You have managed to get your website to that magical point where you have established popularity, traffic, loyalty and a community of fans. Your site contains a wealth of information, resources and services that you provide free because that’s just the kind of person you are. You may not have intended to make money from your site but now that you have an audience you realise that it’s possible, or perhaps you have to start thinking about generating income because your costs to manage the site have increased and it’s starting to hurt.
You have been diligent over the years to build up your community, but now you wonder how to go about making some revenue by leveraging this audience (as the marketers would say, you want to monetise your site). Maybe you have some big dreams and plan to one day generate advertising income from your new web project. This is a very common plan for online business given people tend to expect information and services to be free on the web. Advertising may be one of the only revenue generation strategies available to you.
How much traffic do I have to have to make money?
In my experience once you have about 500-1000 unique visitors per day to your site *at least* before you can start to make real money. You can make chimps change from day one from your 50 hits, but this article is targeted at those that have a larger audience, or perhaps are constructing a business plan (either real or in your head) and would like to know how to go about monetising your website. If you get more then 1000 unique visitors a day chances are you already make money from your site (if not you should be!) but my points are still relevant.
As per usual I will illustrate my article using real world examples from what I did to make money. Over about five years I managed a hobby site that started off as a very local site focusing on people in my area that played the game Magic: The Gathering. I wrote reports and did news coverage for the game. Later I expanded the site to Australia and eventually opened it to the world although it remained mostly Australian with a good chunk of Asians and New Zealanders.
Banner programs
At around the time I was getting 500 unique visitors a day I decided to start playing with advertising methods. This was before the advent of Google Adsense (more on this later) but there were many banner programs available that paid either on cost per click (CPC) or per impression basis. An impression is a banner being displayed to a user once, a click is someone clicking the banner and visiting the site being advertised.
These networks act as a middle man between business that want to advertise and people like me that have an audience and want to make some money by displaying banners. Unfortunately these programs display banners that often don’t match your audience. I tried a few but it was a short lived experiment that made me a few dollars if that.
I recommend you avoid any banner programs. If you are confused about what I am talking about regarding banner programs take a look at Burst Media to get a grasp of how they work. For small sites they just don’t make much money. For large sites there are much better ways to make money. I’m sure there are people out there that make good money from these programs (I’m sure the program owners do!) but in my experience a little effort to find the right type of advertising can yield much better results.
I decided the best way to make money was to really leverage the demographics of my audience. I had a fairly focused niche, card game playing young males. I started by emailing all the local and international card game shops and asked if they were interested in exposure to my market. Instantly I had responses but I had to come up with a pricing structure first.
How much should you charge?
By this time my site was getting close to 1000 unique visitors per day, with about 300,000 impressions per month. I had done my research and I knew that advertising on websites was usually via a standard 468×60 banner so I would start with that. I also knew that many companies charged by what is called CPM or cost per 1000 impressions. Back then this was by far the most commonly used scale for pricing of web advertising and you could expect to earn anywhere from $0.10 to $10.00 CPM. I never liked this method of advertising because it didn’t guarantee any visitors. Charging by click-throughs is a far better method, but didn’t become mainstream until later.
I decided that in order to keep my advertisers I had to offer value so I went for a blanket approach. I started charging a flat rate of $30 per month to have a banner on my site which offered as many impressions that my traffic could provide. I signed up my first few advertisers at this rate.
Banner management software
In order to “rotate” different banners across my site I needed some special software that would dynamically place banners. This allowed me to have more than one advertiser banner in a single location so I could optimise my adspace and make sure my audience didn’t get too bored from seeing the same banner over and over again.
Let me save you some time, phpAdsNew is the best banner management software out there. It’s under an open source license and has all the features you could ever wish for at a price you can’t beat, it’s free. If you don’t believe me and absolutely have to try searching elsewhere try this category at the PHP Resource Index.
There is a learning curve with phpAdsNew and you do have to install it on your own server. If you are like me and you do things like this yourself most of the time you shouldn’t have too much trouble. Otherwise you might try contacting your favourite ITGeek and get them to give you a hand.
Statistics are important
The best feature with phpAdsNew is that it allows you to provide a unique user login for your advertisers to check their banner statistics in real time. This means at any point in time they can learn how many impressions and clicks their banners are receiving from your site.
Before you start searching for advertisers you should be very familiar with the statistics of your site. Do you know how many unique visitors you get? How many hits you get? How many impressions? Do you even know what the differences are between these? Try this stats terminology primer on for size if you don’t.
Most web servers come with a statistics package. Ask your web host if you don’t know. The most common are Awstats (demo) and Webalizer (demo) which often are preinstalled on many hosting packages. Become familiar with these packages so you can accurately assess your site traffic.
Increasing ad revenue
I now had the foundations laid and was serving the ads of my first few advertisers. From the point onwards I went to work attracting more advertisers by directly emailing North American online card stores and other related sites. I kept an excel file to track which websites I had emailed and their responses so I could follow up in a timely manner.
I created new banner positions and started initiatives like a newsletter to generate more revenue. I created monthly packages that combined newsletter advertising and different banner positions and offered them at $500 per quarter. I increased the top prime banner position fee to $50 per month and started offering a tower banner position for $50 as well.
Eventually I had to limit the number of banners I could take in the prime positions to avoid dilution. I had a guarantee in place that offered at least 30,000 impressions per month (averaging 40,000-60,000) to advertisers so that they always received a good equivalent CPM rate. I even had some advertisers purchase the rights to “own” a position for a certain period to make sure no other advertisers banners would be displayed.
Eventually I reached a point where I was averaging $500 per month and peaked at $1000 in one month. Some advertisers came and went quickly but many stayed loyal and in fact still advertise today though I sold the site a long time ago. The niche for the site was so focused that it became the pre-eminent site for Australia in it’s marketplace and consequently some Australian advertisers simply stuck their banners up as a branding exercise. They knew that the exposure from the site would help to align their business as one of the pre-eminent retailers or event organisers for the game. Some advertisers stopped caring about click through stats and kept advertising purely for the branding exposure.
Google adsense
At some point Google Adsense popped up and I was in with other early adopters to try it out. My results were okay. The money wasn’t nearly as good as the established relationships with advertisers I had, however the ads being displayed were a lot more targeted than banner networks I had tested early on.
I eventually stopped using Adsense because I could better monetise the adspace with my traditional advertisers. However that was before Google went to work providing such a variety of banner sizes and display options. Nowadays Google Adsense is a viable income source for many websites so I definitely suggest you look into it as a possible option for generating revenue, but remember it’s not the only means and you can earn more if you get busy chasing targeted advertisers.
Ongoing maintenance
I wouldn’t call web advertising income passive, but it sure is close. The systems I had in place handled everything automatically. While I did have to manually create advertiser accounts, pursue advertisers and control billing, once the systems were in place, in particular phpAdsNew, I didn’t have to do much. Of course depending on your website often the maintenance of your community is were the labour is involved, but chances are if you started the site you either enjoy it or have plans in place to eventually remove yourself from the maintenance role.
In the end I sold my site but if it wasn’t for the advertiser revenue my asset would not have been valued nearly as highly as the final sale price. Investing in advertising is like investing in any asset, the time and labour you put in today will lead to benefits in the future.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Friday, December 17, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
How to Hide Affiliate Links
It is sometimes necessary to hide, or cloak, your affiliate links to stop people stealing your commission or bypassing the affiliate link and going straight to the main site.
Some people will also replace your affiliate link with their own so that they receive the commission, this is know as link hijacking.
The other advantages to hiding affiliate links are that if people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio), also, as I mentioned in an earlier post ( see How To Get Top Search Engine Rankings With Article Marketing ) many/most article directories won’t accept articles that contain affiliate links.
Please note: Some article directories such as ezinearticles.com will not even allow redirects or cloaked links, in this instance you will need to send people to your own website page, free blog or lens, that has your offer on that includes your affiliate links. This is another good reason to have your own domain (see Cheap affiliate web hosting companies ).
The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like tinyurl.com which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourUglyAffiliateLink.com/?12345 into something like this http://tinyurl.com/35q7rl, however this is only really a quick fix and is better to be used for mailing your opt-in lists, the people who trust you, people who don’t know you can’t tell where that link is going to take them, it could be a porn site for all they know, you will get better click through rates using another method.
IMPORTANT: Some link cloaking techniques may prevent some sites from dropping tracking cookies into your visitors computer which means you may not get credit for that referral. Check all links to make sure they work correctly!
Link redirection using a php script
If you have your own website you can hide your links by setting up a page redirect.
All you have to do is to just insert this one line of code into a php file:-
You can name your php file to anything you want, for example, great-bargains.php, so your actual link would be YourWebsite/great-bargains.php which will redirect to the site you are promoting.
Hide your affiliate links using a zero-frame code
This technique has a little more code than above, but it actually frames the site you are promoting.
Again, you will need your own website to use this technique but it’s just as easy to do.
The following code frames the site you are promoting making it look to the visitor as if they are still on your site, in other words, no matter which page they go to on the framed site they will only see your domain in the browser window.
Regards,
Alleshopz.com
Some people will also replace your affiliate link with their own so that they receive the commission, this is know as link hijacking.
The other advantages to hiding affiliate links are that if people see your link in a post or email, they just won’t click it just because of the affiliate connection, hiding links WILL increase your CTR (Click Through Ratio), also, as I mentioned in an earlier post ( see How To Get Top Search Engine Rankings With Article Marketing ) many/most article directories won’t accept articles that contain affiliate links.
Please note: Some article directories such as ezinearticles.com will not even allow redirects or cloaked links, in this instance you will need to send people to your own website page, free blog or lens, that has your offer on that includes your affiliate links. This is another good reason to have your own domain (see Cheap affiliate web hosting companies ).
The quickest way to hide your links is to use a company like tinyurl.com which is free to use and turns links like http://www.YourUglyAffiliateLink.com/?12345 into something like this http://tinyurl.com/35q7rl, however this is only really a quick fix and is better to be used for mailing your opt-in lists, the people who trust you, people who don’t know you can’t tell where that link is going to take them, it could be a porn site for all they know, you will get better click through rates using another method.
IMPORTANT: Some link cloaking techniques may prevent some sites from dropping tracking cookies into your visitors computer which means you may not get credit for that referral. Check all links to make sure they work correctly!
Link redirection using a php script
If you have your own website you can hide your links by setting up a page redirect.
All you have to do is to just insert this one line of code into a php file:-
You can name your php file to anything you want, for example, great-bargains.php, so your actual link would be YourWebsite/great-bargains.php which will redirect to the site you are promoting.
Hide your affiliate links using a zero-frame code
This technique has a little more code than above, but it actually frames the site you are promoting.
Again, you will need your own website to use this technique but it’s just as easy to do.
The following code frames the site you are promoting making it look to the visitor as if they are still on your site, in other words, no matter which page they go to on the framed site they will only see your domain in the browser window.
Regards,
Alleshopz.com
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Govt. fight against 'rogue' websites
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The corporate websites of Visa and MasterCard were inaccessible at times Wednesday due to an apparent cyberattack by purported Wikileaks backers.
Messages posted on Twitter indicated the attacks maybe be in response to recent moves by Visa and Mastercard against WikiLeaks, the website that recently released thousands of secret U.S. State Department documents
"The issue appears to be the result of a concentrated effort to flood our corporate website with traffic and slow access," said MasterCard spokesman James Issokson, in a prepared statement.
Issokson said the hack attack did not affect the use of credit cards or financial security. The networks used to run credit card transactions operate independently from corporate websites.
By Wednesday evening, MasterCard said it had "made significant progress in restoring full-service to its corporate website."
Visa's site -- which appeared to attract attacks later in the day -- remained inaccessible.
"Visa's processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, is functioning normally and cardholders can continue to use their cards as they routinely would. Account data is not at risk," Visa spokesman Ted Carr said in a statement.
Carr added that Visa.com is experiencing "higher than normal" traffic and that the company is taking steps to restore the site to full operations within the next few hours.
The action against Visa comes after Visa Europe, a division of Visa, stopped accepting payments for WikiLeaks.
"Visa Europe has taken action to temporarily suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending investigation into whether it contravenes Visa operating rules, including compliance with local laws in the markets where we operate," said Visa, in a prepared statement.
Supporters of WikiLeaks claimed to have launched the cyberattack in retaliation for MasterCard's (MA, Fortune 500) refusal to accept credit cards on the WikiLeaks site.
Issokson wouldn't comment on allegations of who was behind the attack. But on Tuesday, MasterCard said it was "working to suspend the acceptance of MasterCard cards on WikiLeaks."
0:00 /:59MasterCard's $1 billion stock buyback
On Twitter, a post from a handle called @Anon_Operation took responsibility for the attacks, tweeting about its so-called Operation Payback: "We are glad to tell you that [Mastercard.com] is down and it's confirmed. Operation: Payback (is a bitch!)"
Just before the apparent attack on Visa, the same alias posted: "TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS."
There was no immediate confirmation that whoever was behind the handle was responsible for the attack.
The website for PayPal was also the subject of an "attempted DDoS [denial-of-service] attack" in recent days, though the site remained operational, according to PayPal spokeswoman Charlotte Hill.
"These attacks have at times slowed the website itself down, but have not significantly impacted payments," she said.
Hill confirmed that this happened after PayPal denied service to WikiLeaks.
PostFinance, a Swiss bank, also had problems with its website on Tuesday, when it announced that the site was "overloaded owing to a multitude of online enquiries."
This happened the day after PostFinance announced that it closed the account of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for having "provided false information regarding his place of residence when opening the account."
The PostFinance website was back up Wednesday.
Credit.com reported, on its blog, that credit card companies and financial firms were making it difficult for supporters to funnel cash to WikiLeaks.
"With such major players cutting off its access to funds, the financial pressure on WikiLeaks appears to be mounting," wrote Credit.com on its blog. "The site can accept donations through DataCell, a Swiss credit card company, and through bank transfers to accounts in Germany and Iceland, though the decision by Visa and MasterCard to block transfers may make it difficult for those channels to remain open."
DataCell reported Wednesday that MasterCard and Visa payments were being rejected in its "donation system" through the WikiLeaks website. DataCell said it was taking "immediate legal actions to make donations possible again."
"The suspension of payments towards WikiLeaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers," said DataCell, in its news release. "This does clearly create massive financial losses to WikiLeaks which seems to be the only purpose of this suspension."
Regards,
Thanks cnn
senthilkc
Messages posted on Twitter indicated the attacks maybe be in response to recent moves by Visa and Mastercard against WikiLeaks, the website that recently released thousands of secret U.S. State Department documents
"The issue appears to be the result of a concentrated effort to flood our corporate website with traffic and slow access," said MasterCard spokesman James Issokson, in a prepared statement.
Issokson said the hack attack did not affect the use of credit cards or financial security. The networks used to run credit card transactions operate independently from corporate websites.
By Wednesday evening, MasterCard said it had "made significant progress in restoring full-service to its corporate website."
Visa's site -- which appeared to attract attacks later in the day -- remained inaccessible.
"Visa's processing network, which handles cardholder transactions, is functioning normally and cardholders can continue to use their cards as they routinely would. Account data is not at risk," Visa spokesman Ted Carr said in a statement.
Carr added that Visa.com is experiencing "higher than normal" traffic and that the company is taking steps to restore the site to full operations within the next few hours.
The action against Visa comes after Visa Europe, a division of Visa, stopped accepting payments for WikiLeaks.
"Visa Europe has taken action to temporarily suspend Visa payment acceptance on WikiLeaks' website pending investigation into whether it contravenes Visa operating rules, including compliance with local laws in the markets where we operate," said Visa, in a prepared statement.
Supporters of WikiLeaks claimed to have launched the cyberattack in retaliation for MasterCard's (MA, Fortune 500) refusal to accept credit cards on the WikiLeaks site.
Issokson wouldn't comment on allegations of who was behind the attack. But on Tuesday, MasterCard said it was "working to suspend the acceptance of MasterCard cards on WikiLeaks."
0:00 /:59MasterCard's $1 billion stock buyback
On Twitter, a post from a handle called @Anon_Operation took responsibility for the attacks, tweeting about its so-called Operation Payback: "We are glad to tell you that [Mastercard.com] is down and it's confirmed. Operation: Payback (is a bitch!)"
Just before the apparent attack on Visa, the same alias posted: "TARGET: WWW.VISA.COM :: FIRE FIRE FIRE!!! WEAPONS."
There was no immediate confirmation that whoever was behind the handle was responsible for the attack.
The website for PayPal was also the subject of an "attempted DDoS [denial-of-service] attack" in recent days, though the site remained operational, according to PayPal spokeswoman Charlotte Hill.
"These attacks have at times slowed the website itself down, but have not significantly impacted payments," she said.
Hill confirmed that this happened after PayPal denied service to WikiLeaks.
PostFinance, a Swiss bank, also had problems with its website on Tuesday, when it announced that the site was "overloaded owing to a multitude of online enquiries."
This happened the day after PostFinance announced that it closed the account of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for having "provided false information regarding his place of residence when opening the account."
The PostFinance website was back up Wednesday.
Credit.com reported, on its blog, that credit card companies and financial firms were making it difficult for supporters to funnel cash to WikiLeaks.
"With such major players cutting off its access to funds, the financial pressure on WikiLeaks appears to be mounting," wrote Credit.com on its blog. "The site can accept donations through DataCell, a Swiss credit card company, and through bank transfers to accounts in Germany and Iceland, though the decision by Visa and MasterCard to block transfers may make it difficult for those channels to remain open."
DataCell reported Wednesday that MasterCard and Visa payments were being rejected in its "donation system" through the WikiLeaks website. DataCell said it was taking "immediate legal actions to make donations possible again."
"The suspension of payments towards WikiLeaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers," said DataCell, in its news release. "This does clearly create massive financial losses to WikiLeaks which seems to be the only purpose of this suspension."
Regards,
Thanks cnn
senthilkc
Monday, November 29, 2010
WikiLeaks leaks will hurt U.S. relations
(CNN) -- Former President George W. Bush joined a chorus of U.S. officials calling leaks of sensitive government information "very damaging," telling a forum at Facebook headquarters that WikiLeaks' recent release of 250,000 documents may significantly hurt Washington's image abroad.
"It's going to be very hard to keep the trust of foreign leaders," the nation's 43rd president said of the documents on issues ranging from Iran to Honduras to Turkey. "If you have a conversation with a foreign leader and it ends up in a newspaper, you don't like it. I didn't like it."
A relaxed Bush was joined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage in Palo Alto, California, with hundreds watching from the audience and up to 6,500 following the interview live online.
The hourlong discussion centered on Bush's memoir, "Decision Points." Released just over two weeks ago, the book ranks atop the New York Times' hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, topping works by the likes of rapper Jay-Z, rocker Keith Richards and the late Mark Twain.
The president made it clear that pitching that memoir was his main reason for visiting the social network's office, saying, "you have got a lot of people paying attention, and I'm trying to sell books."
Still, beyond hawking his 481-page memoir and pushing several initiatives from the George W. Bush Institute, Bush said he had no desire to intervene in day-to-day politics or be the center of the world's attention once again.
"I have no desire to generate publicity," said Bush, 64. "I've had enough of fame, and I want to go back to a life that is productive ... without generating the [limelight]."
Beyond passing references to current events, like calling South Korea a "force for peace," Bush focused on key moments from his time in the Oval Office from January 2001 to 2009. He offered anecdotes, talked about sports and even kidded with Zuckerberg, no stranger to the spotlight after this year's hit movie "The Social Network," which presented one version of Facebook's rise.
The president admitted personally using "the Facebook" since leaving office, pointing to his 600,000 online friends. And he playfully, though publicly, asked Zuckerberg to join him in a "joint venture" promoting public education -- in light of his initiatives at the Bush Institute and Zuckerberg's donation this fall of $100 million toward improving public schools in Newark, New Jersey.
As he has in other interviews, Bush stated his confidence that the decision to invade Iraq was just, predicting that Iraq will become a crucial hub of democracy in the Middle East. He said that promoting "freedom" -- be it personal, political, educational or economic -- will be central to his post-presidency life.
"We're involved in an ideological struggle that will eventually be won, as freedom prevails," Bush said.
While his standing has improved, a poll released this month shows that four in 10 Americans say Bush was a poor president, and another third rate him as average. Another 28 percent rated him as a good or as one of the greatest presidents ever, up from 20 percent when he left the Oval Office in January 2009.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted November 11-14, with 1,014 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Bush said he won't criticize President Barack Obama, saying, "it's not good for the country ... [and] I don't want to." And Bush said he's learned, from his time as a business and political executive, how to handle criticism -- including when to ignore it and when to learn from others -- and come to grips with what others think of him.
"Anybody can distinguish between someone who is trying to be helpful and someone who is trying to hurt you," Bush said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a college graduate, for that matter." Here he pointed to Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook.
Regards,
Thanks cnn
Senthilkc
"It's going to be very hard to keep the trust of foreign leaders," the nation's 43rd president said of the documents on issues ranging from Iran to Honduras to Turkey. "If you have a conversation with a foreign leader and it ends up in a newspaper, you don't like it. I didn't like it."
A relaxed Bush was joined by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stage in Palo Alto, California, with hundreds watching from the audience and up to 6,500 following the interview live online.
The hourlong discussion centered on Bush's memoir, "Decision Points." Released just over two weeks ago, the book ranks atop the New York Times' hardcover nonfiction best-seller list, topping works by the likes of rapper Jay-Z, rocker Keith Richards and the late Mark Twain.
The president made it clear that pitching that memoir was his main reason for visiting the social network's office, saying, "you have got a lot of people paying attention, and I'm trying to sell books."
Still, beyond hawking his 481-page memoir and pushing several initiatives from the George W. Bush Institute, Bush said he had no desire to intervene in day-to-day politics or be the center of the world's attention once again.
"I have no desire to generate publicity," said Bush, 64. "I've had enough of fame, and I want to go back to a life that is productive ... without generating the [limelight]."
Beyond passing references to current events, like calling South Korea a "force for peace," Bush focused on key moments from his time in the Oval Office from January 2001 to 2009. He offered anecdotes, talked about sports and even kidded with Zuckerberg, no stranger to the spotlight after this year's hit movie "The Social Network," which presented one version of Facebook's rise.
The president admitted personally using "the Facebook" since leaving office, pointing to his 600,000 online friends. And he playfully, though publicly, asked Zuckerberg to join him in a "joint venture" promoting public education -- in light of his initiatives at the Bush Institute and Zuckerberg's donation this fall of $100 million toward improving public schools in Newark, New Jersey.
As he has in other interviews, Bush stated his confidence that the decision to invade Iraq was just, predicting that Iraq will become a crucial hub of democracy in the Middle East. He said that promoting "freedom" -- be it personal, political, educational or economic -- will be central to his post-presidency life.
"We're involved in an ideological struggle that will eventually be won, as freedom prevails," Bush said.
While his standing has improved, a poll released this month shows that four in 10 Americans say Bush was a poor president, and another third rate him as average. Another 28 percent rated him as a good or as one of the greatest presidents ever, up from 20 percent when he left the Oval Office in January 2009.
The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted November 11-14, with 1,014 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey's overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Bush said he won't criticize President Barack Obama, saying, "it's not good for the country ... [and] I don't want to." And Bush said he's learned, from his time as a business and political executive, how to handle criticism -- including when to ignore it and when to learn from others -- and come to grips with what others think of him.
"Anybody can distinguish between someone who is trying to be helpful and someone who is trying to hurt you," Bush said. "You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a college graduate, for that matter." Here he pointed to Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook.
Regards,
Thanks cnn
Senthilkc
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
PPC Trends 2010
Later in 2010, Google and Microsoft Bing will be competing head-to-head in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms (i.e. Adwords and Adcenter), after Yahoo decided to exit search and became Bing’s largest search traffic partner.
PPC Strategies for the Big 3 Search Engines
Your search engine marketing strategies will include the big three search engines (i.e. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Bing Adcenter).
To do well with the big 3 search engines:
* Understand Google Adwords Quality Score, standardize your Google Adwords PPC Optimization, and manage with Adwords Editor.
* Manage/optimize your Bing PPC with Microsoft Adcenter Desktop.
* Before seeing your Yahoo traffic all migrate to Bing, overcome your Yahoo Search Marketing problems and avoid Yahoo PPC automatic account optimization.
Keyword Research and Keyword Management
Create keyword lists for search targeted campaigns and content targeted campaigns:
* Use SEM keyword research tools to build your search campaign keyword lists, and estimate your keyword cost with Google Adwords Bid Simulator.
* Ensure the keyword list consists of all your trademark keywords and make use of Adwords PPC site links.
* Start with broad match keywords, review the search query report, and make good use of negative keywords to save cost.
* Create Adwords content targeting ad groups / keywords with Google Wonder Wheel Tool, and discover Google content network websites in your industry/category with Google Ad Planner.
Track Conversions
To monetize through search engine marketing, the ability for big brands to track return-on-investment (ROI) will become far more important than before. Google offers free PPC conversion tracking tools for search engine marketers who will not be spending budgets on “paid” conversion tracking software.
* Setup Adwords Conversion Tracking to track your website’s goals (i.e. leads and/or sales), and review Adwords reports regularly.
* Run Adwords Geographic report to review your campaigns’ performance in different cities/regions/countries.
* Use Google Analytics to track your PPC conversions from Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing Adcenter, Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest, and the 2nd tier PPC search engines.
Optimize Keyword Bidding
Keyword / ad group bidding is/are another areas that can no longer be done manually in an efficient way. Google offers Adwords Conversion Optimizer, a free keyword bidding tool. Follow Adwords Conversion Optimizer tips before using this bidding tool.
Use one of the auto-bid / portfolio bid management software from Efficient Frontier, Marin Software, Search Force or Kenshoo, if you prefer “paid” software and services. Paid bidding software allows you to manage/optimize all your different search engine accounts (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Adcenter) in one system.
Optimize Landing Pages
Use dynamic keyword insertion to improve your ads’ click-through-rate (CTR), and optimize PPC landing pages to:
* Improve your site users’ experience
* Increase your websites’ conversion rates
Regards,
Senthilkc
PPC Strategies for the Big 3 Search Engines
Your search engine marketing strategies will include the big three search engines (i.e. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Bing Adcenter).
To do well with the big 3 search engines:
* Understand Google Adwords Quality Score, standardize your Google Adwords PPC Optimization, and manage with Adwords Editor.
* Manage/optimize your Bing PPC with Microsoft Adcenter Desktop.
* Before seeing your Yahoo traffic all migrate to Bing, overcome your Yahoo Search Marketing problems and avoid Yahoo PPC automatic account optimization.
Keyword Research and Keyword Management
Create keyword lists for search targeted campaigns and content targeted campaigns:
* Use SEM keyword research tools to build your search campaign keyword lists, and estimate your keyword cost with Google Adwords Bid Simulator.
* Ensure the keyword list consists of all your trademark keywords and make use of Adwords PPC site links.
* Start with broad match keywords, review the search query report, and make good use of negative keywords to save cost.
* Create Adwords content targeting ad groups / keywords with Google Wonder Wheel Tool, and discover Google content network websites in your industry/category with Google Ad Planner.
Track Conversions
To monetize through search engine marketing, the ability for big brands to track return-on-investment (ROI) will become far more important than before. Google offers free PPC conversion tracking tools for search engine marketers who will not be spending budgets on “paid” conversion tracking software.
* Setup Adwords Conversion Tracking to track your website’s goals (i.e. leads and/or sales), and review Adwords reports regularly.
* Run Adwords Geographic report to review your campaigns’ performance in different cities/regions/countries.
* Use Google Analytics to track your PPC conversions from Yahoo Search Marketing, Bing Adcenter, Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest, and the 2nd tier PPC search engines.
Optimize Keyword Bidding
Keyword / ad group bidding is/are another areas that can no longer be done manually in an efficient way. Google offers Adwords Conversion Optimizer, a free keyword bidding tool. Follow Adwords Conversion Optimizer tips before using this bidding tool.
Use one of the auto-bid / portfolio bid management software from Efficient Frontier, Marin Software, Search Force or Kenshoo, if you prefer “paid” software and services. Paid bidding software allows you to manage/optimize all your different search engine accounts (Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Adcenter) in one system.
Optimize Landing Pages
Use dynamic keyword insertion to improve your ads’ click-through-rate (CTR), and optimize PPC landing pages to:
* Improve your site users’ experience
* Increase your websites’ conversion rates
Regards,
Senthilkc
Current SEO Trends
Latest SEO Trends
Search Engines are regularly updating their algorythms that are used to rank content from the web. It is important to keep abreast of these changes and ensure that your website meets the criteria.
BuySearchEngineReports recommends that you monitor Google, MSN, and Yahoo's regular news postings to web masters.
Here is some useful advice based on latest Search Engine reports:
* Google's Web Authoring Statistics
This report noted that many websites do not follow best practice coding standards. While a normal web browser is forgiving of technical errors, a search engine browser (automated system) is not, and you website may be altogether invisible to major search engines. See http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html for further details. You can validate your website for free at http://validator.w3.org/
* Googles Jagger Update
Google has targeted sites with invisible links (same colour text on same colour background or hyperlinked fullstopes, excessively small text, and use of the word s. e. x. where it is not relevant.
* Artificial Linking Schemes
Paying companies to provide links to your site where there is no relevance is not recommended. Avoide SEO's that promise hundreds of links to your site. One QUALITY link is worth a thousand ARTIFICIAL links. In fact, participating in these schemes can even cause your website to be removed by a search engine. WHY? If a user searches for 'hotels in Hong Kong' and discovers your website that sells watches, it reflects badly on the searc engine - a search engine's business is all about returning RELEVANT CONTENT.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Search Engines are regularly updating their algorythms that are used to rank content from the web. It is important to keep abreast of these changes and ensure that your website meets the criteria.
BuySearchEngineReports recommends that you monitor Google, MSN, and Yahoo's regular news postings to web masters.
Here is some useful advice based on latest Search Engine reports:
* Google's Web Authoring Statistics
This report noted that many websites do not follow best practice coding standards. While a normal web browser is forgiving of technical errors, a search engine browser (automated system) is not, and you website may be altogether invisible to major search engines. See http://code.google.com/webstats/index.html for further details. You can validate your website for free at http://validator.w3.org/
* Googles Jagger Update
Google has targeted sites with invisible links (same colour text on same colour background or hyperlinked fullstopes, excessively small text, and use of the word s. e. x. where it is not relevant.
* Artificial Linking Schemes
Paying companies to provide links to your site where there is no relevance is not recommended. Avoide SEO's that promise hundreds of links to your site. One QUALITY link is worth a thousand ARTIFICIAL links. In fact, participating in these schemes can even cause your website to be removed by a search engine. WHY? If a user searches for 'hotels in Hong Kong' and discovers your website that sells watches, it reflects badly on the searc engine - a search engine's business is all about returning RELEVANT CONTENT.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Search Engine Optimization SEO Trends in 2010
Online market is growing rapidly and it will continue to grow in much more better way in 2010. As all of us know, there is a huge contribution of search engines mainly of Google in online marketing. Websites which tops in Google ranking will undoubtedly get huge volume of visitors to the websites than the other sources. Only way to top the search engines is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
It is likely to be a question in SEO expert’s mind that it is reliable to continue with current SEO strategy in order to rule the search rankings or there will be some dramatic changes in Google’s algorithm for improved search engine results. In fact, the Google has already began to show some variation in ranking with some hard to solve formulas for SEO masters.
Some of the notable variation in Google search results in 2010 will be:
* Geo location of any search query:
Google search engine algorithms may pay more attention geo location of any search query. That means search results in Google.com may vary in USA and UK. The variation of results may vary upon competition of querying keyword. Means higher the competition, higher the variation.
* Great role of Social Media and Social Networking:
Social media and social networking sites like FaceBook, Twitter will also have some noticeable impact on search engine results in 2010. It does already have some talk to include twits from the twitter in search engine results. So it’s time to include social media optimization as one of the search engine optimisation SEO strategies for SEO companies.
* Back-links from Low PR and Irrelevant websites:
Yes. This point is directly pointing to directory submissions, link farms and reciprocal link exchanges. Google is very smart and getting more and more smart and hard with spammers. Continuous back-links from low PR and irrelevant websites may really hurt your rankings. It’s also useless to use two-way (reciprocal) or three-way link exchanges in an order to improve rankings. Google is having the number of heads with PhDs and for them it is not hard to find two-way or three-way links.
* Google will no more equal to Search Engine:
Yes. After dominating nearly a decade, Google is now facing very tough competition in search engine market with rivals like Yahoo and Bing. Even though Yahoo is not as much effective as Bing because Bing is really giving some very good and relevant results in compare to Yahoo. In 2010, Google will definitely have to face some great challenges from Bing. In addition, if Yahoo/Bing partnership will come into reality than it would be biggest search engine revolution in the decade.
* Some other small but important factors:
Page load time, bounce rate, domain age would remain some other factor which may gain some importance in search engine results of Google. Google has already announced that page load time would be a factor in search engine result pages, to give user improved and fast loading websites in search results.
Search engine market is developing quickly. So you can expect some exciting and new trends to emerge for search engine optimisation SEO industry in 2010. It’s been time to change your online marketing strategies as New Year begins with some more stirring market trends and techniques. It is advisable to left those SEO services company which are using old-age SEO strategies in order to give higher search engine rankings. Get some advice from expert SEO consultancy in an order to step forward in highly competitive market. Finally, it’s time to get smarter with new trends and technology in 2010.
Author is well known search engine optimization expert and owning a website for quality search engine optimisation services. Come into touch with such organic SEO services provider firm in order to start the successful online business.
google seo rule of sept 2010 new trends seo new google seo rules 2010 what is the present trend for google algorithms Advanced Search Pages - Trends optimization trend google marketingtrend 2010 main trends in seo market usa search engine industry trends 2010 is trend is important factor in seo search engine optimisation current seo market? SEO trends june july august 2010 search engine trends usa http://seoguys net/blog/seo/search-engine-optimization-seo-trends-in-2010/ search trends summer 2010 google algorithm trend SEO Trends & Techniques new search engive trend current google seo current trends in engine what is the new google algorithm trend? whats happening with search engines changes in google seo rules 2010 search engine Today Trends
Regards,
Alleshopz.com
Senthilkc
It is likely to be a question in SEO expert’s mind that it is reliable to continue with current SEO strategy in order to rule the search rankings or there will be some dramatic changes in Google’s algorithm for improved search engine results. In fact, the Google has already began to show some variation in ranking with some hard to solve formulas for SEO masters.
Some of the notable variation in Google search results in 2010 will be:
* Geo location of any search query:
Google search engine algorithms may pay more attention geo location of any search query. That means search results in Google.com may vary in USA and UK. The variation of results may vary upon competition of querying keyword. Means higher the competition, higher the variation.
* Great role of Social Media and Social Networking:
Social media and social networking sites like FaceBook, Twitter will also have some noticeable impact on search engine results in 2010. It does already have some talk to include twits from the twitter in search engine results. So it’s time to include social media optimization as one of the search engine optimisation SEO strategies for SEO companies.
* Back-links from Low PR and Irrelevant websites:
Yes. This point is directly pointing to directory submissions, link farms and reciprocal link exchanges. Google is very smart and getting more and more smart and hard with spammers. Continuous back-links from low PR and irrelevant websites may really hurt your rankings. It’s also useless to use two-way (reciprocal) or three-way link exchanges in an order to improve rankings. Google is having the number of heads with PhDs and for them it is not hard to find two-way or three-way links.
* Google will no more equal to Search Engine:
Yes. After dominating nearly a decade, Google is now facing very tough competition in search engine market with rivals like Yahoo and Bing. Even though Yahoo is not as much effective as Bing because Bing is really giving some very good and relevant results in compare to Yahoo. In 2010, Google will definitely have to face some great challenges from Bing. In addition, if Yahoo/Bing partnership will come into reality than it would be biggest search engine revolution in the decade.
* Some other small but important factors:
Page load time, bounce rate, domain age would remain some other factor which may gain some importance in search engine results of Google. Google has already announced that page load time would be a factor in search engine result pages, to give user improved and fast loading websites in search results.
Search engine market is developing quickly. So you can expect some exciting and new trends to emerge for search engine optimisation SEO industry in 2010. It’s been time to change your online marketing strategies as New Year begins with some more stirring market trends and techniques. It is advisable to left those SEO services company which are using old-age SEO strategies in order to give higher search engine rankings. Get some advice from expert SEO consultancy in an order to step forward in highly competitive market. Finally, it’s time to get smarter with new trends and technology in 2010.
Author is well known search engine optimization expert and owning a website for quality search engine optimisation services. Come into touch with such organic SEO services provider firm in order to start the successful online business.
google seo rule of sept 2010 new trends seo new google seo rules 2010 what is the present trend for google algorithms Advanced Search Pages - Trends optimization trend google marketingtrend 2010 main trends in seo market usa search engine industry trends 2010 is trend is important factor in seo search engine optimisation current seo market? SEO trends june july august 2010 search engine trends usa http://seoguys net/blog/seo/search-engine-optimization-seo-trends-in-2010/ search trends summer 2010 google algorithm trend SEO Trends & Techniques new search engive trend current google seo current trends in engine what is the new google algorithm trend? whats happening with search engines changes in google seo rules 2010 search engine Today Trends
Regards,
Alleshopz.com
Senthilkc
New Trends in Search Engine optimization
New Trends in Search Engine optimization
The past year has been one of major transition in the search engine industry. Changes to the landscape have been enormous with mergers, acquisitions, and the easing of several formerly big-players out of the sector or, in the case of AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart, into the minor leagues. We’ve seen new technologies and revenue models being tested by search firms, along with fresh promises of personalized ad-delivery through contextual placement. While there is no end in sight for changes in this evolving medium, this is a good time to examine the impact of such upheaval on the state of website marketing and search engine placement.
The biggest recent shift in the industry is the steady erosion of Google’s dominance over the past eight months. In mid-July, the SEO community started to notice subtle changes in Google’s ranking algorithm. At that time, Google had an absolute lock on the search engine world with some form of involvement in over 76% of all searches conducted globally. By the time Google released its infamous "Florida Update" in mid-November, Google’s lock-hold was slipping. At that time, Google was the main listings provider for a host of Internet properties including the gigantic search-portal Yahoo!. That changed recently when Yahoo discontinued their relationship with Google in place of their in-house database, Inktomi. With the loss of distribution through Yahoo!, Google now fuels approximately 48% of all search traffic, with the bulk of the remainder split between Yahoo and MSN, both of which are currently fed by Inktomi. (Please note: Yahoo will be moving away from Inktomi in mid-April in favour of their own paid-inclusion database.) While Google continues to enjoy a higher viewership than any other search tool, it has lost a great deal of distribution power since being dumped by Yahoo!. The bottom line here is that there are now three major search engines as opposed to just one and SEO strategies need to change to meet the new environment. Last year, clients were strictly concerned with Google rankings, knowing full well that good Google rankings were a sure-fire ticket into Yahoo. SEO-Reaction: This year, SEOs will need to concentrate on a mixture of strong-keyword enriched copy in order to please Inktomi, along with a well thought-out link-building campaign to please Google. The re-emergence of Yahoo and MSN as serious players in the search industry is beneficial to advertisers and webmasters as competition and the corresponding increase in consumer choices tend to produce better products and services in the long run.
Bigger, Better, Undercut&ldots;
The validity of the truism about competition driving innovation and producing better products and innovations is demonstrated by the number of new services and innovations introduced over the past twelve months. Search is becoming far more technical and, in many ways, far more specific. Localization and personalization are two of the new common buzzwords in Internet marketing. Localized search results promise increased relevance to the searcher by delivering search results from sources within a reasonable traveling distance such as a postal/zip-code or telephone area-code. Personalized search results promise listings based on specific interests or behaviours of the individual searcher, or the computer used to conduct the search. An early example of a search tool designed to deliver personalized Eurekstersearch results is Eurekster. Eurekster bases it’s results on two major factors. The first is the user’s personal behaviour. The second is the behaviour of friends and others belonging to a social or work grouping. The basic idea is that groups share common interests. Weighing a search-query by those interests may produce better, more personalized search results. SEO-Reaction: In order to adapt to these two innovations, website marketers and SEOs will need to add highly specific elements to a client’s website such as geo-specific metatags and text, and corporate identifying information such as full street addresses and telephone numbers. Website marketers will also need to add features to websites making them more useful to individual searchers such as newsletters, local-promotions and blogs to make their site relevant to specific users in order to present a level of personalized attention that will keep viewers coming back, or at least keep the client’s website in the minds of search engine users.
The big three are using these and other features to try to undercut each other’s level of service offerings, including blogging, news aggregators, email and instant-messaging, and a whole host of tool-bars. It is only a matter of time until someone introduces a new technology or search tool that "re-invents" the way we relate to information retrieval. Both IBM and MSN are developing deep-crawling spiders that will certainly expand the scope of search. IBM is developing the Webfountain tool and MSN is slated to release its new search tool based on the coming Longhorn operating system. These tools will include Excel sheets, Word docs, emails, and other documents found on a hard drive that a user has viewed, in search results for that specific user.
Evolution or Bust
Over the past three years, search engine marketing has become the fastest growing advertising medium in the world. New SEO firms are emerging and established SEO firms, like StepForth are growing rapidly. Website owners and webmasters are advised to shop around before choosing an Internet marketing provider. Check out several SEO websites and compare service offerings. Ask serious questions and don’t be afraid to challenge an SEO’s knowledge of the environment. With change comes confusion and we are noting a number of new firms playing on that confusion in order to see short-term gains. A new company in our area will take $200 from clients in order to add their URL to an automated submitter. As difficult as it may be to believe, there are still millions who fall for that old, "better living through automation" argument. Another pitfall to watch out for is hiring a company that is not prepared to evolve their services to meet new technical innovations. As the search world changes, good, honest SEOs are prepared to adapt and tell their clients exactly how that evolution will take place and why.
Regards,
Senthilkc
The past year has been one of major transition in the search engine industry. Changes to the landscape have been enormous with mergers, acquisitions, and the easing of several formerly big-players out of the sector or, in the case of AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart, into the minor leagues. We’ve seen new technologies and revenue models being tested by search firms, along with fresh promises of personalized ad-delivery through contextual placement. While there is no end in sight for changes in this evolving medium, this is a good time to examine the impact of such upheaval on the state of website marketing and search engine placement.
The biggest recent shift in the industry is the steady erosion of Google’s dominance over the past eight months. In mid-July, the SEO community started to notice subtle changes in Google’s ranking algorithm. At that time, Google had an absolute lock on the search engine world with some form of involvement in over 76% of all searches conducted globally. By the time Google released its infamous "Florida Update" in mid-November, Google’s lock-hold was slipping. At that time, Google was the main listings provider for a host of Internet properties including the gigantic search-portal Yahoo!. That changed recently when Yahoo discontinued their relationship with Google in place of their in-house database, Inktomi. With the loss of distribution through Yahoo!, Google now fuels approximately 48% of all search traffic, with the bulk of the remainder split between Yahoo and MSN, both of which are currently fed by Inktomi. (Please note: Yahoo will be moving away from Inktomi in mid-April in favour of their own paid-inclusion database.) While Google continues to enjoy a higher viewership than any other search tool, it has lost a great deal of distribution power since being dumped by Yahoo!. The bottom line here is that there are now three major search engines as opposed to just one and SEO strategies need to change to meet the new environment. Last year, clients were strictly concerned with Google rankings, knowing full well that good Google rankings were a sure-fire ticket into Yahoo. SEO-Reaction: This year, SEOs will need to concentrate on a mixture of strong-keyword enriched copy in order to please Inktomi, along with a well thought-out link-building campaign to please Google. The re-emergence of Yahoo and MSN as serious players in the search industry is beneficial to advertisers and webmasters as competition and the corresponding increase in consumer choices tend to produce better products and services in the long run.
Bigger, Better, Undercut&ldots;
The validity of the truism about competition driving innovation and producing better products and innovations is demonstrated by the number of new services and innovations introduced over the past twelve months. Search is becoming far more technical and, in many ways, far more specific. Localization and personalization are two of the new common buzzwords in Internet marketing. Localized search results promise increased relevance to the searcher by delivering search results from sources within a reasonable traveling distance such as a postal/zip-code or telephone area-code. Personalized search results promise listings based on specific interests or behaviours of the individual searcher, or the computer used to conduct the search. An early example of a search tool designed to deliver personalized Eurekstersearch results is Eurekster. Eurekster bases it’s results on two major factors. The first is the user’s personal behaviour. The second is the behaviour of friends and others belonging to a social or work grouping. The basic idea is that groups share common interests. Weighing a search-query by those interests may produce better, more personalized search results. SEO-Reaction: In order to adapt to these two innovations, website marketers and SEOs will need to add highly specific elements to a client’s website such as geo-specific metatags and text, and corporate identifying information such as full street addresses and telephone numbers. Website marketers will also need to add features to websites making them more useful to individual searchers such as newsletters, local-promotions and blogs to make their site relevant to specific users in order to present a level of personalized attention that will keep viewers coming back, or at least keep the client’s website in the minds of search engine users.
The big three are using these and other features to try to undercut each other’s level of service offerings, including blogging, news aggregators, email and instant-messaging, and a whole host of tool-bars. It is only a matter of time until someone introduces a new technology or search tool that "re-invents" the way we relate to information retrieval. Both IBM and MSN are developing deep-crawling spiders that will certainly expand the scope of search. IBM is developing the Webfountain tool and MSN is slated to release its new search tool based on the coming Longhorn operating system. These tools will include Excel sheets, Word docs, emails, and other documents found on a hard drive that a user has viewed, in search results for that specific user.
Evolution or Bust
Over the past three years, search engine marketing has become the fastest growing advertising medium in the world. New SEO firms are emerging and established SEO firms, like StepForth are growing rapidly. Website owners and webmasters are advised to shop around before choosing an Internet marketing provider. Check out several SEO websites and compare service offerings. Ask serious questions and don’t be afraid to challenge an SEO’s knowledge of the environment. With change comes confusion and we are noting a number of new firms playing on that confusion in order to see short-term gains. A new company in our area will take $200 from clients in order to add their URL to an automated submitter. As difficult as it may be to believe, there are still millions who fall for that old, "better living through automation" argument. Another pitfall to watch out for is hiring a company that is not prepared to evolve their services to meet new technical innovations. As the search world changes, good, honest SEOs are prepared to adapt and tell their clients exactly how that evolution will take place and why.
Regards,
Senthilkc
seo latest trends
So what SEO techniques are you using? Are you using the latest techniques and are you aware the latest SEO trends? Do you have any idea what direction the search marketing industry is going? Unfortunately to keep up you must work hard to be educated on the latest direction the industry is moving.
All the big forces and even some of newest players are taking the industry in a new direction and if you are not keeping up the picture will become dull. What is becoming a major change in how people communicate on the internet?
The train has left the station did you get on board? The changes taking place are so fast you may only be aware of the SEO methods you use just don't work as well as they have in the past. The old methods of directing your customer via emotions to make a purchase just is not working like it used to. The direction we are moving today some of the old guys just may remember. The new business model today is moving in the direction of trust before a purchase is made.
Some may remember that a customer's trust had to be earned instead of assumed to insure getting a sale.
If you are keeping up with the game a new area that has left the station is the mobile search technology. We are headed for a huge growth in this area get onboard for huge opportunity.
Search marketing is moving in the direction of location based searches. Have you taken note of late that even Twitter has done the job of giving the axe to the old fashion spammy business model to prepare for location marketing that is coming. You can see this change coming at us very fast by the new phones hitting the market. Just look the new phones that know your exact location and the technology even knows all the places you are close to.
The location game is growing in leaps and bounds with all the things that can be done with the information. If you are following along you may already see this with Facebook and Twitter building their location marketing options. The train has left the station in the direction of location based marketing for the industry.
Are you Onboard Yet?
You do not have to look very hard to see all the mobile phone new additions the mobile application has already blasted off with the new applications. The major search industry is no longer just providing results for laptops and kids home and business computers. The search capability is now following you everywhere on the planet. You can download and application from your phone for many businesses to improve your visit experience for more efficiency.
Today's Marketing Strategy is Trust
Not really a new concept just one that has long been forgotten. Internet marketers that are not putting in the time to learn the changes in the industry will quickly be left behind. Trust will be the key to driving sales in the not too distant future online trust will be the answer to many companies success in getting the sale.
The ever changing industry of search engine marketing is moving at lightning speed to the future. The new technologies are descending on us almost every single day. The strange part is it is not going to slow down for you to catch up. The changes in SEO techniques are going to come faster and faster as time goes
Regards,
Senthilkc
All the big forces and even some of newest players are taking the industry in a new direction and if you are not keeping up the picture will become dull. What is becoming a major change in how people communicate on the internet?
The train has left the station did you get on board? The changes taking place are so fast you may only be aware of the SEO methods you use just don't work as well as they have in the past. The old methods of directing your customer via emotions to make a purchase just is not working like it used to. The direction we are moving today some of the old guys just may remember. The new business model today is moving in the direction of trust before a purchase is made.
Some may remember that a customer's trust had to be earned instead of assumed to insure getting a sale.
If you are keeping up with the game a new area that has left the station is the mobile search technology. We are headed for a huge growth in this area get onboard for huge opportunity.
Search marketing is moving in the direction of location based searches. Have you taken note of late that even Twitter has done the job of giving the axe to the old fashion spammy business model to prepare for location marketing that is coming. You can see this change coming at us very fast by the new phones hitting the market. Just look the new phones that know your exact location and the technology even knows all the places you are close to.
The location game is growing in leaps and bounds with all the things that can be done with the information. If you are following along you may already see this with Facebook and Twitter building their location marketing options. The train has left the station in the direction of location based marketing for the industry.
Are you Onboard Yet?
You do not have to look very hard to see all the mobile phone new additions the mobile application has already blasted off with the new applications. The major search industry is no longer just providing results for laptops and kids home and business computers. The search capability is now following you everywhere on the planet. You can download and application from your phone for many businesses to improve your visit experience for more efficiency.
Today's Marketing Strategy is Trust
Not really a new concept just one that has long been forgotten. Internet marketers that are not putting in the time to learn the changes in the industry will quickly be left behind. Trust will be the key to driving sales in the not too distant future online trust will be the answer to many companies success in getting the sale.
The ever changing industry of search engine marketing is moving at lightning speed to the future. The new technologies are descending on us almost every single day. The strange part is it is not going to slow down for you to catch up. The changes in SEO techniques are going to come faster and faster as time goes
Regards,
Senthilkc
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Tips for improving seo traffic
To include every Google SEO tip out there, a lot of time, typing and research would have to be done. However, if you are searching for a few helpful “on page” tips, you have come to the right place. The following will help you improve Google SEO on your website.
Keywords Outside of Content
For Google SEO, or any SEO for that matter, keywords should appear in more than just the main content. Website owners should include a main keyword in the site’s URL, title tag, and domain name. Priority keywords should also appear in the titles of articles and alternative text for images and photographs.
Pick Reliable Sites for Linking
Websites often contain links to other websites. When working with Google SEO, make sure your website only links to reliable, relevant websites that offer quality. Google has become very intelligent in how it indexes pages. Choosing a good link can boost your site’s position, but choosing a bad one can hurt it.
Proper Linking with Anchor Text
When linking a website, make sure the anchor text includes a relevant, appropriate description of the site being linked. This is reviewed for Google SEO and can impact how your site is indexed. The anchor text doesn’t have to be long and drawn out, but it should be accurate and descriptive so Google (and human readers) know what the site is about.
Update Often
Update your website content often. The new content will attract web crawlers and can improve your Google SEO. New content will also attract visitors and encourage return visits, especially if they are done regularly (such as daily, weekly, multiple times a week or even bi-weekly). Stick to a schedule and both Google SEO and human readers will come back for more.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Keywords Outside of Content
For Google SEO, or any SEO for that matter, keywords should appear in more than just the main content. Website owners should include a main keyword in the site’s URL, title tag, and domain name. Priority keywords should also appear in the titles of articles and alternative text for images and photographs.
Pick Reliable Sites for Linking
Websites often contain links to other websites. When working with Google SEO, make sure your website only links to reliable, relevant websites that offer quality. Google has become very intelligent in how it indexes pages. Choosing a good link can boost your site’s position, but choosing a bad one can hurt it.
Proper Linking with Anchor Text
When linking a website, make sure the anchor text includes a relevant, appropriate description of the site being linked. This is reviewed for Google SEO and can impact how your site is indexed. The anchor text doesn’t have to be long and drawn out, but it should be accurate and descriptive so Google (and human readers) know what the site is about.
Update Often
Update your website content often. The new content will attract web crawlers and can improve your Google SEO. New content will also attract visitors and encourage return visits, especially if they are done regularly (such as daily, weekly, multiple times a week or even bi-weekly). Stick to a schedule and both Google SEO and human readers will come back for more.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Seo tips & tricks to rule #1 position in search engine
(1) Initially add search engine friendly theme with less heavy images,java codes etc .Try to reduce code size as much as possible to maintain the speed factor as well.
(2) Install "All in SEO" Plugin".This plug-in are easily available online free of cost.
(3) You must configure and add Google Custom Search and Google Analytic Code to track the website traffic.
(4) Don't forget to add "alt tags" in banners or while posting a content, if it's difficult for you to solve this problem you can try "Custom Header" plug-in and enter HTML codes for each posts and pages.
(5) create search engine friendly URLS is very important part and that too helps to stand at a good position in to the search engines ranking.
(6) You should add your sitemap 'sitemap.xml" file to webmaster tools such as Google,Yahoo and MSN ,to crawl the URL on regular basis by the crawler.
(7) Don't miss to add archive section with in your website because new visitors love to read old posts written in your blog.
(8) Add and activate "Recent post" plugin . This plugin helps to retrieve a list of the most recent post for your visitors
(9) Add "Google Sitemaps" to the plugin folder and activate . Set write access to the root server and then go to options >>
Google sitemap and then click "Build sitemap manually" link and this creates site map and as you add new post xml file gets updated automatically with new posts URL.
(10) Register to Feedburner and add your post RSS feed to Feedburner and create an option in the blog for your readers to subscribe your posts and when you make a post, then th reader will be sent mail or noticed through browser about your new posts
Regards,
Senthilkc
(2) Install "All in SEO" Plugin".This plug-in are easily available online free of cost.
(3) You must configure and add Google Custom Search and Google Analytic Code to track the website traffic.
(4) Don't forget to add "alt tags" in banners or while posting a content, if it's difficult for you to solve this problem you can try "Custom Header" plug-in and enter HTML codes for each posts and pages.
(5) create search engine friendly URLS is very important part and that too helps to stand at a good position in to the search engines ranking.
(6) You should add your sitemap 'sitemap.xml" file to webmaster tools such as Google,Yahoo and MSN ,to crawl the URL on regular basis by the crawler.
(7) Don't miss to add archive section with in your website because new visitors love to read old posts written in your blog.
(8) Add and activate "Recent post" plugin . This plugin helps to retrieve a list of the most recent post for your visitors
(9) Add "Google Sitemaps" to the plugin folder and activate . Set write access to the root server and then go to options >>
Google sitemap and then click "Build sitemap manually" link and this creates site map and as you add new post xml file gets updated automatically with new posts URL.
(10) Register to Feedburner and add your post RSS feed to Feedburner and create an option in the blog for your readers to subscribe your posts and when you make a post, then th reader will be sent mail or noticed through browser about your new posts
Regards,
Senthilkc
Use The Excellent SEO Tips To Get Traffic for Your Website
These days various well known companies are using SEO techniques in order to bring the much needed traffic to their websites. If you are operating a large internet based business then you can hire a good SEO service provider that can provide you all the excellent features and services. The basic purpose of the Seo service is to put your website on top of the search engine results. If your website is popular then you would surely get the much needed traffic to it. The SEO services would provide you the much needed tools with the help of which you would be able to achieve success in your internet based business.
Before you select a particular SEO service provider, it is highly essential for you to consider the pros and cons. In this article, I would like to tell you about the important things that you need to keep in mind before selecting the best SEO service provider.
#
I would like to tell you that you must consult professional people who can provide you all the information that you need for hiring a good service provider. Understand the competition in the industry as it would be able to help you to plan out certain strategies for the benefit of your business.
#
If your website is popular then you would surely get the much needed traffic to it. Look at the previous projects that were undertaken by that specific SEO firm. If they were successful in providing good services to their precious clients then you can also consider them for your company.
#
It might take some time before you actually experience great results after taking the help of the SEO services but you must never lose hope and interest.
#
Carry out a throughout market research as this would help you to locate providers that are genuine and can actually provide you good results.
#
You must stay in touch with your provider during the entire process as this would help you to know about the techniques and tools that your provider is using.
#
There are various SEO software also available in the market these days that can provide you a lot of help, but they can be very complicated to use.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Before you select a particular SEO service provider, it is highly essential for you to consider the pros and cons. In this article, I would like to tell you about the important things that you need to keep in mind before selecting the best SEO service provider.
#
I would like to tell you that you must consult professional people who can provide you all the information that you need for hiring a good service provider. Understand the competition in the industry as it would be able to help you to plan out certain strategies for the benefit of your business.
#
If your website is popular then you would surely get the much needed traffic to it. Look at the previous projects that were undertaken by that specific SEO firm. If they were successful in providing good services to their precious clients then you can also consider them for your company.
#
It might take some time before you actually experience great results after taking the help of the SEO services but you must never lose hope and interest.
#
Carry out a throughout market research as this would help you to locate providers that are genuine and can actually provide you good results.
#
You must stay in touch with your provider during the entire process as this would help you to know about the techniques and tools that your provider is using.
#
There are various SEO software also available in the market these days that can provide you a lot of help, but they can be very complicated to use.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Monday, November 15, 2010
Obama shares dreams for his kids in book on 13 Americans
President Obama's picture book for kids, Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters (Knopf, $17.99), pays tribute to 13 Americans whose traits he sees in his own children.
The 31-page book, for kids ages 3 and up, is filled with lyrical questions for Malia, 12, and Sasha, 9, opening with, "Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?"
The book, out Tuesday, is illustrated with Loren Long's paintings of the Obama girls and their dog, Bo, as well as the 13 famous Americans as kids and grown-ups.
A series of two-page spreads asks questions ("Have I told you that you are creative?") across from short tributes. He writes of Georgia O'Keeffe: "She helped us see big beauty in what is small: the hardness of stone and the softness of feather." His most controversial choice may be Sitting Bull, who defeated Custer at Little Bighorn: ("A Sioux medicine man who healed broken hearts and broken promises.")
Obama's publisher says he's not planning interviews or events for the book. His royalties are to go to a scholarship fund for children of soldiers killed or disabled.
Obama has written two best sellers: Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir reissued in 2004, and 2006's The Audacity of Hope. The first printing for his kids' book is 500,000 copies.
Long, 46, who has illustrated picture books by Frank McCourt and Madonna, says that after reading Obama's manuscript for the first time, "all I wanted to do was share its powerful message with my own two sons."
Obama's lawyer, Robert Barnett, says the manuscript was written between the 2008 election and the 2009 inauguration, but publication awaited "the beautiful illustrations."
Regards,
Thanks usatoday.com
Senthilkc
The 31-page book, for kids ages 3 and up, is filled with lyrical questions for Malia, 12, and Sasha, 9, opening with, "Have I told you lately how wonderful you are?"
The book, out Tuesday, is illustrated with Loren Long's paintings of the Obama girls and their dog, Bo, as well as the 13 famous Americans as kids and grown-ups.
A series of two-page spreads asks questions ("Have I told you that you are creative?") across from short tributes. He writes of Georgia O'Keeffe: "She helped us see big beauty in what is small: the hardness of stone and the softness of feather." His most controversial choice may be Sitting Bull, who defeated Custer at Little Bighorn: ("A Sioux medicine man who healed broken hearts and broken promises.")
Obama's publisher says he's not planning interviews or events for the book. His royalties are to go to a scholarship fund for children of soldiers killed or disabled.
Obama has written two best sellers: Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir reissued in 2004, and 2006's The Audacity of Hope. The first printing for his kids' book is 500,000 copies.
Long, 46, who has illustrated picture books by Frank McCourt and Madonna, says that after reading Obama's manuscript for the first time, "all I wanted to do was share its powerful message with my own two sons."
Obama's lawyer, Robert Barnett, says the manuscript was written between the 2008 election and the 2009 inauguration, but publication awaited "the beautiful illustrations."
Regards,
Thanks usatoday.com
Senthilkc
Thursday, November 11, 2010
World Series of Poker Circuit Biloxi Day 3: Lutes Wins Main Event!
After an exhilarating three days of tournament poker, the 2010-2011 World Series of Poker Circuit Main Event from Biloxi, Mississippi, ended with Travis Lutes being crowned champion!
The event began with a field of 270 players vying for the title. It was mainly a mix of local pros and circuit regulars willing to pony up the cash to let it ride in this event. Only nine made it to Day 3, all with their eyes on the top prize of $95,253. The chip counts heading into the final table were as follows:
Seat 1: Jerry Monroe - 154,000
Seat 2: Jason Cluxton - 589,000
Seat 3: Steven Marshall - 106,000
Seat 4: Yair Alon - 404,000
Seat 5: Farid Nasserazad - 1,697,000
Seat 6: John Holley - 315,000
Seat 7: Robert Gunter - 144,000
Seat 8: Bob Talbot - 276,000
Seat 9: Travis Lutes - 1,725,000
The pressure was on with every move, and the action got off to a fast and furious start. On the first hand, John Holley three-bet all-in with {A-Hearts}{3-Hearts} but was unable to shake original raiser, Farid Nasserazad, who called with {A-Diamonds}{8-Hearts}. Two eights fell on the flop and Holley, who could not recover, was eliminated in ninth place. Even though Nasserazad took the chip lead with that pot, he remained pretty quiet for the next 75 minutes or so when the rest of the table started dropping like flies.
Steven Marshall exited next when he shoved {K-Spades}{8-Diamonds} into Yair Alon's {K-Hearts}{J-Clubs} in a battle of the blinds. A king hit the flop but was not enough for Marshall. Less than five minutes later Alon struck again, calling Jerry Monroe's all-in bet with {A-Diamonds}{9-Clubs}. Monroe tabled a dominating {A-Hearts}{K-Spades}, but a nine fell on the flop and Monroe did not catch up, finishing in seventh place.
Robert Gunter busted in sixth, running his two red nines into Bob Talbot's {K-Clubs}{K-Diamonds}. Yair Alon was the next to go, four-betting all-in with {A-Spades}{7-Clubs} smack into Travis Lutes’ {A-Hearts}{K-Spades}. No help came for Alon, who exited in fifth place. Jason Cluxton seemed primed to double up four-handed, calling all-in with {A-Hearts}{A-Spades} after Bob Talbot shoved with {J-Diamonds}{J-Spades}, but the board ran out {10-Clubs}{9-Hearts}{8-Hearts}{5-Diamonds}{Q-Clubs} to make a straight for Talbot. Those chips did not last very long for Talbot, though, as he was our third-place finisher. In a limped pot between the blinds, Talbot and Nasserazad clashed. The final board read {A-Diamonds}{10-Diamonds}{9-Hearts}{Q-Clubs}{5-Clubs} and Nasserazad check-called bets on every street, culminating with an all-in call on the river holding {A-Spades}{7-Spades} besting Talbot’s {9-Diamonds}{4-Diamonds}.
Just like that, we were down to heads-up play within 90 minutes. Nasserazad help about a 2-to-1 chip lead over Lutes and the two battled for over five hours before it came to an end. At one point, Lutes was facing a 6-to-1 deficit but battled back and truly earned the title. On the final hand, Nasserazad called on the button and Lutes checked out of the big blind.
The flop came down {A-Clubs}{10-Spades}{6-Spades} and Lutes checked. Nasserazad fired at the pot and Lutes shoved all-in, quickly getting called. Lutes tabled {A-Spades}{6-Hearts}, having Nasserazad's {A-Hearts}{9-Diamonds} needing help. None came as the turn and river brought running fours, securing the victory for Lutes.
2010-2011 WSOP-C Biloxi Final Table Results
1. Travis Lutes - $95,253
2. Farid Nasserazad - $57,857
3. Bob Talbot - $42,523
4. Jason Cluxton - $31,295
5. Yair Alon - $23,445
6. Robert Gunter - $17,865
7. Jerry Monroe - $13,841
8. Steven Marshall - $10,898
9. John Holley - $8,717
Regards,
Thanks pokernews
Senthilkc
The event began with a field of 270 players vying for the title. It was mainly a mix of local pros and circuit regulars willing to pony up the cash to let it ride in this event. Only nine made it to Day 3, all with their eyes on the top prize of $95,253. The chip counts heading into the final table were as follows:
Seat 1: Jerry Monroe - 154,000
Seat 2: Jason Cluxton - 589,000
Seat 3: Steven Marshall - 106,000
Seat 4: Yair Alon - 404,000
Seat 5: Farid Nasserazad - 1,697,000
Seat 6: John Holley - 315,000
Seat 7: Robert Gunter - 144,000
Seat 8: Bob Talbot - 276,000
Seat 9: Travis Lutes - 1,725,000
The pressure was on with every move, and the action got off to a fast and furious start. On the first hand, John Holley three-bet all-in with {A-Hearts}{3-Hearts} but was unable to shake original raiser, Farid Nasserazad, who called with {A-Diamonds}{8-Hearts}. Two eights fell on the flop and Holley, who could not recover, was eliminated in ninth place. Even though Nasserazad took the chip lead with that pot, he remained pretty quiet for the next 75 minutes or so when the rest of the table started dropping like flies.
Steven Marshall exited next when he shoved {K-Spades}{8-Diamonds} into Yair Alon's {K-Hearts}{J-Clubs} in a battle of the blinds. A king hit the flop but was not enough for Marshall. Less than five minutes later Alon struck again, calling Jerry Monroe's all-in bet with {A-Diamonds}{9-Clubs}. Monroe tabled a dominating {A-Hearts}{K-Spades}, but a nine fell on the flop and Monroe did not catch up, finishing in seventh place.
Robert Gunter busted in sixth, running his two red nines into Bob Talbot's {K-Clubs}{K-Diamonds}. Yair Alon was the next to go, four-betting all-in with {A-Spades}{7-Clubs} smack into Travis Lutes’ {A-Hearts}{K-Spades}. No help came for Alon, who exited in fifth place. Jason Cluxton seemed primed to double up four-handed, calling all-in with {A-Hearts}{A-Spades} after Bob Talbot shoved with {J-Diamonds}{J-Spades}, but the board ran out {10-Clubs}{9-Hearts}{8-Hearts}{5-Diamonds}{Q-Clubs} to make a straight for Talbot. Those chips did not last very long for Talbot, though, as he was our third-place finisher. In a limped pot between the blinds, Talbot and Nasserazad clashed. The final board read {A-Diamonds}{10-Diamonds}{9-Hearts}{Q-Clubs}{5-Clubs} and Nasserazad check-called bets on every street, culminating with an all-in call on the river holding {A-Spades}{7-Spades} besting Talbot’s {9-Diamonds}{4-Diamonds}.
Just like that, we were down to heads-up play within 90 minutes. Nasserazad help about a 2-to-1 chip lead over Lutes and the two battled for over five hours before it came to an end. At one point, Lutes was facing a 6-to-1 deficit but battled back and truly earned the title. On the final hand, Nasserazad called on the button and Lutes checked out of the big blind.
The flop came down {A-Clubs}{10-Spades}{6-Spades} and Lutes checked. Nasserazad fired at the pot and Lutes shoved all-in, quickly getting called. Lutes tabled {A-Spades}{6-Hearts}, having Nasserazad's {A-Hearts}{9-Diamonds} needing help. None came as the turn and river brought running fours, securing the victory for Lutes.
2010-2011 WSOP-C Biloxi Final Table Results
1. Travis Lutes - $95,253
2. Farid Nasserazad - $57,857
3. Bob Talbot - $42,523
4. Jason Cluxton - $31,295
5. Yair Alon - $23,445
6. Robert Gunter - $17,865
7. Jerry Monroe - $13,841
8. Steven Marshall - $10,898
9. John Holley - $8,717
Regards,
Thanks pokernews
Senthilkc
Obama jokes
Obama Himself Cracking Jokes (just for fun)
"That's what he talked about yesterday, 'I want to drill here. I want to drill now.' I don't know where he was standing. I think he was in a building somewhere." ~Obama on John McCain's energy plan.
"I would have to...investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities, you know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother." ~Obama on whether Bill Clinton was our first black president. Obama jokes
"I don't want to be invited to the family hunting party." ~Obama responding to revelations that he and Dick Cheney are eighth cousins.
"But I have to say tonight's venue isn't really what I'm used to. I was originally told we'd be able to move this outdoors to Yankee Stadium, and can somebody tell me what happened to the Greek columns that I requested?" ~Obama at the Al Smith Dinner.
Obama, McCain and All Hillary Die And Go To Heaven
John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all die and go to heaven. God looks down from his throne and asks McCain, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?"
McCain takes a breath and then replies, "Well, I think so because I was a great leader and tried to follow the words in your great book." God looks down and then says, "You can sit to my left side."
So, McCain takes his seat and then God asks the same question to Hillary, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?" Hillary thinks for a second and then replies, "I think so because I have been fighting for the rights of so many people for so long." God again looks down and this time says, "You can sit to my right side."
Finally God turns to Barack Obama and asks, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?"
Obama smiled and replied, "I think you're in my seat." ohh my god said god (Obama jokes)
"That's what he talked about yesterday, 'I want to drill here. I want to drill now.' I don't know where he was standing. I think he was in a building somewhere." ~Obama on John McCain's energy plan.
"I would have to...investigate more of Bill's dancing abilities, you know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother." ~Obama on whether Bill Clinton was our first black president. Obama jokes
"I don't want to be invited to the family hunting party." ~Obama responding to revelations that he and Dick Cheney are eighth cousins.
"But I have to say tonight's venue isn't really what I'm used to. I was originally told we'd be able to move this outdoors to Yankee Stadium, and can somebody tell me what happened to the Greek columns that I requested?" ~Obama at the Al Smith Dinner.
Obama, McCain and All Hillary Die And Go To Heaven
John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama all die and go to heaven. God looks down from his throne and asks McCain, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?"
McCain takes a breath and then replies, "Well, I think so because I was a great leader and tried to follow the words in your great book." God looks down and then says, "You can sit to my left side."
So, McCain takes his seat and then God asks the same question to Hillary, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?" Hillary thinks for a second and then replies, "I think so because I have been fighting for the rights of so many people for so long." God again looks down and this time says, "You can sit to my right side."
Finally God turns to Barack Obama and asks, "Do you think you deserve to be in heaven?"
Obama smiled and replied, "I think you're in my seat." ohh my god said god (Obama jokes)
Today's Issue in Link building
In Today's Issue:
***What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?***
***Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right? Wrong!***
***OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?***
What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?
What theme relevancy means is the site that places a link to yours (an vice versa) should be relevant or related to your sites "theme". Ideally, your link partner's Website should complement, but not compete with whatever you are offering.
For instance, if you are selling blue widgets, it makes sense to get a link from a site selling widget accessories. Or, if you are selling Search Engine Optimization services, it's a good idea to get links pointing to SEO-related articles, search engines news and forums. And, in both examples, it's definitely NOT a good idea to exchange links with casino, gambling, or real estate sites.
This is not to say that blue widget buyers never gamble or never purchase real estate. But if they came to your site looking for your products or services such as blue widgets or SEO services, there's probably one chance out of a million they are interested in casinos or real estate right now.
This is how your site's visitors would have thought, and this is how search engines think it should be. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other major search engines have been designed with one purpose — to provide value to their users, which means relevant, accurate search results. Their algorithms may — and will — change, but this underlying principle will remain the same.
"Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right?"
Wrong! This is a misconception that can easily get you in trouble. This approach could bring you short-term benefits 2 or 3 years ago, but major search engines (especially Google) have gotten a lot smarter since then.
If you still think theme relevancy is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, well, think again. Get a hundred unrelated links pointing to your site, and several things will happen, none of which involves high rankings for you:
* Google will simply not count these links when computing your ranking. This is the best thing that could happen since it doesn't involve penalizing your site;
* Google will think (justifiably) that your site belongs to a different theme (say, gambling) and treat it accordingly. This could mean your site will go up in gambling-related search results, and down in the results you seek (such as blue widget results). Now, you don't want this, do you?
* With the last Google algo update (dubbed "Big Daddy"), Google will decide (again, justifiably) you are trying to trick search engines and will simply drop your site from its index. Ouch. That was definitely NOT intended.
So here's a rule of thumb: Always keep your site's visitors in mind when running your link building campaigns. Try to get into your visitors' shoes and think what resources they would be interested in. Would they be interested in casino sites? No? Then don't do it.
"OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?"
Easy. There are several ways you can do it:
1. Do a search in major search engines such as Google using your niche keywords. Scan the results, copy the URLs you are interested in into a spreadsheet, wash rinse and repeat.
2. Visit a good link directory. Link directories are human-compiled directories of sites broken down into categories. DMOZ is an excellent example. Simply find your niche category in a directory, and search for relevant link partners there.
3. A trick you could use is examine your competition. Your competitors, who are selling, say, red widgets, most likely have other sites that link to them. You can use the LINK:WWW.COMPETITOR.COM command in Google, for example, to find out who.
So really, you can do it all by hand. The only problem is that finding quality link partners for your site — as important for your site's success as it is — is very time-consuming. So if the above does not seem easy for you, here's the good part.
LinkAssistant makes it a lot easier to find relevant link partners. Just point to Tools -> Find new link partners... and explore your options. In short, you can do it all:
1. Find new partners using keyword search. Point to Tools -> Find new link partners... -> Search for new partners on the Web -> Find sites by keyword search. Then simply enter your niche keyword phrase and let LinkAssistant do the rest — find hundreds of potential link partners related to your site's theme. Pretty fast, too.
2. With LinkAssistant you can also scan a complete Website (such as a links directory) and harvest all links from it, or just a specific category or page.
3. LinkAssistant doesn't stop here. You can also use it to quickly figure out who links to your competition and acquire hundreds of relevant link partners this way.
4. And it's getting even better. Some sites are using link submission forms to exchange links. They provide you with a form that you must fill in specifying your domain, the page with a backlink, your email, etc. With LinkAssistant you can quickly find relevant "Auto-Complete" link partners, and fill in their submission forms automatically — again, saving you time.
Now, let's assume you need to find and evaluate 50 link partners a day. If you do it by hand, and spend 5 minutes on every link partner, you'll end up stealing more then 4 hours of your precious time. If you don't use LinkAssistant, that is.
And, after you've tried the manual versus the LinkAssistant way of finding potential link partners, I won't have to ask you which one you like best — I know the answer ;-)
I hope you enjoyed this issue as much as I did when I wrote it. So go make yourself a cup of your favorite beverage, sit back, power up LinkAssistant and let it do the job for you.
That's it for now. Contact me at dan@link-assistant.com if you have any questions, and stay tuned for the next issue entitled "Link Anchors And Descriptions — Things You Must Know About Them To Get On The Right Side Of Google".
***What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?***
***Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right? Wrong!***
***OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?***
What Is Theme Relevancy And Why Should I Care?
What theme relevancy means is the site that places a link to yours (an vice versa) should be relevant or related to your sites "theme". Ideally, your link partner's Website should complement, but not compete with whatever you are offering.
For instance, if you are selling blue widgets, it makes sense to get a link from a site selling widget accessories. Or, if you are selling Search Engine Optimization services, it's a good idea to get links pointing to SEO-related articles, search engines news and forums. And, in both examples, it's definitely NOT a good idea to exchange links with casino, gambling, or real estate sites.
This is not to say that blue widget buyers never gamble or never purchase real estate. But if they came to your site looking for your products or services such as blue widgets or SEO services, there's probably one chance out of a million they are interested in casinos or real estate right now.
This is how your site's visitors would have thought, and this is how search engines think it should be. Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other major search engines have been designed with one purpose — to provide value to their users, which means relevant, accurate search results. Their algorithms may — and will — change, but this underlying principle will remain the same.
"Hey, A Link Is Still A Link, No Matter Where It Comes From, Right?"
Wrong! This is a misconception that can easily get you in trouble. This approach could bring you short-term benefits 2 or 3 years ago, but major search engines (especially Google) have gotten a lot smarter since then.
If you still think theme relevancy is nice-to-have rather than a must-have, well, think again. Get a hundred unrelated links pointing to your site, and several things will happen, none of which involves high rankings for you:
* Google will simply not count these links when computing your ranking. This is the best thing that could happen since it doesn't involve penalizing your site;
* Google will think (justifiably) that your site belongs to a different theme (say, gambling) and treat it accordingly. This could mean your site will go up in gambling-related search results, and down in the results you seek (such as blue widget results). Now, you don't want this, do you?
* With the last Google algo update (dubbed "Big Daddy"), Google will decide (again, justifiably) you are trying to trick search engines and will simply drop your site from its index. Ouch. That was definitely NOT intended.
So here's a rule of thumb: Always keep your site's visitors in mind when running your link building campaigns. Try to get into your visitors' shoes and think what resources they would be interested in. Would they be interested in casino sites? No? Then don't do it.
"OK, So How Do I Find All These Beautiful Sites Related To Mine?"
Easy. There are several ways you can do it:
1. Do a search in major search engines such as Google using your niche keywords. Scan the results, copy the URLs you are interested in into a spreadsheet, wash rinse and repeat.
2. Visit a good link directory. Link directories are human-compiled directories of sites broken down into categories. DMOZ is an excellent example. Simply find your niche category in a directory, and search for relevant link partners there.
3. A trick you could use is examine your competition. Your competitors, who are selling, say, red widgets, most likely have other sites that link to them. You can use the LINK:WWW.COMPETITOR.COM command in Google, for example, to find out who.
So really, you can do it all by hand. The only problem is that finding quality link partners for your site — as important for your site's success as it is — is very time-consuming. So if the above does not seem easy for you, here's the good part.
LinkAssistant makes it a lot easier to find relevant link partners. Just point to Tools -> Find new link partners... and explore your options. In short, you can do it all:
1. Find new partners using keyword search. Point to Tools -> Find new link partners... -> Search for new partners on the Web -> Find sites by keyword search. Then simply enter your niche keyword phrase and let LinkAssistant do the rest — find hundreds of potential link partners related to your site's theme. Pretty fast, too.
2. With LinkAssistant you can also scan a complete Website (such as a links directory) and harvest all links from it, or just a specific category or page.
3. LinkAssistant doesn't stop here. You can also use it to quickly figure out who links to your competition and acquire hundreds of relevant link partners this way.
4. And it's getting even better. Some sites are using link submission forms to exchange links. They provide you with a form that you must fill in specifying your domain, the page with a backlink, your email, etc. With LinkAssistant you can quickly find relevant "Auto-Complete" link partners, and fill in their submission forms automatically — again, saving you time.
Now, let's assume you need to find and evaluate 50 link partners a day. If you do it by hand, and spend 5 minutes on every link partner, you'll end up stealing more then 4 hours of your precious time. If you don't use LinkAssistant, that is.
And, after you've tried the manual versus the LinkAssistant way of finding potential link partners, I won't have to ask you which one you like best — I know the answer ;-)
I hope you enjoyed this issue as much as I did when I wrote it. So go make yourself a cup of your favorite beverage, sit back, power up LinkAssistant and let it do the job for you.
That's it for now. Contact me at dan@link-assistant.com if you have any questions, and stay tuned for the next issue entitled "Link Anchors And Descriptions — Things You Must Know About Them To Get On The Right Side Of Google".
Amazon.com title defending pedophilia sparks boycott call
(CNN) -- An e-book that was for sale on Amazon.com that appeared to defend pedophilia has sparked hundreds of angry user comments and threats to boycott the online retailer unless it pulled the title.
A listing for "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct" was no longer available on Amazon.com late Wednesday.
Before then, more than 2,000 users had commented on the title. The lion's share deplored its publication and vowed to boycott Amazon until it removed the self-published title from the site, and at least two Facebook pages have been dedicated to boycotting Amazon because of the book.
The stated content appears to violate two of Amazon's content guidelines for digital publication.
The author of the controversial tome said he publised it to address what he considers unfair portrayals of pedophiles in the media.
"True pedophiles love children and would never hurt them," Phillip R. Greaves II said in a phone interview with CNN on Wednesday.
When asked if the self-published e-book was a "how-to manual," he said, "there are certain parts that are advisory," which set out lines that should not be crossed.
"Penetration is out. You can't do that with a child, but kissing and fondling I don't think is that big of a problem," he said.
The Pueblo, Colorado, man told CNN that he has not had sexual contact with a child as an adult, but did when he was a teenager. He also said he "was introduced to oral sex when I was 7" by an older female but did not provide specifics.
In the title's Amazon.com product description, Greaves described it as "my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow.
"I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught," he said.
Most users who commented on the title said they deplored its publication and vowed to boycott Amazon until it removed the title.
"It is ILLEGAL to molest children, and for Amazon to promote such is insane. I'm an abuse survivor, and am OUTRAGED Amazon would choose to promote this nonsense. I will not be purchasing anything from your website until this is removed," one user wrote in a comment echoed by others.
Others lamented they could not give the book less than "one star" in submitting their reviews, saying they would shop elsewhere during the holiday season.
"Cannot believe that Amazon is selling this. I was in the middle of placing my whole Christmas shopping order when I saw something about this. After reviewing it, I have canceled my order from Amazon and am encouraging all of my friends not to order from Amazon because they are choosing to sell this book. I will not be purchasing anything from Amazon until they agree to quit selling this book," another user said.
Amazon did not return CNN's requests for comment, but one user posted what it said was Amazon's response to an e-mail the person had sent.
"Let me assure you that Amazon.com does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts; we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions."
"Amazon.com believes it is censorship not to sell certain titles because we believe their message is objectionable."
The company's website provides content guidelines for titles sold through its Digital Text Platform Program. The guidelines say publishers are expected to conduct proper research to ensure that titles are in compliance with all local, state, national and international laws.
"If Amazon Digital Services, Inc. determines that the content of a Title is prohibited, we may summarily remove or alter it without returning any fees. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to make judgments about whether or not content is appropriate," the guidelines state.
Pornography, offensive material and "titles which may lead to... illegal activity" are among the prohibited content listed in the guidelines.
What Amazon deems offensive, "is probably about what you would expect" the guidelines state, without elaboration, except to say that, "Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of Titles sold on our site."
A few Amazon.com users defended the author's right to free speech, and a discussion on the site titled "Why Amazon is Right" delved into the constitutional implications of the controversy.
"While I think 99.9 percent of us object to pedophilia (even though I think this particular book was a publicity stunt/joke), I think we can all agree that we don't want someone else censoring a subject matter that we may be interested in. Religion, atheism, homosexuality, etc. are some subjects that spring to mind ... and they have been censored in the past until we realized that it's best to let all information in (even if we don't like some of it), rather than allow some authority or individual decide what we can and can't know about based on their own opinions or motivations," one user wrote.
The author has three other titles on Amazon.com under his name. They are available on the e-reader, Kindle, and all were published within the last week.
Greaves described himself as a former nurses' aid and in-home health care provider who is retired and on disability for "manic depression." He said he first began writing as a child and hopes to continue doing so full time.
But conspiracy theories over the book abound, with commenters citing it as a publicity stunt, a hoax, or perhaps a law enforcement sting.
"People... Relax... This book is obviously promoted by Amazon per request of FBI in order to track down and catch pedophiles. This book is obviously a bait for the sickos that are lurking around out there trying to prey on our children."
Regards,
Thanks cnn
Senthilkc
A listing for "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct" was no longer available on Amazon.com late Wednesday.
Before then, more than 2,000 users had commented on the title. The lion's share deplored its publication and vowed to boycott Amazon until it removed the self-published title from the site, and at least two Facebook pages have been dedicated to boycotting Amazon because of the book.
The stated content appears to violate two of Amazon's content guidelines for digital publication.
The author of the controversial tome said he publised it to address what he considers unfair portrayals of pedophiles in the media.
"True pedophiles love children and would never hurt them," Phillip R. Greaves II said in a phone interview with CNN on Wednesday.
When asked if the self-published e-book was a "how-to manual," he said, "there are certain parts that are advisory," which set out lines that should not be crossed.
"Penetration is out. You can't do that with a child, but kissing and fondling I don't think is that big of a problem," he said.
The Pueblo, Colorado, man told CNN that he has not had sexual contact with a child as an adult, but did when he was a teenager. He also said he "was introduced to oral sex when I was 7" by an older female but did not provide specifics.
In the title's Amazon.com product description, Greaves described it as "my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow.
"I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter [sic] sentences should they ever be caught," he said.
Most users who commented on the title said they deplored its publication and vowed to boycott Amazon until it removed the title.
"It is ILLEGAL to molest children, and for Amazon to promote such is insane. I'm an abuse survivor, and am OUTRAGED Amazon would choose to promote this nonsense. I will not be purchasing anything from your website until this is removed," one user wrote in a comment echoed by others.
Others lamented they could not give the book less than "one star" in submitting their reviews, saying they would shop elsewhere during the holiday season.
"Cannot believe that Amazon is selling this. I was in the middle of placing my whole Christmas shopping order when I saw something about this. After reviewing it, I have canceled my order from Amazon and am encouraging all of my friends not to order from Amazon because they are choosing to sell this book. I will not be purchasing anything from Amazon until they agree to quit selling this book," another user said.
Amazon did not return CNN's requests for comment, but one user posted what it said was Amazon's response to an e-mail the person had sent.
"Let me assure you that Amazon.com does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts; we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions."
"Amazon.com believes it is censorship not to sell certain titles because we believe their message is objectionable."
The company's website provides content guidelines for titles sold through its Digital Text Platform Program. The guidelines say publishers are expected to conduct proper research to ensure that titles are in compliance with all local, state, national and international laws.
"If Amazon Digital Services, Inc. determines that the content of a Title is prohibited, we may summarily remove or alter it without returning any fees. Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to make judgments about whether or not content is appropriate," the guidelines state.
Pornography, offensive material and "titles which may lead to... illegal activity" are among the prohibited content listed in the guidelines.
What Amazon deems offensive, "is probably about what you would expect" the guidelines state, without elaboration, except to say that, "Amazon Digital Services, Inc. reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of Titles sold on our site."
A few Amazon.com users defended the author's right to free speech, and a discussion on the site titled "Why Amazon is Right" delved into the constitutional implications of the controversy.
"While I think 99.9 percent of us object to pedophilia (even though I think this particular book was a publicity stunt/joke), I think we can all agree that we don't want someone else censoring a subject matter that we may be interested in. Religion, atheism, homosexuality, etc. are some subjects that spring to mind ... and they have been censored in the past until we realized that it's best to let all information in (even if we don't like some of it), rather than allow some authority or individual decide what we can and can't know about based on their own opinions or motivations," one user wrote.
The author has three other titles on Amazon.com under his name. They are available on the e-reader, Kindle, and all were published within the last week.
Greaves described himself as a former nurses' aid and in-home health care provider who is retired and on disability for "manic depression." He said he first began writing as a child and hopes to continue doing so full time.
But conspiracy theories over the book abound, with commenters citing it as a publicity stunt, a hoax, or perhaps a law enforcement sting.
"People... Relax... This book is obviously promoted by Amazon per request of FBI in order to track down and catch pedophiles. This book is obviously a bait for the sickos that are lurking around out there trying to prey on our children."
Regards,
Thanks cnn
Senthilkc
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Learning the Latest in SEO Techniques
One of the fastest growing forms of marketing is the use of search engine optimization or SEO. Think about it, how many use the Internet today for searching things that they need as compared to using, say, the yellow pages? There is a cool marketing viral video about Google vs. Yellow pages that can shed light on the issue in fact.
If you are a business owner who owns a website, or even without one, you should get with the program if you aren't already. Without a website? Time to start one if you want to take advantage of SEO. Already have a website but no SEO yet? Time to jump in. Learning SEO is a pretty straightforward thing to learn, but it requires time and dedication. You know what they say, you cannot rush perfection.
A primer on how SEO works, you first start by figuring out the keywords you want to get ranked for. Then you optimize your site using these keywords. You then do some off page optimization by linking back to your site using the same keywords. There are many more steps and procedures to learn if you really want your site to rise up from the ranks. This is why you must be on your toes when it comes to learning the best and most recent SEO techniques available.
SEO can be simple or it can be complicated. It is really up to you which direction you want to take, but learning the latest SEO techniques will always help your cause. There are tons of SEO experts out there, and it will be good for you to grow as an SEO practitioner if you learn from them. Though the techniques they use vary from user to user, it is also up to you how you build your SEO campaign. Many can live with simple SEO, while others prefer to rise up to the challenge and do it the complicated way. However, do not let the word complicated confuse you. Being complicated does not mean it is difficult, it only means that it requires a little more work.
So whether you are an SEO newbie, or a seasoned SEO expert, learning the latest SEO techniques will keep you on your toes and give you a leg up no matter what. A boost to your business is almost always recommended. So utilize SEO to its maximum and watch your profits rise.
Regards,
Senthilkc
If you are a business owner who owns a website, or even without one, you should get with the program if you aren't already. Without a website? Time to start one if you want to take advantage of SEO. Already have a website but no SEO yet? Time to jump in. Learning SEO is a pretty straightforward thing to learn, but it requires time and dedication. You know what they say, you cannot rush perfection.
A primer on how SEO works, you first start by figuring out the keywords you want to get ranked for. Then you optimize your site using these keywords. You then do some off page optimization by linking back to your site using the same keywords. There are many more steps and procedures to learn if you really want your site to rise up from the ranks. This is why you must be on your toes when it comes to learning the best and most recent SEO techniques available.
SEO can be simple or it can be complicated. It is really up to you which direction you want to take, but learning the latest SEO techniques will always help your cause. There are tons of SEO experts out there, and it will be good for you to grow as an SEO practitioner if you learn from them. Though the techniques they use vary from user to user, it is also up to you how you build your SEO campaign. Many can live with simple SEO, while others prefer to rise up to the challenge and do it the complicated way. However, do not let the word complicated confuse you. Being complicated does not mean it is difficult, it only means that it requires a little more work.
So whether you are an SEO newbie, or a seasoned SEO expert, learning the latest SEO techniques will keep you on your toes and give you a leg up no matter what. A boost to your business is almost always recommended. So utilize SEO to its maximum and watch your profits rise.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Friday, October 29, 2010
Seo questions and answers
Technical / Tactics
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.
1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.
1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Industry Involvement
Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Regards,
Senthilkc
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.
1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.
1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Industry Involvement
Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Regards,
Senthilkc
Seo problems and solutions
My Bad Experience with EtrafficJams and Mike Pedone
For the past several years I've published and run a website dedicated to helping hair loss sufferers avoid the pitfalls of bad hair transplants and quack treatments. Almost very day a newbie comes on our forum to tell yet another hair transplant horror story.
Now, ironically, I'm publishing this site to tell my own SEO horror story after having $12,000 taken from me by Mike Pedone and his company EtrafficJams. And like the patient who has been burned, I hope to help others avoid my fate.
As Web publishers we all know that the SEO field is full of quick buck artists and assorted scammers. But some are so slick they can lull even an experienced Web publisher into their clutches and snare thousands of dollars in one fell swoop.
This is what happened to me when I signed up with Mike Pedone and his company, Etraffic jams, and had my $12,000 payment confiscated without any services provided.
According to a former employee of EtrafficJams.com, Owen Dillinger, this has happen to numerous other customers of Mike Pedone and Etraffic jams. However, some of these customers were fortunate enough to have used credit cards and thus were able to recover their money with a charge back.
Unfortunately I paid $12,000 up front by check and my only recourse has been filing a civil action in the state of Florida. This lawsuit is still pending.
My case number in Pinellas County, Florida is 05-1977-CI-20
Case is Media Visions, Inc. Versus EtrafficJams.com LLC
According to Owen Dillinger, who previously worked with Mike Pedone at Etrafficjams, Mike Pedone is a master at promoting Etrafficjams online. However, when it comes to promoting his actual search engine optimization customers online many get no service at all for the money they are required to pay in advance.
According to Mr. Dillinger, the typical scenario that myself and others experience is that Michael Pedone makes big promises that are well presented and polished. Then once the payments are deposited into Etrafficjams account, his interest in performing the actual work evaporates.
Then, when customers complain that they are not getting the services they paid for, Mike Pedone fabricates an excuse for why he has taken offense by such complaints and "cancels" their project without refunding the customer's payment/s.
This is exactly what happened to me. When, after months of waiting and hearing only excuses, I insisted that Mike Pedone complete the work, he became indignant on the telephone and said that he was simply going to cancel our project without refunding the $12,000 that I prepaid. This is exactly what he proceeded to do during December of 2004.
It is now January of 2007 and our project remains canceled and our $12,000 fee remains confiscated.
Those considering paying Mike Pedone for his "services" or who publish his "expert" search engine optimization articles should consider this and other customer accounts before doing business with him and Etraffic Jams.
Regards,
Senthilkc
For the past several years I've published and run a website dedicated to helping hair loss sufferers avoid the pitfalls of bad hair transplants and quack treatments. Almost very day a newbie comes on our forum to tell yet another hair transplant horror story.
Now, ironically, I'm publishing this site to tell my own SEO horror story after having $12,000 taken from me by Mike Pedone and his company EtrafficJams. And like the patient who has been burned, I hope to help others avoid my fate.
As Web publishers we all know that the SEO field is full of quick buck artists and assorted scammers. But some are so slick they can lull even an experienced Web publisher into their clutches and snare thousands of dollars in one fell swoop.
This is what happened to me when I signed up with Mike Pedone and his company, Etraffic jams, and had my $12,000 payment confiscated without any services provided.
According to a former employee of EtrafficJams.com, Owen Dillinger, this has happen to numerous other customers of Mike Pedone and Etraffic jams. However, some of these customers were fortunate enough to have used credit cards and thus were able to recover their money with a charge back.
Unfortunately I paid $12,000 up front by check and my only recourse has been filing a civil action in the state of Florida. This lawsuit is still pending.
My case number in Pinellas County, Florida is 05-1977-CI-20
Case is Media Visions, Inc. Versus EtrafficJams.com LLC
According to Owen Dillinger, who previously worked with Mike Pedone at Etrafficjams, Mike Pedone is a master at promoting Etrafficjams online. However, when it comes to promoting his actual search engine optimization customers online many get no service at all for the money they are required to pay in advance.
According to Mr. Dillinger, the typical scenario that myself and others experience is that Michael Pedone makes big promises that are well presented and polished. Then once the payments are deposited into Etrafficjams account, his interest in performing the actual work evaporates.
Then, when customers complain that they are not getting the services they paid for, Mike Pedone fabricates an excuse for why he has taken offense by such complaints and "cancels" their project without refunding the customer's payment/s.
This is exactly what happened to me. When, after months of waiting and hearing only excuses, I insisted that Mike Pedone complete the work, he became indignant on the telephone and said that he was simply going to cancel our project without refunding the $12,000 that I prepaid. This is exactly what he proceeded to do during December of 2004.
It is now January of 2007 and our project remains canceled and our $12,000 fee remains confiscated.
Those considering paying Mike Pedone for his "services" or who publish his "expert" search engine optimization articles should consider this and other customer accounts before doing business with him and Etraffic Jams.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Seo Technique
What would be a good SEO strategy?
Before you write one line of code:
* Do keyword research to determine what keywords you want to target.
While constructing your website you should do the following:
* Use markup to indicate the content of your site
o Optimize your title tags on each page to contain 1 - 3 keywords
o Create unique Meta Tags for each page
o Use header tags appropriately
o Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
o Use keywords in your domain (http://www.keyword1.com/)
o Use keywords in your URL (http://www.example.com/keyword2/keyword3.html)
o Use dashes or underscores to separate words in your URLs (keyword2-
* Optimize your content
o Use keywords liberally yet appropriately throughout each page
o Have unique content
o Have quality content
* Use search engine friendly design
o Create a human sitemap
o Do not use inaccessible site navigation (JavaScript or Flash menus)
o Minimize outbound links
o Kept your pages under 100K in size
* Design the navigational structure of the site to channel PR to main pages (especially the homepage)
* Create a page that encourages webmasters to link to your site
o Provide them the relevant HTML to create their link to you (make sure the anchor text contains keywords)
o Provide them with any images you may want them to use (although text links are better)
* Make sure your website is complete before launching it
Immediately after launching your site you should do the following:
* Create Webmaster Accounts
o Google Webmaster Tools
o Yahoo! Site Explorer
* Submit your site to all major search engines
o Google (Use a Google SiteMap)
o Yahoo (Use the page list option)
o MSN
* Submit your site to all free directories
o DMOZ (also powers Google Directory)
o JoeAnt
* Submit your site to relevant directories
o Find more at ISEDB
* Begin a link building campaign (attempting to get keywords in the link anchor text)
o Put a link to your website in your forum signatures (hint hint)
o Reply to relevant blog posts (Don't spam please)
If you will pay to promote your website:
* Submit your site to pay directories
o Yahoo
o GoGuides
Finally, as part of an ongoing strategy:
* Continually update your website with quality, unique content
* Continually seek free links preferably from sites in your genre
Do NOT do the following: for seo
* Make an all Flash website (without an HTML alternative)
* Use JavaScript or Flash for navigation
* Spam other websites for incoming links
* Launch your site before it is done
* Use duplicate content
o Do not point several domains to one site without using a 301 redirect
o Do not make a site of duplicated content from other websites
* Use markup inappropriately
o Doorway/Landing pages
o Cloaking
o Hidden text
Additional Tips: for seo
* Usable and accessible sites tend to be search engine friendly by their very nature
* Be patient! High rankings don't happen overnight
* Don't obsess with any one search engine. They are all worth your attention.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Before you write one line of code:
* Do keyword research to determine what keywords you want to target.
While constructing your website you should do the following:
* Use markup to indicate the content of your site
o Optimize your title tags on each page to contain 1 - 3 keywords
o Create unique Meta Tags for each page
o Use header tags appropriately
o Use Search Engine Friendly URLs
o Use keywords in your domain (http://www.keyword1.com/)
o Use keywords in your URL (http://www.example.com/keyword2/keyword3.html)
o Use dashes or underscores to separate words in your URLs (keyword2-
* Optimize your content
o Use keywords liberally yet appropriately throughout each page
o Have unique content
o Have quality content
* Use search engine friendly design
o Create a human sitemap
o Do not use inaccessible site navigation (JavaScript or Flash menus)
o Minimize outbound links
o Kept your pages under 100K in size
* Design the navigational structure of the site to channel PR to main pages (especially the homepage)
* Create a page that encourages webmasters to link to your site
o Provide them the relevant HTML to create their link to you (make sure the anchor text contains keywords)
o Provide them with any images you may want them to use (although text links are better)
* Make sure your website is complete before launching it
Immediately after launching your site you should do the following:
* Create Webmaster Accounts
o Google Webmaster Tools
o Yahoo! Site Explorer
* Submit your site to all major search engines
o Google (Use a Google SiteMap)
o Yahoo (Use the page list option)
o MSN
* Submit your site to all free directories
o DMOZ (also powers Google Directory)
o JoeAnt
* Submit your site to relevant directories
o Find more at ISEDB
* Begin a link building campaign (attempting to get keywords in the link anchor text)
o Put a link to your website in your forum signatures (hint hint)
o Reply to relevant blog posts (Don't spam please)
If you will pay to promote your website:
* Submit your site to pay directories
o Yahoo
o GoGuides
Finally, as part of an ongoing strategy:
* Continually update your website with quality, unique content
* Continually seek free links preferably from sites in your genre
Do NOT do the following: for seo
* Make an all Flash website (without an HTML alternative)
* Use JavaScript or Flash for navigation
* Spam other websites for incoming links
* Launch your site before it is done
* Use duplicate content
o Do not point several domains to one site without using a 301 redirect
o Do not make a site of duplicated content from other websites
* Use markup inappropriately
o Doorway/Landing pages
o Cloaking
o Hidden text
Additional Tips: for seo
* Usable and accessible sites tend to be search engine friendly by their very nature
* Be patient! High rankings don't happen overnight
* Don't obsess with any one search engine. They are all worth your attention.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Seo problems and solutions
My Bad Experience with EtrafficJams and Mike Pedone
For the past several years I've published and run a website dedicated to helping hair loss sufferers avoid the pitfalls of bad hair transplants and quack treatments. Almost very day a newbie comes on our forum to tell yet another hair transplant horror story.
Now, ironically, I'm publishing this site to tell my own SEO horror story after having $12,000 taken from me by Mike Pedone and his company EtrafficJams. And like the patient who has been burned, I hope to help others avoid my fate.
As Web publishers we all know that the SEO field is full of quick buck artists and assorted scammers. But some are so slick they can lull even an experienced Web publisher into their clutches and snare thousands of dollars in one fell swoop.
This is what happened to me when I signed up with Mike Pedone and his company, Etraffic jams, and had my $12,000 payment confiscated without any services provided.
According to a former employee of EtrafficJams.com, Owen Dillinger, this has happen to numerous other customers of Mike Pedone and Etraffic jams. However, some of these customers were fortunate enough to have used credit cards and thus were able to recover their money with a charge back.
Unfortunately I paid $12,000 up front by check and my only recourse has been filing a civil action in the state of Florida. This lawsuit is still pending.
My case number in Pinellas County, Florida is 05-1977-CI-20
Case is Media Visions, Inc. Versus EtrafficJams.com LLC
According to Owen Dillinger, who previously worked with Mike Pedone at Etrafficjams, Mike Pedone is a master at promoting Etrafficjams online. However, when it comes to promoting his actual search engine optimization customers online many get no service at all for the money they are required to pay in advance.
According to Mr. Dillinger, the typical scenario that myself and others experience is that Michael Pedone makes big promises that are well presented and polished. Then once the payments are deposited into Etrafficjams account, his interest in performing the actual work evaporates.
Then, when customers complain that they are not getting the services they paid for, Mike Pedone fabricates an excuse for why he has taken offense by such complaints and "cancels" their project without refunding the customer's payment/s.
This is exactly what happened to me. When, after months of waiting and hearing only excuses, I insisted that Mike Pedone complete the work, he became indignant on the telephone and said that he was simply going to cancel our project without refunding the $12,000 that I prepaid. This is exactly what he proceeded to do during December of 2004.
It is now January of 2007 and our project remains canceled and our $12,000 fee remains confiscated.
Those considering paying Mike Pedone for his "services" or who publish his "expert" search engine optimization articles should consider this and other customer accounts before doing business with him and Etraffic Jams.
Regards,
Senthilkc
For the past several years I've published and run a website dedicated to helping hair loss sufferers avoid the pitfalls of bad hair transplants and quack treatments. Almost very day a newbie comes on our forum to tell yet another hair transplant horror story.
Now, ironically, I'm publishing this site to tell my own SEO horror story after having $12,000 taken from me by Mike Pedone and his company EtrafficJams. And like the patient who has been burned, I hope to help others avoid my fate.
As Web publishers we all know that the SEO field is full of quick buck artists and assorted scammers. But some are so slick they can lull even an experienced Web publisher into their clutches and snare thousands of dollars in one fell swoop.
This is what happened to me when I signed up with Mike Pedone and his company, Etraffic jams, and had my $12,000 payment confiscated without any services provided.
According to a former employee of EtrafficJams.com, Owen Dillinger, this has happen to numerous other customers of Mike Pedone and Etraffic jams. However, some of these customers were fortunate enough to have used credit cards and thus were able to recover their money with a charge back.
Unfortunately I paid $12,000 up front by check and my only recourse has been filing a civil action in the state of Florida. This lawsuit is still pending.
My case number in Pinellas County, Florida is 05-1977-CI-20
Case is Media Visions, Inc. Versus EtrafficJams.com LLC
According to Owen Dillinger, who previously worked with Mike Pedone at Etrafficjams, Mike Pedone is a master at promoting Etrafficjams online. However, when it comes to promoting his actual search engine optimization customers online many get no service at all for the money they are required to pay in advance.
According to Mr. Dillinger, the typical scenario that myself and others experience is that Michael Pedone makes big promises that are well presented and polished. Then once the payments are deposited into Etrafficjams account, his interest in performing the actual work evaporates.
Then, when customers complain that they are not getting the services they paid for, Mike Pedone fabricates an excuse for why he has taken offense by such complaints and "cancels" their project without refunding the customer's payment/s.
This is exactly what happened to me. When, after months of waiting and hearing only excuses, I insisted that Mike Pedone complete the work, he became indignant on the telephone and said that he was simply going to cancel our project without refunding the $12,000 that I prepaid. This is exactly what he proceeded to do during December of 2004.
It is now January of 2007 and our project remains canceled and our $12,000 fee remains confiscated.
Those considering paying Mike Pedone for his "services" or who publish his "expert" search engine optimization articles should consider this and other customer accounts before doing business with him and Etraffic Jams.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Monday, October 25, 2010
Seo questions and answers
Technical / Tactics
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.
1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.
1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Industry Involvement
Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Regards,
Senthilkc
Every SEO prefers certain tactics over others, but familiarity with many could indicate a deeper understanding of the industry. And while every SEO doesn't need to have a web developer background, having such skills can help set someone apart from the crowd.
1. Give me a description of your general SEO experience.
2. Can you write HTML code by hand?
3. Could you briefly explain the PageRank algorithm?
4. How you created any SEO tools either from scratch or pieced together from others?
5. What do you think of PageRank?
6. What do you think of using XML sitemaps?
7. What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?
8. What SEO tools do you regularly use?
9. Under what circumstances would you look to exclude pages from search engines using robots.txt vs meta robots tag?
10. What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?
11. Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?
12. Have you ever had something you've written reach the front-page of Digg? Sphinn? Or be Stumbled?
13. Explain to me what META tags matter in today's world.
14. Explain various steps that you would take to optimize a website?
15. If the company whose site you've been working for has decided to move all of its content to a new domain, what steps would you take?
16. Rate from 1 to 10, tell me the most important "on page" elements
17. Review the code of past clients/company websites where SEO was performed.
18. What do you think about link buying?
19. What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI Indexing)?
20. What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?
21. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?
22. What kind of strategies do you normally implement for back links?
23. What role does social media play in an SEO strategy?
24. What things wouldn't you to do increase rankings because the risk of penalty is too high?
25. What's the difference between PageRank and Toolbar PageRank?
26. Why might you want to use nofollow on an internal link?
Analysis
A big part of SEO involves assessing the effectiveness of a campaign both relative to past performance as well as to competing sites.
1. Are you familiar with web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?
2. From an analytics perspective, what is different between a user from organic search results vs. a type-in user?
3. How do you distinguish the results of your search optimization work from a seasonal change in traffic patterns?
4. How do you evaluate whether an SEO campaign is working?
5. What does competitive analysis mean to you and what techniques do you use?
6. If you've done 6 months of SEO for a site and yet there haven't been any improvements, how would you go about diagnosing the problem?
7. How many target keywords should a site have?
8. How do *you* help a customer decide how to their budget between organic SEO and pay-per-click SEM?
9. You hear a rumor that Google is weighting the HTML LAYER tag very heavily in ranking the relevance of its results - how does this affect your work?
10. Why does Google rank Wikipedia for so many topics?
Industry Involvement
Is SEO just a job to pay the bills? Nothing wrong with that, but some senior positions can benefit from more enthusiasm and interest that can be measured by work done outside of the office.
1. If salary and location were not an issue, who would you work for?
2. In Google Lore - what are 'Hilltop', 'Florida' and 'Big Daddy'?
3. Have you attended any search related conferences?
4. Google search on this candidates name, (if you cannot find them, that's a red flag).
5. Do you currently do SEO on your own sites? Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?
6. Of the well-known SEOs, who are you not likely to pay attention to?
7. What are some challenges facing the SEO industry?
8. What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?
9. Who are the two key people - who started Google?
10. Who is Matt Cutts?
11. If you were bidding on a contract, what competitor would you most worry about?
Open-Ended
These questions are more about how an answer is given rather than the actual answer. They often scare interviewees, but with no wrong answer they're actually a good opportunity to shine.
1. Tell me your biggest failure in an SEO project
2. What areas of SEO do you most enjoy?
3. In what areas of SEO are you strongest?
4. In what areas of SEO are you weakest?
5. How do you handle a client who does not implement your SEO recommendations?
6. Can you get "xyz"? company listed for the keyword "Google"? in the first page?
7. What do you think is different about working for an SEO agency vs. doing SEO in-house?
8. Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?
Regards,
Senthilkc
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
seo traffic calculation
8 Short Steps To Forecast and Estimate SEO ROI…
… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.
Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.
The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.
Flowchart on how to project and/or forecast the ROI on SEO.
1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.
2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.
- Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.
- Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.
- Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.
Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.
3) Find search volume for your target keywords.
Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.
It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.
3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.
- Run a PPC campaign.
- If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:
* Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.
* Compare with Aaron’s tool.
* Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)
* Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?
4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:
* Look for backlink numbers and quality,
* Consider backlink growth rates,
* Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,
* Look at their anchor text,
* Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.
5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.
Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.
My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.
6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.
Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.
Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.
7) Calculate your potential revenue.
If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.
To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.
7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.
7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.
8) Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.
I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.
This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…
p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.
Regards,
Senthilkc
… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.
Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.
The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.
Flowchart on how to project and/or forecast the ROI on SEO.
1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.
2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.
- Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.
- Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.
- Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.
Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.
3) Find search volume for your target keywords.
Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.
It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.
3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.
- Run a PPC campaign.
- If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:
* Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.
* Compare with Aaron’s tool.
* Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)
* Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?
4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:
* Look for backlink numbers and quality,
* Consider backlink growth rates,
* Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,
* Look at their anchor text,
* Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.
5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.
Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.
My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.
6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.
Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.
Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.
7) Calculate your potential revenue.
If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.
To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.
7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.
7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.
8) Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.
I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.
This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…
p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.
Regards,
Senthilkc
Guide to Learning Search Engine Optimization
While many people consider SEO to be complicated I believe that SEO is nothing but an extension of traditional marketing. Search engine optimization consists of 9 main steps
1. market research
2. keyword research
3. on page optimization
4. site structure
5. link building
6. brand building
7. viral marketing
8. adjusting
9. staying up to date
Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done
Market Research
Do you have what it takes to compete in a market?
I recommend: using SEO for Firefox and searching on major search engines to get an overview of how competitive a marketplace is.
The first step is to search the major search engines to see what types of websites are ranking for words which you deem to be important. For example, if mostly colleges, media, and government institutions are ranking for your most important terms it may be difficult to rank for those types of queries. If, on the other hand, the market is dominated by fairly average websites which are not strongly established brands it may be a market worth persuing.
You can extend out the research you get from the search results by using the SEO for Firefox extension with the Firefox browser. This places many marketing data points right in the search results, and thus lets you see things like
- site age
- Google PageRank
- inbound link count
- if any governmental or educational sites link at their site
- if they are listed in major directories
- if bloggers link at their sites
Keyword Research
What keywords are people searching for?
I recommend: Using the SEO Book Keyword research tool to search for popular and Long Tail keywords related to your industry. This tool cross references Overture, the Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, and other popular keyword research tools.
Keyword research tools are better at providing a qualitative measure than a quantitative measure, so don't be surprised if actual traffic volumes vary greatly from the numbers suggested by these tools. When in doubt you can also set up a Google AdWords account to test the potential size of a market.
In addition to looking up search volumes for what keywords you think are important also take the time to ask past customers how they found you, why they chose you, and what issues were important to them in chosing you.
You can also get keyword ideas by doing things like
- checking your web analytics or server logs
- looking at page contents of competing websites
- looking through topical forums and community sites to see what issues people frequently discuss
Site Structure
How should you structure your site?
I recommend: Before drafting content consider what keywords are your most important and map out how to create pages to fit each important group of keywords within your site theme and navigational structure based on
- market value
- logical breaks in market segmentation
- importance of ranking in building credibility / improving conversion rates
You may want to use an excel spreadsheet or some other program to help you visualize your site structure.
Make sure
- your most important categories or pages are linked to sitewide
- you link to every page on your site from at least one other page on your site
- you use consistant anchor text in your navigation
- you link to other content pages (and expeically to action items) from within the content area of your website
If you are uncertain how deep to make a portion of the site start by creating a few high quality pages on the topic. Based on market feedback create more pages in the sections that are most valuable to your business.
On Page Optimization
How should you structure your on page content?
I recommend: Using unique descriptive page titles play a crucial role in a successful search engine optimization campaigns. Page titles appear in the search results, and many people link to pages using the page title as their link anchor text.
If possible create hand crafted meta description tags which compliment the page title by reinforcing your offer. If the relevant keywords for a page have multiple formats it may make sense to help focus the meta description on versions you did not use in the page title.
As far as page content goes, make sure you write for humans, but also use heading tags to help break up the content into logical sections which will improve the scanability and help structure the document.
When possible, make sure your page content uses descriptive modifiers as well.
Each page also needs to be sufficiently unique from other pages on your site. Do not let search engines index printer friendly versions of your content, or other pages where content is duplicate or nearly duplicate.
Link Building
How do I build quality links?
I recommend: In this post Matt Cutts suggested that Google is getting better at understanding link quality. Search engines want to count quality editorial votes as links that help influence their relevancy algorithms.
Here are a few tips for building links
- submit your site to general directories like DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
- submit your site to relevant niche directories
- here is more background on directories and SEO
- if you have a local site submit to relevant local sites (like the local chamber of commerce)
- join trade organizations
- get links from industry hub sites
- create content people would want to link at
- here is a list of 101 useful link building strategies
Other link building tips
- try to link to your most relevant page when getting links (don't point all the links at your home page)
- mix your anchor text
- use Yahoo! Site Explorer and other tools to analyze top competing backlinks
- don't be afraid to link out to relevant high quality resources
Brand Building
How does brand relate to SEO?
I recommend: Brand related search queries tend to be some of the most targeted, best converting, and most valuable keywords. As you gain mindshare people will be more likely to search for your brand or keywords related to your brand.
A high volume of brand related search traffic may also be seen as a sign of quality by major search engines.
If you build a strong brand when people search for more information about your brand other websites will have good things to say about your brand, thus reinforcing your brand image and improving your lead quality and conversion rates.
Things like advertising and community activity are easy ways to help improve your brand exposure, but obviously branding is a lot more complicated than that. One of my favorite books about branding is Rob Frankel's The Revenge of Brand X.
Viral Marketing
How does viral marketing relate to SEO?
I recommend: Seth Godin's Purple Cow is a great book about being remarkable. Links are nothing but a remark or citation.
Link building is probably the single hardest and most time consuming part of an effective SEO campaign, largely because it requires influencing other people.
The beautiful thing about viral marketing is that creating one popular compelling idea can lead to thousands and thousands of unrequested links.
In SEO many people create content based around linking opportunities. Many of us refer to this as Link Baiting.
You can learn link baiting tips from
- SEO Book
- Stuntdubl
- Copyblogger
- Wolf Howl
You can search social news or social bookmarking sites like Digg or Del.icio.us to see what stories related to your topic became popular.
You can also hire Chris Angus, Todd Malicoat, or Brent Csutoras to perform link baiting services.
Measuring Results
How can I tell if my SEO campaign is effective?
I recommend: The bottom line is what counts. Is your site generating more leads, higher quality leads, or more sales?
Search engines lag market activity though, so it may take a while for them to fully analyze how authoritative your site is after you work to target new markets and build linkage data and brand value.
You can look at your server logs and an analytics program to track traffic trends and what keywords lead to conversion.
Outside of traffic another good sign that you are on the right track is if you see more websites asking questions or talking about you. If you start picking up high quality unrequested links you might be near a Tipping Point to where your marketing really starts to build on itself.
Depending on how competitive your marketplace is it may take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple years to establish a strong market position.
In my SEO tools I also offer Google Gadgets, which make it easy for you to embed keyword, competitive, and link research tools inside any webpage.
Keeping up to date
How do you track the changes in the SEO market?
I recommend: You can track your ranking changes using this free keyword rank checker. Remember that the perspective of only one site is probably not enough to understand all the changing market dynamics though.
Regards,
Senthilkc
1. market research
2. keyword research
3. on page optimization
4. site structure
5. link building
6. brand building
7. viral marketing
8. adjusting
9. staying up to date
Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done
Market Research
Do you have what it takes to compete in a market?
I recommend: using SEO for Firefox and searching on major search engines to get an overview of how competitive a marketplace is.
The first step is to search the major search engines to see what types of websites are ranking for words which you deem to be important. For example, if mostly colleges, media, and government institutions are ranking for your most important terms it may be difficult to rank for those types of queries. If, on the other hand, the market is dominated by fairly average websites which are not strongly established brands it may be a market worth persuing.
You can extend out the research you get from the search results by using the SEO for Firefox extension with the Firefox browser. This places many marketing data points right in the search results, and thus lets you see things like
- site age
- Google PageRank
- inbound link count
- if any governmental or educational sites link at their site
- if they are listed in major directories
- if bloggers link at their sites
Keyword Research
What keywords are people searching for?
I recommend: Using the SEO Book Keyword research tool to search for popular and Long Tail keywords related to your industry. This tool cross references Overture, the Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker, and other popular keyword research tools.
Keyword research tools are better at providing a qualitative measure than a quantitative measure, so don't be surprised if actual traffic volumes vary greatly from the numbers suggested by these tools. When in doubt you can also set up a Google AdWords account to test the potential size of a market.
In addition to looking up search volumes for what keywords you think are important also take the time to ask past customers how they found you, why they chose you, and what issues were important to them in chosing you.
You can also get keyword ideas by doing things like
- checking your web analytics or server logs
- looking at page contents of competing websites
- looking through topical forums and community sites to see what issues people frequently discuss
Site Structure
How should you structure your site?
I recommend: Before drafting content consider what keywords are your most important and map out how to create pages to fit each important group of keywords within your site theme and navigational structure based on
- market value
- logical breaks in market segmentation
- importance of ranking in building credibility / improving conversion rates
You may want to use an excel spreadsheet or some other program to help you visualize your site structure.
Make sure
- your most important categories or pages are linked to sitewide
- you link to every page on your site from at least one other page on your site
- you use consistant anchor text in your navigation
- you link to other content pages (and expeically to action items) from within the content area of your website
If you are uncertain how deep to make a portion of the site start by creating a few high quality pages on the topic. Based on market feedback create more pages in the sections that are most valuable to your business.
On Page Optimization
How should you structure your on page content?
I recommend: Using unique descriptive page titles play a crucial role in a successful search engine optimization campaigns. Page titles appear in the search results, and many people link to pages using the page title as their link anchor text.
If possible create hand crafted meta description tags which compliment the page title by reinforcing your offer. If the relevant keywords for a page have multiple formats it may make sense to help focus the meta description on versions you did not use in the page title.
As far as page content goes, make sure you write for humans, but also use heading tags to help break up the content into logical sections which will improve the scanability and help structure the document.
When possible, make sure your page content uses descriptive modifiers as well.
Each page also needs to be sufficiently unique from other pages on your site. Do not let search engines index printer friendly versions of your content, or other pages where content is duplicate or nearly duplicate.
Link Building
How do I build quality links?
I recommend: In this post Matt Cutts suggested that Google is getting better at understanding link quality. Search engines want to count quality editorial votes as links that help influence their relevancy algorithms.
Here are a few tips for building links
- submit your site to general directories like DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
- submit your site to relevant niche directories
- here is more background on directories and SEO
- if you have a local site submit to relevant local sites (like the local chamber of commerce)
- join trade organizations
- get links from industry hub sites
- create content people would want to link at
- here is a list of 101 useful link building strategies
Other link building tips
- try to link to your most relevant page when getting links (don't point all the links at your home page)
- mix your anchor text
- use Yahoo! Site Explorer and other tools to analyze top competing backlinks
- don't be afraid to link out to relevant high quality resources
Brand Building
How does brand relate to SEO?
I recommend: Brand related search queries tend to be some of the most targeted, best converting, and most valuable keywords. As you gain mindshare people will be more likely to search for your brand or keywords related to your brand.
A high volume of brand related search traffic may also be seen as a sign of quality by major search engines.
If you build a strong brand when people search for more information about your brand other websites will have good things to say about your brand, thus reinforcing your brand image and improving your lead quality and conversion rates.
Things like advertising and community activity are easy ways to help improve your brand exposure, but obviously branding is a lot more complicated than that. One of my favorite books about branding is Rob Frankel's The Revenge of Brand X.
Viral Marketing
How does viral marketing relate to SEO?
I recommend: Seth Godin's Purple Cow is a great book about being remarkable. Links are nothing but a remark or citation.
Link building is probably the single hardest and most time consuming part of an effective SEO campaign, largely because it requires influencing other people.
The beautiful thing about viral marketing is that creating one popular compelling idea can lead to thousands and thousands of unrequested links.
In SEO many people create content based around linking opportunities. Many of us refer to this as Link Baiting.
You can learn link baiting tips from
- SEO Book
- Stuntdubl
- Copyblogger
- Wolf Howl
You can search social news or social bookmarking sites like Digg or Del.icio.us to see what stories related to your topic became popular.
You can also hire Chris Angus, Todd Malicoat, or Brent Csutoras to perform link baiting services.
Measuring Results
How can I tell if my SEO campaign is effective?
I recommend: The bottom line is what counts. Is your site generating more leads, higher quality leads, or more sales?
Search engines lag market activity though, so it may take a while for them to fully analyze how authoritative your site is after you work to target new markets and build linkage data and brand value.
You can look at your server logs and an analytics program to track traffic trends and what keywords lead to conversion.
Outside of traffic another good sign that you are on the right track is if you see more websites asking questions or talking about you. If you start picking up high quality unrequested links you might be near a Tipping Point to where your marketing really starts to build on itself.
Depending on how competitive your marketplace is it may take anywhere from a few weeks to a couple years to establish a strong market position.
In my SEO tools I also offer Google Gadgets, which make it easy for you to embed keyword, competitive, and link research tools inside any webpage.
Keeping up to date
How do you track the changes in the SEO market?
I recommend: You can track your ranking changes using this free keyword rank checker. Remember that the perspective of only one site is probably not enough to understand all the changing market dynamics though.
Regards,
Senthilkc
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