Xbox 360 leverages social networking

Facebook and MySpace have made the Internet obsessed with popularity. Sites are adopting social networking features as quickly as we can find and friend each other. It seems only natural, then, that services should adopt social networking features, too.

You can argue that Xbox Live has always been a game-centric social network. Every connected Xbox owner maintains a list of friends with whom they hop into “Halo 3″ multiplayer bouts. But Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) is trying to make social networking the linchpin of its effort to attract an expanded gaming audience to the platform. Shane Kim, a vice president at Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, says the New Xbox Experience that launches Wednesday is “a big part of [Live's] transformation from a multiplayer matchmaking service to a social and entertainment network.”

Kim says Microsoft will be “investing more in social networking capabilities.” What the company is trying to “tap into is the growth of social networking and the disruption in the media industry,” he adds. With the New Xbox Experience, players will connect with such “networking elements” as avatars that will enhance self-expression–just like decking out their MySpace pages. They will share photos or voice chat with friends, and they can even form their own groups for game playing.

The more social connections folks have on Xbox Live, the more time they’ll spend on the service and, in theory, the more money they’ll spend in Xbox Live’s Marketplace downloading new games or movies. That’s the same philosophy Facebook game developers use to drive “engagement” on its social networking site. Games, developers say, are more fun when you play together.

Finally, the console makers are catching on that they, too, need to build “engagement” among their customers so they don’t lose them to other services. This is why Sony (nyse: SNE – news – people ) is building its Second Life look-alike Home. Social networking is also responsible for the Wii’s success–although its social Web is defined by your living room.

And all this focus on social networking suggests that some day consumers will make their console purchasing decisions based not on the power or tech specs of the console, but on its social capabilities. We’re already seeing that trend with the runaway success of the Wii. And it’s no doubt why the Xbox 360 needed to create a new experience.

by Jason Mick

‘Facebook is believed to be under attack by a relatively organized group of cybercriminals.’ -

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site with over 200 million users, is an attractive target for hackers and cyber criminals.  Unsurprisingly, the site has been increasingly under attack in recent months.  The latest attack comes in a cohesive phishing assault designed to lure Facebook’s users to unwittingly give up their passwords.

The attack began earlier this month, when hackers gained access to a handful of users accounts.  From there, they used the compromised accounts to send out emails to other users, posing as a friendly message and asking them to click a link.  Users clicking the link were taken to a page that looks like Facebook’s login page.  The users would then think that their account had logged out, and give the hackers’ page their username and password.

The malicious domains include www.151.im, www.121.im and www.123.im.

The ploy proved successful, and a growing number of accounts began sending out the phishing messages over Facebook’s messaging system.  Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt says that the site is currently trying to block all the compromised accounts and clean up the mess.  He declined to say precisely how many accounts had been compromised.

Facebook believes that the attacks were geared to gain access to a large number of accounts to use as spammers, sending out advertisements for pharmaceuticals and other popular spam fodder.  They also believe the hackers were considering using the compromised account information to engage in identity theft.

A similar attack against Facebook had occurred just a few weeks ago, and both attacks serve as evidence that the hackers are growing increasingly bold and organized.  Last year, Facebook was targeted by a similar scheme, which spread a Trojan malware called Koobface (a reference to Facebook).

Facebook users are urged to never click links from friends, unless they’re entirely sure of their authenticity.  Further, users should physically retype Facebook’s web address into their web browser’s address bar if logged out, rather than typing in their information on a redirect page.

By Michel Fortin

googleIn today’s Internet, conversations are cropping up all over the place. People are talking. They are talking about products. They are talking about businesses. And they are certainly talking about their experiences.

When you look at how blogs, forums and social networking sites have exploded in the last few years, you can see how powerful word-of-mouth is. But the question is, is it all really important? Can it really help your business?

Yes.

And I’m not talking about traffic. And you don’t need to be controversial, either. I’m talking creating systems to leverage, manage and profit from the “buzz.”

Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful lead and business generation processes there is. Online, some people call it “word-of-mouse.” But we know it more as viral marketing.

Viral marketing is the process of implementing means or tools through which the knowledge of your existence self-propagates. Like a virus, your visibility spreads throughout a network of people who refer you to each other.

Notwithstanding the power of backlinking, traffic and SEO, viral marketing is key for a number of reasons. Success in the offline world is “location, location, location.” The Internet is no different. Your success depends highly on the number of locations you appear online – places on which your site, link, company or product name exist.

In essence, to expand your reach, you need to be in as many places as possible, talked about by as many people as possible and be in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

With viral marketing, there are three ways of doing it:

* Create content
* Create applications
* Create systems

The first is self-explanatory.

* Your content may be controversial or buzzworthy.
* It may create raging fans – or enraged enemies.

The second is simple: you create an application — whether it’s a video, audio, file, software, document, etc – that people can pass around, and thus proliferates the knowledge of your existence on the web through other people’s efforts.

I might write about these two at a later time. But for now, the one on which I want to focus is the third: creating a system.

Before I give you some examples, let me explain why word-of-mouth works wonders. Those who get to know you or to know about you through a third party grant you a higher level of confidence, credibility and loyalty. According to Dr. Robert Cialdini in his amazing book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” this is social proof in action.

Remember a dictum a mentor of mine once told me, which is: “Implication is far more powerful than specification.” In other words, if you tell people you’re the best, that you’re the leader in your field, or that your product is the best solution to their needs, your self-serving promotional bias makes it all suspect.

However, if someone other than you – whether it’s on a blog, in an email, on a social networking site or in person – says to another that you are indeed the best or that you do have the best solution to their problems, how much more believable will that person’s statement be? How much more credible and trustworthy?

The answer is “definitely more.”

Accordingly, word-of-mouth is not only important because it creates an awareness of your business (let alone traffic), but also it is important to the degree to which third party marketing indirectly communicates greater credibility, superiority and value of the products or services you offer.

In his book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” Al Ries stresses the importance of leadership and how that leadership is communicated.

According to Ries, people never buy the best – they only think they do. They usually buy the leader (or what they perceive as being the best). And that perception is often molded by what they are told and by what others do, not by what is fact or by what is being advertised.

Coke, for example, outsells Pepsi. But according to Ries, taste tests reveal that Pepsi is the better tasting brand. So, why does Coke still beat Pepsi in sales? It is not because it is the leader in the marketplace or promoted itself as such but because it is known as the leader. And the reason it is known as the leader is because Coke was the first cola “in the mind” of the marketplace.

It is the one most talked about, even to this day. When a person is introduced to cola for the first time, they are often told to try Coke. Restaurant patrons still ask for “coke,” even when Pepsi is the only cola served. Why is that? While other colas are bombarding them with marketing messages, people have heard of Coke first, and most likely from other people.

Consequently, if people hear about you from other people, and not some advertisement or pitch, this social proof will create not only a certain buzzworthiness about you but also an almost instant trustworthiness.

How do you do that? The most significant method is to be the first. If your business or website is unique, focuses on a niche or is the first in some category, the knowledge of your existence will spread quite naturally, almost like wildfire. It becomes viral in and of itself, in other words.

Now, I’m not saying you need to be new. I’m only saying you need to be unique. Or better yet, you need to be the first. Whether it’s catering an existing product to a new niche, or adding a new twist to an existing product, you become the first.

I said it before: don’t be the best, be the first. But more important, as Ries pointed out, “Don’t be the first in the marketplace, be the first in the MIND of the marketplace.”

That said, there are ways to use systems that will leverage the spreading of that message, on the other hand, which helps to multiply your marketing punch. Such systems both simulate and stimulate word-of-mouth advertising.

Networking systems, for example, include strategic marketing alliances, joint ventures, and affiliate programs. And unlike the more traditional traffic generators such as ads and search engines, these specific tools are much more effective since they are used by third parties and not by the original advertiser.

In these cases, people don’t find you. They are told where you are because someone told them about you – especially if that “someone” is a person whose opinion they value.

If you received a call, letter or email from someone you know (and especially trust) referring you to a particular company, how much more credible will that referral be when compared to a blatant advertisement coming from the company itself?

You got it. A lot more.

When we think of viruses, we remember when “Melissa” and “I Love You” hit the scene in the late 90s and early 2000s. No, they weren’t some kind of adult-oriented websites, but computer viruses (or is that virii?).

But here’s why they were so effective: the devious (or perhaps even brilliant) way these viruses worked was that, after opening the email attachment, it sent more virus-infected emails to the first fifty people in your address book without your knowledge.

While we are bombarded with spam and phishing attempts, and anti-virus warnings telling us to never open an attachment from an unknown person, how can we resist doing so when the email apparently comes from someone we actually do know (since the virus uses address books to multiply itself and even personalizes the email with that person’s name)?

We can certainly learn the way viruses work – and, in the same way, apply that process to online marketing.

How? Remember that good ol’ fashion process called “networking”? According to Jill Griffin’s wonderful book “Customer Loyalty: How to Earn it, How to Keep it,” we are more open, trusting and loyal when doing business with or being marketed by people we know – and we certainly refer them to others more often as well.

Networking grants you the ability to reach corners untapped – areas that would have been unreachable otherwise. I personally don’t advocate traditional networking (the simple, “I’m open for business” kind) because, in my experience, it hasn’t brought me anything substantial in return. While it can be a fantastic marketing tool, the way in which networking is conducted is often the reason why it does not produce any favorable results.

When you’re only networking, more often than not people will want something in return – otherwise, they will lose interest or stop sending referrals if you don’t take the time to recognize their efforts. A way to consistently reward others is to turn your networking efforts into systems – in other words, to develop strategic marketing alliances.

There are many ways to accomplish this. But the most effective forms of networking are those that are systematized.

A traditional network is one in which qualified leads that you can both share, or information about each other that is promoted to each other’s market, clientele or subscribers. This way, you can effectively cross-promote or share markets with each other. As long as your alliance logically shares a same target market but without directly competing with you, it could be potentially rewarding.

On the Internet, this technique is one in which a systematized method of cross-promotion between you and your alliance through a unique, joint marketing effort is created. It is also often referred to as a “joint venture.”

For example, this includes the coupling of complementary products or services in a single offer that’s exclusively marketed to each other’s market. While different, these offers are combined and marketed under the banner of a single promotion.

Whose product or offer can you bundle with yours to create an entirely new and distinct package?

In its simplest form, if your alliance sells a product to a market that matches yours, they can add to their offer additional products, services or bonuses from you, which may include an exclusive special offer for one of your products as an upsell.

But the best method I’ve found is when you create an entirely distinct product with those from two or more strategic alliances, amalgamating existing products from all companies into a single offer that’s sold simultaneously from your partners’ sites.

For example, you sell cookware online. You can easily team up with a publisher specializing in cookbooks and throw a book in the mix. While you raise the price and split the profits with the publisher, you instantly raise the perceived value of the cookware through a co-branded approach or a combined package of non-competing products or services.

Best of all, each of you market the “new” product separately while sharing in each other’s traffic, market, lead-base and referral-sources (i.e., your own respective networks, including affiliates, “fans” and even suppliers) – thus doubling the reach with the same marketing effort.

If they have their own distinct affiliate program, network of affiliates and fan base, including their own blogs for instance, they can leverage the knowledge of your existence quite rapidly. And vice versa.

Ultimately, by leveraging the efforts of others you not only propagate the knowledge of your existence on the web, but also you create trust and credibility. And if you cater to a new market, or offer a new product by taking an existing product and giving it a new twist, you also give yourself an extra dose of buzzworthiness, too.

By Chris Crum

Spammers May Have Another Trick in Twitter

Spammers have found a new way to use Twitter. This one lets them harvest email addresses easily,  and use these addresses to do their dirty business. The good news is that you can avoid this practice by simply not tweeting your email address. Have other tips to avoid being spammed? Share them with WebProNews readers.

“You can sit and just watch the email addresses steadily trickle in,” he noted. “I wouldn’t doubt it if spammers are harvesting these.”

“It would be trivial to write a script that gathers these addresses,” he added. “They could have several hundred thousand over a few weeks at the rate they trickle in.”

The ability to search for email addresses has always existed on search engines like Google, but Twitter and it’s real-time updates brings a whole new element to the matter. They come in fast, and they’re always going to be up to date. This is why it could be enticing for spammers.

“The Twitter stream really weeds out all sorts of irrelevant data and cuts right to the email addresses within 140 characters, so it’s a lot less intense, and would require very little coding skill,” says Daines. “The thing is this makes it just too easy to get email addresses.”

Warren Riddle at Switched makes a good point about the threat. The retention rate among Twitter users has not been the greatest, and the potential for spammers to harvest users’ email addresses might turn some off too, although the ball is in the users’ court on this one.

Twitter may want to consider taking some kind of precautions to prevent this kind of abuse. Spam is already a huge problem plaguing email and the web. When a service continues to grow in popularity the way Twitter continues to do, such abuse should be a great concern.

The lesson here is: Don’t throw your email address in your tweets unless you want it to be searchable. That means it will be vulnerable to this kind of practice.

Some are probably thinking that this is common sense, but looking at the query that the above screenshot is lifted from makes it pretty clear that people are not really thinking about this. And if they are, they must not care.

By Lauren Hobson (c) 2009

Most of us are well aware that the search engines frequently change their algorithms to improve search results for users (and foil spammers), which can make it challenging for small businesses just to keep up. But as web technology continues to evolve, it also creates new opportunities for small businesses to improve their SEO strategies and boost their rankings as well. Social media (sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, Digg, etc.) provide an excellent opportuníty for small businesses to not only promote their products and services online, but also to gain significant ground in the search engine results.

One of the most critical components to getting top search engine rankings is the number of inbound links and link popularity a web site is able to build. Although there are several existing link building strategies available to small businesses (e.g., press releases, directory submissions, article syndication, etc.), social media can help create additional high-value, on-target inbound links that are essential to achieving top placements in the search engines.

For example, each time you use Twitter to publish a link to new content on your web site, that link gets “planted” on the Twitter page of each person following you, and has the potential to spread even further as your followers share that information with their own network of contacts.

Integrated Social Marketing (ISM)TM

If you have properly integrated your social networking profiles together, that same Twitter “tweet” could then be fed via RSS to your Facebook business profile, your corporate blog, your LinkedIn account, and any number of other social sites that you have set up for your business. It’s not a far stretch to imagine the link you broadcast on Twitter could reach dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other places on the web, all pointing back to your web site! By integrating your social networking profiles with each other, with your web site, and with your existing marketing initiatives, you can easily make one single marketing action (such as a tweet) show up in multiple places online, each containing a new, relevant inbound link to your site.

Quantity AND Quality

In addition to the sheer number of inbound links that are created through social marketing, the value of the links that are created is another important criterion that search engines consider. To be valued by the search engines, inbound links must be from relevant, “quality” web sites, and search engines today give social sites like Facebook and Twitter great value. These sites are highly visible to the search engines, and are constantly taking updates from users. Links tend to be shared according to subject matter, which means the search engines will see them as being relevant and on-target. All of these factors combine to create high-quality inbound links in the eyes of the search engines.

Online Visibility and Branding

Creating visibility for your business and your “brand” is really key when using social media for building links. The power of social media is realized when other users see your links or content, then share that information with their own network of contacts. Simply adding a bunch of links to your social profiles is not enough; you need to have a strong reputation and a brand that users trust so they will feel comfortable sharing your content with others. Brand recognition typically leads to natural link building anyway, which means your inbound links will end up coming from bloggers, colleagues, customers, and other people who are exposed to your links and find them useful enough to share with their own contacts.

The Proof is in the Rankings

A recent example from Website Magazine explained somewhat surprising results when they searched for their publication’s name in Google. As expected, their web site came up as the number one listing on the results page. But what was not expected was the number three listing on the results page was the magazine’s Twitter page. They then performed a number of Google searches for the terms “Chicago Tribune,” “Chicago Public Golf,” and “Daily Career Tips,” all with similar results in Google – the Twitter page for each of these terms came up near the top of the search engine results every time.

The conclusion was that given these results, Google must be giving serious weight to Twitter content, and I happen to agree. The search engines of course keep their ranking algorithms top-secret, so there’s no way to know how much weight (if any) is really given to Twitter or other social media sites. But results like those in the example above are hard to ignore!

A Great Opportunity

Social media is here to stay, and small businesses are beginning to use it to effectively promote their businesses, reach their customers, find new leads, keep customer mindshare, and instantly communicate with customers. But maybe one of the biggest benefits of adding social media to your marketing mix is the creation of high-value, on-target inbound links that can help improve visibility in the search engines and boost your business to the top of the search engine rankings.

By Michel Fortin

article writingThroughout my research, I’m always surprised when I stumble onto websites that are professionally designed and seem to offer great products and services, but lack or fail in certain important elements.

Elements that, with just a few short changes, can help multiply the results almost instantaneously.

Generally, I have found that there are seven common mistakes. I call them the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Is your website committing any one of these?

1. THEY FAIL TO CONNECT

Traffic has been long touted to be the key to online success, but that’s not true. If your site is not pulling sales, inquiries or results, then why would it need more traffic?

The key is to turn curious browsers into serious buyers. Aside from the quality of the copy, the number one reason why a website doesn’t convert is that the copy is targeting the wrong audience or fails to connect with them.

First, create a “perfect prospect profile.” List all the attributes, characteristics and qualities of your most profitable and accessible market.

Don’t just stick with things like demographics and psychographics. Try to get to know them.

Who are they, really? What are their most pressing problems? What keeps them up at night? How do they talk about their problems? Where do they hang out?

Then, target your market by centering on a major theme, benefit or outcome so that, when you generate pre-qualified traffic, your hit ratio and your sales will increase dramatically.

Finally, ensure that your copy connects with them. Intimately. It speaks their language, talks about their problems, and tells stories they can easily appreciate and relate to.

Since this is the most common error that marketers and copywriters commit, and to help you, follow the following formulas.

The OATH formula helps you to understand the stage of awareness your market is at. (How aware of the problem are they, really?)

The QUEST formula guides you in qualifying and empathizing with them. And the UPWORDS formula teaches you how to choose the appropriate language your market can easily understand, appreciate and respond to.

2. THEY LACK A COMPELLING OFFER

“Making an offer you can’t refuse” seems like an old cliché, but don’t discount its relevance and power. Especially in this day and age where most offers are so anemic, lifeless, and like every other offer out there.

Too many business believe that simply offering a product or service, and mentioning the price, are good enough. But what they fail to realize is that people need to intimately understand the full value (the real value and, more importantly, the perceived value) behind the offer.

Sometimes, all you need is to offer some premiums, incentives and bonuses to make the offer more palatable and hard to ignore. (Very often, people buy products and services for the premiums alone.)

Other times, you need to create what is called a “value buildup.”

(In fact, premiums are not mandatory in all cases, particularly when the offer itself is solid enough. But building value almost always is.)

Essentially, you compare the price of your offer not with the price of some other competing offer or alternative, but with the ultimate cost of not buying - and enjoying - your product or service.

This may include the price of an alternative. But “ultimate cost” goes far beyond price. Dan Kennedy calls this “apples to oranges” comparisons.

For example, let’s say you sell an ebook on how to grow better tomatoes. That might sound simple, and your initial inclination might be to compare it to other “tomatoe-growing” ebooks or viable alternatives.

But also look at the the time it took for you to learn the best ways to grow tomatoes. Look at the amount of money you invested in trying all the different fertilizers, seeds and techniques to finally determine which ones are the best.

Don’t forget the time, money and energy (including emotional energy) people save from not having to learn these by themselves. Add the cost of doing it wrong and buying solutions that are either more expensive or inappropriate.

That’s what makes an offer valuable. One people can’t refuse.

3. THEY LACK REASONS WHY

While some websites are well-designed and provide great content, and they might even have great copy, they fail because they don’t offer enough reasons for people to buy - or at least read the copy in the first place.

Visitors are often left clueless. In other words, why should they buy? Why should they buy that particular product? Why should they buy that product from that particular site? And more important, why should they buy now?

What makes your product so unique, different and special? What’s in it for your customers that they can’t get anywhere else? Not answering those questions will deter clients and impede sales.

John E. Kennedy, a Canadian fireman and copywriter at the turn of the last century, talked a lot about the power of adding “reasons why.” His wisdom still rings true to this day, and we know this from experience.

Once, my wife had a client whose website offered natural supplements.

It offered a free bottle (i.e., 30-day supply). But response was abysmal. Aside from being in a highly competitive industry, the copy failed to allay the prospect’s fears. They thought it might be a scam or that there’s a catch.

So all she did was tell her client to add the following paragraph:

“Why are we offering this free bottle? Because we want you to try it. We’re so confident that you will see visible results within 30 days that you will come back and order more.”

Response more than tripled.

Similarly, add “reasons why” to your copy. To help you, make sure that it covers all the bases by answering the following “5 why’s:”

* Why me? (Why should they listen to you?)
* Why you? (Who is perfect for this offer?)
* Why this? (Why is this product perfect for them?)
* Why this price? (Why is this offer so valuable?)
* Why now? (Why must they not wait?)

4. THEY LACK SCARCITY

Speaking of “why now,” this is probably the most important reason of all.

A quote from Jim Rohn says it all, and I force myself to think about it each time I craft an offer. He said, “Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.”

People fear making bad decisions. With spams, scams and snake oils being rampant on the Internet, people tend to procrastinate, and they do so even when the copy is good, the offer is perfect and they’re qualified for it.

Most websites I review fail to effectively communicate a sense of urgency. If people are given the chance to wait or think it over, they will. Look at it this way: if you don’t add a sense of urgency, you’re inviting them to procrastinate.

Use takeaway selling in order to stop people from procrastinating and get them to take action now. In other words, shape your offer - and not just your product or service - so that it is time-sensitive or quantity-bound.

More important, give a reasonable, logical explanation to justify your urgency or else your sales tactic will be instantly discredited. Back it up with reasons as to why the need to take advantage of the offer is pressing.

Plus, a sense of urgency doesn’t need to be an actual limit or a deadline. It can be just a good, plausible and compelling explanation that emphasizes the importance of acting now - as well as the consequences of not doing so.

For example, what would they lose out on if they wait? Don’t limit yourself to the offer. Think of all the negative side-effects of not going ahead right now.

5. THEY LACK PROOF

Speaking of the fear of making bad decisions, today’s consumers are increasingly leery when contemplating offers on the Internet.

While many websites look professional, have an ethical sales approach, and offer proven products or services, the lack of any kind of tangible proof will still cause most visitors to at least question your offer.

The usual suspects, of course, are testimonials and guarantees. Guarantees and testimonials help to reduce the skepticism around the purchase of your product or service, and give it almost instant credibility.

(I often refuse to critique any copy that doesn’t have any testimonials. It’s not just to save myself time and energy. I would be wasting my client’s money if the only recommendation they got from me was to add testimonials.)

Elements of proof is not just limited to guarantees and testimonials, either.

They can include the story behind your product, your credentials, actual case studies, results of tests and trials, samples and tours, statistics and factoids, photos and multimedia, “seals of approval,” and, of course, reasons why.

Even the words you choose can make a difference. Because, in addition to a sense of urgency, your copy also needs a sense of credibility.

Today, people are understandably cynical and suspicious. If your offer is suspect and your copy, at any point, gives any hint that it can be fake, misleading, untrue, too good to be true, or too exaggerated to be true…

… Then like it or not your response rate will take a nose dive.

So, help remove the risk from the buyer’s mind and you will thus increase sales - and, paradoxically, reduce returns as well. Plus, don’t just stick with the truth. You also need to give your copy the ring of truth.

To help you, follow my FORCEPS formula.

6. THEY LACK A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION

Answer this million-dollar, skill-testing question: “What exactly do you want your visitors to do?” Simple, isn’t it? But it doesn’t seem that way with the many sites I’ve visited.

The KISS principle (to me, it means “keep it simple and straightforward”) is immensely important on the Internet. An effective website starts with a clear objective that will lead to a specific action or outcome.

If your site is not meant to, say, sell a product, gain a customer or obtain an inquiry for more information, then what exactly must it do? Work around the answer as specifically as possible.

Focus on the “power of one.” That is:

* One message
* One audience
* One outcome

If your copy tells too many irrelevant stories (irrelevant to the audience and to the advancement of the sale), you will lose your prospects’ attention and interest.

If it tries to be everything to everyone (and is therefore either too generic or too complex), you will lose your prospects completely.

And if you ask your prospects to do too many things (other than “buy now” or whatever action you want them to take), you will lose sales.

Use one major theme. Make just one offer. (Sure, you can offer options, such as ordering options or different packages to choose from. But nonetheless, it’s still just one offer.)

Most important, provide clear instructions on where and how to order.

Aside from the lack of a clear call to action, asking them to do too many things can be just as counterproductive. The mind hates confusion. If you try to get your visitors to do too many things, they will do nothing.

Stated differently, if you give people too many choices, they won’t make one. So keep your message focused or else you will overwhelm the reader.

7. THEY LACK GOOD COPY

It may seem like this should be the number one mistake.

While it’s still one of the top seven mistakes, it’s last because the ones above take precedence. If you’re guilty of making any of the previous six mistakes, in the end your sales will falter no matter how good your copy is.

Nevertheless, lackluster copy that fails to invoke emotions, tell compelling stories, create vivid mental imagery, and excite your prospects about your product or service is indeed one of the most common reasons websites fail.

Top sales trainer Zig Ziglar once said, “Selling is the transference of enthusiasm you have for your product into the minds of your prospects.”

Copy is selling in print. Therefore, its job is no different. In fact, since there’s no human interaction that you normally get in a face-to-face sales encounter, your copy’s job, therefore, has an even greater responsibility.

It must communicate that same enthusiasm that energizes your prospects, excites them about your offering and empowers them to buy.

Aside from infusing emotion into your copy, give your prospects something they can understand, believe in and act upon. Like a trial lawyer, it must tell a persuasive story, make an airtight case and remove any reasonable doubt.

Above all, it must serve your prospect.

Many sites fail to answer a person’s most important question: “What’s in it for me?” They get so engrossed in describing companies, products, features or advantages over competitors that they fail to appeal to the visitor specifically.

Tell the visitor what they are getting out of responding to your offer. To help you, first write down a series of bullets. Bullets are captivating, pleasing to the eye, clustered for greater impact and deliver important benefits.

(They usually follow the words “you get,” such as “With this product, you get.”)

But don’t just resort to apparent or obvious benefits. Dig deeper. Think of the end-results your readers get from enjoying your product or service.

Do what my friend and copywriter Peter Stone calls the “so that” technique. Each time you state a benefit, add “so that” (or “which means”) at the end, and then complete the sentence to expand further.

Let’s say your copy sells Ginko Biloba, a natural supplement that increases memory function. (I’m not a Ginko expert, so I’m guessing, here. Also, I’m being repetious for the sake of illustration.) Here’s what you might get:

Ginko supports healthy brain and memory functions… so that you can be clear, sharp and focused… so that you can stay on top of everything and not miss a beat… so that you can be a lot more productive at work… so that you can advance in your career a lot faster… so that you can make more money, enjoy more freedom, and have more job security… so that (and so on).

That could have turned another way depending on the answer you give it, which is why it’s good to repeat this exercise. Here’s another example:

Ginko supports healthy brain and memory functions… so that you can decrease the risks of senility, Alzheimer’s disease, and other degenerative diseases of the brain… so that you won’t be placed in a nursing home… so that you won’t place the burden of your care on your loved ones… so that you can grow old with peace of mind… so that you can enjoy a higher quality of life, especially during those later years… so that (and so on).

Remember, these are just examples pulled off the top of my head. But if you want more help with your own copy, my FAB formula is a useful guide.

Bottom line, check your copy to see if you’re committing any of these seven deadly sins. If you are, your prospects won’t forgive you. By not buying, that is.

by Rebecca Buckman,

The Internet portal didn’t shed light on a possible deal with the software giant as it reported a loss and more job cuts.

BURLINGAME, Calif. — Beleaguered Internet portal Yahoo! reported first-quarter earnings of $118 million, or 8 cents per share, a decrease of 78% from the year-ago period.

In an effort to cut costs further, the portal expects to lay off 600 to 700 people, 5% of global employees, in the next two weeks.

On a conference call with analysts, Yahoo! ( YHOO – news – people ) CEO Carol Bartz said the company would invest in businesses “that generate the majority of our traffic” and discontinue less-popular offerings, rather than simply making across-the-board staff cuts. Candidates for more investment include the Yahoo! home page and functions like e-mail and Web search, she said, as well as mobile-phone programming and specific Web-content areas like news, sports and entertainment.

Bartz said that “brand advertising is not going to go away,” and Yahoo! wants to position itself to take advantage of the economic recovery when it eventually arrives. The recession has walloped most companies’ ad budgets, which has hurt Yahoo!’s bottom line.

The company generated revenues of $1.58 million, a decrease of 13% from the first quarter of 2008. Without currency losses, revenue would have declined 8%. Marketing revenues declined to $872 million from $966 million, and were driven by a 3% decline in search-advertising revenue.

Revenues based on fees from online services, partnerships and music downloads decreased 20%. Net income per share was in line with Wall Street estimates, compared with 37 cents in the first quarter of 2008. Earnings in the year-ago quarter, however, were bolstered by a one-time, $401 million gain.

On the conference call, Bartz didn’t shed light on whether she is actively pursuing a Web-search deal with Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ), an alliance many analysts think would benefit both companies. She reiterated, however, that search is “absolutely critical to Yahoo! It’s critical to our customers and partners.”

Taylor Buley,

The social network loses the case to trademark one of its ad products.

BURLINGAME, Calif. — If Facebook is trying to make a name for its nascent advertising platform, why didn’t it fight to keep its Social Ads trademark?

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network launched its Social Ads product in 2007 as a way to target ads from companies to users. For instance, a news item about baseball might appear in a user’s Facebook news feed, and an advertiser may choose to target that user for ads about sports-related clothing.

But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected Facebook’s trademark application, saying another company, Dave Networks, had already registered an advertising product with a similar-sounding name. Moreover, the name “SOCIALADS” is too generic to trademark, the agency said.

Facebook appealed the agency but was rejected again. The company says it allowed the application to expire last month, but it isn’t planning any changes to its products.

A registered trademark would have allowed Facebook to sue copycats in federal court. The agency won’t comment on specific cases, but it says companies have two months to request trademark application reinstatement after they’ve let their case expire.

This means that Facebook has until May 23 to refile a trademark application. Maybe it should: Social Ads is likely to be one of the company’s principle sources of revenue.

Georgia-based Dave Networks, the company that owns the trademark that preempted Facebook’s, says it was unaware that the patent agency had rejected Facebook’s application. “That’s news to me,” said Chief Executive Rex Wong. “But that’s why we file trademarks.”

Evan Hessel, 04.24.09, 05:30 PM EDT

Former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta becomes CEO of MySpace.

LOS ANGELES — Owen Van Natta, the former operations and revenue boss at Facebook, is now chief executive at his former rival MySpace. The appointment was announced Friday and follows MySpace parent News Corp.’s decision the previous day to bounce Chris DeWolfe, the social network’s co-founder and architect of its image as an edgy online hub to Gen Y-ers to flirt and find new music.

In a relatively short career, Van Natta, 39, has earned high praise for keeping Facebook running amid its recently explosive growth and for managing business development at Amazon.com ( AMZN – news – people ), prior to Facebook.

In his new gig, Van Natta faces the potentially perilous task of reinvigorating an enterprise many see as an also-ran. Facebook has lately trounced MySpace in attracting buzz, landing cover stories in Newsweek and New York, among others. It’s also reeling in users at a much faster rate. Over the past two years, MySpace’s user count in the U.S. has grown 3.4% to 70 million monthly visitors, while Facebook’s has boomed 77% to 57 million.

It’s hard to see how Van Natta can lure traffic back to MySpace from Facebook, which has invested heavily in building a vastly sleeker interface. MySpace has tried to make up for its buggy system by offering slick music and video products, but neither sparked big gains in traffic.

Unable to substantially grow its user base, Van Natta may focus on overhauling the way MySpace monetizes its current traffic. But wringing revenue from user-built profile pages, a notoriously tricky enterprise, has never been the network’s problem.

Big brands typically shy away from advertising next to user-generated content, which can range from the mundane to offensive. Under DeWolfe, MySpace created a respectable revenue stream with special promotional pages for big brands and sponsored concerts.

While neither News Corp. ( NWS – news – people ) nor MySpace are saying how Van Natta’s leadership will differ from DeWolfe’s, it’s possible Van Natta will take a page from former employer Amazon and inject the site with some type of e-commerce function. While at Facebook, he advocated social networks driving personal purchase decisions and insisted that recommendations from friends will become more influential than traditional types of advertising.

An interesting thesis. He better hope his ex-colleagues at Facebook don’t exploit it first.

By Matt Tuens (c) 2009

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) writing, as a distinct style, was born in the Internet era and has matured before our very eyes in a relatively short span of time. Although it is evolving and maturing still, and will continuously do so, we can define some of the tried and tested steps of content optimization to help unique pages place at or near the top of search engine rankings.

Some experts go on to say that the goal of SEO is two-fold, with the first objective to put out the appropriate “bait” for search engine spiders and the second to serve up useful information to people who want and need it. Debates about priorities continue among SEO professionals, but it is not a good idea to devalue the human factors in any success formula. The singular goal, then, would be to develop, position and refine content in such a way as to satisfy all visitors to the page and/or site, both human and bot alike.

Rethinking Search Engine Content Terms

“Content is king,” goes the old saying – and not only is good content king, it is becoming more important with every passing day. But the term content is best taken in its broadest sense. Content is not simply the written copy placed in a document, assembled on a page, or aggregated at a site. It includes all this, of course, but content actually comprises titles, headings, tags, intra-site links and external links, as well.

All of these components need to work together and form an interconnected whole so that both search engines and humans find the right things, come to the right conclusions and, most importantly, make the right decisions. Good writing is always targeted to the audience, and you are writing for an audience of two readers, human and software. Remember these two components of the audience and find creative ways to reach both of them at the same time.

First Things First

Titles are critically important – they are usually the first thing read by both real and virtual visitors. A title is the “primary topical identifier” and, as such, has an invaluable function – again, a dual-purpose one. It must contain keyword targets at the individual word level while stoking interest in potential readers at the phrase level.

When a person performs a search, the title is both their first indication of your relevance to their needs and your first chance to compel them to click through. Search engines, more clinical and objective, give the title importance because they see it as an indicator of the page’s main idea.

Yet many pages on the Internet have no title at all, or share “Home” and “Untitled” with several million others. There is no excuse for this oversight. The ignorant cousin of these mistakes, making the company name by itself the title of every page, is just as bad. Keywords relevant to the page should be part of every page’s title.

Heading tags carry some importance too. Simply put, heading tags define the headings and subheadings of your article to both readers and spiders. By default they appear larger than normal text and are bolded. While not a magic ranking bullet, they are looked at with more importance than average text and are a chance to show spiders the themes of your content and what keywords you wish to rank for.

The H1 tag is the main heading of your article and carries the most importance, like a headline in a newspaper article. It should clearly convey the article’s topic to the reader and main keywords to the search engines. H2 tags are one level down in importance and structure. Use them to define subtopics under your main topic, and again use keywords where descriptive and useful. If you needed to break down your article to sub-sub-headings, you would use the H3 tags, and so forth.

For both human and robotic readers, it is vital to keep page content focused. The “one topic per page” rule is an unwritten one, certainly, and it’s followed by most professional content developers. This has less to do with the intelligence of the readers (either kind) than it does with several other considerations. For one thing, search engine “crawlers” have algorithms that tend to work best on one concept at a time, and most humans work best this way, too.

In addition, limiting the focus eases the task of placing keywords in the meta descriptions, page title, body copy, tags and links. Finally, dealing with more than one topic necessarily means using more verbiage, which dilutes the potency of a site-wide SEO program and may negatively impact ranking. Better to give these other topics their own content, strengthening your site’s overall informational authority.

SEO Copywriting Balance

Much ink has been spilled and many pixels propagated in discussing SEO techniques, analyzing strategies, teaching “web content” writing, and chasing changing algorithms. Mentioned less but encompassing everything is that SEO copywriting, like all SEO, is about balance.

While articles such as this one can be helpful, it is important to understand that SEO will always evolve, change, adapt and improve. Study and implement tested techniques, but remain flexible and nimble. Writing for search engines and people at the same time is tricky and challenging at best, and can be frustrating and time-consuming, too. Approach the challenges in a businesslike fashion.

SEO content writing at its best balances art with science, blending the craft of engaging the reader with the dispassionate analysis of keywords on a page. Follow best practices, but fill each article to the brim with information useful to your demographic.

In simultaneously targeting a subject, an audience, and an algorithm, a great deal of creativity must take place to get effective SEO results. And, of course, it all has to happen in an environment that encourages short attention spans and constantly tries to lure people elsewhere. It is a major challenge to craft article titles and copy so compelling as to make people stop and read – or, better yet, stop and then clíck where you want them to.

Basics, Opportunities, and Consistency

The basic approach to writing for such a dynamic, ever-changing environment is to get to the point quickly. The “USA Today” news style – which relies on short headlines, descriptive sub-headlines and a few concise paragraphs – is perhaps the best analogy for good SEO writing. The important points (keywords) should appear early and often, and within a short period of time the human readers should know what they are supposed to do, while the search engines should be able to tell what the page is about from a consistency between your page structure and your body copy.

In the eyes of the search engines, everything that it can possibly see counts. That is, using image alt-text not only helps blind readers and people using phone- or text-based browsers, it also gives you another chance to add more descriptive strength to the overall page for the search engines. Do not miss any opportunity to further empower and refine your content.

And always remember when writing for search engines – keep writing. Write write write. Search engine bots gorge on new information, and if you consistently update your site with fresh content they will come around more often. While this gives you more opportunities to display your value, more importantly it builds the foundation of information that obviates it.

There’s a lot to do, and it all needs to be done well. Use your numbers, metrics and analytics to point you in the right direction for creating more content. That’s some science. Your creativity and amount of useful information, on the other hand, will point site visitors and search engines in the right direction. That’s a touch of art. When both aspects of your SEO program are firing on all cylinders, you should soon be marching up the search engine rankings.

By Jay Gaulard

If you are online and are not already using article directories to promote your website, you are missing out on a free and highly effective marketing option. Article directories are great ways to draw traffic to your site without paying for advertising. However, to get real traffic to your site using an article directory, you must know how to use them correctly.

What Article Directories Are

Before you can use an article directory, you have to know what one is. Article directories are websites where thousands upon thousands of articles on just about any subject are posted. They are generally categorized to make it easier for readers to find information they want. They are also linked together, so a reader reading about “Hawaii travel” will naturally go from article to article on that topic. People can use the articles they find in the directories on their own websites, either for free or for a small fee. Authors pay nothing to submít to article directories.

How Article Directories Benefit Online Businesses

You are probably thinking, “Sure, that’s great. But how does an article directory help me promote my business? Doesn’t giving away free content defeat my purpose as an online business?”

These are great questions. When you submít an article to an article directory, it will contain a bio with a link to your website. Since you are the author of the article, you are allowed to include this information.

This means that anyone who is searching online and comes across the article directory will see a link to your site. Not only that, but the people who use the content on their own websites are required to keep it exactly as it appears in the directory. This means that your link could show up on hundreds of websites.

Article directories are generally large websites. This means that the web spiders are attracted to them. Having your link in these articles is a crucial part of an online linking campaign.

How to Make Your Submissions Effective

If you are going to submít to article directories, you need to do two things. First, you need to learn about proper keyword usage. You need the right percentage of keywords in your article, and they need to appear naturally within the content. This will draw the search engine spiders to the article, thus exposing people to your link at the bottom.

You also need to make your content unique and helpful. If your article is the same as thousands that are already online, other website owners will not want to use it. Also, if the information is not helpful, people will not read the entire article. Your goal is to have them read the entire article so that they will click at the link on the bottom.

Having helpful information in the article also helps the reader view you as an “expert” in the field. This is important, because you want them to have a reason to click on the link. If they are reading useless information, they will have no desire to visit your site. Also, proving that you are knowledgeable about a particular topic will show that whatever product or service you are marketing is worth buying.

What to Do if You Can’t Write

At this point you are probably wondering what you can do because you can’t write. You are an entrepreneur and business owner, not a writer. The good news is that you have options.

You can hire a freelance writer to “ghostwrite” the article for you. Ghostwriting means writing the article in your name. Instead of placing his or her name on the article, the freelancer uses your name and your business link. You will need to pay for this service, but the amount you will pay for a quality article is far less than the amount you would pay for an advertising campaign, and a well-written article placed in the right article directoríes will draw more traffíc to your site than just about any other form of advertising.

Where can you find ghostwriters? There are a variety of online classifieds where you can post your job requirements or search for available writers. You can ask for quotes to help you learn what the going rate for a writer is. Keep in mind that you will pay more if you have detailed information that needs to be researched or if you are working on a tight deadline. You can also hire a content creation company to help you if you require numerous articles that would be too much for one individual writer.

If you do use a ghostwriter, be sure that you proofread the article before submitting it. You may find that the writer did not approach a particular topic as you would have wanted. You can ask the writer to rewrite the material, but posting something that is inaccurate or does not sound well written will detract from your goal of drawing traffic to your site.

Risks of Using an Article Directory

There is only one main risk to using an article directory, and that is that someone will download your content and use it on their site without including the link. You can do some work to check for this, but it is hard to police. However, the occasional unscrupulous website owner who uses your content incorrectly is a risk worth taking for the many users who will give you a link on their site.

Post Much and Often

Once you get the hang of using an article directory, post many articles, and post them often. The more fresh, relevant content that links to your page, the greater traffic you will receive. Be sure to continually research your keywords, because the keywords that people search for constantly change.

Also, submit your articles to a variety of sites. The most popular article directories may not draw a certain demographic of people. The more places that have your article and your link, the better your traffic results will be. Since these sites are free to use, you might as well submit to as many as you can.

By Nancy McCord

Social networkingTwitter is the current top “hot property” on the Web, but its popularity and how to use it has mystified many business owners. Many people think that they want to, or should be using Twitter, but simply do not understand the platform, its use, or its place in building web exposure. This article will demystify Twitter and help you to learn how to use it in the workplace and to promote your business.

First, I have to say that I had been confused on how to use Twitter to benefit my own business until I downloaded TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a desktop application that allows you to review and post status updates on Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. I consider it a “must have” application for anyone who wants to make sense of Twitter. TweetDeck allows you to sort the people you follow on Twitter into groups, allows you to limit the number of Tweets (Twitter micro posts) to be shown at any one time, and also allows you to remove all Tweets you have seen with one click. Additionally, using TweetDeck, finally a Twitter search on a topic makes sense.

Since using TweetDeck, I have had a much better Twitter experience. As a Twitter newbie, visiting your own Twitter home page is intimidating; it consists of post after post from people who you are following, who you may not know much about, and it just seems like a huge volume of content. To get started effectively first group the people who actually have something interesting to say on TweetDeck and voila, you have a powerful tool that keeps you at the forefront of what is happening in your industry and on the Web.

So how do you get started with Twitter? Well the first thing is to start on Twitter yourself to understand what you like to read, who you like to follow, and to clearly identify what you like about Twitter. For me, it boils down to this: I like to follow people in my industry who say something of value, who provide a link to a new application or point me to an interesting new article, video, or blog site that I should review but may have never have found myself. Based on what I like, and the people who I find interesting to read, I now write my Twitter posts using this same formula to grow my own Twitter audience.

What I also like about Twitter is that the people who I follow also know how to show their true personality in their Tweets. Yes, I do like to know what Danny Sullivan (famous search engine marketing guru) ate for lunch, but better yet is the link to the video he thought was funny. I love following Ashton Kutcher (movie star married to Demi Moore who just hit 1 million Twitter followers in April). Man, that guy is really funny and is having a ball with Twitter. His posts are great and he has just earned the status of the user with the most followers. This is why you can’t hire someone to “Ghost Twitter” for you. It’s about showing the real you – you can’t fake that!

So how can you use Twitter for business? Twitter is an excellent tool for linking and this is the real value for businesses. By using Twitter to point people to content on your website, articles you have written either on or off your website, or by linking to a service you want to highlight, you drive traffic. On top of that, Google actually indexes Twitter and so your Twitter page can appear in the organic search results so make sure your bio is well thought out. Don’t waste time using Twitter to point to blog posts, use TwitterFeed to post your blog posts directly onto Twitter. If you have a blog or website, you’ll get new Twitter followers by posting your TwitterFeed right onto your web pages. People who may not have known your Twitter ID can simply click the bottom “follow me link” and start following you on Twitter.

What’s important to be successful in using Twitter is to identify what you personally like about this new media and then deliver the same type of things that you like back to your own followers – work to provide value not drivel! So you’ve got to play with Twitter and learn how to use it first before you can really become successful with it for your business.

So how do you get followers? Well, I started by following everyone (who I found by doing a Twitter search) who had the last name McCord. Then I searched for web design, search engine optimization, and pay per click. Any site profile that looked good, I clicked to follow the writer. It was that easy. Many times people who you follow will choose to follow you. That’s how you initially build up your Twitter base. Over time you will start to identify your “Twitter voice” and refine the type of Twitter presence you want to have by changing your content style and the things that you Tweet about. As you refine your presence, you will build a following.

Another cool Twitter use is that you can reply to any of your followers by simply putting an @ in front of their Twitter ID. For example to send something to my attention use @mccordweb at the very front of your Twitter posting and click enter. Just remember that this post is seen by all followers on my site and on your Twitter site. If you need a more private exchange, go to the direct message link on the Twitter.com site and select a follower by Twitter ID name and send your message from there. This note will be private. If you are using TweetDeck, you can click on a follower’s Twitter ID icon and then select to send a direct message or @reply to them. TweetDeck will automatically insert the correct syntax for you in the Tweet.

For many businesses the ability for users to communicate with top management using Twitter is an invaluable resource. This one-to-one exchange allows a company principal to keep tabs on customer viewpoints, concerns, and interests. As a Twitter reply or direct mail does not use email and does not require a response, this is a great way to tap into social networking to test new ideas and to ask for user feedback. For example, if you have a new software product, ask your Twitter followers for feedback on a specific feature, or provide a link to your beta version for their testing.

How you use Twitter is all about your personal business needs. The best advice that I can offer to you is that you need to use Twitter a bit yourself first to understand the medium and to find out what you like to read best using Twitter. Then, create your own Twitter network sharing information that you find interesting and have some fun.

Currently I am following 204 people and 183 people are following me on Twitter. Personally I find Twitter great fun and a very cool way to find out first what’s happening in the world before you see it on TV, read it on the Web, or see it in the newspaper. That’s the real power of Twitter; you share, you find out, and you know, all by a person-to-person exchange of information.

For those of you clicking in from my e-newsletter the rest of the content on Twitter applications and uses follows.

Below are some of the Twitter applications that I like and use regularly for my business.

Twuffer – I love this one, it is a Twitter post scheduler. Some people feel that Twuffer defeats the immediacy of Twitter posts or Tweets, but I like it as I will schedule Tweets on days that I am not blogging to keep my followers advised of things I find important. It is easy to use, allows you to Tweet ahead, and lets you select a posting schedule by day and time. If you are pushing content on a service or product, this is an excellent tool to use. Set your Tweets up one week or one month at a time and feed your content to readers in addition to your regular Tweets. Make sure to use www.TinyUrl.com to change any long URLs you point to in the Tweet to a Twitter-friendly short version to save space.

Twitter Feed – This is another one of my top favorites. TwitterFeed allows me to show my blog posts from “The Web Authority” directly onto Twitter. It also allows me to post my Tweets back on my blog (by installing a widget) in my blog template – very cool cross interaction! I pick up many Twitter followers with this technique. Readers come to visit my blog and then choose to follow me on Twitter.

Twitter Grader – This one is a vanity application that allows you to see where you stack up against other Twitter users. Twitter Grader measures the power of a Twitter user based on followers, number of updates, and posting frequency.

TweetBeep – With this application, you can manage your online Twitter reputation. Alerts will be emailed to you whenever a Twitter user Tweets about your business, name, or domain. You select the alert criteria and what to watch for using TweetBeep. This is great for a business that is concerned about branding and online identity. PR professionals should make sure to use this tool to watch for comments about their clients.

Twitoria – Clean up your Twitter followers by finding out which people never use Twitter or post
infrequently so you can delete them right from the Twitoria interface.

Qwitter – If you want to know when someone stops following you, sign up for this service. Actually, this can be an excellent tool to find out what a reader hated that you posted about and caused them to “chop” you, so you can fine tune your message. If you get a flood of drops after a Tweet, it allows you to learn that people don’t like a certain type of Tweet – instant feedback at an anonymous level!

One big thing about Twitter that I have not even mentioned yet but is actually one of Twitter’s best features is the ability to text-in Tweets from your mobile phone. Although you can’t easily link to great content typically on the fly like this, the ability to connect with others without being tethered to a computer is an opportunity to show the “real you”. Maybe your followers do want to know what you are eating for lunch or about a seminar you just attended, just be kind and don’t vomit out Twitter spam using your Blackberry on meaningless drivel.

You can easily set up the ability to receive text messages from your Twitter account to your cell or Blackberry, but be careful as you may be inundated if you have a large following. I would recommend receiving Twitter updates via text message to your cell only from a small group. For example if you have a project team, set up a Twitter account for each member to allow them to post just to this small unique circle of team members. The value to track and interact with each other at anytime and anywhere using Twitter by computer or by cell phone adds real value for work groups and teams – particularly team managers. Twitter even allows you to make this type of group private.

Another feature of Twitter is the ability to add hashtags in front of keywords in your Tweets to help with sorting to allow others to find your important content. For example if you wanted to Tweet about a recent earthquake in LA you would use #laearthquake in the front of your Tweet. By using hashtags you enable Twitter to return your information for topic searches on newsworthy Tweets. You can visit Hashtags.org for more information on the current hot hashtags that are in use for today so you can follow, add to the topic, or create your own. For example in Twitter World, Fridays are the day you post with #followfriday and enter in the Twitter IDs you want to recommend to others. You would be amazed at the cool new people you can follow and interact with from recommendations of the people you follow.

In conclusion, Twitter is one of the hottest new mediums to arrive on the Internet scene since Facebook. Although it is not exactly “new”, Twitter has just recently become very high profile. If you are in business, Twitter definitely warrants your attention. Not only is it a very smart new tool to use in your marketing arsenal, but I think that the more you use it, the more you will you grow to love it and find it fun to use. The ways that you can use Twitter are endless: for teams, for family members, for business networking, to stay at the forefront of news, to promote yourself and your services, and to just have fun connecting with others online. Just remember you can’t really make sense of Twitter for business without using TweetDeck or another similar aggregating and sorting application. Thanks for reading, see you on Twitter, you can reach me at @mccordweb or visit me at www.Twitter.com/mccordweb.

by Chris Crum

What Google is Explaining to Difference Makers

There’s a short but interesting blog post up on Google’s official Public Policy Blog, which states six principles the company holds with regards to competition and openness.

Adam Kovacevich”As Google has grown, the company has naturally faced more scrutiny about our business principles and practices,” says Google’s Senior Manager of Global Communications and Public Affairs. “We believe that Google promotes competition and openness online, but we haven’t always done a good job telling our story.”

He notes that the company has been meeting with policymakers, think tank reps, academics, journalists, ad agencies, and trade associations in the US and Europe.

1. Help other businesses be more competitive.

2. Make it easy for users to change.

3. Open is better than closed.

4. Competition is just one click away.

5. Advertisers pay what a click is worth to them.

6. Advertisers have many choices in a dynamic market.

Google actually has a 53-minute webinar available for download

on the topic of Google competition and openness. The webinar took place back on April 9th, but presumably in an effort to be more open with this, Google is throwing it in the spotlight so others can learn from it.

The posting of these materials appears to be a response to recent media coverage of antitrust concerns regarding the company. Earlier this week the FTC launched an inquiry into whether the overlap of directors on the boards of Apple and Google violates antitrust laws. CEO Eric Schmidt sees no conflict with the Apple Board seat.

By Mike Tekula (c) 2009

I started in SEO working for an agency that required an annual contract. Clients who wanted to hire them had to be prepared to pay in full upfront for 12 months of service.

That’s a heck of a commitment, isn’t it?

The worst part is that most of the time what the client was “buying” wasn’t clear.

Many of proposals read something like this:

“Acme SEO Consulting will optimize Client’s website for search engines using best practices and proprietary tools and techniques. Work may include the following:

• Title tag optimization
• Headline optimization
• ALT text optimization
• Keyword research
• Keyword density improvements
• Canonicalization corrections
• Crawl testing
• Robots.txt setup / maintenance
• Broken link scans
• Link building
• Competitor research
• Internal link optimization
• PageRank sculpting
• 301 redirects”

Whew, sounds pretty advanced, doesn’t it? For someone new to the world of SEO most of these deliverables may as well read, “Flux capacitor installation, GKC valve distribution correction, Removal of vermicious knids.”

The question most people are asking when they read a proposal like this: how do these things all add up to me getting a positive return on my investment? How do they translate into more sales/leads/etc?

As an SEO I know that several of the bullet points above are often crucial optimization points. It’s my job to know which and when/where they’re required – and what the priority is to implement each one when it’s on the table.

There’s also a lot of muddy language in the example above that leaves the actual deliverables impossible to pin down. “Best practices,” “proprietary tools and techniques,” “work may include” – these are all nice ways of saying, “we’re not telling you exactly what we’re going to do.”

From an agency standpoint the argument is often, “well, if we give clients the detailed plan upfront won’t they just take the proposal straight to a low-cost competitor and get the same work for less?”

This is not a great attitude to take in approaching business relationships, is it? “Well, these people could be trying to screw us so let’s tell them nothing.”

It also misses an important point: Internet Marketing needs are different for every website.

Projects Must Be Tailored for Unique Needs

Believe me, it would be great if every client that picked up the phone and called us or contacted us through our website fit into a cookie-cutter mold for SEO and other Internet Marketing services. Everyone would get the same work at the same cost and, most importantly, they’d all see the same positive results.

Happy, prosperous clients = happy, prosperous agency

Unfortunately that’s just not how it works.

The truth is that your website and needs are unique.

• You’re in a unique market with unique competitors
• You’ve been in business for a unique amount of time
• You’re offering is one-of-a-kind (hopefully)
• Maybe you’ve got an in-house email líst, maybe you don’t
• Maybe you’ve got an extensive profile of inbound links, maybe not
• Your website might need a design/usability overhaul, or it may be beautiful, usable
and brand spanking new
• You could be running pay-per-click campaigns
• You might have a blog or articles on your website
• You may have web analytics installed or not – and for how long?
• Perhaps you have staff in-house who can handle website updates and creating new content
- on the other hand, you might need to outsource these

Sure, many of the principles of SEO and Internet Marketing apply across all, or most, websites and markets. But with so many variables and unique characteristics the work (and budget) required to reach your goals are always particular.

It makes sense, then, that any Internet Marketing company, whether they’re proposing SEO, pay-per-click, email marketíng, web design or all of the above, should customize their offering to the client’s needs, doesn’t it?

How to Know What You’re Getting Into

You can probably tell where this is going. Any project, whether it be SEO or another form of Internet Marketing, should have specific strategies, tactics and timelines geared for your particular situation.

If you’re looking to hire an agency, a project proposal should be a plan and not a reiteration of the agency’s selling points. The litmus test here: does the proposal focus on you and your needs, or does it reiterate why you’d want to hire the agency, some of their general methodology, their experience, etc. Sure, that stuff is important too, but a project proposal isn’t about the agency – it’s about the game plan and how it’s going to help you achieve your goals.

Some of the questions that should be on your mind when reviewing a project plan:

• What are the goals of this project?
• More search engine traffic / exposure?
• More leads?
• More sales?
• Do these goals make sense for your business model?

• How will the goals be achieved?
• What strategy the agency is proposing?
• What are the specific deliverables?
• What is the timeline for those deliverables?

• Why will this strategy work?
• What is the logic behind the strategy?
• Has this strategy worked before?

Without the answers to these questions, isn’t it tough to know 1) what you’re aiming for and 2) how you’ll get there? Imagine evaluating a year-long SEO project six months in. How are you going to evaluate the work that’s been done so far? How are you going to tell whether things are going well or not? If the plan or proposal was vague and listed lots of “possible” tactics/deliverables and no real timeline or goals, it’s going to be pretty tough, right?

The Basic Reason Most SEO Projects Fail

The essential reason most SEO projects fail isn’t because the work being done is shoddy (or the agency is just not worth their salt). That might be the case, but more often the cause of failure is the lack of a specific goals, strategy and detailed tactics/deliverables.

You can’t call something a “success” until you define that term. Take pains to understand upfront what your goals are for a project – and when an agency provides a quote make sure they’re addressing your goals, detailing the specific methods of reaching them and explaining logically why it’s all going to work.

By Scott Van Achte (c) 2009

In Part 1 (http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/04/30/
how-to-optimize-for-google-%e2%80%93-part-1-of-3-2/) and Part 2
of How to Optimize for Google (http://www.sitepronews.com/2009/
05/01/how-to-optimize-for-google-part-2-of-3-2/)I discussed
general website optimization, links, and Google webmaster tools.
In Part 3 we will look at a number of other considerations which
play a role in successful rankings in Google, and also touch on
some tactics which are best avoided.

Completing Optimization: Other Considerations

Redirects

If you need to use redirects on your site it is very important
to use the correct one. If a page is moving to a new location,
or being removed all together, it is very important to have this
page redirected to either the new location or the next closest
page using a Permanent 301 Redirect.

While rare, if a page is being moved to a new location for a
short term, with the intent of it returning to the original
location, then and only then, will you want to use a Temporary
302 redirect. For more information please see Redirects:
Permanent 301 vs. Temporary 302 (http://news.stepforth.com/blog/
2008/01/redirects-permanent-301-vs-temporary.php)

Non WWW Redirects

To help eliminate page rank split, and provide your site with a
little extra value, implement a non-www redirect. What this
redirect will do is change the URL to include the “www” whenever
a URL is accessed that does not include it. This can help to
consolidate links to the correct page and give your site some
additional strength. For more help on Non WWW redirects please

see: How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URL’s

(http://www.stepforth.com/faq/non-www-redirect.htm)

HTTP Headers

Check your page headers! If you have implemented any form of
redirect on your site including mod rewrites, check your HTTP
headers. You may be surprised at what you find. Some forms of
redirects may use a 302 code where you really want a 301. By
checking your headers you can ensure all is well, and
troubleshoot problems. On our website we have added our own HTTP
Header Checker (http://news.stepforth.com/seo-tools/
http-header-checker.php) for your convenience.

Home Page URL

Never have more than one URL for your home page. If your home
page is available and displays on more than one URL, then
utilize 301 redirects on all but the main URL you want to focus
on – in most cases “http://www.xyzname.com/”. All your links
pointing to the home page should direct to the exact same URL
otherwise you will split the value of your home page into
multiple duplicate URL’s.

Google sees “http://www.xyzname.com” and
“http://www.xyzname.com/index.shtml” as different pages, but
displaying the same content. This splits the overall value of
your home page, and can decrease the chances of rankings. By
keeping it consistent with a single URL, you remove this split
and retain more of the strength.

In theory having your home page split like this could bring with
it duplicate content penalties, however, I have yet to see this
actually happen – that said, it is best to avoid the risk all
together.

XML Sitemap

XML Sitemaps are great for ensuring that Google and the other
engines are able to spider your entire site. While an XML
sitemap will not directly impact your search rankings it can
help as Google is more likely to see any SEO based changes more
quickly, which in turn can have an impact.

Robots.txt

This is the first file all search engines look for every time
they visit your site. While placing a blank robots.txt file in
your root folder will not help with search rankings, it will
help reduce 404 errors appearing in your log files.

It is also highly recommended that if your site utilizes an XML
sitemap, to include a call to this sitemap within the Robots.txt
file. Simply add the following line to ensure that the major
engines (including Google) can find your sitemap:

Sitemap: http://www.xyzname.com/sitemap.xml

Potential Blockages

If you are finding that your site is simply not being indexed, it
is possible that you are blocking the spiders in one way or
another.

Start with checking your main site navigation, if you are using
Flash or some other fancy form of navigation that could be your
problem right there. Next check your HTTP headers to ensure that
your home page is returning a 2xx code which indicates that the
clients’ request was successfully received. Finally take a look
at your Google Webmaster Tools for any noted errors. If you are
blocking Google, chances are you will be able to uncover the
issue with these steps.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be quite damaging to your rankings. Ensure
that all content on your site is unique. Never steal or “borrow”
content from another site, and never cut and paste large
portions of text from one page of your site to the next. By
keeping all pages of your site entirely original you stand the
best chances of getting a thumbs up from Google.

Fresh Content / Regular Updates

Update your content. In highly competitive markets, sites with
old static content can often slip away. Keep your content fresh
and updated to keep bringing Google back to your site. If they
find new pages and updated pages with every visit, they will
come back more often.

Site Age

The age of your site can also have an effect on search engine
rankings. While there is little you can do (short of keeping the
same domain) to help on this matter, remember that the longer
your site is online, the better its chances for success. It pays
to select the perfect domain right from the start and not to
change domains mid-stream. Older sites that stand the test of
time add a level of authority in Google’s eyes. New sites seldom
see rankings for competitive terms in their first year.

Note: Site Age is determined not by the date the domain was
originally registered but rather by the date Google first
discovered content on your site.

Load Time

Load time can have an impact in your Google AdWords Quality
Score but it is unknown for sure if it can also impact your
organic search rankings. It is best to keep your load time to as
little as possible. If it is not already a part of the Google
Algorithm, it likely will be soon. Besides, it is also best in
order to give your site visitors the best experience possible.

Server Up Time

This can be a rather significant issue. If you find that your
web hosting company has a history of down time, change hosts. If
Google comes to visit your site once and it is down, not to
worry, they will come back, but if Google visits your site often
only to find that it is unavailable, you can find yourself with
drastically depleted rankings.

Google Local

If you have a traditional brick and mortar store, consider
submitting to Google Local (http://www.google.com/local/add).
While this will not directly impact your regular organic
rankings, you may find your site ranking above the organic
results with a “local business results” map listing. This tends
to be most common when your business is near the geographic
center of a city, and when the search phrase uses a geographic
modifier.

W3C Compliant Code

There is much speculation as to if W3C compliant code can have a
positive impact on search rankings, and the majority believe
“maybe” with some saying “yes”. Regardless, it is definitely a
good idea to have your site be W3C Compliant if at all possible.
Not only may it help you in terms of search rankings, but having
compliant code can decrease load times, and help to ensure
cross-browser compatibility, all of which are good things. If at
all possible, it is recommended that sites be made to be
compliant.

Many experts who took part in the SEOMoz “Google Search Engine
Ranking Factors” (http://www.seomoz.org/article/
search-ranking-factors) lean towards it not being a big
contributor, however, it may be an issue if Google has
difficulties indexing a page properly.

A code validation service is available at validator.w3.org
(http://validator.w3.org/).

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME

I want to stress that this section is about things you should
NOT do. These issues could be damaging to your rankings. If your
site is implementing any of these, it may be best to remove it.

Hidden Text
This includes any text that you can simply not see when viewing
the page. It may be text hidden in invisible div layers, text
located below the fold with vertical scrolling disabled or even
text on the same colored back ground (white text on a white
background for instance). Whatever the case, hidden text can get
your site into hot water and it is not recommended.

Excessive Keywords

Don’t go over board in placing target phrases within your body
text. Stuffing keywords everywhere possible just because you
can, is not only unlikely to help you achieve rankings, it could
very well have the opposite effect.

Duplicate content

Large amounts of duplicated content or pages, as well as
stealing or scraping content from other sites is one good way to
get your site banned.

Doorway pages

Creating multiple websites or pages with nearly identical, yet
slightly different content for the purposes of trying to grab
some Google rankings is a good way to get your site into
trouble.

If you have created pages of this nature for PPC campaigns, make
sure that they are blocked from the search engines as to not get
you into any hot water.

Cloaking

Simple – Don’t Cloak. In a nutshell cloaking is when you display
different information to the search engines than you do to your
human visitors. Google frowns on this, and if they catch you,
watch out!

All Flash

Websites that are entirely flash based will not get you into
trouble. The reason I have included it here however, is that
they won’t do you many favors either. Sites that are all Flash,
have little to no content for Google to digest and thus,
drastically reduce your chance of rankings. If you must keep
your “All Flash” site, it is recommended that you also create a
secondary HTML version for the search engines and for those
visitors who simply prefer it.

Frames (including iFrames)

Frames are also one of those things that won’t get you into
trouble, but do significantly reduce your chances of rankings.
If you want any chance of ranking in Google using a Frames site,
be sure to copy your relevant content from each page into your
‘noframes’ tag. While this is far from ideal it may help you
salvage some listings.

When it comes to including content through the use of an iFrame,
remember, Google cannot see any of this content located within
the frame. It will be of no use to your rankings. If you rely on
this content to help your listings, find another method such as
a server side include.

TOOLS

In this article I mention a few items which can be made much
easier with the help of available online tools. Here are some to
help you on your way:

HTTP Header Checker

The StepForth HTTP Header Checker (http://news.stepforth.com/seo-tools/http-header-checker.php)

Spider Simulators

XML Sitemaps, Search Engine Bot Simulator
(http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/se-bot-simulator.html)

Page Size and Load Time

1-Hit Load Time Analyzer (http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/

tool.loading-time-checker.htm)

Google’s Cached Text Version

Click on “cached” next to your listing in Google, then click
“Cached Text Version” at the top of the page. This is Google’s
Cached Text version of your page. Substituting www.domain.com
with your website will also bring up the cached version:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:WWW.DOMAIN.COM/&hl=en&strip=1

To see a larger selection of tools visit our SEO Tools page at

the StepForth website.

SUMMARY

There are a lot of little pieces to getting a site to the top of
the rankings in Google that I didn’t have time to mention here.
In most cases not all items noted in this 3 part Google
optimization series (http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2008/04/
how-to-optimize-for-google-part-1-of-3.php) need to be in place
to achieve top rankings, however, the more you can implement the
better. Links, optimization, and content all play a significant
role in Google rankings and the more competitive the term, the
bigger the role they play.

If you have a site in a competitive market it is best to ensure
that the site is entirely Google friendly and well optimized,
while working on increasing links, and expanding on relevant
content.

Patience is important and Google rankings are possible, but they
do take time and effort. In nearly all cases it can take several
months before you start to see significant results, although in
cases where a site is just missing one or two pieces of the
puzzle and those are put into place, rankings can come much
quicker. If you have any questions about optimizing for Google
try sending them to us here at StepForth and we will get to them
as soon as our workload permits.

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

Optimizing for top Google rankings includes a number of factors. In Part 1 of 3 we discussed onsite optimization. In Part 2 we will touch on incoming links as well as using Google Webmaster Tools.

LINKS
Links are very important in today’s Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need.

There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.

Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don’t work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.

Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help increase both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth’s SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very lest within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.

Press Releases
If something of importance has happened to your company such as a new product launch, or other notable achievement – essentially anything news worthy, put out a press release. Submit this press release through services such as PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Again, be sure to include a target phrase as part of the anchor text.

There are also a number of places you can get links that have basically turned south, and are not generally recommended. These include signatures in form posts, guest books, and other typically free links.

Forum Posts
Forum posts can help to marginally increase your link counts; however, with this one you must be careful. Only add a link to your site in your signature if both the forum allows it, and you are a respected member of the forum. If you are a solid contributor and your posts have depth and meaning, and the forum is highly relevant to your site, then having a link in your signature may give your site some juice. Posting wildly to random forms will in most cases get yourself banned, and will be both a waste of time and potentially make you and your site look bad.

Guest Books
In nearly all cases, do not post your link to guest books. If you happen to stumble upon a guestbook that is highly relevant to your site, the other comments are relevant to your site, and you have something useful (and again relevant) to say, then perhaps consider it, but typically focusing on links from guest books is considered SPAM and is best avoided all together.

Blog Comments
Having a link from your blog comments is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find a relevant blog post of use, and have something relevant and constructive to say, don’t be afraid to enter your link into the “URL” field of the form, but don’t try stuffing links into the comment itself.

Link Farms & Bad Neighborhoods
These are sites that allow you to simply post your link no strings attached. They are mostly long scrolling pages with countless links. Stay away from them. If you see one, run in the other direction. These links are bad, will not help with your rankings, and in some cases can actually damage your rankings.

Stay away from sites that cross link with obvious spammers. These networks of SPAM sites are not ones you would want your site associated with, and if you achieve links from enough of these sites it can adversely impact your rankings. Even more important, NEVER link to any of these sites – as that will certainly tie in your connection to them and give Google reason to discount your rankings.

DMOZ, Yahoo and Other Directories
Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold. Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits. The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link “Volunteer to edit this category” try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.

Yahoo Directory is seen as an authority in the eyes of Google, and getting your site in will help your link reputation. This link does come at a price of $299 per year, but will play a role in helping your website achieve top rankings.

There are a number of other valuable directories out there that can help you with your search rankings. Before submitting to any directory the key is a combination of relevance and authority. If the directory is relevant and active it may be worth considering.

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools can be very useful for your optimization efforts. It may not directly help you obtain higher rankings, but can help you trouble shoot if you are experiencing problems. It will also allow you to remove URL’s that you don’t want indexed and set various preferences such as your domain, crawl rate, and geographic target.

XML Sitemaps
This is the most common reason people use Google Webmaster Tools – the submission of their XML sitemap. While you can use your robots.txt to have Google find your XML sitemap, by submitting it directly to Google you can check up on the spidering status.

Error checking
Webmaster Tools is also quite useful for checking on various error URL’s that Google may know about. Under the Diagnostics > Web Crawl you can view any errors that Google has to report on your site. By cleaning up any errors you can help increase your chances of rankings.

Links
From inside Google Webmaster Tools you can get a much clearer look at what sites Google is noting as having links to you, and give you a better indication of the need, if any, to increase your link counts.

WWW Preference
Be sure to select your domain preference under Tools > Set Preferred Domain. In nearly all cases you will want to select the version including the “www”

SUMMARY

Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings. By focusing on relevant links, as well as by diversifying where you get those links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future.

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

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

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

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word “hotel” would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to “Victoria BC hotel” you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.

It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.

To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term “hotel” and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.

If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.

Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.

The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and never repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on you site should have its own unique description tag.

Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won’t influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.

Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.

This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.

Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.

Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.

To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as “~hotels”. Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the “~hotels” example Google brings up phrases such as ‘travel’, ‘tourism’, ‘accommodation’, as well as various hotel chain names such as ‘Hilton Hotels’.

Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.

If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.

While having a keyword located within your domain can offer some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.

Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL’s can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:

MyTourismSite.com/Victoria/Accommodations/Hotels/Hilton.html

Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don’t flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.

Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you click on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.

While a link that simply states “click here” or “www.domainname.com” does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use “discount hotels” as its anchor.

Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.

Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.

Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can offer more relevance to the linked page.

Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google’s ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.

- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.

- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google’s Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.

- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google’s cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn’t mean Google won’t follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.

URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL’s with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.

MyTourismSite.com/?locid=”victoria”&catid=”accommodations”
&type=”hotel”&comp=”hilton”

stands a better chance if cleaned up to read:

MyTourismSite.com/victoria/accommodations/hotels/hilton.htm

SUMMARY
Basic website optimization is a critical component for successful placement in Google but is only part of the overall picture.

Glenn D. Porter,

Cash-strapped customers play chicken when it comes to paying bills. Here’s how to collect.

It’s tough enough to get a purchase order in this recession–now you have to collect. I don’t have to tell you closers out there that salespeople don’t get their commission checks until the invoices are paid. Like it or not, that makes collections a sales function.

Welcome to accounts-receivable chicken. The name of this game for customers: Conserve as much cash as possible by not paying until the last possible moment–all the while use your vendor like a bank. As of December 2008, the average days-beyond-terms (a fancy phrase for the length of overdue payments) for the manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail industries jumped to 11.7 days from 7.6 days just eight months earlier, according to data tracker Cortera.

And the later the payment, the more likely you’ll get stiffed. According to the Commercial Collection Agency Association, you can expect to collect 90% on every dollar of debt 30 days past due; that percentage plummets to 52% for receivables that have grown moss for six months.

Not that you can tell every late payer to take a long walk off a short pier. Get too heavy handed–especially in this precarious environment–and many valuable customers will happily take their business to a vendor that will bend over backwards for it.

How to pry your money from tight-fisted customers (without resorting to expensive, and often incompetent) collection agencies? Here are seven steps:

Establish solid accounting controls. Many small businesses don’t have them. Every Friday morning, be sure to disseminate an accounts-receivable aging report, broken into 30, 60 and 90-day time periods, so everyone is on the same page. (Remember, too, that there are few things more embarrassing than calling an account that has already paid up.)

Prioritize wisely. Divvy up delinquents not only by age but by size, importance and quality of the business relationship. Work easy collections first–that’ll put cash in the kitty faster.

Know your customers. Determine which accounts can be cleaned up with a friendly phone call and which will require pulling teeth. You should know who is easy to work with and who is a problem. Record their responses and keep records.

Get them to commit. Ask outright: “Mr. Customer, when can you pay?” Mark down their answers, and follow up when payments don’t come in.

Be flexible–to a point. It’s bad out there; be prepared to get creative. Don’t give discounts (it’s bad for pricing and your brand), but be willing to stretch out payments.
Dugg on Forbes.com

Meet face to face. Even the crustiest purchasing manager sweats when you look him in the eye. Get the sales manager in there, too. Recognize, respectfully, that invoices can be confusing. Go through each line item. Fix any mistakes immediately.

Ask them to cut a check. Collecting takes tact, not steaming into a customer’s office baring teeth. At the same time, don’t forget to ask for what you came for.

And, of course, don’t forget to lob a hearty thank you on the way out.

Compete.com has released a study of the Web’s fastest rising and falling searches, revealing Twitter as the term Web consumers searched most in March. It marked a 130% growth from February 2009. The top 10 fastest rising terms were:

Twitter
American Idol
Dancing With the Stars
Twilight (a popular book series)
Dr. Seuss (Birthday is March 2)
Melissa Rycroft (Dancing With the Stars and Bachelor contestant)
NCAA Basketball
Adam Lambert (American Idol contestant)
Watchmen (movie and graphic novel)
Jon and Kate Plus 8 (popular home/reality show)

Looking at this list, it is clear that the biggest driver of consumer search is entertainment. Moving down the list are even more entertainment and sports-related search terms. Below are the 10 fastest dropping consumer search terms.

IRS
TurboTax
Acai Berry
www.IRS.gov
HGTV
Watch Movies
Jessica Simpson
TaxAct
Slumdog Millionaire
Abraham Lincoln

Clearly, declining search terms have plenty to do with seasonality, but entertainment terms make an impact on this list as well. One interesting note is that HGTV and Watch Movies appear pretty high on this list. Looking at Compete’s traffic data, HGTV also suffered a 46% drop in traffic for March. For movies, you wonder if channels like Hulu and YouTube have branded so well that consumers are searching less and navigating directly to these sites. Terms like “free movies” and “free online movies” appear farther down the list. Or possibly the piracy industry is taking a hit. Of course, that’s pure speculation.

Compete’s search data includes the five largest search engines in Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live Search, Ask and AOL. This is only one analysis, but these are always good things to watch. It may affect your keyword bidding strategies, content development ideas or tagging practices.

By Mark Yarrobino

If you’ve been online for any amount of time, then I’m sure you’ve heard many of the success stories about internet entrepreneurs, and how they’re making millions every year, and you’ve probably heard how easy it is for you to do it, too.

And the truth is, it actually is kind of easy, but not as easy as most salesmen would have you believe. There is a little bit of work involved, and anyone who’s really been successful has put in the time and effort to get there. And they’ve managed to avoid the pitfalls on this list.

If you’re trying to start your online business and things haven’t gone as well as you’ve hoped so far, then hopefully, these suggestions will help.

Here are the five most common reasons that most internet businesses fail that I’ve seen, in no particular order:

1. Information Overload

You’ve probably already been inundated with emails explaining how some new money makíng scheme is the hottest thing on the planet and you need to get in now so that you’re on the cutting edge of internet marketing.

The problem is that you haven’t finished working on the previous hot new thing yet, and as soon as you start this one, yet another hot idea will hit, and so on, and so on.

In every valid email you get, there should be an “unsubscribe” link at the bottom. Start clicking on it, and just stick with a few of the people who you know are giving you good information about building your business from start to finish in the right order without any distractions.

And make sure that you see every task through to completion before moving onto the next one. It’s the only real way to get anything done.

2. The Curse of Perfection

Speaking of seeing tasks through to completion, also consider that not everything on your website and in your sales process has to be absolutely perfect before you can unleash it on the public.

So many home busíness owners who are just starting out have a habit of obsessing over every little detail forever before they’ll allow themselves to launch their site.

Stop it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to make sure your website is working properly first. It means that you can work on adjusting small details, such as the color scheme, the sales copy, the images, later on. In fact, if you’re planning to do any proper testing (and you should be), then you should be constantly working on those items anyway.

So get your website out there, get some traffic, make sure the big things are working right, and then worry about adjusting the small details.

3. Waiting for the “Magic Bullet”

Let me just start by saying that there is no magic bullet when it comes to running your business, or doing any kind of work online.

I know that a lot of salesmen make it sound that way when you’re reading their sales letters, but it simply isn’t true. They’re lying to you. And even if they’re not lying to you, and let’s say their system does work, it’s only going to work for a short period of time, and it’s only going to make you a little bit of money. Not the millions they’re promising.

That’s why I constantly warn people away from the “business-in-a-box” opportunities. The result isn’t ever very good. Maybe you’ll make a small bit of side money, if you’re lucky. Besides, why would you want to sell the same thing everyone else is selling anyway?

The only way to have lasting success online is to have a website that is unlike anyone else’s, that you’ve built up into a success, with a loyal customer base, one step at a time.

4. Being a Shopaholic

This goes along with #3 above. Stop paying for every new scheme that comes along because they’re promising you instant riches. All that’s going to do is drain you of your money.

And then, if you’re like so many others, there’s a good chance you’ll get frustrated and give up on the whole thing, because you don’t know who you can trust anymore, and you don’t want to take a chance. So your dream of workíng from home is over before it began.

Or, maybe they’re not selling you a scam, but in fact have valid programs that many people use successfully in their businesses. That’s great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s right for you right now. It might be something that will be a good investment for your business later on, but you should really concentrate on getting your website up and running first. Otherwise you end up with information overload as described in #1 above.

5. Fear of Technology

Just because you haven’t tried something before doesn’t mean that you can’t learn to do it. Think about pretty much everything you’ve ever done, especially the things you’re good at. Did you always know how to do that, or did you learn it over time?

I’m guessing that you learned it, and you can learn to do a lot of the work on your website, too. I constantly have to tell the people I meet that it’s in their best interest to learn at least a little bit of the technical stuff that comes with having a website.

I’m not saying you have to be a programming expert. In fact, if you need heavy duty programming done, then you should definitely get someone to do it for you. It’ll save you a lot of time, for one. But there’s no reason why you can’t learn some of the basics of HTML so that whenever you need to make a small change to your website (such as the testing we talked about earlier) you won’t have to pay someone to do it for you. And you won’t have to wait for them to have the time.

It’s not as hard as you think. It just takes a little time to learn it.

Conclusion

The most important point I’m trying to convey is that, in order to be successful online, you need to remain focused on one task at a time. Finish that task and move onto the next one. Finish that task and move on. And keep going until you’re done.

Stop investing in every fancy new program that comes along. There are no “magic bullets” anyway. Stick to the plan from the beginning, and see it through to the end.

Starting a new website does require a bit of work at the beginning. There’s no way around that if you want to succeed. But the great thing about working online is that once you have everything set up, you can put almost all of it on autopilot and bring in money 24 hours a day with a minimum of work.

So get started now, don’t be afraid that you can’t do it, don’t get frustrated, and don’t let anything distract you. You could be making very good money in very little time if you do it right.

By Leona Griffin

While we all work to beat the competitors for targeted search terms, hoping to land that top ten ranking; Google’s Universal search provides additional opportunities to improve your website’s exposure by mixing in universal search results.

Most companies are not taking full advantage of universal search and are really missing the opportuníty to improve their exposure and interact with their visitors in a new exciting way. We’ll show you how you can utilize Universal Search to push your website to the top of the search results and drive more traffíc to your website with this exciting addition to Google Search.

Introduction to Google’s Universal Search

While Google offers up paid search results via Google Adwords and organic search results within the center of their search results page; they are now mixing in other types of results in attempt to give visitors a taste of everything that is related to their search. This includes:

• Products (Google Product Search)
• News (Google News)
• Images (Google Image Search)
• Blogs (Google Blogs)
• Geo-targeted Business Listings (Google Maps)
• Video (Google Video )

Benefits of Universal Search

For visitors, the benefits of universal search are that they can see various types of results without having to leave the organic search results page. Another benefit is that it breaks up the page adding images, video still shots and information in a way that is appealing.

For site owners, there are quite a few benefits. First, there are now multiple ways to have your products and services listed on the 1st or 2nd page of Google.

Second, if visitors did not select your organic listing, they may select your image, blog or business listing; offering more opportunities to obtain targeted visitors to your website.

And finally, some Universal Search results are bumped ahead of the organic listings. If your website is listed in the #12 spot on page two and you just can’t get your site to the 1st page, you may be able to have your images, videos or products listed above the organic results for specific search terms.

Users Intent

If you searched for the word “Apple” using Google in 1999, you were presented with various types of informational websites; discussing the various types of apples, how to use them in recipes and other great apple related information. But over time, people who typed in “Apple” would complete their search and then run another search for “Apple computers”. As this trend continued to happen, Google’s Algorithm learned that a trend was emerging. Most visitors who typed in the word Apple were looking for computers, not fruit.

Now when you type in “Apple” into Google, you are presented with the Macintosh Apple website, websites that review Apple computers and e-commerce stores where you can purchase an Apple computer. Google’s focus is to not only provide searchers with relevant search queries based on their search term, but to emulate the thought process that is derived from the search term itself.

When a searcher enters a query, Google’s artificial intelligence attempts to understand what the visitor may want to see before returning the search results. They have come to learn that when a visitor types in a brand name or a product, that searchers may want to:

• See Photos of the Product
• Read Product Reviews
• Purchase The Product
• Research The Product

In an attempt to give the visitor what they want they try to return the types of results related to the user’s intent.

To use Universal Search to your advantage, you must understand the user’s intent when they type in the search terms related to your website. The best way to see which universal search products are being used for your search terms is to search them within Google. Once you enter the search query, above the search results in the top left area of the screen you will see a listing for the products pulled into the results. For example, if I enter the search query “red scarf” I see the following Google Products listed at the top left area of the screen:

1. Web
2. Shopping
3. Images

Essentially this means that Google attempted to pull in (web) organic search results, Google Product Search and Google Images.

The Strategy

Creating a strategy to improve your rankings through Universal Search can allow you to locate opportunities that your competitors missed; giving you more exposure and targeted traffíc.

In the example of the “red scarf”, you will notice that although Google attempted to pull in images, there aren’t any images displayed within the results. This essentially means that you could possibly receive a listing on the 1st page of Google via Google Images if you optimize your images and submit an Image Map through Google Webmaster Central. Additionally, you can upload your red scarves to Google Base to get them listed within the Google Shopping results.

Now if you visit the second page of results, you’ll see that they are now showing different universal search results.

• Web
• Video
• Images

Towards the top of the results you will see 1 video; however in most searches where videos are in the results, you will usually see two. This indicates that you could potentially have a video listed towards the top of the second page. As you continue to view the remaining results on page two you will again notice that you don’t see any photos on page two; another opportuníty to gain exposure over your competitors.

Once you have completed this type of research and analysis for the keywords important to your website, begin creating and optimizing your shopping feeds, videos, images, blog posts and other universal search products to gain the competitive advantage before your competitors do.

Optimizing Images

You can improve the chances of your images showing up for relevant search queries by optimizing your images. There are a few key areas that will help improve your ability to raise rankings for your images in Google Image Search, as well as where images are shown in Google Search.

Although these tips are for Google Images, these examples can be used throughout various areas of your website; to improve all of your universal search results.

File Names – Give your images accurate names rather than defaulting to what your camera or image editor provides. If the image is of a cashmere red scarf, then consider naming our image cashmere-red-scarf.jpg. This help to further classify the image and show relevancy to the search terms you are targeting.

Image Alt Attribute – Ensure that you have provided a quality description for your images using the image alt attribute. Try using product colors, sizes, materials, brand names, textures, manufacturer names etc. Remember not to overdo it, but provide an accurate description of the product to assist with increasing relevancy for desired search terms.

Captions – Include a caption for your image that describes or relates to the product. The text that surrounds the image helps Google to understand the subject matter of the image.

Anchor Text – The text you use when linking to the image helps to describe and classify the image. Try using descriptive anchor text rather than words such as “click here”, “larger image” or “more photos” when describing the link.

Google Image Labeler – While you can do your part in helping to optimize your images, you can also improve your chances of having your images appear in Google Image Search by allowing others to help classify your images through Google’s Image Labeler. By simply enabling the Google Image Labeler from the Google Webmaster Console, you allow Image Labeler users to provide words and phrases they believe accurately describe your images in a fun online game. As users are shown images from your website, they type in a few words they feel accurately describe the photo, which is later used to further classify the subject matter of your image.

Summary

Google has provided many new opportunities for you to reach searchers in the ways they want to be reached. Search engine optimization has been taken to another level; it’s no longer about who has the most number of pages, the best density; or who has the most inbound links. It is about who is utilizing all their available opportunities.

Almost every aspect of your website is being analyzed and classified; use it to your advantage. Now is the time to take advantage of these opportunities and improve your visibility in every area of universal search; allowing you to grow your traffic and exposure in new and exciting ways.

By Nancy Fraser

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

Edward Lear must have had some precognition about what was in store for us all with the development of the internet when he wrote this nonsensical poem.

Many people do feel at sea after they launch their website and attempt to navigate the sometimes confusing channels of the internet. They wonder why their website doesn’t get more traffíc and why their inbox is not filling up with emails from people clamoring to buy their products or services.

It seems that the rules change as often as Oprah changes her clothes and who could ever hope to keep up with that!

Price quotes for search engine optimization are all over the map; the process seems never-ending and expensive.

How is it that some people seem to have great success on the web without spending a huge amount of money? Is it unrealistic to think that you can make a living working on the web?

When faced with a seemingly overwhelming challenge it helps to break things down into bite-sized pieces.

Effective websites should include the following:

1. Your website needs to focus on a specific niche.

2. You need to do keyword research and although Google no longer gives weight to Meta keywords some of the other major search engines still do.

3. Your website should have the main keyword used throughout and each page should be written around 5-10 keywords that are tightly focused on that particular page’s topic.

4. Content is still King. Well written, focused content is crucial.

5. Meta titles need to include your keywords.

6. Organization of content should include headings and subtitles to make it easy for readers to scan the pages. Be sure to include your keywords in these headings as well.

7. Most people on the web are looking for information. If you don’t give them anything of value or entertain them, they will be gone, probably for good.

8. Use keywords in links whereever possible.

9. Include a call to action and, if possible, provide a Free tríal. You have to build trust before you can make a sale.

10. Check your website in various browsers (FireFox, Internet Explorer, etc.) to make sure it displays equally well in all.

11. Your personality is what attracts people to you so why would you create a generic website with all of the excitement of a flat glass of pop. Keep the content fresh so it has Fizz!

12. Most importantly, have realistic expectations of what you want to achieve with your website. With all the hype about overnight successes on the internet it’s difficult to put your results into perspective. If you expect instant success and it isn’t happening, it’s easy to become demoralized and quit before you reach your goal.

Some Other Important Web Marketing Tips

Google page rank counts! The higher your page rank number the higher you will rank in user searches. How do you find out your page rank? Download the Google toolbar here for Internet Explorer http://toolbar.google.com/T4/ or here for FireFox http://tools.google.com/firefox/toolbar/install.html.

Improve your page rank by encouraging other highly ranked websites in complementary businesses to link to yours and by developing content with a niche focus. Page rank is also affected by traffic numbers. A couple of ways you can improve traffic are pay-per-click advertising and posting articles on the web.

Your web image is at least as important as your personal image. You wouldn’t go out to meet a prospective client wearing a mishmash of styles and colours but many businesses have websites with tools that don’t work, tables and text that are out of alignment, old information, dated colours, and confusing navigation. Those things are bad enough but when an experienced web developer looks at the code on a website they often find a website that looks good but is not built to encourage search traffic.

Be prepared like the wise owl and make the job of marketing your business as easy as possible with a website that enhances your brand image and is technically sound and purrrr your way to success.

By Jerry Bader

How much time does it take your website to deliver your marketing message? Assuming the site traffic you generate is the least bit interested in what you have to say, how much of what you’re saying do they remember, or more to the point, how much do they need to remember?

Have you ever thought about, or even considered, how much face-time your website needs to be effective? It is probably the last thing many business website operators ever think about, let alone do anything about.

The notion of ‘stickiness’ has been around for as long as the Web has been used as a commercial vehicle, and stickiness is a vital website ingredient. Developers, designers, and marketing experts are continuously coming up with ways to keep people on their clients’ websites. Many of these sticky methods do work and keep people on sites for hours, but are they effective; just because someone stays on your site for hours doesn’t necessarily mean they have any intention of doing business with you, especially if these so called sticky ingredients are implemented without any commercial purpose.

Sticky Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Effective

Many sticky concepts were developed for sites whose financial model was based on advertising, which makes sense; the longer people stay on a site the more chance they will see the ads presented, and the more likely they will click on one of them. But for sites that are in business to sell something and are not just advertising vehicles, stickiness takes on a whole different purpose.

The challenge is to make what you have to say engaging so that it attracts attention, informative so that it explains the offering, AND entertaining so that it is retained in memory. We have a goal for each website or campaign we create, and that is to turn advertising into content, and content into an experience, a challenge for sure, but one that needs to be achieved if the client wants their site to be effective.

Provide A Memorable Experience In An Appropriate Amount of Time

Think of website face-time like a restaurant thinks of the dining experience. A restaurant has only so many tables and can only accommodate so many quests at one tíme; so in order to maximize profíts, restaurants try to turnover the tables as many times as possible. The trick is to provide guests with a delicious meal, great service, and a memorable experience without rushing them, but also in a way that turns the table over in an appropriate amount of time; allowing the restaurant to maximize it’s seating capacity.

Websites for the most part, don’t have the capacity problem, but the discipline of providing value, quality, and a memorable experience, in an appropriate amount of time is just as valid. Many complicated sticky site implementations take too long to unfold, and lack the purposeful payoff that makes them commercially effective.

People have other things to do, and will only invest so much time on your site; therefore you better say what you have to say as efficiently and effectively as possible. Site information presented as bulleted points may seem efficient, but it sure isn’t effective due to its abbreviated nature and lack of psychological context; and sites with thousands of words of search engine optimized text may provide copious details, but if no one reads it, it isn’t very effective or efficient.

So how much time is appropriate? How much time do you need to deliver your marketing message in a way that website visitors will remember it, and hopefully contact you? And what presentation method does the job both efficiently and effectively in that appropriate time frame?

One Message One Minute

It takes, discipline to focus on what makes you special, confidence in what you sell, and an understanding of how to deliver an effective website presentation.

Every presentation you make on your website should only take about a minute or two to deliver. If you have six points to make create six separate presentations, each concentrating on one message. That way visitors can choose which specific concern they need clarified without boring them, or loosing their interest by covering things they aren’t interested in hearing.

With a series of focused, entertaining presentations, you maintain interest, establish memory, and get them hooked on what you can do for them. As a result they will delve deeper by investigating the other presentations; and with each viewing they become more comfortable with what you do, more aware of what makes you special, and more confident in your ability to deliver what you promise.

It’s all about establishing a memorable experience in an easy to understand, fast-paced digestible format that will be memorable and effective.

Why Creating An Experience Is Important

If your visitors do not remember your website, than it won’t ever achieve its full marketing potential. Over and over we talk about the importance of making your site a memorable experience. To fully appreciate why making your site a memorable experience is so important, you have to understand a little of how the brain retains memories.

Episodic Memory

Think of an event that has stayed with you for years and will probably stay with you forever. Perhaps it’s a life altering experience like the birth of your daughter, or maybe it’s an inconsequential incident that refuses to disappear from your memory. These kinds of experiences, or episodes, create what psychologists call Episodic Memory, memories that are associated with a specific experience. By delivering your marketing message in an entertaining, informative video presentation you create the episodic memory that is the essence of product or brand positioning.

Semantic Memory

Now think of a strongly held opinion. Chances are that opinion was formed by some long forgotten experience. This is called Semantic Memory, a memory induced point-of-view formed by the brain’s processing of an experience where it retains the significance but buries the memory of the specific event. Consistent, continuous, ongoing marketing campaigns that focus on what makes you special have the long-term psychological effect of creating product preference even after the specific campaign details are forgotten.

Putting It All Together

From a marketing perspective, the opinions we hold and many of the products we purchase are the result of both episodic and semantic memory induced experiences. If your website doesn’t generate these kinds of memories, it is not fulfilling its potential as a marketing presentation vehicle.

5 Ways To Connect To A Web Audience

In order for your website to reach its maximum marketing potential, it must make an impression on your audience, and it must connect to those potential clients on multiple levels, emotional, psychological and rational. In order to communicate to website viewers on all three levels you must effectively employ all the presentation options available: layout, text, images, audio, and video.

Some people learn best by reading, some by listening, and others by viewing. Each presentation element targets a different aspect of recognition and connects to the audience in different ways. By combining all five elements into a coherent presentation you relate to your viewers on multiple levels, each re-enforcing the other, creating a memorable experience. For an example of how all these elements work together to form an effective and efficient marketing presentation visit www.136words.com.

By Chris Crum

Is There a Need to Follow Over 1,000 People in a Day?

Twitter has had a limit on how many people a user can follow in a day (1,000) in place for some time, and on Monday the company said this limit was not being consistently applied to all accounts, but that it would be from here on out.

In a post on the Twitter Status Blog, the company says there are technical reasons behind the limit, but that it is mainly to discourage spam. Understandable given an increased amount of complaining about spam and a recent wave of worms spreading across Twitter.

Britney Spears Friends and Followers”Also, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes the mass following activity disingenuous,” says Twitter. “We understand that there may be exceptions where mass following is needed in excess of the daily limit: for example, some API applications or for the ability to exchange direct messages. There are also some who think it’s simply polite to follow back other accounts.”

Twitter encourages users who feel that they fit the bill of such exceptions to leave feedback with @twitter so they can address their needs.

Commentary around the blogosphere regarding Twitter’s follower limit ranges from one side of the spectrum to the other. “It seems Twitter would prefer that these celebrity accounts only follow, say… 93 as Ashton does, rather than the nearly 400,000 Britney Spears follows, which I would guess would be even higher if it weren’t for Twitter’s API troubles,” says blogger Louis Gray.

“It’s likely Twitter is issuing this newest limit to try and stop spammers and go after the worms that have recently impacted the system,” he adds. “But the ecosystem that has helped the service grow to such high visibility is getting impacted.

Andy Merrett talking about the subject at Performancing says, “Now, I have recently subscribed to the viewpoint that it is good to reciprocate follows – however I do so manually. Granted, I only get a handful of new followers each day at present so it’s no great problem, but it does mean I have a better chance at weeding out spammers from the outset.”

“I just can’t get my head around the concept that anyone getting over one thousand follows per day can possibly keep up following them all back,” Andy adds.

By Jason Lee Miller

Blackhat SEO spammers force Google’s hand

Google is set to make changes to its search ranking algorithm to combat the spate of links leading to malicious web pages appearing at the top of Google’s search results, according to an inside source.

Over the past few months, cybercriminals have been using blackhat SEO techniques to manipulate search rankings. When it first began, they were marginally successful at following Google Trends to find buzzy search queries and elevating a newly created targeted webpage.

But after a short period of time, these same gangs appear to have become disturbingly effective. Last week, when researching a news story, I found the top five results all led to fake scareware pages.

Obviously if Google fails to do something about this manipulation, users will lose trust and the good ole days of Google will be over fast. A Googler speaking on condition of anonymity told WebProNews a ranking change is pending that tackles spam of this kind. Once the change goes live, users shouldn’t see it “nearly as often.”

A report from security company PandaLabs identified over a million links targeting malicious webpages ranking for auto part searches. Google noted that many of the phrases mentioned in the report were rare. A phrase like [1989 Nissan Pickup Truck Engine Check Light Troubleshooting], for example, only appears on attack sites set up by spammers, which explains why Google brought back so many attack sites in response to it and similar queries.

Google’s response seems also an admission of how difficult it is to provide fresh, timely search results while simultaneously combating spammers. Part of the appeal of Twitter to many people is the platform’s ability to provide real-time information; the live Web works remarkably well there so far because Twitter’s set up isn’t very conducive to spam (yet). At least Twitter has to some extent control over accounts.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.

The company naturally didn’t have a comment on the recently pondered “link velocity” ranking factor. Search engine optimization experts have identified the speed at which organic links appear as a possible important influence.

Link velocity therefore aids in explaining how blackhatters were able to manipulate search results by dropping enormous amounts of link spam into comment and discussion areas of social sites. The freshness or buzzy nature of a query also aided in this pursuit, and cybercriminals merely have to follow Google Trends and Google News to know which keywords and phrases to target.

By Chris Crum

Gannett Restricting Employees from Social Network Use?

Update: The original title of this article was “USA Today Publisher Restricting Employees from Using Social Networks?” USA Today called WebProNews requesting a change because it made it look like USA Today itself was discouraging social media use, which is apparently not the case.

“I can’t speak for the posting on Gannett Blog, but I can say that we at USA TODAY have been working extensively on our social networking efforts,” says USA Today Communications Manager Alexandra Nicholson. “USA TODAY was the first national newspaper to offer reader comments, and we continue to expand our community tools by allowing readers to communicate with each other directly, add ‘friends’ through USATODAY.com and through social networking tools like Facebook Connect. Additionally USA TODAY has recently launched a series of moderated communities targeted specifically to our readers, this includes a recent MMA community launch.

Alexandra says that USA Today sees social networking as “a growing effort” on their part and one that they’re “taking on enthusiastically.”

Incidentally, Alexandra found our article while doing routine “Twitter surveillance.”

Original Article: The controversy never ends when it comes to newspapers and online news. It’s amazing how many debates there really are within this industry.

You’ve got the bloggers vs journalists debate, the fair use debate, and the should social media be used as a source debate to name a few. That last one is apparently even an internal debate within some news organizations.

Valleywag is pointing to a post from a blog (unofficial) about Gannett, publisher of USA Today. The post shares a memo from an editor with the company that is restricting access by employees to social networks. This example is not really about the legitimacy of social networks as credible sources. It’s more about social media in the workplace. The memo says:

It has come to my attention that some staff members are spending a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites during work hours. Also, some staff members apparently are spending work time on Fantasy baseball research and other personal recreation activities.

This is not appropriate. It is not part of the job. Occasionally it will be necessary for staff members to visit these sites for work purposes, but please reserve social networking and recreational pursuits for your private time.

Is the editor wrong? Probably not entirely. Unless employees are using fantasy baseball research for actual stories, there is probably some misuse going on. But is restricting access to social networks the way to go?

News breaks on Twitter all the time. How would a writer get to it without spending some time on Twitter (or using some kind of Twitter app)? Then there is the fact that social networks are a way to contact potential leads and sources. They’re often easier to get through to people than by phone or email.

“As one reporter put it, ‘Facebook is a modern day Rolodex,’” says VW’s Ryan Tate. “Exactly, and if those infernal tele-phones had never been given out like candy to individual reporters, maybe newspapers would be in better shape today!”

By Titus Hoskins

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

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

What are Keywords?

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

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

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

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

Number of Keyword Searches?

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

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

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

Commercial Intent of Keywords?

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

Conversion Rate of Keywords?

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

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

Long-Tail Keywords?

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

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

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

How to Rank High for Your Chosen Profitable Keywords?

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

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

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

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

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

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

By John Metzler

Small business owners may not have the resources to invest heavily in their web presence and finding solutions to problems can be like finding a needle in a haystack. You know something’s wrong but don’t have the faintest idea how to fix it. Is it a technical issue? Are your ads not performing well? Don’t know what kind of traffic you’re getting? Website problems can fall into a myriad of categories. So if you think your website sucks, a) it probably does, and b) you should read on.

1. You Aren’t Getting Traffic

You’re excited about the big, expensive job the design team just finished on your site. It looks like a million bucks! Well it’s a shame it isn’t making you a darn cent. Just because it exists doesn’t mean people know about it. Announce it to the world by submittíng it to reputable directories and sharing your useful content with others on social bookmarking sites (you do have useful content, don’t you? If not, I’ll cover this later). You can even do some link exchanges — provided the sites you exchange with are reputable — just to get your site crawled early on. Further optimize it for search engines by following good SEO practices, building quality content and generating inbound links from other sites. Once you do that, you’ll need to monitor progress with web analytics software. Google Analytics is free and it has a slick interface. And we know you like pretty things seeing as how you broke the bank on your web site design.

If you’re looking for high ROI, invest your time in learning search engine marketing. Better yet hire a qualified SEO firm if you have the budget for it. Don’t settle for quick-fix promotional ideas. Build long-term exposure and a solid reputation by attaining high rankings, keeping email/newsletter lists, targeted ad placement and social media participation.

2. You Have Worthless Content

What defines worthless content? Without knowing what topic your web site covers it’s tough to say, but if you have nothing that sets you apart from your top competitors then I’d say you aren’t in good shape. If you don’t know what kind of content people are looking for on the Internet today, take a peek at what’s popular on social bookmarking sites. Observe some of the story titles on the front page of Digg.com:

“Guinness Stout Beef Stew Recipe for St. Patrick’s Day”
“In Move to Digital TV, Confusion Is in the Air”
“Kim Jong-Il Interprets Sunrise As Act Of War”
“Automatic bacon dispenser?”
“The 5 Best Obama Photomosaics on Flickr”

Words I would use to describe these topics, in order, are: seasonal, informative, satirical, comical, and trendy. This information is popular because it’s appealing in its uniqueness and is relevant to today’s market. To set yourself apart from your competition, you need to get creative. If you’re the kind of person who had trouble painting by numbers, then hire someone creative. Professional copy writers can be well worth the investment. Create free tools your customers will want to use; write funny or interesting commentary in a blog about your industry; put a new spin on a traditional product or service or provide seasonal discounts. Create a comprehensive F.A.Q. on your site that covers topics your competitors don’t.

Take the time to beef up your content. Be innovative – don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Use the top competitor in your field as a measuring stick.

3. You Have No Call-to-Action

Poor promotional language can have a sabotaging effect if visitors aren’t drawn to your conversion pages. A conversion page is any page that acts as the final step in a visitor submitting a form, making direct contact or purchasing a product online. Obscuring those pages or confusing the visitor on where to go next can make them leave your site. Internet users have a short attention span – give them a clear direction when navigating your web site.

Use your web analytics software again to find out what pages visitors are landing on first. If your home page gets the most traffic, make sure there are clear links to your sub-topics. If inner pages are your most popular landing pages, find out if the traffic is targeted. Once you know the type of visitor and the specific page they land on, then you can start marketing your content more accurately.

The bottom line is to always make clear why, and how, visitors can buy your product. Don’t get too cute with multiple steps, options or convoluted language.

4. You’re Getting Traffic But No Sales

Are you sure the traffic is relevant? If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, ensure your ads are geo-targeted properly and your ad text or landing pages appeal to your customers. For organic search engine placement, have you done keyword research and analysis before optimizing your content? Look at your web stats and see where your visitors are coming from. What keywords were they searching for when they landed on your site? Are the referring sites relevant to your industry or topic? How much time does the visitor spend on each page? Sales won’t come if your visitors aren’t interested in what you’re selling. This is why preliminary keyword analysis is so important to search engine marketing.

If you’re running ads, it’s always good practice to experiment with different ad campaigns. If you put all your eggs in one basket you run the risk of losing out on potential revenue. Elements of your ads that you can change are:

• ad text
• landing page
• specific network your ads are shown across
• topics on which you focus the campaign
• geo-locations targeted

Remember, it doesn’t pay to skimp on initial product/market research and analysis.

5. You’re Getting Relevant Traffic But No Sales

This problem could signal a technical error or navigation problem with your site. Make sure you thoroughly test all functionalities on various web browsers and systems. Submit test forms. Do a link check to spot possible broken links. Is your web hosting service reliable?

If you’ve ruled out technical issues as the cause then turn your attention to the content and customer base. Has your market taken a downturn? Can the lack of sales be attributed to the poor economy? Have you fallen behind your competition in product quality, selection or pricing? Does your web site’s navigation system confuse users? Your web site is the first line of contact between the business and potential customer, but it’s not the only step you need to worry about. Telephone operators or online payment systems can present their own issues.

This is moving away from web site problems but if any part of the sales process takes place away from the site, investigate those areas of your business as well.

If you’re pulling out your hair over a problem with your site and these tips still haven’t helped, feel free to post a comment and I’ll personally have a peek at your site.

By Chuck Crawford

blog flippingThe market for blogs has exploded. Many companies do not want to invest the time in developing a blog in their respective niche, which has given rise to a whole new cottage industry, blog flipping.

Blog flipping is done in a few different ways. Some flippers buy an existing blog that has potential, but is not currently producing. They take that blog and build the traffic and sales up to a level productive enough to reap a profit from their investment, and then sell it.

Or, more common in today’s blog flipping market, is to research a specific niche, develop a domain / blog, and then sell it.

But what does “developed” really mean? It depends on the flipper. So buyers really need to do their homework (read due diligence) before investing in an “established” blog or website. Because “established” is in the eyes of the beholder, and means many different things depending upon who you consult.

In my opinion, established means that the site, or blog, is profitable. Now profitable can be defined very differently for different companies. It doesn’t mean that the site has to be making money, though it does help justify the investment when purchasing the blog. It can mean to a prospective company only that the site has traffic that company believes it can convert into sales. Not everyone can convert website traffic in the same way. So there are companies out there looking to buy blogs that have a certain, specific reader demographic that fits their market. However, these types of sales are few and far between. Companies that are buying blogs normally want to see one thing.

Profit.

Not just income, because a blog’s gross monthly income and it’s actual profit margin can be two very different things as well. We’ve all seen the advertisements screaming that you can make ten thousand dollars a month blogging, or with Adsense, or whatever. But the part usually left out is the investment it takes to get that income. Sometimes the cost is far greater than the income, making the blog or website a LOSER.

So what steps should you take to sell your blog if you are a would be website flipper? Here are a few factors your blog or website should have in order to get top dollar:

1. Real Web Property

Your blog needs to be a real web property. What I mean by this is that it needs to be a real domain, on hosting you are paying for. Free hosted blogs are not a viable investment for most companies and corporations. There are exceptions to every rule and I’m sure that there have been a few sales of extremely popular Blogspot blogs, but unless you have a million visitors a month, you’re probably not going to sell a free hosted blog anytime soon. Buy a domain, pay for some hosting, build something that has value.

2. Professional Appearance

Your blog or website needs to have a professional appearance. Custom design is always better, but at the very least, it needs to have a template or layout that fits that blog’s readership or market. If you have poor graphics, even if your blog has monster traffic, you’ll sell it for much less than you could have if you had professional web design. It’s sort of like house flipping or selling a used car. If you can afford it, a fresh coat of paint usually brings the resell value up substantially.

3. Developed Traffic Sources

Potential buyers want to see traffic. Not just any traffic will do for most serious investors. They want to see solid, search engine traffic and a solid bookmarked reader base. StumbleUpon and other social bookmarking websites are awesome traffic sources, no doubt. But when it comes to someone buying your blog, they want to see more than just a few traffic spikes from a front page listing on Digg. They want to see that the traffic is going to keep coming for months and years to come. Without a lot of work if they can get it.

4. Documented Traffic Statistics

It is going to take more than just the summary of “hits” screen capture from your webalizer stats to make the sale. You are going to need at least three months history of actual traffic statistics. Unique visitors, tracking cookie info if you have it, Google Analytics, etc. Numbers, numbers, numbers. Corporations want numbers in order to convince their board of directors that your blog would be a sound investment. Private investors are no different for the most part and they want to know exactly what they are buying when it comes down the actual traffic your blog has.

5. Profit and Loss

Lots of income statistics. If you are looking to sell your blog or website for real money (read more than a few bucks nabbed on EBAY) then you are going to need to show your buyer some stats about money. P&L statements (Profit and Loss) for as far back as you can go will help your buyer make his or her decision. It is one thing to tell a potential buyer what the gross income per month is, it’s a completely different thing to show them exactly what the net income is and how it is obtained each month. Keep good records of your website expenditures and what the income received from those investments are. Include every cost. Website hosting, design, redesign, employee or outsourcing costs, whatever. Include everything and show them the real bottom line.

6. Set a Fair Price

I know you love your site, I love all of mine too. So it’s easy to attach an emotional value to your blog and inflate the price. It’s also really easy to confuse a blog’s actual value with your vision of it’s potential value. What you think the site will make someday and what it’s making now are two very different things. Sorry, but what you think it will make someday has zero value to a would be investor. They only want to know what the net profit is, right now. Yes, you can take some long term income growth statistics and make profit projections, but unless you have these statistics going back a year or more, most buyers are going to dismiss them entirely.

Set a real price. In the bricks and mortar world most companies sell for 2 to 3 years of the total net income. Online, this number is usually cut down to one year. So if your website is netting $300 per month, the actual value of your blog is probably somewhere around $3600. Once again, it’s easy to add an emotional price tag for all the hard work you’ve done to get that blog making $300 clams a month, but your sweat equity doesn’t mean much to a buyer.

Neither do website values created with online calculators. These sites are traffic magnets and are built totally to obtain webmaster traffic. If you search long enough and hard enough, you’ll find a website value calculator that comes up with a number you like. It still means nothing to a buyer. It’s not what your site is really worth and should have no bearing whatsoever on your sale price.

7. Where to Sell your Website

Where and how you sell your website is super important. The profit you make will be directly related. Try to stay away from auction type formats if at all possible. If your site has some real value, use a website broker. A broker will help you determine the real value of your blog or website and then help you find a qualified and interested buyer. You would call a real estate agent (read professional) if you were selling your house, right? So why would you rely on your “for sale by owner” plan when it comes to your web property? Call a professional.

Sadly, one of the main reasons most flippers don’t call in a pro is because deep down they don’t really want to know what the site is worth. They want to live in their imaginary world where their holdings are worth millions. They can put a site up for sale on Sitepoint or Ebay for whatever price they want. Creating the illusion that they are worth substantially more than they really are.

8. Pie in the Sky Promises (magic beans)

Stay away from “Pie in the Sky” promises to potential buyers. When it comes to buying a website or blog, 99% of the buyers out there are from Missouri (the “Show Me” state) and only want to see the cold hard facts. Offering to take them to some new level of income at a later date is only going to make you look unprofessional and like an amateur.

There are sales contracts that require you to assist the new buyer for a set period of time. But these are normally for sites that are currently making money and allow time for you to teach the new owner just how that income is made. These clauses in sales contracts are not designed for you to hatch your half baked plans or for time to realize “what you think” the site’s potential might be someday.

9. Accessible Communication

You need to be extremely accessible to both your broker and potential buyers. They are going to have questions. So you need to have a cell phone number and an office number where they can reach you. You need to check your email often and respond quickly. Slow response can be a red flag signaling uncertainty, and that’s something an investor just does not want to see when they are thinking about laying some cash on you. Be available to talk to them.

10. Know the Details

Communication is only effective if you have answers. If you have to stumble and stutter with your answers, it’s going to have impact on the sale. You need to have done your homework and you need to know the answers to the questions in advance.

There you have the basics for flipping your blog or website. Of course there are many more points that can increase the actual dollar amount realized when you sell your blog, this only covers some of them.

But if you follow these guidelines and are realistic with yourself and your buyer, you can sell your website for a profit. So take the time to prepare your web property for a real sale. Writing a good sales pitch is fine, but it’s not going to be sufficient for most investors. You’re going to need to have these bases covered.

Good luck. I hope you sell your blog for what it’s worth.

By Jason Lee Miller

About 2 a.m. East Coast time, Ashton Kutcher declared victory in attracting one million followers on Twitter. For what it’s worth—is it worth something?—CNN piggyback publicity team conceded victory, but would reach a million itself sometime in the wee morning hours.

About 7:30 last night, just about the time the Twitter-battle was being hyped on entertainment news, bookies reached out to my inbox to inform me the odds favored CNN. Odds were even on Kutcher, long on Britney.
Ashton Kutcher Millionth Tweet

“Clearly the world wants to know if Ashton Kutcher will be able to continue his furious rise towards top tweeter, if media giant CNN will retain its firm grip on the number one spot, or if a dark horse emerge at the last minute and take the world by surprise,” said Mickey Richardson, CEO of Bookmaker.com

But the really interesting part of this is the waiting to see what happens with Oprah Winfrey’s account. Before single tweet was made this morning, she had amassed 72,000 followers. Kutcher tweeted he was about to introduce her to Twitter on the show this morning and just a few minutes ago, Oprah greeted the Twitter audience before tweeting to her assistant to order her a reuben sandwich.

Um, seriously? What an odd world. It would almost be Alexandergrahambellish if not so, well, surreal. Just wait till the show airs. Bet Oprah blows way past a million followers and Twitter itself is flooded with new Oprahbot members.

It all does make one wonder how much a Twitter account is worth. When Andrew Baron briefly put up hisTwitter account for auction last year, 1,700 followers seemed like a huge Twitter crowd, and the going rate appeared to be a dollar a follower. It’s not clear how much the Twitter-squatter for CNN’s account received for his partnership, but it does make one wonder what the going rate today is.

By Kurt D. Lynn

So much SEO.

You might think, from all the buzz about search engine optimization – SEO – that it offers a cure for all the world’s business ills. Somehow, SEO has been propelled from the backwaters of Internet geekdom into the forefront of modern business marketing. For example, if Google’s own search results are any indication, the interest in SEO yields almost 50% of the interest in general advertising. That level of interest seems way out of proportion to the realities of business advertising.

So Why All The Hubbub?

The excitement seems to be around the notion that SEO means “free advertising”, that it means, if you do it right, millions of people will be clicking through to your site willy-nilly having found you on some search engine and then will immediately do business with you. And behind all that excitement are thousands of overnight SEO “experts” that, variously, all claim to … (pick one):

Have SEO secrets that will help you get an unfair advantage over the next guy;

Guarantee you a first-page listing for an incredibly low monthly rate;

Provide hundreds of high page rank sites that will link to your site;

Give you 5/10/20 quick tips to immediately improve your rankings;

Tell you what Google/MSN/Yahoo doesn’t want you to know about SEO;

Tell you that whatever SEO you’re doing is all wrong; or

Some other variant of the above.
To some extent, this notion of “free advertising” is not altogether inaccurate. SEO can result in your site being found – free of charge – and it can result in traffic to your site that may, in fact, result in new business. But the reality of SEO is not quite that simple.

SEO Is Far From “FREE”

SEO takes work… often, hard work. For those that aren’t familiar with what’s involved in SEO, below is a líst of some of the typical activities that (as the CREST commercials used to say) “when applied in a conscientious program of regular professional care” will result in higher search engine rankings.

Researching and selecting keywords that are truly relevant to your desired audience;

Researching competition for desired keywords;

Researching and analyzing competitive websites;

Re-writing and restructuring your website to address desired keywords, to be more accessible by search engine “crawlers”, to have appropriate label meta tags, headings, and inter-page links;

Create a program to build links to your site from other sites (directories, exchanged links,article marketing, etc.)

Create a program to keep content on your site regularly refreshed and synchronized with all the above.

Regularly (daily or weekly) monitor all the search engines and your competitors positions

SEO Is Not Easy

Doesn’t quite sound as easy as some people suggest does it? That’s because it’s not. And it’s all the more complicated when you realize that every site on that first page, and on the second and third, is trying to do the same thing – but against you! You boost your rank above them. They go to work and boost their site back above yours. And so on and so on… It’s a war and the SEO “experts” are the arms dealers.

Your Goals And Those Of The Search Engine May Be Different

If you’re going to pay good money for SEO, it may also be worthwhile to keep in mind that search engines don’t necessarily have a goal of making you the most findable site on the web. The bottom line for them is making sure that their users find what they are looking for. Satisfying that requirement may mean that you don’t and should not come up first. Google is the number one search engine for a reason: Google users get results they want. Those may not be the results you want.

Short Term and Long Term

In the short run, there may be some serious benefits from investing in SEO to boost your search engine rankings. In the long run, however, there’s probably not much you can do beyond a certain point. Frankly, if you have a finite budget, altering the basic nature of your site and trying to boost how valuable your site is to others (as represented by links to your site) can only be taken so far. After a point, the perfect market characteristics of the search engine will prevail.

Balance SEO With Other Forms Of Traffic Generation

What this means is: yes, do make sure you do the essential SEO necessary to optimize your rankings in search engines. But do it in the context of an overall marketing program. Definitely use SEO to ensure that you get a fair and accurate appraisal by search engines. But also invest in other non-SEO lead-generation methods to bring traffic to your site and business to your table.

Above all, measure the results of your SEO and non-SEO activities carefully and frequently. When SEO reaches the point of diminishing returns, cut the rate in which you invest in it and boost your reliance on non-SEO marketing to reach your goals. In the long run, traditional non-SEO marketing may just be the most reliable and consistent way to boost traffíc to your site.

By Chris Crum

Starts Offering Movies and Shows

YouTube has finally announced after months of talks about deals with major media companies that they are now offering new sections on the site dedicated specifically to movies and television shows.

Partners include Crackle, CBS, MGM, Lionsgate, Starz and many others, which contribute thousands of television show episodes and hundreds of films. They also bring the social element of YouTube along with them because users can still comment, favorite, and share the videos.

“This addition is one of many efforts underway to ensure that we’re offering you all the different kinds of video you want to see, from bedroom vlogs and citizen journalism reports to music videos and full-length films and TV shows,” says the YouTube team in a blog post.

Obviously this puts YouTube in even more direct competition with Hulu, which specializes in TV shows and movies. Though Hulu has been growing steadily in popularity, YouTube is still ahead by far. This could push the site that much further out in front.

YouTube also announced a wider roll-out of in-stream ads, which they have been testing since October.  Hulu users and television watchers are already used to this.

At this point, shows and movies are only available in the US. However, YouTube intends to expand the features into other regions “as soon as possible. They also note that the “subscriptions” tab will be available worldwide within the next several weeks.

By Doug Caverly

Turns back on $4 billion valuation

Not a lot of money is changing hands these days; there’s all sorts of evidence of funding slowdowns and stoppages, making for a “get while the getting’s good” situation.  A new report claims that Facebook was offered funding at a $4 billion valuation, though, and then – this is the really interesting part – Facebook supposedly rejected the offer.

Eric Eldon writes, “Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just had a board-level conversation about possibly accepting money at a $4 billion valuation, but decided against doing so.”

So why did Facebook decline the cash?  One possible reason is that, bad economy or not, it just didn’t want to let things drop so much from the $15 billion level at which Microsoft invested in October 2007.  A decline of that magnitude might scare away other parties and would be embarrassing, besides.

Another idea is that Facebook feels a workable advertising solution is finally within reach.  If it could start generating a real cash flow, there’d be no reason to go to outside sources.

Finally, one more possibility is that Facebook’s long-rumored IPO is right around the corner.

Facebook representatives are keeping their lips sealed on all of these subjects.

By Jason Lee Miller

Link velocity a clue to gaming search

Every so often SEO professionals produce a list of what they believe to be the top factors influencing search engine rankings. The latest update to this list of proposed factors looks much like past lists, focusing on traditional factors like links, content, HTML tags, and domain registration age, and some new ones like geographical factors and personalized search history. But one term might be new to many people: link velocity.

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we main gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

But the Web has changed, become more of a live Web than a static document Web. We have the advent of social bookmarking, embedded videos, links, buttons, and badges, social networks, real-time networks like Twitter and Friendfeed. Certainly the age of a website is still an indication of success and trustworthiness, but in an environment of live, real time updating, the age of a link as well as the slowing velocity of incoming links may be indicators of stale content in a world that values freshness.

This puts Google and other search engines in a tight spot for determining the relevance of any given destination. With information suddenly so viral and speedy, bursts of links to content are key indicators of freshness and what is at the top of mind for searchers. That means the balance has changed, and we may have caught Google in an awkward stage of transition.

Obviously Google can’t go full-on real time like Twitter; search results would become a spammer’s ball. At the same time Google must reevaluate what is considered relevant. Age of content and websites are then devalued in favor of freshness, and link bursts regain value so long as link bursts appear naturally viral. But that’s a real trick, isn’t it? How does a search engine differentiate between spam bursts and natural viral bursts?

Part of that equation involves evaluating the source of the link, which means link farms and paid directories are out, and trusted sites, including and especially trusted sites with social features, are in. The other part of that appears to be where Google is currently failing. By devaluing apparently stale content and slowed link velocity, the value of fresh content and link bursts to it is artificially elevated, but Google isn’t so perfect at determining which fresh, apparently viral content is legitimate and which is full on malicious spam.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s criticism of Google for giving so much weight and relevance to Wikipedia was dismissed as the sour grapes of an old-world information source failing to keep up with the times. But I think there is a major clue: Wikipedia’s content is continually updated by its editors, giving it the appearance of constant freshness. Combined with continual linking, that gave it live Web relevance. As Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, et alia, skyrocketed in popularity, gaining links and continuous user-generated freshness, they also enjoyed sudden boosts in search engine ranking. Just as everybody was talking about and linking to Twitter, Twitter started dominating search results.

But this emphasis on freshness and link velocity has an inherent flaw, one that blackhat SEOers have been disturbingly effective at exploiting for malicious ends. Yesterday, we reported how PandaLabs had discovered a million links targeting Ford-related search queries in order to dupe searchers landing at targeted destination pages into paying to download phony security software.

These blackhatters were astonishingly successful at getting at least ten (I stopped looking after ten) full pages of search results to point to malicious web pages, despite the pages’ obvious spamminess and relative youth, despite very suspicious machine-generated URLs resolving to Polish domains, despite that all but the first result were largely irrelevant to the query (a search for Nissan motor parts brought back Nissan door part results, etc.).

They were able to do so, in part, by dropping multitudes of links into comments sections and discussion areas of current and trusted websites and forums. I think the blackhatters were so successful precisely because of Google’s current need for freshness in the age of the real time live Web.

They didn’t create link bursts from telltale link farms and paid directories, they created them, complete with buzzy anchor text, by piggybacking on Google’s inherent trust of social media. As a result, the targeted webpages take over the search results, and the average user, trusting Google more than they trust their own analysis of what should be obvious spam URLs, get directed to harmful sites.

By Scott Van Achte

As the population with internet access explodes, and more and more people are using search engines to find what they need, the usage of local search also continues to rise. For any sites servicing a local or specific geographic audience, submission to local search based engines is becoming more and more important.

What is it?
In a nutshell local search involves the use of specialized search engines specifically created to focus on a selected geographic region to find local businesses and websites focused on your area.

Local search is commonly utilized as a directory, where users select their location, and narrow their search by categories till they find the listíng they want. In many cases local search engines also guess at the users’ location by using their IP, so when you visit the site and search, for example, “Chinese restaurants” you automatically see results specific to your location.

Google has been doing this for a while to one degree or another. When you perform a search in Google using a geographic modifier the map comes up with results specific to that location. You can also take it one step further and search Google Local specifically.

But Google isn’t the only engine out there focused on local search. There are several of these directories ranging from the better known Best of the Web, right down to small town specific websites offering local search options. You even may find a web directory or guide specifically created for your city, and chances are, it will be a great place for you to submit your site.

Many local directories are free for basic listings along with paid advanced listing options.

Who needs it?
Local search is ideal for anyone serving a specific region, especially those with brick and mortar stores. While you do not necessarily need a physical location, some local search directories, including Google Local, require that you do.

Only recently have small local businesses realized the need to be found in the major search engines. I know that if I am personally looking for a bike tune-up, the first place I turn to is online, to find the various bike shops in my area, if at very least, I search online to find their contact info. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a phone book. As the internet grows in popularity, there are more and more people like me who use it exclusively to find what they want, local or otherwise. For businesses not found within the various local search sites, they are missing out on a growing piece of their market.

Considering the limited expense in getting lísted in local search directories, traditional brick and mortar business can’t afford to not be listed, it’s quickly becoming a necessity.

Why bother?
With more people using these directories, and the incredibly low cost of “free” involved in being listed in many of them, it only makes sense to get listed. These directories, even the lower traffic ones, are a great free source of relevant traffic and the few minutes required to submit to them (usually around 10 minutes or so) only needs to result in a very small handful of site visitors to make it worthwhile.

Where to get listed?
When it comes to local search there are a few places you don’t want to miss such as Google Local. Many local search directories are country specific, so try your searching by using your country name; such as, “Canadian business directory”.

Try to focus your efforts on finding local directories that not only focus on your geographic region, but also offer you something in return.

How to decide if a directory is worthwhile
There are 5 main factors you need to consider when choosing to submít to a local search directory.

1. Location
What geographic regions does the directory serve? Do they serve your location?

2. Relevance
Does a relevant category exist? When you navigate to your appropriate category, are the other business listings relevant to your business? Some local directories may focus only on one industry, such as hotels. If the theme of the directory will not cater to your industry, you certainly don’t need to be listed there.

3. Price
How much does the directory charge? If it is free, it’s most likely worthwhile. If there is a cost associated with the listing, you need to know more to find out if it’s money well spent (which is where the next two points come in).

4. Traffic
Does this directory have much traffic? The quickest way to get a rough idea on this is to check their Alexa rating. Alexa is a rough indicator of how busy a site is, the busier the site, the closer their ranking will be to 1. If the site looks like it has very limited traffic, then you need to find out if the listing will have any SEO benefits if you are to spend any money here. (A low traffic free directory is likely still worthwhile however.)

5. SEO
Will your listing help you with your organic rankings? This is relatively simple to find out. You want to first check the Google Page Rank for their home page. If it is low (less than 5) then this is not one of the major directories. If it is between 5 and 10, then they likely have some authority. Next check the page your listing will actually reside on. Is this page indexed by Google, and does it have any Page Rank? If so, is the link back to your site search engine friendly?
Many local search directories may link to your site using the rel=nofollow tag, or by redirecting through a variety of tracking methods, which can cause your link to have no value in terms of SEO. However, some of them will give you a straight link fully readable by Google, so you will also get the added benefit of increased link density from many of these links. Some directories will also create a brand new page just for you. In that case, your page will not be indexed by Google and will have no Page Rank, but in time, it will. If this is the case, check a few of the listings to see if their pages are indexed.

If Google can not see this link, it has no SEO value. If the directory has no SEO value, and no traffic, it is not worthwhile to pay for this submission. (That said, if it’s a free listing, you may as well list your site there.)

How can I get listed?
Unlike organic SEO, getting lísted in a local directory is often as simple as finding the local directories that are relevant and submitting your site. Once you have decided that a directory is worthwhile, filling in a few online forms and submitting payment where applicable is all it takes. Most paid local directories will have your listing posted within a few days, if not immediately. Free directories can take anywhere form a couple of days to several weeks, depending on their policies, etc.

By Matt Siltala (c) 2009

From month to month I have the opportunity to present 4 different webinars on different topics related to Internet marketing to brand new online business owners.

The reason I bring this up is because no matter what the topic I am presenting on, I usually get asked the same question by completely different random people. They are all wanting me to “look at their site” and give them a “quick, what do you think?”.

These people are wanting to know if their site is ready to “go live” (although I never really understand why people ask that question) but for these people, and this post – I have come up with what I’d like to call “The 5 Minute SEO Site Audit Checklist”. If you have a brand new site, and haven’t done any kind of SEO before, this will be a great list of reminders that will set you off on the right foot.

1. URL canonicalization and 301 re-dirs. One of the first things I look for on any domain I am giving a health check on is the URL canonicalization. In My Opinion it does not matter if you pick proper URL canonicalization pointing to the www’s or non-www’s, but you need to pick one and stick to it. I personally always choose the www’s because more people (from my experience) tend to link to you with the full URL. So you need to get into your .htaccess file and make a few edits. Any variation of the homepage URL needs to be done this way too – for example you need to have the /index.php also re-direct to the main URL (however you have it set up) Bottom line here, you need to make sure all variations of your URL point to the same way you set it up.

Any extension of your URL like:

• http://www.example.com/index.php
• http://www.example.com/index.htm
• http://www.example.com/default.html
• http://www.example.com/default.php
• http://www.example.com/anything (that goes to homepage)

All need to be pointed to the main – http://www.example.com (without any extensions). You also need to make sure that you don’t have any dev links that need to be 301-ed to their new addresses so you don’t have any bad or dead links on the site. You can handle all these changes via the .htaccess file. Here is a little more in depth look into 301 re-directs via a post I did on it a few months back.

Here’s the code:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(Make sure your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled.)

As long as your Apache installation has mod_rewrite enabled then you should be able to use this fix on almost any host.

2. Unique Title Tags and Meta Data. I will go to Google and run a site: command and see all of the pages that are indexed just to make sure that there are no duplicate content issues and that all pages seem to be individual and unique with their own title tags and meta data. If your site is not right – all results that come back will look exactly the same, and if the title and data that comes back is all the same – you have a problem!

3. Search Engine Friendly. Check to make sure the CMS you are using is search engine friendly. Are your URLs search engine friendly? Are you using keywords in the naming structure of your URLs or just automatically created jibberish by the builder? Are you able to include header tags? Alt Tags?

4. Has the site been submitted to Google Webmaster Central? By submitting your site to Google you are able to get your whole site indexed properly on Google, and they are able to show you any errors your site may have. There are so many tools that are offered here that you need to become aware of, but for the sake of “The 5 Minute SEO Site Audit” I just want to make sure the site has been submitted.

5. Check for Duplicate Content. If you are selling products and are using a supplier with their descriptions and info, I am going to make sure there is no duplicate content issues. If you are using the same content that 1,000 other people are using, there might be a problem. I would always suggest making sure you do everything you can to make sure that you have no duplicate content of any kind on your site.

In Conclusion: Again, this is just a quick “What I would do” SEO Audit checklist of what I look for when “checking out” brand new sites. These are a few of the steps that I would recommend anyone new to Internet business and SEO should check out before really thinking they are ready to make money with their website. I know this info may seem basic to a lot of us that have been doing it “forever”, but you woul be surprised how many people still do the simple things wrong!

by Raena Jackson Armitage

Everyone’s talking Twitter, right? And there’s Plurk, Jaiku, and Identica — in fact, there’s dozens of new microblogging services popping up every week.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve already wondered how easy it would be to make your own — perhaps you’d like to set up a microblog for you and your colleagues to share links and have discussions. Or, perhaps you have a cool idea for a new social network surrounding your favorite topic.

Whatever your plans, the good news is that it’s easy to host a microblog of your own, using any one of several free tools. Today we’ll look at three new solutions that are easy to set up, have reasonably modest hosting requirements, and even include some features that blow Twitter out of the water.

P2 for WordPress

Last month saw the announcement of P2, a special theme for use with WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress installations that makes a regular blog look and act more like a microblog. It’s an upgrade of the Prologue theme that was released early last year, and if you’re comfortable with WordPress you’ll certainly find this is easy to understand.

For those of you who are running your own WordPress installation, adding P2 is as simple as activating a theme: just upload the P2 files to the appropriate spot on your web server, and activate it in the WordPress administration panel. At the time of writing, the P2 theme is only available from the Automattic Subversion repository, but it should appear on the Theme Directory any day now. If you’re feeling adventurous, grab it with SVN:

svn checkout http://svn.automattic.com/wpcom-themes/p2/

Otherwise, you can try P2 on a free WordPress.com blog right away.

P2 features a number of Ajax enhancements that make browsing and posting extremely fast. Keyboard shortcuts are available that make navigating your P2 microblog as fast as typing; posts and comments can be added and edited without a page refresh; and there’s even a heads-up notification area that lets you know immediately if fresh content has appeared since you first opened the page. If you’re looking for Twitter-like features such as marking an item as a favorite or the ability to befriend other users, these are unavailable by default, but WordPress’s wide variety of plugins can help you add those features. New users are able to become blog authors right away, so if your aim is to create a new free-for-all microblog, you’ll be able to achieve that with P2.

WordPress’ installation requirements are quite straightforward and should be available on most web hosts: you’ll just need PHP and MySQL. Both WordPress and P2 are free.

Motion for Movable Type

Also freshly revealed last month, Motion is an extension to blogging platform Movable Type Pro, and it’s an interesting blend of social aggregator and microblogging service.

Installing Motion is fairly straightforward — simply install Movable Type, create a new blog, and when the wizard asks for the type of blog you wish to create, use the Motion setting.

Visitors can sign up to the service either directly through your Movable Type instance, or by using their account from a number of other authentication methods such as a Google Account, Facebook Connect, or an OpenID. Unlike WordPress, above, newly registered users can only comment on a blog — but it’s a snap for a blog administrator to promote that user to full posting rights if required; alternatively they have the option to create a new, self-contained Motion blog for every registered user.

One fun feature in Motion is the ability to aggregate social actions from other locations on the Web. Authors are able to pull in their posts on other social media services, such as their Twitter stream, an RSS feed, or their Delicious bookmarks — and there are dozens of other sites to choose from. Those actions become part of each author’s individual page, along with their contributions to your own blog, and can also be added to the homepage of your blog.

Movable Type’s installation requirements are fairly easy to accommodate — you’ll need an Apache or IIS web server, a PostgreSQL or MySQL database, and the ability to use Perl. The cost is based on your Movable Type Pro licence, which depends on your organization — non-profits, educational institutions, and individuals can use it for free, but for-profit organizations need to pony up the cash. You’ll find the details on the Movable Type download page.

Laconica

If you’re looking for a solution that’s most like Twitter, Laconica might be the choice for you. Laconica is the platform that powers Identica and the TWiT Army and it’s packed with interesting features such as groups, instant messaging, posting via email, and the ability to send and receive messages from other Laconica installations. Desktop clients are already available, and there’s an API to use if you find yourself in need of one.

Laconica’s web-based installation wizard takes just a few moments to initialize your database and set up your service; once that’s done, you’re ready to start microblogging right away. But to start taking advantage of some of the more interesting features of Laconica, such as posting by instant messenger or SMS support, you’ll need to dirty your hands with a configuration file. Fortunately, the configuration directives are well documented in a README file, and there’s a sample configuration file to show you how it’s done.

It’s also a little fiddly to adjust the appearance: Laconica supports themes based on CSS only, and at the moment there are no plans to allow users to edit the HTML that Laconica produces without editing the application itself. Fortunately, the markup is full of IDs and classes with which to work your CSS magic.

Laconica’s installation requirements are fairly modest: you’ll need a web server running Apache, PHP 5.2 or better, MySQL 5.x, and some additional PEAR modules — the complete list of system requirements is available in the README file that accompanies the download. What’s more, it’s open source — hack away!

Conclusion

We’ve looked at just three microblogging applications, each with different strengths and weaknesses. The platform you choose really depends on your goals — are you creating a site for you and your friends or colleagues, or are you aiming to create a Twitter-killer? Whatever your aim, by now you hopefully have a good idea of where to start.

By Scott Buresh (c) 2009

“I want to be number one on Google for (insert hyper-competitive keyphrase here).”

It’s usually the first thing we hear in terms of search engine optimization – a company wants to be in that coveted top spot on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN. No matter the industry or specialty, when companies approach us with their desired goals for an SEO campaign, it’s usually all about improving their rankings and positions…and often nothing else. Yes, achieving first page rankings or top spots on the search engines is an incredibly desirable accomplishment to many companies who want immediate and noticeable results. But with such a considerable investment in an SEO campaign, you’d think companies in need of search engine optimization services would also be concerned with their overall ROI, especially in light of the current economy.

Vastly improved (or even #1) rankings are rather easy to achieve in an SEO campaign, even by a novice search engine optimization company. I once wrote an article demonstrating that top rankings were simple – and proved it by optimizing the article for the phrase “Leprechaun Repellent .” To this day, that article, on various sites, takes up nine of the top ten spots on Google for the ridiculous phrase. The obvious question, then, is what those rankings ultimately accomplish. And so we peel back the layers of the onion until we get there.

The First Layer – Rankings

Rankings, rankings, rankings. This is by far the most popular metric for any SEO campaign. Occasionally, a search engine optimization company may not be concerned with your bottom line because it can offer guarantees and focus exclusively on achieving this goal (even though, as in the ‘Leprechaun’ example above, it’s really not getting you anywhere significant in the long run).

Rankings by themselves mean little, and the problem with companies obsessed over rankings is that it doesn’t demonstrate the usefulness of search engine optimization. For a company website, high rankings are great (and impressive for an SEO campaign), but they are just the first layer of the onion. As any good search engine optimization company will demonstrate, our goal is (and yours should be) to bring and/or improve the levels of high quality traffic to your website, meaning visitors who come to your website via a search are already reasonably interested in your products or services.

The Second Layer – Search-Engine Referred Traffic

Increasing search-referred traffic is not a perfect metric because, if visitors are not converting on your website, there’s not a big value proposition to be had. Alone, the metric relies heavily on the right keyphrase selection by your search engine optimization company during the beginning phases of your SEO campaign.

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Say that a farming supply company who wanted to be number one on Google for “affordable farming equipment” decided to try a different tactic while attempting to improve its search-engine referred traffic. If the website had been optimized for ‘Britney Spears,’ for example, traffic levels would undoubtedly be high (if the site ranked well for the term – admittedly a huge challenge), but few visitors would be converting, and business, in turn, would be far from booming. Visitors will jump ship immediately and serve as an immediate reminder of the negative impact that poor phrase selection by your search engine optimization company can have on your long-term ROI.

The Third Layer – Take Rate

Essentially, the take rate refers to the number or percentage of search-referred visitors showing interest in your products or demos (your POA or Point-of-Action). The take rate merely signifies a visitor who demonstrates an interest in your POA, for example, by clicking on a “Contact Us” link. The data you’re gauging here is simply overall interest, since not all of the visitors will follow through and actually convert.

Fortunately, there are ways to improve your take rate during the SEO campaign – making the point-of-action blatant and clear on every page is usually the most effective (but overlooked) method. Collaborating with your search engine optimization company to make certain that the primary POA on your website is indeed the most desirable action that a visitor can take is of paramount importance.

The Fourth Layer – Conversion

Strictly speaking, “Conversion” is the percentage of visitors to your website that actually follow through with your POA. Once your search engine optimization company has helped you improve your take rate, you should work on getting more of those people to actually convert. Is your form too long? Do you show a prominent privacy policy promising not to use or sell personal data? Is it a quick, easy process or do people have to jump through hoops? A good search engine optimization company will be able to help you to identify the elements that are serving as barriers to conversion.

The Fifth Layer – Offsite Metrics

If a client allows it, we like to get involved in the nitty-gritty of offsite metrics as part of the SEO campaign. Though the usual search engine optimization company doesn’t go this far into the process, this area alone proves invaluable to demonstrating your ROI.

By analyzing offline metrics on a granular level, your search engine optimization company can examine and report on your average dollar sale for search-referred traffic, the average dollar value of each search-referred lead, the average lifetime value of each search-referred lead, and much, much more.

A software system is usually required to report the data acquired during your SEO campaign; we use Salesforce, a leading CRM (customer relationship management) solution that can be implemented to track these statistics for you. Though it requires diligence to analyze (as well as follow leads from cradle to grave), your company can analyze which engines attracted the most visitors, which keyphrases were the most profitable, the value of customers, and retention levels.

More than Rankings

All layers of the onion, so to speak, are important to an SEO campaign, but the closer you get to the actual dollar return, the more accurate your assessment of success or failure will be. Rankings alone are no indication of success. For that matter, neither is search-referred traffic if the visitors don’t take an action on the site that can lead to a sale. And when the lead finally comes in, there is no way to track the value unless you follow up with offline metrics to determine exactly how much leads from your website are worth.

These are all base metrics – many campaigns are much more involved and use thousands of different data points. But if you are new to the conversion/ROI game and are thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company, make sure that its goal is to be attuned to your bottom line.

By George Peirson (c) 2009

We are going to look at 7 Basics of SEO below. These aren’t the only things you want to know about SEO, but are the areas you should learn first. Some topics will only take you a minute, some will take a little longer, and others will become an ongoing process. But after reading through this list you should have a good handle on where to start and where to proceed next.
SEO Basic 1: Let’s start off with a definition. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and is the process by which you Optimize your web site so that it is positioned well in the search engines. This is not the same thing as designing a site so that it attracts customers and entices them to buy.

SEO is what you do specifically on your site to improve your Search Engine Position. If you do a search on Google for any search term you will be presented with a list of links. At the top of the page and along the right side will be PPC links where someone pays an amount per click to get positioned. With PPC the more you pay the better your position. Most people only glance at these listings. You don’t need SEO to get one of these positions, just lots of money.

The body of the page contains “organic” listings. These links are listed in the order that Google determined best fit your search, with the best match first. There are only 10 listings per page, most people will only look at the 1st page, maybe the 2nd. So your site needs to be listed within the top 10 and at the worst within the top 20 for any useful exposure. With SEO you will be adjusting your site code so that your site will rank highly. This can be a daunting process as there may be thousands of sites competing for the same top listing. A trick is to aim your pages at less popular search terms to get higher placement. It is better to be on page one for a term that gets 1,000 searches per month than to be on page three for a search term that gets millions of visits.

SEO Basic 2: Your web site must be search engine friendly. The search engines send out “spiders” or “bots” cataloging web pages they come across. If the search engine has trouble getting through to your pages it will either rank your page poorly, or skip your site all together. Making your site Search Engine Friendly means having the code easily accessible, no errors in the code, and guiding the search engine through your site.

Try to steer away from complicated coding when possible. Check your site for coding errors. This is fairly easy to do with web programs like Dreamweaver which do this for you automatically. Plan on having text based navigation on every page. This is usually placed at the bottom of the pages. You may also want to have a “Site Map” page with easy to follow text based links to all of your important pages. Search Engines will look for a Site Map and will use that to navigate a site if available.

SEO Basic 3: The Most Important SEO Aspect is Keywords. Keywords are the terms you type into a search engine to find interesting web sites. You need to know what search terms people are likely to use to find your site, then use those terms as your Keywords. Make a list of the keyword combinations you can think of that you would use to find your site. Try them all on a search engine and see the results.

You need to see how these search terms perform on the web and what other search terms could be used. A great free tool to help with this research is available at Google:

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

You type in a search term, then you are given a list of similar search terms, how often they were searched and some advertiser comparison figures. You can quickly find additional keywords and to see how well they perform. A good idea is to optimize your site for a less frequently used keyword combinations so that you can achieve a higher placement. The Google Keyword Tool will help you figure this out.

Focus on keyword groups with 3 or 4 keywords. Many times keywords will overlap, so you can focus on a longer keyword combination and cover many other combinations at the same time. For instance, if you are designing a page to sell Photoshop Training, you can optimize for this keyword phrase “Adobe Photoshop Training Video”. This will not only give you optimized performance for this keyword combination but also for these other keywords and combinations as well:

Adobe
Photoshop
Training
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop Training
Adobe Photoshop Training
Photoshop Training Video

So try to come up with a multiple keyword combination that will contain several other keyword combinations as well.

Once you know what keywords you want to use you are ready to place those keywords on your page. The main places you want to use the keywords are:

In the meta title of the page
In the meta description of the page
In the first sentence on the page
In all of the image alt tags
In links to and from the page
Well represented in the body text of the page

Make sure you Pick the right keywords, and make sure they cover more than 5% of the word usage on the page. An easy way to get more keywords onto a page is by using lists such as:

We carry:
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Educators
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Students
Adobe Photoshop Training Video Sets for Business

Keep in mind that your page text should still be user friendly. If you use your keywords too frequently or in strange ways on your page, it may rank better in the search engines, but it will drive away visitors. Who wants to read a poorly written page?

SEO Basic 4: Don’t try anything funny. There are lots of “tricky” things you can do to cram more keywords into a page without annoying your visitors. The problem is that the search engines know about these tricks and will penalize your site if you use them. So don’t do any of the following or you may find your web site disappear completely from the search engine listings.

White letters on white background, or any other similar text coloring trick. Even using a very light gray text on a white background, or very dark gray text on a black background can get you bumped from the search engines.

Don’t repeat your keyword over and over again. People used to do things like this at the top or bottom of their pages: Photoshop Photoshop Photoshop. This worked in the early days of search engine optimization, but no longer. You should also not try this trick in alt tags, image names, links or other places in your code. The search engines will spot this and you will be penalized.

Don’t put keywords into comment tags. Also don’t put keywords in hidden form fields. The search engines will spot these and mark you down accordingly.

Even though putting keywords into image names and alt tags is a great idea, don’t think that you can just create a bunch of clear gif images sized at 1×1 and fill those with keywords. The search engines are very good at spotting tricks like this as well.

So use your keywords appropriately, don’t try to sneak one past the search engines and you should do just fine. Just keep in mind, if you think that you need to hide the keywords to trick the search engine you can rest assured that they have already thought of that and will do their best to devalue your site accordingly if you use these “black hat” tricks.

SEO Basic 5: All pages should have links to other pages. The main search engines like links. They like outside sites linking into yours, but they also like links within your site going to other pages. So in this case having more pages can be useful. Also since you now have all these pages that you are linking to it gives you a great place to use some more keywords. Make sure that your links include your keywords.

But, and this could have been in section 4 above, don’t create “doorway pages” that redirect you to another page. It used to be common SEO practice to create lots of doorway pages, each one stuffed with specific keywords, all of which would redirect the visitor to the actual page they were looking for. This would give your site lots of pages, with lots of internal links and would allow you to tightly optimize these doorway pages for specific keywords, but the search engines have gotten wise to this trick and now penalize the use of redirect pages. So don’t use redirects unless you absolutely need to and never use doorway pages.

SEO Basic 6: Only optimize a page for one or two keyword groups. More than that just dilutes your keyword ratio. The search engines will analyze your web page to determine which words are used as keywords. They do this by looking at the title, the description, the page heading and the words used on the page. They then determine how relevant your keywords are to your page. So, if you try to use too many different keywords on a page, it will only bring down the percentage of any individual keyword or group for that page. It is better to optimize for a larger keyword group as discussed above than to try to optimize a page for a lot of individual keywords that can’t be easily used in one sentence. If you need to have a page optimized for several different, unrelated keywords you are better off creating several different pages and re-writing the body text on each page to match the keywords you are optimizing for. This will make each page relevant for the specific keyword and will get a better placement in the search engines.

SEO Basic 7: Be patient. Even with a perfectly optimized web site it can take several months for it to rise in the search engine standings. I usually recommend waiting at least 90 days and up to 6 months to see how well a web page is doing in the search engines. Also, even though you have gone to great lengths to target a specific keyword or keyword combination keep in mind that the search engines aren’t required to agree with you. So when checking your standings look at several different search terms that you discovered in your research and see how well your page is placing. Hopefully you will find that your chosen keywords are getting your page listed the way you want, showing that your SEO has worked properly.

If you find that your page is ranking better for a different keyword, you should examine your page code to see why and make adjustments as needed. Maybe your page is placing higher for a keyword combination you weren’t focusing on, but it is still a good combination for your goals. This gives you an ideal opportunity to go with that new combination to achieve even higher placing.

So, get started right now on your SEO. The longer you wait, the longer it will be before your web site is showing well up in the search engines.

In Closing

There is a lot more to SEO than just these 7 quick points, but this will get you started on the right path. Go through these steps and your web pages will be well positioned for any other SEO you may want to perform on your site in the future.

By Bill Platt (c) 2009

For years, it has been well known that Google’s search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google’s mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website’s ranking in Google were over.

The Shot Heard Around The World

With Matt Cutts declaration, a world full of online marketers began to cry foul. It was said that “They can’t do that!”

But the truth was and is that the Google Search Algorithm is Google’s intellectual property, and therefore, Google can do anything they want within their algorithms – no matter who those changes might hurt or help.

By the end of the Summer of 2007, the people crying foul had quieted down a bit and got back to the business of trying to find new ways to manipulate their website’s rankings inside of the Google search results. That is the way it has always been and always will be.

The summer of 2007 was just such an oddity… For me, it has always been exciting to challenge the brains at Google to get my websites to rank well within Google’s search algorithms. But for some reason, at that moment in time, many of those who held the top rankings in Google felt as if it was their God-given right to be at the top of Google’s search results, and how dare Google oppose God’s decree in this matter.

Yep, I know I am going to catch flak for that statement – comparing a few webmasters to religious zealots – but that is how I roll sometimes.

For me, Matt Cutts was telling people to work harder to actually “earn” what they have been given. For me, it was a chance to re-dedicate myself to the goal of ranking well in Google for competitive keywords. I did not have to change anything I was already doing, because I have never gained a single ranking in Google by paying for a link from any web page. (wink)

Google’s Search Engineers Are Not Foolish

Matt Cutts has said time and again that Google does not want to attack any problem in their search algorithms by manually deleting any participant in the Google search ranking game.

Instead, Google in every case wants to program a solution to address a particular bad practice.

I guess it might be easier for me to understand since I am also a computer programmer. It is a hobby I really enjoy, and I exercise my mind with computer programming anytime I want to improve my own websites or to build a new website. I keep my brain sharp by solving problems in computer code.

So, whenever I see Google making moves in one direction or another, I try to visualize how I would solve their algorithm problems in computer code.

In my mind, solving the paid links issue was a super-easy solution. Just look at the pages linking to a particular website, and then do a cross-comparison of the PageRank of all of those linking pages. If all of the pages linking to a particular URL have a PageRank of Four or higher, then chances are that those links were artificially created, through some kind of paid linking system.

Let me explain this in an example, where all of the sample web pages have 100 inbound links each:

If Site A has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 4 or higher, then that is unnatural and therefore suspect.

If Site B has all of its 100 links on pages that have a PageRank of 0, then those links offer no value to the Internet community as a whole, and therefore Site B should not measured as a quality search result.

If Site C has a mix of PageRank 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 links, then that is more natural in its structure and it also shows that some of the links are considered to have value in the Internet community as a whole. Therefore, Site C has proven itself worthy above Site A and Site B in Google’s search results.

This example should show in no uncertain terms how easy it was for Google to properly address the issue of paid links and to put a stop to people using paid links to manipulate their websites’ ranking in Google’s search algorithms.

Publication Standards

A couple years back, I wrote another article discussing this concept in relationship to article marketing. You can read that article with third-party commentary from Chris McElroy, aka NameCritic, on the Article Content Provider Blog.

In a nutshell, I was discussing the role of article directories in the article marketing industry. Again, this solution came to me from my programming mind. The simple way for Google to have dealt with all of the junk articles that have been written for the purpose of building links to a website is to look at the article in the context of where that article is published.

The article marketing carpet bombers send their articles to hundreds of article directories to get hundreds of links pointing to their website. But the role of the article directory has always been to be a repository where newsletter publishers and webmasters could go to find articles that they would like to reprint in their own newsletters and on their own websites.

Some article directory managers bring a commitment to providing publishers with only quality articles. Other article directory managers approve anything and everything sent to them.

Through computer programming, it is relatively easy to identify which websites are article directories and which ones are not.

If an article is of good quality, then niche website publishers will find the article and put it on their own website. If the article is a crap article, then the only websites that will accept it are those article directories that publish anything and everything given to them.

As a result, it is easy for Google to look at the Linking Portfolio (list of publishing websites) of a single article and to see which articles were considered worthy of reprint by human reviewers. If the article only exists on article directory websites, then the article must not provide any real value to other people. But if the article is of good quality, the article will be able to be located on article directories AND on niche websites.

This concept very elegantly feeds into Google’s overall strategy of determining which web pages people recommend to others. After all, if you look at Google’s PageRank, it is very simply a system which measures how many people have voted on the quality or value of a particular web page.

Expanding On Google’s PageRank Formula

Google loves any system that they can conceive to measure how much value the overall Internet community gives to a particular web page.

Google naturally treats links found in the Yahoo! Business Directory and the Open Directory as higher value links, because the search engineers at Google understand that links in these directories are all approved by a human being.

Google also gives extra value to social bookmarking websites, because the concept behind social bookmarking is that individuals “bookmark” a web page when they find that web page to offer good value to its readers.

Google openly dislikes paid links and can easily identify those paid links, without having to jump through too many hoops. (This should not be confused with paying for a service that will help you increase your rankings in Google. Paying a service provider to provide services to you is very different than just paying for links on high PageRank web pages.)

Google also appreciates reprint articles that have a Linking Portfolio beyond the article directories. Once again, Google appreciates reprint articles that are shown to provide real value to individuals in the greater Internet community.

When you take a close look at the original premise of Google’s PageRank, it has always been about creating systems that measure the value of a web pages to find which web pages will best answer a searcher’s question. Rightfully so, Google believes that the best way to ensure that they are able to give their users good quality search results is to look at what web pages others have already deemed useful.

Herein rests the secret to ranking well in Google’s search results. If you can create content that people will find useful, interesting, and valuable to others, then Google’s search algorithms will look favorably upon your website.

By Jason Lee Miller

Eric Ward illustrates

Links on Twitter are already nofollowed and most are shortened anyway by a shortener. What use can Twiitter be for link building? Link building Eric Ward says the site is perfect for finding niche experts.

It’s not about huge amounts of followers or traffic spikes. You can get that kind of traffic from Digg. But the advantage of Twitter, says Ward, is that people specific to an industry are out there, findable on Twitter.

So if you specialize in little plastic doohickeys they put on shoestrings, irrelevant traffic is not what you’re after. At Search Engine Land, Ward explains how a message that begins as a tweet ends up as a link from a highly trusted website:

A few weeks ago I announced a new site via URLwire, and whenever I do this I set up several alerts/trackers to see where mentions/links show up.  I also set up a Twitter search for that new URL….the new site I announced has been tweeted or re-tweeted by seven people…I discovered all of them were health experts in one form or another.  Also, all of them had several hundred followers (one had 780), and a quick check of a few dozen of those showed some overlap (expected) as well as frequent health URL tweets.  In other words, I’d found a loose community of several thousand collective Twitterer’s who had shared news about a new web site URL.

One of those re-tweets came from a librarian at a med school web site, who did one more thing with that URL. She added a link to it from the med school web site she’s in charge of editing.  What started to her as a tweet ended as a permanent link from her high trust web page.

What’s even better about that is that earned link was a free, organic one, the best kind. No manipulation, no buying, no trading. And that one very trusted link is likely to outweigh many links (however they’re gotten) from not-so-trusted websites.

By Merle (c) 2009 Merle’s Mission

When you hear the word “bounce”, you’re probably more inclined to associate it with a checking account, not your website. But for those who study and understand website statistics, they understand that “bounce rate” is an important measure of your website’s effectiveness.

Bounce rate, simply put, is the percentage of people who come to your site, then immediately leave without viewing any of the inside content pages. Think of it like window shopping. Say you browse by a shop and don’t really care to enter based on what you saw at first glance through the window. The window in this case is your home page. A bad first impression, or irrelevant content, can chase away a visitor and stop them from freely investigating the full content of your site.

Google Analytics defines bounce rate as:

“The percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.”

Therefore, a high bounce rate is bad but a low bounce rate is a positive sign that your visitors are engaging and exploring your website. So what constitutes a good rate? This is a very hard question to answer, but if you do some research, most say it needs to be under 50%. It also will depend on the type of site that you have. For example, if you’re a blogger, many times a visitor will come to your blog to read the latest updates then leave. Thus more often a blog will have a higher bounce rate than a “normal” site as there is no need for them to go any deeper.

How do you know what your bounce rate is? One free program that makes it easy is “Google Analytics”. Register, list your sites and paste some HTML code on your pages and you’re ready to go. You’ll clearly see your bounce rate go up and down as you view the in-depth reports.

So, how can you improve your bounce rate? First, you’ll need to track the rate over time, and also look at the amount of time your visitors are sticking around. Also, take note of the traffic sources. Where is the majority of the traffic coming from? Search engines, direct links, social networking sites like Stumble Upon or Twitter, etc. The source of the traffic and the quality of that traffic will contribute to the overall bounce rate being higher or lower for the week. Some traffic, depending on the source will naturally convert better than others.

Once you know your statistical rate, you’ll need to start making small changes, then run tests to see if it improves over time. It all starts with trying to improve the usability of your site’s landing page. Translation: what people see when they come to your home page.

You can make changes to the design, look and feel of your site. Make sure there are other links readily available to peak the visitor’s interest so they’ll want to dive further into your content. Of course, you always want to make sure your site’s navigation is user friendly, and that the site itself is easy to use and well organized. Another trick is to play around with different headlines, even change your website’s copy. Another big problem is a heavy load time. Make sure your site loads quickly so the visitor isn’t reaching for their back button before it even finishes loading.

Change one thing at a time, and keep your eye on the bounce rate to see if it improves. If you’re not doing so already, have Google Analytics email your site reports weekly in PDF format. This will make your homework a little easier.

As you can see, bounce rate is an important statistical measure and says a lot about the “stickiness/effectiveness” of your website. There are also those who believe it plays a role in search engine algorithms and how they rank your site. If this is true or not, I don’t know – but if it is true it gives you some extra motivation in working on improving it. For more on this controversial subject see:

SearchEngineLand

WebProNews

By studying your site’s bounce rate, you really can learn a lot as to what’s working and what’s not with your website. It really is an important number to know and one you’ll want to continually strive to improve upon.

Like costly heated air leaking out a drafty window, you’ll want to do what you can to plug those leaks and try to keep visitors at your site a little longer. It’s only when they are fully engaged that they’ll make a purchase, subscribe to your ezine or do whatever action you consider a conversion. In the end, isn’t that what it’s all about? If your site’s been losing visitors as fast as they enter, it’s time to follow the “bounce rate” and make some much needed changes.

By Chad Sweely

Since many employers are laying off their employees, for example, IBM laid off 5,000 last week alone, and many former employees are going to be looking for jobs, the job market is more competitive than ever. With this in mind, I would like to bring your attention to the Careers category of our directory. This category contains eBusiness job related tiers like:

• Career News and Advice – Find news sites and blogs covering professional development topics.

• HR Consultants – Find agencies that specialize in Human Resources consulting services.

• Internships – Find resources to help you get started in an internship in your career field.

• Job Search Engines – Places to find jobs and for employers to find job candidates.

• Online College Search – Find sites that will help find schools to further your education and career.

• Resume Software – Software and tools to make your resume standout from the crowd.

• Staffing Agencies – Find listings of employment staffing and temp agencies.

• Student Financial Aid – Find scholarships and student loan sources to help you further your education.

Also, if you are an eBusiness job-related site that fits into any of the categories above, please feel free to submit your website for inclusion to us using our quick-and-easy submit form. We would be happy to list your site within our quality directory!

By Jason Lee Miller

CEO fixes unbroken social network

Here’s your scenario: You’re the CEO of an immensely popular social network with 175 million registered users, or just shy of the population of Brazil. Your users are passionate and tend to protest over the slightest changes. Just recently they got really mad about a terms of service change—so mad it was on the evening news and you had to change them back.

Despite those numbers, despite rabid user loyalty, you’re losing money, so much money you got delisted from Forbes’ Masters of the Universe Billionaires list. At the same time another social network, much smaller than yours with less functionality and more questionable future, is gaining a lot of buzz and membership.

What do you do?

Do you:

A.    Don’t fix something that’s not broken. And by not broken, it means that meteoric growth over the past year led your site to trounce MySpace and every sensitive person on the site is relatively happy in their social networking habitat.
B.    Ignore that a growing number of people seem to like an incomprehensible platform much like a feature you already offer. Remember that you have 175 million and growing members, and that Twitter does not, and show that you have plenty of confidence in your product. After all Google didn’t just become a portal because some people didn’t get the spare interface.
C.    A and B, and focus on Job 1, which is figure out a way to monetize so that you can rejoin the Masters of the Universe at Davos next year.
D.    None of the above. Instead, hold a press conference. Announce you’re making the website more democratic if that’s what everybody wants and call for a vote. While everybody’s busy voting on that, change everything.

If you picked D, congratulations, you’re thinking like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

At the end of last month, Zuckerberg laid down what resembled the Magna Carta for Facebook, noting that future changes would be made via a more democratic process in “virtual town halls.” Voting on that set of new principles and user rights and responsibilities would be in effect until March 29, and only required 52 million votes to ensure they took effect. Over that month, said Zuckerberg, Facebook would be making “hundreds of changes.”

Presumably before anybody could stop him. Maybe we’re seeing the grooming of a future politician.

On March 13, Facebook radically redesigned the site to make it more Twitter-esque and less traditionally Facebook-y.

How did the Facebook masses respond? Hard to gauge really.

Yesterday, an update on the Facebook blog about the new Town Hall voting on the new governance plan was met with a barrage of comments about how much they hated new Facebook and wanted the old one back. But comment threads get ugly sometimes, right? You can’t let a minority of protestors beat you back. Just how many protestors are there, anyway?

The number against the changes are even harder to gauge because there are too many separate factions of new Facebook haters. A couple of groups appear to have around 400,000 members, one has 2.7 million, another around 50,000, and several others just have hundreds. We’ll round up and call it a cool 4 million, well shy of the 30 percent of Facebook needed to vote down changes under the new governance that has yet to take effect.

Groups rallying to keep or save the new Facebook exist as well. One of them even has 76 members.

Chris William at the HuffingtonPost does a pretty good job of summing up what appear to be the most unpopular changes. They include:

–No more automatically updating “live feed” with updates on everything. One critic called the live feed a “TV alternative.”
–Data is fully integrated into the new status updates. Users used to be able to separate out by category: wall posts, status updates, links, photos, etc.
–The feed no longer tells you when friends add new friends. This was a popular way of expanding one’s own friends list.
–Now users get updated with every photo posted in a separate post. 30 new pictures posted. 30 new posts in the feed.
–Gone is the ability to just see less of an individual’s posts. Now it’s all posts or no posts from a person.

The complaints go on for a while at different sources. The least that can be said is there are a lot of people out there wondering why unbroken Facebook needed to be fixed, and why anyone with a user base so change-averse to begin with would think hundreds of changes over a short period of time—no testing, no asking—would go over well.

By Jeff Beale (c) 2009

Business owners are facing a harsh reality: A website in itself offers no assurance of business. “If you build, it they will come” is a cliché that has misled many into believing all a company needed was an online presence to succeed. However, without a strategic marketing plan and a tactical approach, you’re more likely to fail than to reach your goals. Proper planning will not only improve your chances of success, but it will also keep you from throwing away money on e-commerce fiascos.

The first step of planning is to define your goals in light of the target market you aim to reach. As you classify your target, you should determine the core needs of that group and observe the buying behavior that occurs among your potential purchasers. Characterizing their purchasing habits enables you to position your business to appeal to your target market with compelling information before they buy from another resource.

Several online resources can help you place your business in the forefront of your target audience. The process, however, can be complex because a variety of online vehicles, if utilized properly, can help you yield the results you desire. Also, the key to successful marketing online is in developing a diverse marketing plan which takes advantage of several approaches to deliver your message. Components in your marketing plan should include such elements as search engine marketing, pay-per-performance, ad placement, joint ventures, targeted traffic, e-mail marketíng, media marketing, optimization and copywriting.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing has been one of the most highly visible forms of marketing online. With millions of businesses employing search engines to gather information daily, search engine placement for key terms has been a major business generator for companies who properly place themselves in the search engines under the right terms relevant to their market offering. An obstacle to being ranked at or near the top, however, is that thousands can be competing for the same position. And with the search engines changing their algorithms often, achieving placement on the first page for the terms relevant is extremely difficult without a solid working knowledge of and experience in the search engine marketing field. Consequently, one should not solely rely on ranking.

Pay-Per-Performance

Another marketing technique on the rise is pay-per-performance advertising. This is a method for which you pay per click, impression, or visit a site that refers to your site. The application works best if the placements chosen are locations that directly connect with the target market you desire to reach. Advertisement rates are based on an auction format in that the highest bidder obtains the top placement. If your bid is $1.00 for every time someone utilizes your link while your competitor bids $1.01, your competitor will gain a better placement than you. If 100 individuals click your link, you should understand that you will owe $100 whether they buy from you are not. Pay-per-performance advertising clearly requires a full understanding of your conversion ratio to determine the budget necessary to commit to such a program.

Ad Placement

Ad placement is similar to pay-per-performance in that you pay for advertisements on sites or newsletters. The difference is that you typically pay for impressions and market reach. Impressions encompass how many unique visitors view the location in which your ad is placed. The market reach refers to the number of individuals accessing that website or newsletter over a period of time. However, you have no guarantee of the number of visitors who will follow your ad to your website. The concept is similar to traditional print ad placement in that advertisers have no guarantee that people exposed to their print ads will visit their places of business.

Joint Ventures

Another method, joint ventures, can be highly effective in helping businesses obtain referral customers. Joint ventures can be as simple exchanging links with another website or as complex as assembling a tiered affiliates program.

Targeted Traffíc Marketing

Targeted traffíc marketing is an additional marketing online tool with two main applications. The first involves the purchase of a demographic defined list which will contain individuals that match a specified demographic to whom you have permission to send information freely either through an e-mail campaign or a sales call. The second form of targeted traffíc entails the purchase a specified number of unique visitors to your site who match a demographic. This is a mass marketing or shotgun approach. Using either approach requires a skilled implementation of marketing content or your conversion ratio will be low, meaning you’ll be wasting money.

E-Mail Marketíng

The most criticized but still effective form of online marketing is e-mail marketíng. Too many marketers utilized this method improperly by imposing upon individuals who had no interest in their products or services. The answer to marketing effectively using e-mails lies in ensuring you have permission before sending to those individuals.

Media Marketing

A more effective method would be to utilize media marketing in which you write articles, white papers and other content relevant to your industry to be published. Sharing valuable insights and information rather than out-and-out selling helps to validate your company’s expertise as you also acquire free brand exposure.

Relevant Content & Copywriting

Finally, marketing effectively online requires the right kind of preparation for your website. Many sites fail in that they generate traffic but they lack the kind of relevant content that retains the visitor, educates the prospect, and/or encourages the prospect to take action. Developing content that relays a clear message to your visitors is critical. Copywriting professional Sallie Boyles states, “Lead with your punch line. Be clear. Be concise. Rather than covering each page top-to-bottom with solid content, use windows and links to provide detailed explanations as needed. When people gather research online for an immediate or future purchase, they want ease and efficiency – or they’ll leave the site and go elsewhere.”

In developing your next marketing online plan, follow these key steps to success: First, define and research your market. Second, prepare your site for action. Third, position yourself in the marketplace utilizing several marketing methods. Fourth, be prepared to follow up and close the deal. A world of e-commerce awaits!