Link Building Tips

As the online market place continues to warm up to the idea of SEO, link building has become center stage as it tends to be the most time consuming and crucial part of any internet marketing strategy. Link building services are the most commonly outsourced aspect of SEO. This process involves finding qualified and thematically relevant one-way linking partners who will link back to your website.

At first glance this sounds easy and there are hundreds of automated products out there that claim to add thousands of back links overnight. The truth is there are no short cuts in cultivating authoritative back links for a site. Link building companies spend many hours link building by hand in order to get the best results. Spammy automated products often don’t cultivate valuable links and tend to do more harm than good. Here are a couple quick suggestions to help you get started.

1. Know What Keywords You’re Targeting

Link building strategies are an extension of your current SEO practice. You’ll want to reference the list of keywords you have selected to optimize your site. Make sure that the anchor text of the link has the keyword you are targeting. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword “baby names” you’ll want to place that keyword in the anchor text of the link. I’ve seen many companies go after links by using their company name. Although this does boost link popularity it fails to pass popularity for a specific keyword and can be seen as a failed attempt.

2. Develop a Link Building Strategy

There are many strategies link building companies use to source qualified back links to their clients. The most tedious but often most rewarding method is manual linking requests also known as “cherry picking”. This method allows you to obtain exceptionally qualified links which can really help boost your position in the search engine results page (SERPS). A good place to start with manual link building is to look at your suppliers, vendors, clients, related organizations associations and more.

Besides manual link requests other well known tactics include:

1. directory submission (Dmoz, Yahoo Directory, Joe Ant)
2. article submission (ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com)
3. optimized press releases (PRWeb.com)
4. social media outlets (FaceBook, Linked In)
5. bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, Furl)
6. Blogs (niche blogs)
7. Forums (niche forums)
8. Classifieds (niche classifieds)

3. Identify Thematically Relevant and Authoritative Linking Sources

Search engines see links as votes of confidence for your site. The more relevant and authoritative the site, the more consideration is given to the link and the subsequent keyword in the anchor text. It really pays off to focus on the quality of your links rather than the quantity. It is also important for your link building to look natural and not an attempt to deceive search engine spiders in search of links. Try looking for sites within your industry rather than general, unrelated sites to get links from.

A good example of this would be content creation and distribution. Try creating content on a relevant subject of which you can speak authoritatively. An example of this would be a SEO company writing a short article on 5 simple ways companies can start link building and placing it on an authoritative, industry relevant site like this one. Remember, before placing a link on a site (or making a request), ask yourself three questions:

1. Does a link to my website belong here (does it look natural)?
2. Is this site relevant and authoritative?
3. Is there any benefit to my potential customers?
4. Look for the onsite attributes of the linking site

4. Determine Where Your Link Will Reside

Once you’ve nailed down a potential linking partner that represents the overall quality and thematic authority that your site deserves you’ll need to see where your link will reside.

Here are a couple guidelines that I look for when placing links on a site. I try to get my links no more than a few clicks away from the homepage. The page must be thematically relevant and recently cached by Google’s search engine (this lets me know that the page has been indexed by Google). I also take a look at the number of external (outbound) links leaving that page. I try to keep the number of external links below 50 as it will dilute the effect of the page. Lastly, I look at the page the link will be placed on. For some sites this is harder to control, but if you have the option you should know where the most valuable locations are. I always try to get my links in line with thematically relevant content, like an article or blog post. I’ve found this produces some of the best results. Try to avoid placing your links on a “sponsored” or advertisers section that runs throughout the entire site. Also avoid footer links as rumor has it Google has devalued links buried in the footer of the site. Links placed at the top of the page or inserted into the site’s navigation also tend to do quite well. Bottom line is that your links need to look like they belong and provide value to the user and the site it is published on.

5. Be Aware of “No-Follow” Links

Within the last 5 years Google developed the concept of the “no-follow” link. The “no-follow” code is inserted into your link and instructs the Google spider to ignore it. The “no-follow” link can be seen used most commonly in blog comments and forum posts. This initiative was set forth to combat spam and automated linking mechanisms that would throw links automatically on blog comments and forum posts.

There are a lot of SEO professionals that will only place a link if it is a “do-follow” link, meaning it doesn’t have the “no-follow” attribute. I tend to disagree with this notion especially when the link in question is on a highly trafficked authority site. If it makes sense for the link to be there, then add your link. Even though Google won’t give you any credít for it, it will be seen by thousands of people who may visit your site and link to you themselves because your site is highly relevant. I call this concept indirect link building. You are influencing and promoting your site to potential linking partners.

Link Building is a very time consuming process and link building companies spend a lot of time researching, testing and improving their techniques. Link building services are available for companies that don’t have the time to invest in manual link building. The bottom line is that with a little help anyone can link build and move their site up the SERPS.

About The Author
Oliver Feakins is the owner of WebTalent, a full service SEO company offering internet marketing services nationwide. Oliver is a frequent speaker at industry conferences as well as regional colleges and universities. He also writes for MarketingProfs.com, WebProNews.com, Social Media Today, ITworld and more. For more information on WebTalent visit www.webtalentseo.com.

Paying for links? Good or bad..

Online Marketing is Complex - One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex.

There are hundreds or thousands of ways to win a market. Each idea is a tool that has potential risks and potential rewards on a per market and per project basis.

Link Building in 2003

With link buying people get emotional and just consider it out of the question. Back when I got started as an SEO, many SEOs were considered spammers simply because they even did any link building at all. Why?

• It was amazingly effective.
• It was time consuming and expensive work that many established SEOs did not want to do for their clients.

Since then the web graph has got amazingly polluted and paid links are treated similarly to how link building efforts were treated back then.

Few SEO Tips Are Universal

Rand recently stated that he no longer recommends paid links. If you philosophically didn’t believe in buying links then why would you spend $1,000,000+ building a web graph of link data? What good is researching all the link data if you take link buying off the table as one of the options? Most of the competing links that you can replicate will require some level of payment.

Sure link buying does not make sense for everyone, but it makes a lot of sense for some businesses. And if you don’t buy links then there is little purpose to link research tools, IMHO.

The potential risks & ROI in link buying are not the same for everyone. Saying link buying is off the table is like saying keyword research is off the table. Sure if you are TechCrunch you don’t need to do keyword research to succeed, but it still wouldn’t hurt to consider it.
Waiting in Obscurity is a Real Cost

Let’s say that you are starting a brand new project and have 0 market momentum - a position almost every successful webmaster starts from at some point in time. I don’t think there is risk in buying a few links because you have to start from somewhere. Most of the people who launched new websites in the past year will be out of it by the end of next year. The biggest online risk for new webmasters is perpetual obscurity.

While being obscure you are not…

* building brand and momentum
* building cashflow
* building customer loyalty
* optimizing conversion flows
* catching up with established competitors who are re-investing into growing their businesses

One way or another you have to start doing some push marketing to build momentum. Eventually pull marketing can drag you along, but you don’t benefit from it until AFTER you have built some awareness and market momentum.

At Pubcon 2 years ago Stephan Spencer mentioned you might get penalized 5 years from now for links you bought today. I said that I got started in SEO less than 5 years ago and if I didn’t buy any links back then I wouldn’t be speaking into the microphone right now. I also said that if you get penalized 5 years later for what you did back then well then you didn’t build much of a business.
Brands

But for established brands doing limited link buying can still make a lot of sense. Since “brands are how you sort out the cesspool” there is much less risk in a brand buying a few links.

Some SEO consultants who are trying to appear like the safe option (to pull in corporate consulting clients) think that saying they don’t recommend link buying makes them look wholesome, but any SEO who has worked for fortune 500s knows that once you get in the board room all that matters is efficacy.

Having wrote that, I can think of numerous instances where we advised clients to approach their overall strategy in a way that was less spammy and less risky than what they were already doing and what they were proposing.
Deep Links

If you don’t buy links it is hard to influence the anchor text, particularly if you are doing SEO at the enterprise level AND want to get deep links into commercially oriented pages. Companies spend billions of dollars a year on organic SEO because ranking a few spots higher in Google can be worth a lot of money. If you know a #5 ranking is worth x, then there is a good chance that a #1 ranking can be worth something like 8x.
A Tool is a Tool

Am I advocating that everyone go out and buy links? Not at all. I am just saying that it does not make sense to categorically take it off the table. Link buying is a tool which has various value levels depending what market you are in and how your company is positioned.

Paid links can be a stepping stone or part of your strategy, but rarely should they be your entire strategy. On some client projects we have done we have suggested shifting away from doing as much link buying or reciprocal linking because we felt that the strategy needed to be more holistic and well rounded. It worked, and there was no reason to stop doing what already worked, but going forward it would make sense to leverage some of the brand assets and audience to build other types of links.
Where Link Buying Can Lead You Astray

If link buying is your only SEO strategy it is hard to stay competitive long-term because

* if your link profile is nothing but paid links that is risky
* if your link profile is nothing but paid links that is easy for competitors to clone
* if you are in a big money market some competitors will have other assets to leverage against you in addition

Doing a bit of link buying way back when helped get me some exposure, but it didn’t produce the explosive ROI that we got from doing things like going to conferences, networking with people, and launching a bunch of popular SEO tools. Link buying can be considered a support, but the most successful businesses typically have numerous supports.
Creative Link Buying

Did you see that Mint.com was recently bought by Intuit for $170 million? It seems they used a creative way to buy links:

To build demand, we started asking for email addresses for our alpha 9 months in advance of launch. Then when we had too many people sign up, we asked people to put a little badge that said “I want Mint” on their blogs to get priority access. We got free advertising and 600 link backs which raised our SEO juice.

See how they required links as payment for priority access? Well I would say they got a nice return on those link buys. And so would they. And now that they have so much momentum they can’t and won’t be penalized for buying links.
Where Link Buying Can Make Sense?

* if you are new and have nothing to lose
* if your brand & link profile are so big that buying a few links won’t stick out
* in markets where the competitive barrier set by all the top ranked competitors includes an array of link buying (not saying you should match them link for link, but it might make sense to cherry pick a few of the best opportunities)
* getting a few deep links with targeted anchor text
* in markets where links are valuable and there are few organic links

A Word From Bing

One thing SEOs should love about Bing is that Bing’s search team gives practical advice and does not try to scare you:

The truth is that getting bad links happens to great sites. We know this happens. In fact, we’ve never seen a decently ranking site that doesn’t have a few (or more) bad inbound links. We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites.

Consider this as well: perhaps the reputation of the site linking to you is bad, but the content on the actual linking page is relevant to the page on your site. This could possibly be a decent inbound link-not as good as one from an authority site, but it might give you a little link goodness.

When it comes to inbound links, just remember this: zero inbound links are better than all bad inbound links. But if you have many good, relevant inbound links from respected sites, a few bad links won’t count against you (but they won’t help you, either).

So in general they look at the overall profile of the business when making editorial decisions and are not likely to penalize you for having a couple bad links. They not only won’t penalize you for having a few bad links, but even expect them to be there.
Summary

I don’t buy all that many links for SEO purposes. But I don’t think it is a good perspective for most webmasters to remove the option from their tool set. Had I not bought links back in 2003 and 2004 I am not sure if I would have as big of an audience as I do today.

If you are just starting out and have limited capital you might want to approach link buying creatively (like Mint did), but if SEO is core to your business strategy you shouldn’t be afraid to buy a few links.
Comments

About the Author:
Aaron Wall is the author of SEO Book, a dynamic website offering marketing tips and coverage of the search space, free SEO videos, and free SEO tools. He is a regular conference speaker, partner in Clientside SEM, and publishes dozens of independent websites.

Struggling to make the Sales with an eCommerce website?

During a recent copywriting consulting call with a new client, we discussed her primary concern: having good traffic, but no sales. I’ve seen this a thousand times before. Usually, what I find is a site filled with content that is chock-full of keyphrases and sounds stupidly repetitive. The solution is easy: Write natural-sounding, persuasive SEO copy that entices customers to buy. But this client’s site didn’t fit the stereotype.

The home-page copy needed some work, but it wasn’t awful. The category and sub-category pages had no copy at all that needed to be fixed. The product descriptions were canned (straight from the manufacturer). While that’s definitely not the best way to go for several reasons, it’s not a death sentence. But still, for a site – even a brand-new one – to have several hundred unique visitors a week and not one sale was frustrating.

We looked at some stats. Low bounce rate, high number of pages viewed per visit, acceptable length of time spent on the site. The rankings left something to be desired, but they’d come along soon enough with a few tweaks and some linking.

As we clicked our way through the site’s pages, it became clear. This site suffered from a common curse among e-commerce resellers: lack of differentiation.

Why Should I Buy From You?

Generally speaking, most grocery stores carry nearly the same things. So how did you decide to shop at the one you frequent most? Chances are it was because of the store’s location. Online, we don’t have that advantage.

When e-commerce resellers carry the same exact items as hundreds or thousands of other sites, comparison shoppers have a difficult time deciding whom to buy from. Most often, it falls to price. Since my client wasn’t branding her site to be the cheapest, she had lost the location and the price advantage.

After searching through dozens of websites offering the same products, the surfer had no way to answer their most burning question: Why should I buy from you?

Identifying Differentiation Points

As our tour continued, I asked questions – lots of questions – in an effort to help my client find ways she was different and/or better than her competition.

> > Do you offer free shipping or reduced shipping (with or without a minimum order)?

She did, but that wasn’t stated visibly on her site. There’s one differentiating item. Online shoppers love free shipping.

> > Do you hold any promotions?

She did, but that also wasn’t clearly stated. She made a note to draw attention to her promotion on the home page.

> > Do you offer quantity discounts?

She did, but the link to the copy that explained the discounts was rather hidden. We discussed adding a few words of copy right by the price to let visitors know discounts were available.

> > Can you tell me about the wish list feature? What happens after someone adds products to their wish list?

She didn’t know, so we went through the process together and created a plan for strategically placed copy that would entice visitors to add items to their wish lists. We then discussed the particulars of creating copy for an autoresponder series that would follow up with people who had created a wish list, but never ordered.

When our hour was up, we had identified several actionable steps for her to work on to differentiate her site from her competitors. Of course, they’ll all need to be tested to see which works best to achieve her goals. But for now she’s busy tweaking and tracking instead of scratching her head.

Karon Thackston is an SEO copywriter and trainer. She has authored 3 popular books including the keyword optimization guide “Writing With Keywords.” Get details at http://www.WritingWithKeywords.com today.

How To Increase Your Followers And Make Money With Twitter

The web is fast becoming a center for social activities. Instead of just looking for information, advice and the latest news in the more conventional ways the internet has to offer, people are relying on their friends and acquaintances.

This is now easier and faster than ever before, thanks to innovative websites such as Facebook and Twitter. The latter is particularly popular since you can get all the latest updates and information directly to your mobile phone, no matter the hour of the day or your location.

This innovative communication system is therefore an excellent source of revenue in many ways, as long as you put a little effort in the venture you are undertaking and use some of your own creativity.

This article discusses some useful tips to help you succeed and make money with Twitter.

How Twitter Works

In order to take advantage of the opportunities the social site has to offer, you should know first how it works.

It is quite simple – you sign up for an account, which allows you to post short messages (tweets) to people who have agreed to receive them (your followers). This in turn provides you with a totally free way to share your views and advertise your offer in various ways. If you do it right, you can make some healthy profits out of it.

How To Increase Your Twitter Followers Fast

The first step towards twitter success is to get as much people as possible to become your followers. This is especially important if you are going to market various products and you want them to get massive exposure.

There is no point in posting your tweets to only a few people, unless they are raving fans or dedicated followers.

Here are 4 effective ways to get more people to follow you on Twitter.

1) Spread The Word To All Your Contacts.

Collaborate with your friends and acquaintances to spread the word about each other’s Twitter accounts. This is a great option if you are an active member of an internet community that is at the same time a distinctive target group.

Let’s say you have a music blog with regular readers. If you are constantly writing in various dedicated online forums, you can ask fellow members to become your Twitter followers.

If you have a list of subscribers, you could invite them to receive your messages. If you have a website, you could post a note informing visitors about your Twitter account.

2) Provide A Specific Free Service Using Twitter.

This can be an alert for sports games scores, for shopping discounts or the latest gossip and news in a specific area.

It is best to choose a bit broader subject and have an appropriate username presenting your service. You have to put some extra effort in this as it requires regular work, but you can readily do it from your home or office.

3) Add Your Twitter Account In Twitter Directories.

You can increase your chances of getting targeted followers by adding your Twitter account in the appropriate categories of Twitter directories.

Some of the most popular ones include:

http://www.twellow.com/
http://justtweetit.com/directory/
http://wefollow.com/
http://www.loadedweb.com/twitter/
http://www.tweetfind.com/
http://mrtweet.com/
http://mytwitterdirectory.com/
http://tweeplepages.com/

All it takes is a couple of minutes to add yourself into each Twitter directory; and you only need to do it one time to get permanent exposure.

4) Follow Other People In Your Niche Or Field Of Interest.

When you follow Twitterers in your niche, they tend to follow you back. It’s the law of reciprocity at work.

Where do you find them? Browse through the Twitter directories above and follow people who are in the same field, or have the same interests, as yours.

How To Make Money With Twitter

Despite the way in which you have attracted Twitter followers, you have to make your tweets informative and interesting in order to make people read them.

Now it is easier than ever before to make money with Twitter. Through the Sponsored Tweets service, you can present a marketing offer to potential clients to advertise their products in your tweets. This is particularly convenient since you do not have to look for customers elsewhere and spend money and time advertising your own offers.

However, there is an important point you have to pay attention to. You would not want your followers to stop reading your messages just because they are overwhelmed with advertisements. A good way to avoid this is to continue sending the usual information people expect from you and add an end line with the marketing message.

Experienced social marketers recommend sending a promotional tweet only after every 5 to 7 non-self-serving tweets. After you’ve built trust and rapport by sending helpful or interesting tweets, you might increase the number of times you advertise.

But always remember to do it subtly. One way to do that is to point them to a webpage where they can read an informative article or watch a video that “pre-sells” your product. You may also give them a free report branded with your own offers. Avoid blatant promotions and you will get more sales.

Generally, the preliminary creation of a free service will aid you in making money with Twitter, as it will allow you to incorporate advertisements more easily. For example, if you are sending information on electronic gadgets discount stores, you can have these retailers pay you for including their address in your tweets.

All these advertising tips to make money from Twitter can be successfully adopted with the right timing and strategy. It costs you nothing but your profits could skyrocket.

Want to launch, reinvent & grow your online biz dramatically? Discover a breakthrough membership site considered as the #1 source of supply for most hot-selling digital information products on the web. Go to http://www.surefirewealth.com and skyrocket your profits now!

New to Article Marketing? Do you still need keyword research?

If you’ve done any amount of research on the topic of article marketing, no doubt you’ve run into all sorts of strategies and advice on how to write for search engines and how to make effective titles and resource boxes using your keywords.

For newbies it’s very common to feel like you have a lot of learning to do or that you may be over your head technically–please be assured that this is not the case!

Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by all of the technical aspects of this very effective marketing strategy. Article marketing is very “beginner friendly” and you don’t need to have any sort of SEO knowledge at all in order to do it effectively.

What about those “keywords” that you keep hearing everyone talking about?

If you feel up to it, then go ahead and dive in–do your keyword research and then learn some responsible and effective ways of using your keywords in your articles, titles, and resource box.

But, if you’re like many folks who don’t feel up to learning about keywords yet, it is perfectly fine to do article marketing without doing keyword research.

By far, the determining factor for success with article marketing is not SEO or technical knowledge–it’s simply submitting articles on a consistent basis.

Here’s how to get started:

1) Set an article submission goal for your self–I’d recommend submitting several articles a month. I submit 8 a month and get great results. You can submit less than 8 and still see benefits, so if you’re not up to 8 articles right now, start off with 4 articles and have the goal of working up to 8.

2) Write articles on the topic of your website. This is very important–your articles should be on the same topic as your website. This helps Google associate your topic with your website, and will help your search engine rankings. It will also help you receive targeted traffic from your articles.

3) Submit articles consistently, every month as an ongoing part of your marketing plan. Consistency is the key to success with article marketing–you cannot expect to see drastic results by submitting in a hit or miss fashion. You don’t need to have advanced technical knowledge, but you do need to set goals and stick to them.

And that’s it, as simple as 1-2-3! You can do this!

No matter what your background, you can write articles on the topic of your niche every month, month in and month out, and see excellent results with article marketing.

Feel free to read about more advanced strategies having to do with keywords, and store the info away for a day when you’re feeling like taking on a bit more. Right now though, as you’re starting out your job is to develop the habit of writing and submitting articles.

You don’t need any SEO knowledge to get started; you will progress in your knowledge at your own pace. In fact, is it is often the person who is not technically advanced who excels with article marketing–seriously, by just submitting articles on the same topic of your website consistently, you can make a dramatic impact on your website.
Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert, and founder of the popular article distribution service, http://www.submityourarticle.com, used by thousands of business owners. Discover how to use the power of article marketing to reach tens of thousands of potential prospects for your website - download a powerful free report on successful article marketing from http://www.submityourarticle.com/report

Creating a good landing page

Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers.

While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

The page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here are 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

- Relevant Content

A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.

- Multiple Landing Pages

A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffíc and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on a specific offering and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on a specific proposition and your conversion rate will be higher.

- Focus on Functionality

More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.

- Call To Action

You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear and highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.

- Send a Clear Message

Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.

- Provide Incentive

Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Provide more than your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offering is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.

- Make Visitors Stay

Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you eliminate all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.

- Simple is Better

Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t provide multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the pitch the page was created for.

- Power of Freebies

Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is receíved as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you provide it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.

- Testing

I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you a true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion.

Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean a website’s success or failure.

About The Author
Joanna Colek is the owner of Joanna Ciolek Web Design Studio, based in North Denver, Colorado. She offers affordable, custom and effective web design services to small business owners.

New internet Illness spreads around the world!

I’ve had my suspicions that a rather nasty disease has been floating around, under the radar, for many years.

Well, now it has finally been unmasked and its impact on the world, across all continents, has been huge and deadly serious.8-X

It has been logged by Scientists and given an official name of DN-NE1 but the Media have taken hold of this epidemic and tagged it “Domainers Disease”.

Scientists now believe it was actualy created in the 1980s but only had its first outbreak of note in the 1990s. It seems to have then diminished in the late 1990s but then took a stranglehold in and around 2002. It was previously thought of as just being a mutated strain of Capitalismiosis but Scientists now believe it can be classed as a deadly disease in it’s own right.

The exact numbers of infected people is not known but it is now widely believed to have taken a grip on hundreds of thousands of individuals, perhaps millions across the globe. Its growth was most prevalent in the Western World and particular the USA, Germany and UK.
We now understand that in recent years, there have been massive outbreaks in India and China and indeed, some small areas such as Monte Negro, Tuvalu and Western Samoa have been decimated by “Domainers Disease”

Have you got “Domainers Desease”?  What to look out for.

Its all starts when you come into contact with a carrier, otherwise known as a Registrar and purchase your first domain name.

Once this has happened you have effectively got the disease for life and it will be almost impossible to shake off.

You will find yourself completely unable to stop registering more domain names no matter how awful they are.

You ignore the advice of colleagues, friends, family and other “Domainers Disease” sufferers by continuing to renew domain names despite being told it is absolutely futile.

You spend all day thinking about domain names and just about everything you see or do makes you unable to stop thoughts of “Umm, I wonder if that is available in .com”

You spend more time on domain name forums than talking with your family.

Your friends dare not mention domain names or websites in case you go off on a 30 minute rant.

How to avoid catching or spreading  the Domainers Disease

Do not EVER register a single domain name. Otherwise your life will never be the same again.

Avoid contact with anybody who has a website or worse, actualy bought a domain name with absolutely no intention of developing it.

Should you contract DN-NE1, you should hide yourself in your room or study and never mention to people what do you for a living or as a hobby.

Moving Forward

There are various support groups for people with this disease, commonly known as Domain Forums.

Although, the damage has already been done, the impact around the globe is total and devastating, and it continues to get worse every day, you should not be dismayed. Live every Non-Domainer day as your last and enjoy every second until the dreaded disease gets you, for it will get you, it is just a matter of time.

Below is an image of a person , before and after the Disease has hit them.

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How to optimize your website

Website Optimization is a complex issue, but it must be known to any employer wishing to succeed online.

According to the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, optimizing is to find the best way to carry out an activity. Therefore, optimization of your website would make it comply best with each of its functions.

Recall that if a site is intended only for success in the Search Engines, better known as search engines will not be successful with users and the machines do not buy, not sell it. If, however, is intended only for individuals, difficult to achieve a good positioning in search engines and users do not find, therefore, not sell. In conclusion, a successful web site must comply with its duties unfailingly related to Search Engines such as those related to usability from site visitors.

We have said that anyone wishing to succeed in the Internet market, you should make a website that is a true “virtual branch.” Ie, it must be an extension of your company and function as a local online. For this, the site must achieve the objectives for which it was created, it must be compatible with the principles and policies of the Company, be functional and actually convey useful information to its users.

To specify a site that complies with the characteristics listed above, you must be using a Web Optimizer know how the site should work and how to achieve it.
While we know what we need, we do not know how. The optimization process is not fully structured, but could result in the following steps:

1) Analysis of the competition.

A competitive analysis will help us to know what strategies people are using “quarrel” with our company to win the segment. Through this research we can understand their keywords, their advantages and weaknesses. This copy does not mean that all its attributes, but watching you learn. Learn about our competitors will be very useful to know where we can fight and how we should improve.

2) Survey of Keywords.

Through a detailed study we can know the keywords in place and mostly used by the audience that his company will target. Getting on keywords is a vital step for the success of its “virtual office” as they carried their visitors from search engines or search engines to your website.

3) Development of a database for the site.

We must improve the site pages, and starting from scratch, create them. This step optimizes both HTML coding (headings, metatags, etc..) And “site architecture” (internal structure of links to Web pages that compose your site) as the graphical interface of the website (content and design). Recall that a site that has a great design but not the content it offers its visitors need is a sterile site.

4) Incorporation of keywords.

Once you choose the most effective keywords, we must place on our website. These should appear in the most important pages (Home Page and Services page) and in the measure. A repetition of the excessive lead in some Search Engines to erase from their site.

5) Review and building links.

Acquire high-quality links pointing to your website generates 95% success to get high rankings in Search Engines. Although rated to increase in the search engines is also important to have a large number of links pointing to your pages, we see that the truly important is the quality and degree of the same relationship with your site.

6) Measure the results.

Through various methods you can tell if your site traffic has increased after the optimization. Also, obviously if you will notice the presence on the Internet is giving better results in terms of sales since the Optimizer “he threw hand” to your website. If properly complied with their professional work, you will notice the good results.

7) Maintenance of the site and its contents.

Remember that the last step is the longest and perhaps most important. Once your website is ready and positioned in the search engines to be maintained. If not fed by updated and interesting content for its users and does not make the necessary changes so that they like, the previous optimization has been a waste of time and money.

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The Importance of the Right Domain Name

Just how important is the actual Domain Name in your decision process when building your website?

The average man on the street never really understood domain names in the early 2000’s. However,  I now feel that most people I speak to, when they ask what I do for a living, now strongly grasp the concept of domain names and websites. They now realise that they are indeed valuable and are as important as the company name above a shop window.

Still, small business owners, the bread and butter of the commerical world, will not spend enough time and attention on developing the best domain for their needs.

Common Mistakes

Let’s use the example of a fictional Double Glazing window company, based in Berkshire, England run by James Smith and his brother, Peter.

The worst mistake of all is when they simply take the company name, register the nearest domain to it and then do absolutely nothing in the way of promoting it. They would register jandpsmithwindows.co.uk

Now, thats great as a company name but as a domain, with no further promotion or SEO work, it really won’t get them a great deal of extra business. Sure, if they fill it with some great unique content then it should attract some visitors via some search engine interrogation.

Surely, in their case, where they particularly wish to attract local visitors, they should be thnking of a domain like BerkshireWindows.co.uk . This has 2 major keywords and may well replicate what their potential customers are typing into their browser. They should then follow this up by having clear references to ‘Berkshire Windows’ and ‘Berkshire Double Glazed Windows’ througout the site to really get their site high up in the natural search results and lessen their need to spend a fortune on local Google Adwords targetting.

The other route

Strong keywords is one way, an easy way, of helping your natural search engine rankings. The alternative domain name registering policy is pretty much the opposite and go for Branding over keywords.

Strong Brand examples are Yahoo, Google, Bing, Twitter, etc. Clearly, these will do absolutely nothing on their own, all other things being equal, in the search engines. However, the clarity and shortness of the domain name offers it’s very own benefits, such as a super strong identity and ease of recall. This will lead to moew visitors typing that domain name back in their browser for a return visit. It is also fairly obvious that you either have a massive budget, with which to promote your brand, which will then bring in backlinks to the site, as the word gets round, or that a very strong SEO strategy needs to be implemented.

Which solution one goes for therefore really comes down to company size, contacts and budget.

Best of both worlds?

Perhaps a good middle ground is merging the two concepts together and going for a combination of brand and keyword solution.

The brand part of it can in fact be a strong adjective, such as CheapWindows.com, PremierWindows or AxisDoubleGlazing.com (remember the A for local direcory searches!)

These domain will offer decent natural search engine results are only require some reasonable SEO work to make sure the other keywords like ‘Berkshire’ are placed in and around the pages.

Summary

A domain name represents your showcase to the world. It is a very important decision on so many levels. It is also potentially disastrous to change your mind on the domain name down the line and lose a lot of the goodwill built up over time.

Keywords or Brand is up to the small business owner as is how much time and money they feel they should be spending on the usual SEO factors.

Personally, I find the Brand option a lot ’sexier’ but without proper marketing, having a domain name on your business card called ‘Vindar.com’ really does not get accross what your actual business is. This is the crux of the decision so take your time and really focus on which one would work for you.

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PODcasting as a Marketing Tool

Here is another fantastic way to get your name “out-there” and get people visiting your website.

PodCasting!

Podcasting is Audio (and/or Video) that you create on your computer (or via other means, and then load into your computer) that you then share and allow other people to listen and/or view.

There are large numbers of Podcasting sites that allow you to upload your audio or video presentation, and then attach a description and information about the presentation. Once this is done, people who visit these podcast sites can “find” your podcast and hopefully if it is interesting enough to them, they will subscribe to your “feed” (similar to a mailing list, but for audio/video) and then be automatically notified whenever you release a new audio or video.

Now generally the “feed” is not controlled by you (unlike a regular mailing list) but rather is controlled by the podcast directory and a podcast “reader” which is software (often free) that you can use to automatically check whether new content is available for your selected “feeds” and to then get downloaded automatically.

You can then watch or listen to the downloaded presentation at your leisure, copy to your iPod, etc. It’s really quite cool.

One of the biggest names in PodCasting is iTunes. No doubt you’ve heard of iTunes and maybe wonder what it is. iTunes is software that is supplied by Apple (the Mac people) that you can download for free and it will manage all your podcast “feeds” as well as your music and video collection on your computer, and even allow you to buy music (and podcasts) via it’s iTunes store.

Apple have versions of iTunes for both Windows and Mac and it is completely free to download.

Now iTunes is big business, ten of thousands of people download from it every day, so this is probably the first site you should try and get your podcast listed on.

Many people claim to be experts in the area of targeted website traffic. We suggest you do some careful research yourself first before jumping in.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, first things first, lets discuss what you could be putting into the audio / video.

If your like me, and have a great face for radio, don’t despair. You don’t necessarily need to produce video content, audio is perfectly acceptable for many subscribers, as it’s something you can do (listen to) anywhere (although with video iPods available these days this is also true for Video).

First and foremost you presentation should be adding value to your listeners/viewers. A hard sell sales presentation won’t be worth much to listeners/viewers (at least probably not to those who’s first experience of you is via the audio/video), rather it should be quality relevant content that will appeal to listeners with an interest in your niche market.

Bear in mind that it’s highly likely that when you upload a presentation for inclusion in iTunes, it will be reviewed manually by a human, and if it’s just a hyped up call to action to buy something chances are they may not approve it for inclusion. And even if they did approve it, listeners are going to be turned off when they hear it especially if you have not previously built up a relationship with them.

I suggest an interview is a great idea for a podcast. Put together a set of questions and answers to common problems that you “solve” on your website, and have some one interview you. Save the audio and upload to iTunes!

Another idea (once you get a few podcasts completed) is an overview of your product or services, but again not a hard sell, but a detailed list of what you can do or case studies on how you have helped other customers previously.

Just remember it needs to be interesting to listen to, so make sure you target it to your customers needs and to be solving problems that your potential customers may be facing.

You may find iTunes will want a series of podcasts before adding you to their directory, so it would be a good idea to do 2 or 3 podcasts if possible and then submit them to be included as a group.

If you plan to host your podcasts yourself, be very careful and consider if you have another bandwidth to do so, particularly if your feeds get picked up by lots of people.

Because of the nature of podcasts (audio or video) the files can end up being huge, so It’s very important that you plan this out in advance as you may find once you get successful and have a reasonable number of people listening to your podcasts, that you will be putting your server in meltdown and be running out of quota. This may mean your ISP closes down your website!

Don’t be victim to this, plan for growth on day 1, and assume you are going to be a success and put the right steps in place so you have sufficient bandwidth when things do take off.

Either put all your efforts into getting listed in iTunes or other large Podcast sites, or if your going to do it yourself, invest in a reasonable PodCast hosting company who specializes in Podcasts.

A decent alternative to iTunes for hosting your iTunes (especially if your have trouble getting iTunes to actually accept your podcasts is a company called Liberated Syndication. I would suggest you check their website out, they are one of the best out there, and give great value for money and in some cases it’s free.

Remember all podcasters had to start somewhere, and some of the bigger ones actually have paid advertising now (where sponsors pay the podcaster for an advertisement to be placed in the podcast). This could end up to be a really nice little money earner for you as well as provide great value for your listeners.

For more information on website promotion, please visit Anthony & Tim Buchalka today. Their detailed and helpful information and free traffic courses will help you begin dramatically building your web traffic.

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