From the category archives:

Google PageRank

The often missed, but essential practices of SEM and SEO

by Collado on December 29, 2007

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. If you are reading this article you most likely know the basics of what the two mean, but for those who do not or need a refresher…here it goes:

Search Engine Marketing - Typical involves advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and various other search engines. Programs like Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Search Marketing, and more are typically used in conjunction with start up websites and even established ones :) .

Search Engine Optimization -Optimization is completely different from Search Marketing in that Optimization is all about your website as a whole. Some things to keep in mind are: Does your website utilize xhtml and css standards? Does your website use Alternate text (e.g. Some image info ) ? Are your links relevant to information on your page? These are just a few things to take into consideration when building or maintaining SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

To start off, I will discuss the often common missed practices for Search Engine Marketing:

* Time of year - People seem to think that time of year does not matter. By far the worst time to spend most of your money on SEM is towards the end of the year (Christmas, Hanukkah, etc). Some people need to face reality, people are not at their computer’s during this time especially or better yet looking online for your services. Instead, they are spending time with their families, which is a given .

* Too much money spent on advertising - Companies go around spending hundreds of dollars a month on advertising when all their advertising efforts are useless, their marketing steps should begin with their initial design.

* Ads being displayed annoying - How many times have you been to a website and boom an annoying sound starts playing in the background with no on/off switch? How often are you reading a article on a website and the ads get in the way of the text you are reading? How would you feel if your reading was interrupt by someone’s stupid ad being displayed? These are just a few complaints that make a potential reader leave and go somewhere else.

Some common missed practices of Search Engine Optimization include:
* Text is not readable by Search Engines- Numerous businesses today still design their site primarily in Photoshop. While, this might look great from an aesthetic standpoint, from an optimization standpoint its terrible. Search engines cannot understand and/or read text within images or in flash.

* Link farming and invalid links - Newbies to website optimization often look toward link farm agencies to get them inbound and outbound links to their websites to increase their SERP (Search Engine Ranking pages), or the pages that link to a particular website. If search engine optimization were so easy, people would not be getting paid over $100/hour for search engine optimization. However, you do get one thing out of link farming and do you know what that is? Being banned from search engines, that in theory will make you money for free. * Out of date technologies - What is the use of making a website if your not using up to date technologies? You wouldn’t want to create a business and not be able to represent it correctly online? So what’s the point? If your website is a 1990 website built in old-standards of html without anything else why should your potential client trust you or better yet trust your services. They won’t and they shouldn’t, creating a successful isn’t just about creating a website and your done; it’s doing it the right way that counts.

Conclusion - So you’ve seen the benefits of not only building a website from a design standpoint (SEO) correctly, but also how not to burn your business on too much paid advertising like Google Adsense where the ROI isn’t worth what some people spend. If you get anything out of this article, understand that especially for start up businesses spending hundreds of dollars per month just for a handful of clicks is not worth it in the long run, the ROI is not worth it. Remember this before you go to spend hundreds per month on a little three line text ad.

About the Author
Joseph Dickinson, a New Jersey based Web Developer who created JDFreelance.com and the JDFreelance Blog. Currently, I’m a college student studying Computer Information Systems at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I work for the U.S. Navy in Philadelphia, PA as a database adminstrator full-time during the summers working with PHP, mySQL backend databases, XHtml, and Css. I love blogging, enjoy your post my blog!

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SEO Technology? Web 2.0? Seo Web Design? What’s Next?

by Collado on November 7, 2007

What constitutes the birth of one industry is oftentimes the death of another. With all of the internet buzz words flying around these days like Seo Web Design, Web 2.0, Internet Marketing, Seo Technolgy and a host of other mutant forms of traditional advertising and marketing, understanding the underlying premise is important to gauge where all of this is coming from and where it is going.

I’m not going so far as which came first the chicken or the egg, but the last I knew, communication, content and conversation essentially encased all of the above definitions and was part of any aspect of traditional marketing.

These are the three C’s that take precedence at the forefront of any offshoot. Fundamentally, with exposure being the basis of search engine optimization, blogging, or online marketing, positioning tactics have had to evolve in order to keep in tune with the times. Definitions exist for the sake of categorization, but first critical mass needs to occur for acceptance to result from the masses.

Much in the same what when the acronym for SEO was born. (search engine optimization), now it is as common as the yellow pages (a tried and true advertising from the past) in the minds of consumers. But things continually are getting shaken up and evolving to keep us on our toes in regard to what’s hot and what’s not.

From this vantage point, it appears that good old SEO has taken a backseat to social book marking and blogging. Sure, you could spend hours tweaking pages, getting your meta tags just right, going to 3000 search engines to add your url, but you would be wasting your time. Now all you need is a blog, some creativity and hit the publish button to link bait and reel in some traffic.

In addition, contextual advertising and link baiting have become the new form of generating backlinks and traffic to websites as opposed to reciprocal linking, or strong on page factors. At this rate, press releases may be the next dinosaur to fall prey to the new face of marketing, as it is obviously loaded with conjecture and promotion language, which is a big turn off for most users online.

The modern consumer and online citizen are far more savvy than the blue collar industrial generations that proceeded us. Try getting bombarded on a daily basis from billboards, radio, tv and now online and see if natural evolution doesn’t intercede and dampen the impact. So many choices are appearing at break neck speed faster than we can get a grip. So, quite naturally our BS filters are increasing at an alarming rate as well. People like to be sold, but you can’t make it appear as a sale, this is the new form of advertising. Call it tactful third party referral, the art of the passive close or what have you.

In any case, web etiquette is definitely taking on a new protocol. For example, link building is facing a major face lift, personalized search may be the end of SEO as we know it, at least for those savvy enough to sign up and enable it as well as paid links have now taken the hit with the recent removal from Google’s index for over 60 well known directories . In addition to that the pagerank that we all used to cherish adimately has been reduced to a toolbar ornament as trust rank, website authority and personal pagerank are determining who dominates the SERPs.

It will most definitely be interesting the see the next big thing, whatever it is, and how it affects our communication and interaction as a whole.

In the meantime, go with the flow, enjoy all of the conveniences as they arise, you never know when the things you have just become accustomed to as a result of conditioning, will be condemned obsolete. All I can say at this point is, good luck to newspaper and radio advertising, as well as TV as video, pod casts and other forms of social interaction are becoming commonplace as the internet is booming as the new frontier of business, social interaction and entertainment combined.

About the Author
Jeffrey L. Smith is an seasoned search engine optimization strategist and founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Web Design Company in Chicago.
Jeffrey has been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings fresh optimization
methods and solutions for businesses seeking long-tail organic search engine
placement.

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Web Design Templates customizations

by Collado on April 18, 2007


One of the most frequently asked questions we receive about our web design templates is, “Do the forms, newsletters subscriptions and search fields on your web design templates actually work, and how will the search engines be able to find and index my web design template?”

I’m glad you asked! Any web design template purchase alone (meaning a purchase that do not include professional customizations) consists of the design only (or just the web design template PSD file(s), HTML file(s), Flash files(s) fonts etc.); custom design such as programming, SEO (search engine optimization) or scripting is not included. All forms such as a newsletter subscription or a search field are inactive.

Web design template Customization
Notwithstanding professional customizations may be purchased separately to fit that individual business needs. Please, check the price list here or chat with a design consultant now to ask about our low budget customization package now only $349.99. To make your web site based on our web design template unique our low budget package comprises customizing the site name, changing links, adding your logo, contact form script, and up to 5 pages of content; up loading and testing of site to your server also included.

Search Engine Optimization
Fact of the matter is that the esthetics characteristics of your web design template are of no or little relevance to having visitors find your site; conversely Google (or most major search engines) play a major roll in this equation. First of all if you have no idea what a search engine really is, you should check out some of these articles (for example PageRank in a Nutshell or How Do Search Engines Work?) available at http://foamers.net/blogger/archives/category/google-pagerank/ right now. Are you going? You should go… I can’t hear the mouse clicking!

Now that you understand how search engine really work; another really useful resource you’ll want to discover is Google’s Webmaster tools. If you do not already use Gmail or some other type of Google Account services you will need to create one before you can access this service. Webmaster tools is something very special indeed, and not just cause it’s free, but because it’s stacked with some really awesome statistics, diagnostics for the management of Google’s crawling and indexing of your website, as well as many answers to sometimes very hard to find optimization questions you’d wished you knew the answer to. To learn more about Google and how to optimize your web design template for higher ranking, got to http://www.google.com/webmasters/

But I digress. Listen, besides substituting the dummy text on your web design template with your own text and weather you choose a Flash web design template or whatever the underlining technology used to built your web design template may be, the long and short of it is that this is merely the beginning; depending on what skills you posses, you are going to have to make some choices. If you have experience in Flash and HTML then you should think about making these customizations yourself. Also our after sales template help section provides lots of comprehensive web design template editing tutorials that would give you a great start.

On the other hand, if you prefer to avoid HTML like the plague. Then professional customizations are a great solution provided, that together your template customization specialist and you have a clear understanding of your individual business needs and everything that is to be expected upon completion.

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Cheap But Effective Web Site Traffic Promotion Strategies by Neil Day

by Collado on April 8, 2007

In today’s Internet world, there’s nothing more critical than web site traffic promotion. Once you set up an online business, you need to spread the word of its existence. If you don’t, the chances are your business will go down the drain. The Internet is such a huge marketplace and you may probably want to know how you’re going to get free web site traffic.

For no or little cost, there are a lot of ways you can generate free web site traffic. But for the purpose of this article, we can sift through the number of ways where you can get web site traffic promotion without shelling out some of your precious dollars. While it is a fact that some businesses are not ‘big’ on marketing budget, there are still available ways that they can avail of free web site traffic.

Exchanging links is one type of web site traffic promotion that’s proven effective. All other web site owners want to market their own sites the way you do. Through link exchanges, web site owners can get exposure and put themselves on show for viewers to browse on. At the same time, it exposes them to the products and services of the others. This is a very helpful tactic in building and generating free web site traffic. It should be noted, though, that one should establish links with associated web sites. Try to establish link exchanges with sites that are related to your online business. You can try getting your web site’s name spread across as widely as possible.

Another stable web site traffic promotion is offering free items. Everybody likes freebies. You can offer guidelines or tips on certain subjects related to your online business. Try to make your giveaways as valuable for visitors as possible.

You can also create a business blog for your web site traffic promotion. It is an effective tool that you can use to blow your own horn, let the Internet world become aware of your existence of your new products or services, and let your customers know why they should have something to do with you business-wise.

Probably the most excellent way to accomplish web site traffic promotion is through search engine optimization. Major search engines are places where you want to get high rankings. To help you achieve this, there are several ways that can help increase your web site’s rankings. First, you have to submit your web site to major search engines so they can send their web crawlers out, pick your site up and go through it. Second, make use of keywords in the text content of your web site. Select unique keywords that would help pull in searches to your web site.

And don’t forget word-of-mouth as another effective technique for your web site traffic promotion. It is considered to be one of the best forms of advertising. Have a brainstorm session and come up with ways to create a buzz about your web site that will keep online visitors coming back.

For the most effective web site traffic promotion, you can use a combination of these methods. If you decide to use more than one technique, chances are you will catch the attention of online visitors and search engines.

About the Author
Look over the shoulder of an underground traffic guru as he reveals the exact blueprint to web site traffic promotion that generates 15,000 visitors a day to his websites … Visit http://www.website-traffic-blueprint.com TODAY and grab his blueprint for traffic success!

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