Create a Google Sitemap for your Web Site

By Herman Drost

Google Sitemaps is a simple and fast way for your site to be constantly indexed and updated by Google.

This article will discuss the benefits of implementing this new technology, who should use it, how it works and how to create a Google Sitemap for your web site.

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

1. Speeds up the discovery and addition of your web pages in the Google index.

2. Enables Google to quickly find web pages that have been recently changed.

3. A method for your site to be listed and appear quickly in Google.

4. Helps Google to keep search content fresh, so people have the most up to date information available.

Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you have one page or millions of pages, however it's mostly geared towards people that make frequent changes to their web pages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexed because the links are too deep within the site. By including all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have a better chance of them all being indexed as Google thrives on fresh content. According to Google, it won't increase your site's rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is a coding language similar to HTML(though a little more complex). It is often used these days in syndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each page of your site:

[url]
[loc]http://www.yoursite.com/[/loc]
[lastmod]2005-07-15[/lastmod]
[changefreq]monthly[/changefreq]
[priority]0.5[/priority]
[/url]

Here is a breakdown of what each line represents:

location - name of your webpage ie http://www.yoursite.com

last modified - when you last modified the page.

change frequency - tells Google how often you modify that particular page, whether it's never, weekly, daily, hourly, monthly or yearly.

priority - sets the priority you want Google to place for that page on your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 being the least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the middle.

This is only relative to your site. It will not affect your rankings. Certain pages on your site may have more significance than others because they are updated more often ie home page, articles page.

How to Create a Dynamic Google SiteMap XML File

It would take a long time to create your Google Sitemap by hand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s of pages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator that allows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It's a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Other Sitemap Generators

Google has also compiled a list of third party generators.

Personally I use the free sitemap generator. It's simple to use and quickly produces the necessary XML code for your site.

Here are the steps on how to create your Sitemap using this free Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site's address.
2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and paste it into notepad.
3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml
4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place as your home page) of your web server.
5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submit your site's address.
6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to your Google account and click on the resubmit button.
7. Repeat this procedure for all of your web sites.

Conclusion

Google is still the largest and most accessed search engine on Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Google making your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemap will help your web pages stay fresh in Google's index.

About the Author:

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Affiliate Marketing Nightmare - Don't Let This Happen To You!

By Chris Ellington

Everyone knows that affiliates can make or break a company's success rate. Ken Evoy has a whole army of people motivated to earn click-through commissions on his Site Sell program. Marlon Sanders and Yanik Silver have made fortunes with (and for) their affiliates.

"If you've got an e-commerce website," I was frequently told by my internet savvy friends, "you have GOT to have an affiliate program." I took that to heart. "Ok!" I said, and when I created www.ArticleMarketer.com, I made sure that I developed a compelling offer for affiliates.

So what's the nightmare? Here I had created the perfect program for affiliates and what kind of results was I getting? None. Nada. Zilch. A big fat zero. There was no lineup of affiliates banging at the door.

Has this happened to you? Is your affiliate program going nowhere? Here is the step-by-step analysis of what makes an affiliate program take off, and how my results were impacted by each one.

Offer a good deal - make it worth their while Affiliates will not promote your product because it "feels good". An emotional payoff might be sufficient for non-profit organizations or political campaigns, but that's not enough in the cold, hard world of e-commerce. Affiliates are looking for products and services that quickly convert to sale.

Affiliates don't mind pre-selling your goods to their lists and visitors, but you have got to make it worth their effort. Don't be cheap. Give your affiliates a good deal. Unless you're selling Lear Jets or Rolls Royces, that 5% commission you are thinking about isn't going to get anyone excited about being your representative.

How did I fare against this point? I nailed it. I made sure to offer 50% commissions and a lifetime customer program. Residual and recurring revenue are automatic. For any customer that one of my affiliates sends to my site, they get paid. Not just on the first sale either. They get paid every time that person spends money, renews a subscription, or buys something else.

But evidently that was not enough. I had my program set up to offer a good, profitable deal for affiliates. So I moved to the next point:

Provide personal service - be responsive

Affiliates are your business partners, not cattle to be herded. Treat them with respect, provide them with the tools they need to be successful, and be responsive when your affiliates ask for help, guidance or tools. In the end, it will make things better for you. Make sure you take care of your affiliates.

Well I am a naturally outgoing guy, so I have a tendency to reach out to customers, partners and business associates. It's just who I am. I like people. I send email, write articles, post in the blog - I'm a communicative guy. I've got my phone number on the site, and I personally answer my phone. So personal service couldn't be my problem. But still, why weren't people signing up to be affiliates? I moved on to the next point:

Why You?

It's likely that you're not the only company offering the chance to sell a product or service like yours. Give your prospective affiliates a reason to choose your program over your competitor's. Do you do it faster, better, cheaper? Why is it going to be easier and more profitable to sell for you than for someone else? Why do you deserve their attention? Why do you deserve the attention of their visitors?

With 20 years of direct sales under my belt, I certainly know how to craft a presentation to crush my competition. I put direct comparisons to other article submission services right on my home page. I created an instructional video to make it easy to submit articles. Audio prompts explain every step of the way. I have a long listing of places that articles are submitted. There is no reason someone would want to do article submission on their own (because it's tedious) or with any of my competitors (they don't have the reach, and their prices are exorbitant) so I knew that there was no problem in this area. So I moved on to the final point.

Promote! Promote! Promote!

You have to be as diligent in promoting your affiliate program as you are in promoting your products. You have to let people know that you've got a great deal for them. You must let people know that you have an affiliate program, you must provide tools, banners, graphics, articles, ads, and links that they can use to drive traffic to your site.

This was my problem. I was suffering under a "If you build it, they will come" delusion, and it almost killed my response. I didn't even know how hidden my affiliate link was, until I had a conversation (remember, I'm a talkative guy) with a new affiliate. She was an existing customer. She had been to the site, pored over it, in fact, and had asked questions. She had
used our services, so when I asked her what prompted her sudden interest in joining the affiliate program, I was shocked by her response. "I didn't even know you were set up for affiliates until I read it in Michael Campbell's Internet Marketing Secrets newsletter. (www.internetmarketingsecrets.com)

When I saw that he was telling people how great your service was, I said, "Hey, I can do that!"

So it wasn't until I started promoting the service that I discovered how important it is to promote the affiliate program as much as it is to promote the article submission service itself. To ensure that it's easy to find, I have moved the affiliate link on my site. It's now prominently displayed right in my main navigation and clearly marked "Become an Affiliate".

I hope that you'll take this story to heart and implement these four techniques. Start by adjusting your program, make sure you talk with your customers, check your value proposition, and then begin trumpeting your affiliate program from the rooftops. You'll see a quick improvement in your affiliate sign ups!

About the Author:

Chris Ellington gives effective and easy to implement marketing strategies to small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. His Article Marketer website drives thousands of targeted web visitors to your site by distributing your articles to editors and publishers around the world. Try it for free at www.ArticleMarketer.com.

Making A Good First Impression

By Trey Pennewell

You only get once chance to make a first impression. This is true with all things in life, and it is true for an online business.

The reason why your first impression on the Internet is so very important is because most visitors and potential customers will only give your website a 15 second overview, before deciding whether to stay or to move one. Your homepage is how you get your foot in the door with surfers. If your homepage has a poor appearance or is not user friendly, your visitor will likely move on to one of your competitors.

You have seen poorly designed websites and homepages. They are the ones with the annoying pop ups that you cannot get away from, the ones that make it difficult to find vital information that you are looking for, and the ones that are fraught with grammatical and spelling errors. I recently saw a website that had a side scroll window that I could not close. The worst thing about it was that the window overlapped the text on the homepage that I was trying to read. It cut off the first few letters of each sentence. This may not have been so bad if I was able to close the scrolling window, but I could not.

I have also seen websites that make it so difficult to find prices, membership information, contact information, and so forth, so much so that I simply gave up and went to a different site. I left the poorly designed site and went to a competitor's website, even though I liked the first website's product the best.

Perhaps it is because of my line of work, but nothing stands out to me more than poorly written content. Whether it is grammatical errors or spelling errors, I cannot help but focus on them. When I see a website where multiple words are misspelled, I usually leave, because poor grammar and spelling gives me the impression that the Webmaster does not care enough about his website to proofread it. In my mind, I cannot help but think that if the Webmaster doesn't proofread the content, he or she will probably not be very detail oriented when it comes to meeting my customer needs. Remember that you only get one chance to make that first impression with potential customers and to get those customers to bookmark your website.

Now, before you start thinking that I am the spelling police of the Internet, I completely understand how easy it is to make minor errors. However, this is your business, and ultimately your homepage is your best advertisement to potential customers. In this regard, there is no room for errors. You need to make your homepage as customer friendly and professional as possible. With so many competitors on the Internet fighting for customers, you need to exercise control over the areas that you can control.

Correct spelling and good grammar is perhaps one of the simplest things that you can control, when you are trying to create a professional image with your potential customers.

Not everyone feels comfortable with his or her writing skills. Others simply do not have the time or desire to write their website content or free reprint articles. Luckily, there are many
writers who are eager to write your content for you. Many of these writers have years of experience and have written many articles, sales pages, and other types of content.

Employing a writer who can provide you with quality, well-written articles is especially important for those who use English as a second language. I have read and edited articles written by people whose first language was not English, and there have been many spelling and grammatical errors. Even those who reside in the United Kingdom or Australia may want to consider to whom they are marketing. If you are marketing to an American audience, then a U.K. Webmaster may want to seek out an American writer, since there are many minor differences in the dialect. This is also true for Australian webmasters.

The worst foreign language offenders are those who rely on automated translation programs. If, for example, a Webmaster writes an article or site content in German and uses automated translation software, the words will be translated, but the readability of the copy will be lost. I once edited articles for a person, whose first language was not English, and he had used one of these automated software translation programs. Even I had a difficult time understanding what some of the sentences were trying to say. If you need assistance translating business documents, articles or sales copy from one language to another, may we recommend: http://www.linkexchange.etranslate.com/

The bottom line is that you want to turn your website visitors into customers. To do this, you need to make a good first impression. It is difficult to know what exact marketing technique will attract customers to your website. But, it is easy to make sure that your website is easy-to-navigate, easy-to-read, and most importantly, that it has a professional appearance. If your text is misspelled and poorly written, many customers will turn away from your site, and they will look for another website whose webmaster took the time to ensure a professional appearance for his or her website.

About the Author:

Trey Pennewell is a ghost writer at http://www.thePhantomWriters.com. On September 9, 2005, TPW had more than 50 Pre-Written ghosted articles available for purchase on a wide variety of topics. Custom ghost writing is also available on a job-by-job basis for a variety of writing needs. If you need to have very specialized ghost writing work done on your behalf, contact us to see if any of our three dozen ghost writers can meet your needs.

Learn What 98% Of Targeted Visitors Do On Your Website

By Tony Simpson

Getting a Targeted Visitor to a website is a waste of time and money if you've got no idea what 98% of them do when they get there.

I'm assuming that if you have a website selling products that your conversion rate is at least 2%. So you should know at least what 2 out of every 100 targeted visitors do and that's make a purchase.

But do you know what they did before they made a purchase and if they'd have purchased sooner, if it were not for some issue they had with your website?

How much do you know about what 98 out of 100 or 98% of your targeted visitors are doing? If the answer is a big fat zero, you're throwing money down the drain and missing a golden opportunity to learn from every targeted visitor not just 2% of them.

If you could discover a way to stop and ask every targeted visitor why they're leaving your website and they'd give you a reply, would you be interested?

Sure you would, what website owner wouldn't. OK if you said No, then you'd better stop reading this now. Of course no such way exists to stop and ask every leaving targeted visitor. Until it does the only way to learn from a targeted visitor is ask them to complete a survey or learn about their behaviour on a website using targeted visitor tracking.

If you're using just web hosting stats to tell you what your targeted visitor is doing then you're putting yourself at a very big disadvantage. So you know what countries your traffic comes from, what URL's referred them, the total number of pages viewed each day and what part of the day gets most traffic. Well that's better than nothing.

If you have a good web hosting stats package you may even know how much time a targeted visitor group spends on your site. From this at least you know how many visitors found your site interesting enough to stay longer than 30 seconds.

But do you know exactly which pages are viewed each day, what page links are clicked, or if running Adsense Ads, what Ad your targeted visitor clicked on?

If you're still wondering exactly how tracking what a targeted visitor does on you website can help you, let me explain.

By tracking what pages get the most views day by day, you can tell what pages a targeted visitor finds interesting.

If you change the content of a page you can track how many more, or less times the page is viewed. By learning what content interests a visitor you can supply more of it rather than guessing what they're interested in. More interesting relevant content means potentially more visitors.

By tracking changes in the navigation to a page you can tell if the page then gets more visits.

Pages could have content that a targeted visitor would find interesting but your existing navigation may be what's stopping them from finding them. By making a change to the navigation and tracking page views for that page over the following days, you can compare the results with what you had before the change was made.

By tracking any Adsense Ads you know which Ads are being clicked on and can therefore increase your exposure for those Ads.

You do this by creating similar content pages that will feature that type of Ad. This gives you the opportunity to get more Adsense revenue.

By tracking a targeted visitor returning to your website after clicking away you can judge how interesting they find your website.

How much do you know about what your targeted visitor does on your website before they made a purchase?

Tracking tells you what links a purchaser clicked on, what pages they viewed before they purchased and even if they came from one of your own Ads.

It's an established fact that most people don't make a purchase on the first visit. They will have a look around a website, then come back hours or days later, perhaps even several more times before they make a purchase.

It's possible to track all this activity and even have a report emailed to you after your targeted visitor buys.

Armed with this sort of information you can see how often the purchaser returned before they made a purchase, on what dates and what pages they viewed.

If they kept coming back to the same page they could have found something they were unsure about. This gives you the chance to take a look at that page, experiment with some changes and track the results.

If you think targeted visitor tracking is only within the reach of big corporate websites with big budgets you'd be mistaken. You can implement all the targeted visitor tracking I've described on any website, for a single payment of less than $120 and no monthly fees.

A targeted visitor tracking system that enabled you to make just minor improvements to your website could pay for itself in 17 days!

Let's say you get 45 targeted visitors to your website every day and 2% of them buy a product costing $47. Your website earnings would be 45 x 2% x $47 or $42.30 per day.

Now let's assume by using targeted visitor tracking you learn enough from your visitor behaviour to make some improvements to the content and navigation on your website.

Let's further assume your changes improve your website conversion rate from 2% to 2.1% and increase the number of targeted visitors from 45 per day to 50 per day because they find your content more relevant and interesting.

Doing the same math's again but with 50 targeted visitors and 2.1% purchasing the same $47 product, the website earnings would be 50 x 2.1% x $47 or $49.35 per day.

This means the minor improvements made from what you learned from your targeted visitor tracking have increased your website earnings from $42.30 per day to $49.35 per day, an increase of $7.05 per day.

This means from extra earnings of $7.05 per day and a targeted visitor tracking system costing $120 or less, the system paid for itself in 120/7.05 or 17 days.

In the 2nd part of this article Tracking a Targeted Visitor on Your Website I describe in detail, two systems that any website owner can use for targeted visitor tracking.

Now you have no excuse for gaining access to targeted visitor information you never knew you could and use it to your advantage.

Conclusion

Like many website owners you probably spend time and money getting targeted visitor traffic to your website only to get around 2% making a purchase. But you're pouring money down the drain if you don't learn from the 98% who didn't buy from you.

The only way to learn from a visitor is to ask them, or learn from their behaviour by finding out where they go and what they do on your website. The latter requires targeted visitor tracking systems in place on your website.

Even if what you learned from this targeted visitor tracking enabled you to make only minor improvements to your website, the system could pay for itself in 17 days.

About The Author:

Tony Simpson, Advises on Website Design, Promotion and Optimization. He also offers website design reviews through his Restricted Access Membership which is currently free to join, once you are accepted. The 2nd part of his article entitled "Tracking a Targeted Visitor on Your Website" is here.

How to Choose the Affiliate Software That's Right for You

By Peter Koning

With online advertising forecast to grow by 30% this year, the affiliate marketing segment is expected to grow in line with this estimate. Merchants are expected to either add affiliate marketing to their existing online sales channels or upgrade their platforms to expand their existing programmes even further.

A key part of running a successful affiliate program is being able to manage your affiliates efficiently and cost-effectively. Thankfully, there are software products to help you do this. The trouble is, with dozens of different affiliate software suppliers offering a wide range of features, functionality and pricing, how do you choose the right one?

There are six main types of affiliate software, each with its strengths and weaknesses. Once you choose and implement a particular solution, it can be complicated and expensive to switch. Be sure to do your research beforehand and choose a program that meets your needs both now and for the future.

1. Stand-alone Software

You pay a one-time fee to own the software. You install it on your web server where it integrates with your other systems, such as your e-commerce and CRM components.

Pros: Typically has extensive features and functionality. Ongoing fees are minimal and do not change with the size of your affiliate program. Affiliate links show your domain address because the software is hosted on your server. As more affiliates create more inbound links to your site, it can have a positive effect on your search engine rankings.

Cons: Requires installation, which you will need to pay for if you cannot do it yourself. Having the software on your server may require a bigger web hosting package, resulting in higher hosting charges.

2. Hosted (ASP) Software

The software is provided as a service by a third party. They host it on their server and you pay to access it.

Pros: Upgrades are typically included and are rolled out as soon as they are available. Requires no technical skill as installation and hosting is handled by the vendor. Upfront costs are lower.

Cons: Ongoing monthly fees are usually based on volume of transactions. As your affiliate program grows, your costs may grow as well. Some vendors may not allow links that go first to your domain - reducing the added benefit of inbound affiliate links and search engine positioning.

3. Affiliate Networks

Again, the software is hosted and provided by a third party. You also gain access to an established community of people who are actively looking for affiliate opportunities.

Pros: No technical skill or maintenance required. Instant access to a large pool of potential affiliates, which can help build your program quickly. Usually the network handles the administration of the entire program, including affiliate payouts and reporting. You do nothing but upload your affiliate offers to the network site.

Cons: The network takes a relatively high transaction fee on each affiliate sale. Minimal options for customizing the program to your specific needs.

4. MLM Software

Multi-level marketing (MLM) is often considered the "black sheep" of the affiliate marketing concept. However, there is significant overlap between MLM and affiliate marketing. MLM talks about a "downline" whereas affiliate marketers refer to their sub-affiliates. Same concept, different name. Since there are software packages to manage an MLM business, you should not overlook this possibility for running your affiliate program.

Pros: Excellent for managing an affiliate program with multiple tiers.

Cons: There's a certain stigma attached to MLM. Potential affiliates may be scared away if they discover you are using MLM software.

5. Shopping Carts

Shopping cart software allows customers on an e-commerce site to select items they wish to purchase and store them in their virtual shopping basket, before paying for their purchase in one electronic transaction. Many e-commerce shopping carts include affiliate management features as either a standard or add-on module.

Pros: E-commerce and affiliate management functions are integrated into one program, making maintenance easier and less expensive. The affiliate module is not typically based on volume so fees remain the same as your program grows.

Cons: Affiliate management is not the vendor's primary focus so the software may have less functionality than other software options.

6. Web Site Builder Systems

These all-in-one packages usually bundle web site building tools, web hosting, e-commerce and affiliate functionality.

Pros: Can help you launch a complete e-commerce site from scratch very quickly. Little technical expertise required.

Cons: Paying for many different services as one lump sum means you may be overpaying if you only want one or two pieces. Again, affiliate management is not the vendor's primary focus so functionality may be limited.

Whether it is the effectiveness of cookie tracking, the booming popularity off RSS and datafeeds, or companies using the latest tools in fraud and parasite detection, it's critical when choosing an affiliate provider to work with a company that is going to adjust to the market. The affiliate software solution that works best for you will depend on your affiliate strategy and requirements. Think about your needs, do your research, and choose wisely.

About the Author:

Peter Koning is the founder of www.Affiliate-Software-Review.com. He has been active in the international IT, telecom, and Internet industries for over 20 years.

Merchants can compare affiliate software products side-by-side, see examples of products in the categories mentioned, and instantly create free feature comparison charts by visiting
http://www.affiliate-software-review.com

The Five Ways You Should Be Using Keywords

By George Peirson

We have all read lots of articles on how to gather keywords, how to compile a huge keyword list, how to make these keywords relevant to our web site. But exactly what do we do with all these keywords once we have them?

Knowing where and how you can use your keywords will greatly improve the efficiency of your search engine optimization.

There are 5 places in a web page where you can use keywords:

The Title Tag
The Keyword Meta Tag
The Description Meta Tag
Alt Tags for images
Body copy on the page

Of these the page Body Copy, the readable text on the page, is the single most important place for your keywords. More about this later.

Let's first take a look at the Title Tag. This is one of the tags in the head section of the html code of your web page and lists the title that is displayed in the web browser. For instance, Internet Explorer displays this tag in the top bar of the browser window. But there are other uses for the Title Tag as well. Most search engines will index this tag for information about your site and many search engines will use this tag as the title of your listing.

In general you can use from 60 to 115 characters in a Title Tag. The Tag can include the company name, especially if it is a well known company, and should include your most important keywords. Consider this a short description of your web page. One more thing, the Title Tag is also used as the link when the URL is saved into a web browser favorites list.

The Keyword Meta Tag used to be the main way search engines indexed your page. Now-a-days many search engines will simply ignore this tag, but that may not always stay the case. Some search engines still take s look at this tag to help categorize your site. There is no reason not to have this tag on your page, just in case. You are not penalized for including a Keyword Meta Tag.

The keywords should be separated by a comma. Put more specific keywords first then put the less important and general keywords later on. Search engines no longer pay attention to the case of a keyword, so the keywords can all be lower case. I have seen recommendations of 25 keywords or 1000 characters in the list. In general Keyword pairs or triplets are better than single keywords. I try to have one or two lines of keywords if I use this tag.

The Description Meta Tag is slowly joining the Keywords Meta Tag on the lack of support list. But right now it is still a valuable place to use your keywords. Many search engines will look at the description Meta tag for keywords to compare against your body copy. Yahoo goes one step further and will use your description tag as the description of your site in their listings.

Consider the description tag just like it is named, a concise description of your site. Keep it to a short paragraph, under 50 words.

Alt tags are text descriptions that are included with the code used to display images on a page. Basically an Alt tag is the Alternate Text version of the image in case the image is not displayed. Alt tags are important for creating a fully accessible site for people who use screen reader technology that reads the page out loud through their computer speakers. Obviously an image cannot be read aloud, but the Alt tag can.

Alt tags are also displayed as a quick popup when you "hover" your mouse pointer over an image. Many search engines, including Google, will index the Alt tags along with the rest of the body copy, making these ideal places to slip in a few more keywords. Just keep in mind that the text should accurately reflect the content of the image. Plus don't use Alt tags on images that would not normally be read out loud, such as separator lines or bullets.

This brings us to the main place to use your keywords, the body copy on the page, the text that your visitors are reading when they visit your site. The major search engines will no longer give you a top placement just for having the most instances of a particular keyword on your page. They will give top listing to what they believe is the most relevant page on a topic.

Your job is to work your keyword into the text frequently, but appropriately. Select one or two keywords and make the page specifically about those keywords. Think of yourself giving a PowerPoint presentation to an audience of your best customers. Your PowerPoint slides will be your paragraphs. They should be concise and to the point, using your keywords to drive home your point. And, just like in a PowerPoint presentation, you can use bulleted lists to call out the several benefits of your site or product, each time relating it to your selected keyword.

So use your keywords appropriately on your site and use them where you can. This will greatly increase your search engine effectiveness.

Article copyright 2005 George Peirson

About The Author:

George Peirson is the CEO of How To Gurus. He is the author of over 30 multimedia based tutorial training titles. To see training sets and other articles by George Peirson visit http://www.howtogurus.com

Catapult Your Traffic With These Web Site Add-Ons

By Ronald Gibson

Having a website is great but, if the site doesn't have any traffic, then what good is it really doing for you? Here are some features that you can add to your site to generate more traffic and more stickiness for your site.

1. You should add a blog to your website. Blogs are a fast and easy way to add content to your site. Why is that important? Search engines love content. A frequently updated blog will attract the search engine spiders and will get your site indexed quickly. You should try to post blog entries at least a couple of times per day.
2. Add a message board to your web site. This helps your site to develop its own little community. People will visit your web site to ask questions and answer other people's questions.
3. Add a directory of web site links to your web site. People will visit your web site to find related web site links for the topic they're interested in. As an added bonus, links are also content for search engine spiders.
4. Add an article section to your web site. People will visit your web site to read and learn new info related to their interests. And this also will provide content for the search engines.
5. Add an archive of past e-zine issues to your web site. People will visit your web site to read past issues of your e-zine that they've missed.
6. People love freebies. You should add a f.ree software download page to your web site. People will visit your web site to find new software that will make their life easier. Also add a free ebook directory to your web site. People will visit your site to download, study and read new information.
7. Add a free classified ad section. People will visit your web site to place their own free classified ad and to read other offers.
8. Add a free link page to your web site. People will visit your web site to place their own link and to look at other people's links. This is a double bonus. Not only will you get traffic from the links, but, once again, links are also content that search engines love.
9. Add an "about us" page to your web site. People will visit your web site to read about your business and yourself.
10. Add a guest book to your web site. People will visit your web site to leave their opinions about your business and to list their signature file.

Using the above methods to add features to your website will not only draw more traffic to your site, but they will also make your visitors want to stay on your site longer and want to come back and visit again and again.

About the Author:

Ronald Gibson is a Web Designer and Web Marketer. He is the Webmaster of AffiliateUtopia.com, which offers information about some of the best money making opportunities on the Web. For more information, visit: http://www.affiliateutopia.com/

How Do You Know When You Have Enough Backlinks?

By John Taylor

We all know just how important it is to get as many incoming links as possible. The top search engines love backlinks; and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that link popularity plays an important role in their ranking algorithms.

Incoming links aren't just important to the search engines. The more links that you have that link directly to your site, the more opportunities there are for people to click them. Every opportunity to click a link is an opportunity to get a visitor to your web site.

So, if the "arrow" is your targeted visitor, then the incoming link is your bow. Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that you take up archery! But I am suggesting that you get as many bowmen as possible to send targeted traffic to your site.

How do you know when you have enough bowmen?

How many incoming links is enough?

Here's a step by step process to get you the answer...

1. Choose your primary keyword and run off to your favourite search engine and run a search.



2. Identify the URL at the very top, the number one position, and copy the URL to your clipboard.



3. Now open another browser window and get to this page: http://www.link-advantage.com/popularity and paste the #1 URL from the search engine window into the search box. Don't click the "check" button just yet.



4. Go back to your search engine window and click to page two and capture the URL that is in the top of that page (#11 in the overall results).



5. Return to the Link-Advantage.com window and paste the #11 URL into one of the additional search comparison boxes.



6. Enter your own site's URL in one of the remaining boxes and then click the "check" button.

Now look carefully at the results. You now have two targets to aim for. You know how many links you need to beat the site that holds the #1 position; and you know how many links to get your site into the top ten position on that important first page of the results for your keyword.

Surprisingly, now you know what you are aiming for, you are much more likely to succeed and by using the http://www.link-advantage.com/popularity you have an easy way of keeping score.

In my link building experience, having a clear target and measuring progress can be a great motivator. However, it's important not to feel overwhelmed when you first start and see that you're going to need thousands of backlinks. Just set yourself a realistic target to aim for within your first week, or month, and get started.

Building link popularity isn't a one-off project, it's an ongoing and important part of building long term traffic.

Copyright John Taylor PhD September 2005 - All rights reserved.

About The Author:

To learn more information about Link Building & Link Popularity I strongly recommend that you visit http://www.Link-Advantage.com

Build SEO Links & Web Traffic With Content Distribution

By Joel Walsh

Many website owners and SEOs (search engine optimizers) believe that trading links is the most effective way to build the hundreds of links necessary for good search-engine ranking. But there's another way to build links that deserves your attention: content distribution.

A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, the backlink is included in an "author's resource box," which is a brief "about the author" paragraph promoting the author's site.

Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

* Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a relevant website owner. That's it. No adding links to your site and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you can get more links from the time and resources you spend on link-building.

* Links are not always available through reciprocal linking. Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking. Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of website owners.

* Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal links may be "dampened" by the search engines; i.e., they will not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course, reciprocal links are still valuable, there's a just a question of how valuable they really are.

* Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that the higher the number of links per page, the less SEO value each link has. When a website publishes an article, the author's backlink is often the only live link to another website on that page.

Distinct Non-SEO Benefits of Distributing Content

What makes content distribution a truly special method of link building is that it's the only method where the non-SEO benefits may even outweigh the SEO benefits:

* Website building. If you create special content for your link-building campaign, you can publish it on your site. As a general rule, the more content your site has, the more search engine traffic it will receive. Just publish the article and get it indexed in search engines before distributing it, which should help you to outrank your republishers in search engines for that same content.

* Traffic generation. The links in distributed content generate traffic in the form of highly qualified leads: people who liked what you had to say. Distributing content gets you traffic even when it doesn't get you a link. If your article gets picked up by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of highly qualified traffic.

* Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign method that can make the recipient website and its owners appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they've distributed.

* Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.

Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content distribution:

* Desired anchor text is not always available. Unfortunately, the content management systems most widely in place today make it easier for website owners to accept content as text rather than HTML. This means that many website owners simply have their content management system convert a URL into a live link, rather than taking the time to code in the anchor text. Still, an experienced content distributor can usually find ways around this problem to make sure that many if not most of the links use anchor text.

* Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as sure a thing as reciprocal linking. The site that publishes your article has to like not only your site, but also your article. This is especially true for the passively-generated links that come from content clearinghouse websites. But results can vary the other way, too: an article that catches on will yield more links than you ever could have gotten through the same investment in reciprocal linking. In order to minimize the risk of content not catching on with website owners, you should make sure your content is high-quality, and also plan for a large content distribution campaign: the more content you try, the more likely you are to find a winner.

* Requires significant investment. You need high-quality content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few work-hours to distribute the content and track the results. Of course, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of reciprocal linking, which is also significant. These costs can be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process from soup to nuts to a content distribution specialist. Costs of outsourcing content distribution compare favorably with costs of outsourcing reciprocal link building.

* Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this requirement has to be weighed against the real-world requirement of special expertise in other link campaign methods. Again, this drawback can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist.

In short, there are benefits to both reciprocal linking and content distribution. All things being equal, you should use both. Still, content distribution is the only one method that carries substantial non-SEO benefits as well. Plus, a professionally managed content distribution campaign may even yield greater SEO results than reciprocal linking would for the same investment.

You owe it to yourself or your clients to add content distribution to your SEO-toolkit--before the owner of the next highest-ranking site finds out about it.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content, offering a fully managed content distribution campaign guaranteed to get you at least one hundred one-way inbound links for every three pages of content via his website content distribution package.

10 Ways to Tackle Keyword Research and Selection

By Michael Murray

Effective keyword research requires many steps that go beyond your web site. It starts by knowing how your potential customers search.

You need to be extremely careful with keyword research so that you don't miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Here are 10 strategies to guide you along the way:

1. Know your potential customers.

We can't tell you how many businesses we've met who simply pick keywords out of thin air. They don't talk to customers or hot prospects in order to determine what might be a useful set of keywords.

2. Start with core words.

A core set of keywords - even if too broad - can stimulate creative thinking.

3. Look at the industry.

Examine industry trade group web sites and related newsletters to find potential keywords.

4. Study competitors.

Some companies make a bigger deal of competitors' keywords than they should, but it's still a useful strategy. Invariably, a competitor will be using a strong keyword or phrase you don't want to miss. Often, however, they load their web sites with single keywords that aren't appropriate. If internet users are seeking cookware, their search terms shouldn't be laundry-based words. Yet we came across that very example. Be careful which words you use.

5. Be specific - add other words to your primary phrases.

If you sell metal, try metal stamping or metal stampers. Or, how about metal stamping companies? Words like services, companies, products, accessories, and many others can really pay off. Ok, everyone wants to rank #1 for terms like "toys" and "sports." It would take more time and budget than you may have to land such terms (through META updates, content adjustments and links).

6. Visit Wordtracker.

WordTracker is a great tool even if it only collects a sampling of actual searches (more than 300 million). You'll get a good sense of how frequently someone may search.

7. Use your intuition.

Don't hesitate to try some ideas; Wordtracker and other sources can confirm whether you have a search term people might or might not use.

8. Limit your selection.

Come up with a list of words - 10, 20, 30, maybe 50 or more. But don't get so many that you can't manage them all.

9. Tie keywords to site planning.

Pick keywords you can work with over time. Make sure you don't plan to drop a page from the web site or change it so often that your target keywords may be knocked off or irrelevant every 30 days.

10. Study your log files.

Web analytics is a great tool if you want to see how your visitors are searching. Study the results and you will come up with a revised set of keywords.

About the Author:

Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a search engine optimization firm in Cleveland, Ohio. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game."

Internet Directories to Improve Link Popularity

By Olivia Lambeth

You can jumpstart your link campaign by getting directory links. Building links, by listing your website in the search engines and directories, is one way of increasing your link popularity, especially if yours is a new site or one with no inbound links.

However, you should choose your directories and search engines well. But, the shortage of inbound links puts your site at a severe disadvantage because link analysis is an important part of every search engine's ranking algorithm.

So, you can overcome this disadvantage by getting a few quality links. And a good way to start is to get listed in as many directories as you can. There are many directories out there, and the more you can get into, the better. If you have a business related website, and it can't be accepted by non-for-profit directories, then you should try submitting it into business directories and should be prepared to pay a small fee for it. A good strategy is to contact a site that doesn't offer advertising or paid listing and offer a small amount of money in return for a link.

Chances are that few will be willing to accept your link. A few that you should try and get your site listed in, are Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org), Yahoo(http://www.yahoo.com), LookSmart (http://www.looksmart.com), Zeal (http://www.zeal.com), Joeant (http://www.joeant.com) and Business.com (http://www.business.com), Discount-Search.com (http://www.discount-search.com) or any other business directory if your site doesn't qualify for free submission.

And these directories and search engines are gold mines as linking partners, waiting and begging to be mined by an enterprising and prospecting webmaster. The most obvious Internet directory to start with, when beginning a comprehensive link search, is the well-known DMOZ directory. Its complete category and sub-category classification system makes it convenient for any website owner to find numerous sites within their area of business.

With DMOZ, there's no need to contact them for link exchanges if you're concerned about loss of visitor traffic to their sites. However, if you're not listed in the DMOZ directory, you can still find the category where your site would probably be included. And the process remains the same for finding link partners, whether your site is listed or not.

Another directory that is good is The Yahoo! Directory which has many of the same sites in its list as DMOZ. This is inevitable. There are, however, many sites listed in Yahoo! that are not part of the Open Directory Project. And this fact opens up many more possibilities for the webmaster.

When you go to the Yahoo! Directory, you must first go to your category, if you're already listed. But if you're site is not listed, you should select the most probable one. However, keep in mind that the listings are in alphabetical order, and may not have the same descriptions as the DMOZ directory. Then, use the same procedure as before, and your list of potential linking partners
will grow larger.

A third important Internet directory is the Google Directory. They use listings supplied by the Open Directory Project and the listings are very similar to those found in DMOZ. But, Google is different in that it orders the results from the highest PageRank listing to the lowest, making your sorting that much easier. Though, it should be remembered that some of the PageRanks on display are most probably out of date, and may not reflect the site's current PageRank.

But, if exchanges, for higher PageRank purposes are important to your site, then the Google directory is the answer to what you're seeking. However, as a general rule, don't let PageRank determine your linking partners. It's far more important to make your site helpful, for your visitors and customers.

And, since directories are an excellent source of theme related link partners for any website, you should use a major one for the search such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, or the Google Directory. So, finding potential linking partners is very easy when you use the major directories or search engines.

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About the Author:

Olivia Lambeth is a creative and multi-talented fashion designer and has worked with reputed Fashion Houses for the past 12 years. She specialised in Casual Wears but nevertheless her unique design for Formal and hand work is worth mentioning. Her site is at http://www.discount-search.com/

Learn What 98% Of Targeted Visitors Do On Your Website

By Tony Simpson

Getting a Targeted Visitor to a website is a waste of time and money if you've got no idea what 98% of them do when they get there.

I'm assuming that if you have a website selling products that your conversion rate is at least 2%. So you should know at least what 2 out of every 100 targeted visitors do and that's make a purchase.

But do you know what they did before they made a purchase and if they'd have purchased sooner, if it were not for some issue they had with your website?

How much do you know about what 98 out of 100 or 98% of your targeted visitors are doing? If the answer is a big fat zero, you're throwing money down the drain and missing a golden
opportunity to learn from every targeted visitor not just 2% of them.

If you could discover a way to stop and ask every targeted visitor why they're leaving your website and they'd give you a reply, would you be interested?

Sure you would, what website owner wouldn't. OK if you said No, then you'd better stop reading this now. Of course no such way exists to stop and ask every leaving targeted visitor. Until it does the only way to learn from a targeted visitor is ask them to complete a survey or learn about their behaviour on a website using targeted visitor tracking.

If you're using just web hosting stats to tell you what your targeted visitor is doing then you're putting yourself at a very big disadvantage. So you know what countries your traffic comes from, what URL's referred them, the total number of pages viewed each day and what part of the day gets most traffic. Well that's better than nothing.

If you have a good web hosting stats package you may even know how much time a targeted visitor group spends on your site. From this at least you know how many visitors found your site interesting enough to stay longer than 30 seconds.

But do you know exactly which pages are viewed each day, what page links are clicked, or if running Adsense Ads, what Ad your targeted visitor clicked on?

If you're still wondering exactly how tracking what a targeted visitor does on you website can help you, let me explain.

By tracking what pages get the most views day by day, you can tell what pages a targeted visitor finds interesting.

If you change the content of a page you can track how many more, or less times the page is viewed. By learning what content interests a visitor you can supply more of it rather than guessing what they're interested in. More interesting relevant content means potentially more visitors.

By tracking changes in the navigation to a page you can tell if the page then gets more visits. Pages could have content that a targeted visitor would find interesting but your existing navigation may be what's stopping them from finding them. By making a change to the navigation and tracking page views for that page over the following days, you can compare the results with what you had before the change was made.

By tracking any Adsense Ads you know which Ads are being clicked on and can therefore increase your exposure for those Ads.

You do this by creating similar content pages that will feature that type of Ad. This gives you the opportunity to get more Adsense revenue.

By tracking a targeted visitor returning to your website after clicking away you can judge how interesting they find your website.

How much do you know about what your targeted visitor does on your website before they made a purchase?

Tracking tells you what links a purchaser clicked on, what pages they viewed before they purchased and even if they came from one of your own Ads.

It's an established fact that most people don't make a purchase on the first visit. They will have a look around a website, then come back hours or days later, perhaps even several more times
before they make a purchase.

It's possible to track all this activity and even have a report emailed to you after your targeted visitor buys.

Armed with this sort of information you can see how often the purchaser returned before they made a purchase, on what dates and what pages they viewed.

If they kept coming back to the same page they could have found something they were unsure about. This gives you the chance to take a look at that page, experiment with some changes and
track the results.

If you think targeted visitor tracking is only within the reach of big corporate websites with big budgets you'd be mistaken. You can implement all the targeted visitor tracking I've described on any website, for a single payment of less than $120 and no monthly fees.

A targeted visitor tracking system that enabled you to make just minor improvements to your website could pay for itself in 17 days!

Let's say you get 45 targeted visitors to your website every day and 2% of them buy a product costing $47. Your website earnings would be 45 x 2% x $47 or $42.30 per day.

Now let's assume by using targeted visitor tracking you learn enough from your visitor behaviour to make some improvements to the content and navigation on your website.

Let's further assume your changes improve your website conversion rate from 2% to 2.1% and increase the number of targeted visitors from 45 per day to 50 per day because they find your content more relevant and interesting.

Doing the same math's again but with 50 targeted visitors and 2.1% purchasing the same $47 product, the website earnings would be 50 x 2.1% x $47 or $49.35 per day.

This means the minor improvements made from what you learned from your targeted visitor tracking have increased your website earnings from $42.30 per day to $49.35 per day, an increase of $7.05 per day.

This means from extra earnings of $7.05 per day and a targeted visitor tracking system costing $120 or less, the system paid for itself in 120/7.05 or 17 days.

In the 2nd part of this article Tracking a Targeted Visitor on Your Website I describe in detail, two systems that any website owner can use for targeted visitor tracking.

Now you have no excuse for gaining access to targeted visitor information you never knew you could and use it to your advantage.

Conclusion

Like many website owners you probably spend time and money getting targeted visitor traffic to your website only to get around 2% making a purchase. But you're pouring money down the drain if you don't learn from the 98% who didn't buy from you.

The only way to learn from a visitor is to ask them, or learn from their behaviour by finding out where they go and what they do on your website. The latter requires targeted visitor tracking systems in place on your website.

Even if what you learned from this targeted visitor tracking enabled you to make only minor improvements to your website, the system could pay for itself in 17 days.

About The Author:

Tony Simpson advises on website design, promotion and optimization. He also offers website design reviews through his Restricted Access Membership which is currently free to join, once you are accepted. The 2nd part of his article entitled "Tracking a Targeted Visitor on Your Website" is at http://www.webpageaddons.com/stp/targetedvisitor2

How Internet Marketers Can Create Their Own Powerful Niche

By Jeremy M. Hoover

For some reason, people who look to the internet to make more money or start their own online business are drawn to the internet marketing or home business industries. Ironically, these marketers (and I was one of them!) become affiliates for "make money from home" products, or buy reprint rights for the same, and thus try to sell something they have no experience in.

Sooner or later, new internet marketers will hear from an established "guru" that they should stay away from the internet marketing niche. Instead, they should find a "niche" they are interested in-for example, baseball-and focus their marketing efforts on that niche. The reason given by the gurus is that the internet marketing niche is already overcrowded, and "newbies" are going to have a hard time cracking that niche. (Of course, these "gurus" also encourage you to buy their products, because they will help you become a better marketer..)

While I agree that the internet marketing and home business industry is overcrowded, and while I do not think it is a niche at all, but a large overarching concept, I think it is still possible to carve out a niche within this concept for yourself. This is true, if for no other reason than there will always be new people coming online looking for ways to make money online. Why shouldn't you be the one to reach them? For myself, I found many other "money-making" websites before I found the gurus' websites.

So how do you carve a niche for yourself in this industry? For starters, brainstorm all the different aspects (niches) of internet marketing and home business. To get a list begun, here are a few: traffic generation, lead generation, web copywriting, autoresponder follow-up, product creation.

Here is a battle plan for creating your own niche:

1. Think hard about the products you affiliate with. Are they centered around one niche, like traffic generation? If you have too many products, whittle them down to a few you will focus on.
2. Build a website or an autoresponder series around your niche, and make sure it will establish you as knowledgeable in your chosen niche.
3. Drive traffic to your new niche website.

The best way to accomplish 2) and 3) is by writing articles and submitting them (and including them in your autoresponder series). Instead of writing about all aspects of internet marketing or home business, you specialize in traffic generation (for example) and become known as someone who is very knowledgeable about traffic generation. Build your business around this niche.

About the Author:

Jeremy M. Hoover is an online freelance writer who specializes in writing articles for website owners to use to establish themselves as experts, and to promote with. If you need articles, contact Jeremy through his site, www.jhooverwebcopy.com. Read more marketing articles by Jeremy at his marketing blog, www.jhooverwebcopy.blogspot.com

Web Analytics - More Than Just Numbers

By Stephen Oachs

UNDERSTANDING YOUR USER'S WEB SITE EXPERIENCE

According to WikiPedia.org, Web Analytics is defined as, "the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so businesses can better understand the complex interactions between Web visitor actions and Web site offers, as well as leverage that insight for increased customer loyalty and sales." By tracking movement and monitoring the path and activity of site users, Web analytic tools provide valuable information about individual user behavior. This data provides you with important insights based on watching user movements within your website. You will be able to track how users navigate through your site, which pages are most frequented, where users exit your site and any number of other behavioral traits.

Visitor traffic statistics can tell you much more than how many customers visited your site on a given day. A good Web analytics service will provide you with the ability to slice-and-dice your visitor reports so that you can readily identify peak traffic periods by hour, day, week, month and year. The benefit to this granular breakdown is that you can identify trends that can be used to provide an enhanced user experience. For example, if your Web site is used to promote a restaurant, you might tailor your menu pages to display a lunch menu during peak morning Web traffic and a dinner menu during peak afternoon hours. Using Web analytics, you can identify the best hours to present dynamic content. Your Web developer can provide this functionality on your Web site, increasing your users' interest, providing them viable benefits over competitive sites, and bettering the chances that your visitors will find what they are looking for and not abandon their search in frustration.

DO WEB TRAFFIC REPORTS TELL THE WHOLE STORY?

If you are only crunching numbers, it is impossible to accurately judge whether a user has had a satisfactory experience at your Web site. They may have found the information they were seeking, they may even have purchased your products, but visitor number tallies alone cannot tell you if your visitors were confused or frustrated and whether or not they will return to your site in the future. Nor can they tell you what changes you need to make to reduce a user's pain threshold at your site or what changes should be made to increase the overall level of satisfaction with their site experience.

By analyzing the "click path" (also known as "clickstream") of your visitors, you can begin to understand their behavioral patterns. Then, suddenly, behavior analytics becomes a powerful tool for optimizing your Web site content and overall performance.

Click path reports can also be very useful in identifying a navigational issue commonly known as, "click distance." Click distance refers to the distance in which a user has to move their mouse in order to navigate your Web site. If your site navigation is cumbersome, you may be causing the end user more click distance and as a result they may not see, or find, links to pages that are important to your site's success.

In addition to click path and click distance, it is also important to understand the means in which your visitors access your Web site. Statistical information about their computer operating system, browser type and screen resolution can go a long way in helping you provide optimal content and navigation. For example, if your Web site provides a software download, you can improve your visitor's experience by dynamically directing them to a download page that is best suited for their computer type. If, in your operating system analytic reports, you find that you have a high volume of Mac users, then it would be wise to ensure that the nature of your content satisfactorily relates to them. Another great example of technology analytics would be screen resolution. If you have a large percentage of visitors viewing at 800x600 it would
behoove you to ensure that your Web pages view well at that resolution. If not, you are forcing unneeded horizontal scroll, which could in fact be a troublesome source of abandoned visits.

THE KEYWORDS TO SUCCESS

It is a well known statistic that 85% or more of Web site traffic is derived from search engines. Search Engines provide a fuzzy roadmap to billions of Web pages -- hopefully this includes yours. If you are listed, you really are the proverbial needle in a haystack, so maximizing your search engine relevancy is one of the most important marketing strategies you can employ. An additional benefit of understanding keyword relevancy is that this data will go a long way in helping you streamline your visitor's experience. Once you have the information, you can take your visitors directly to specific pages within your Web site, potentially bypassing irrelevant levels of information that might otherwise cause them to lose interest, thus prematurely exit your site.

Again, Web Analytics offers insightful information by providing you with actual keywords and key phrases used by real customers who found your Web site from a search engine listing. Within keyword reports, what you do not see is often more important than what you do. For example, if you sell red sweaters and the key phrase "red sweaters" does not appear in your search engine keyword reports, or has limited use, then this provides you with key information about your meta data and marketing efforts for that page(s). If you combine search engine click- through analysis with visitor click path (which pages they are starting on) you can instantly identify which pages are marketed well and which need improvement.

THE BIG PICTURE

To truly understand all the factors contributing to your Web site user's overall level of satisfaction, you must combine your knowledge of visitor traffic, behavioral analytics and
keyword analysis. This melding of data provides a far richer, extensive and complete picture of your user's Web site experience and provides you with a vital road map of the actions necessary to enhance your visitors' site experience; and this will keep them coming back.

About the Author:

The author of this article, Stephen Oachs, is senior project manager for VisiStat.com (http://www.visistat.com). Oachs has been in the industry for over a decade, specializing in online business and ecommerce development. He is a published writer, having written articles on a variety of Web development topics, including collaboration on the book, "Web Design Index," published by The Pepin Press (2000). Learn more at http://www.visistat.com or write Stephen at stephen@visistat.com

The Hybrid Blog and Ping

By Keith Baxter

For the past two years, one of the best SEO inclusion tactics was the use of blogs. Blogs have become a base standard in SEO marketing, but as times change, so does the efficacy of any tactic.

With that said what worked two years ago certainly isn't the same thing that's working now. The worst part is that uninformed marketers are still teaching the old methods of SEO marketing with blogs to the masses.

In this article, you will be enlightened to the newest form of SEO marketing with blogs.

Let's begin by eliminating a huge fallacy.

The blog and ping is a process by which you post a snippet of information from your site to a blog (mainly blogger.com) with a URL to your site included, and then notify Yahoo that a post exists on this blog. The idea is that your blog will be spidered quickly by both Google (due to blogger.com) and Yahoo.

You only need to blog and ping a maximum of 10 pages from your site. The entire purpose for doing this is to attract search engines to your site and let them spider the rest of your site on their own. You can equate this process to renting links. You simply rent one link to your site in order to get the spiders to visit your site.

Unfortunately money hungry marketers came along, didn't understand the concept, and then took it upon themselves to teach people that every page on your site required blogging and pinging. To top it off, these same uninformed marketers began teaching their followers that three pages should be processed every 15 minutes.

The blog and ping isn't as effective as it was a year ago because of these numbskulls.

With that said, it was time for the process to evolve. Its efficacy was diminished due to misuse and misguided education.

So where has it evolved to?

It's evolved into an organic blog that grows of its own. This blogging system receives its data from remote sources and posts on a consistent, yet infrequent basis. It pulls usable and visitor friendly data from a variety of sources, while still hosting the links you want found by the search engines. This blog informs over 50 blog directories every time an automated post is made, making it extremely valuable to the search engine algorithms.

How is this accomplished?

First, you need Wordpress (http://wordpress.org) and RSS to Blog(http://www.stealthtrafficsecrets.com/rsstoblog.html). Once you've downloaded both of these, make sure you install them.

Once installed, configure Wordpress per the instructions found here:
http://www.stealthtrafficsecrets.com/wordpress-tricks/.

Second, create a list of links from your site which will be used in this new hybrid blog and ping tactic. One of the bonuses for RSS to Blog is a tool that does this automatically for you.

Third, add these harvested links to the RSS to Blog system and hit save. Set your cron to post out as often as you like and you're done.

That's it in a nutshell.

There are a couple of additional points I need to make,

First, when using RSS to Blog you also have the ability to add additional data from other sources in order to make your Wordpress blog readable by the masses.

Second, the Wordpress tricks book gives you the knowledge to make your blog more search engine friendly as well as providing a list of blog directories that are automatically notified every time you make an entry.

With this tactic revealed, it's my intention for you to enjoy the quick search engine inclusion that comes as a result of implementation.

About the Author:

This article has been authored by Keith Baxter, the editor and publisher of the fast selling video newsletter at http://www.StealthTrafficSecrets.com. If you wish to learn how to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website, then subscribe to the site now. it's only $7.00 per month!

What You Should Know About Your Web Host

By Raamakant S.

Yesterday I received a nice email in my inbox, I read that short and interesting email, it was like 5 to 6 lines max, at the end was a link which I was asked to click on. I did exactly that. I wait for about 1 minute but no page downloaded. I thought my Internet connection was down so I checked it but it was perfect.

I refresh the page many times but the results were the same. I read all other mails and did my routine work. In the evening I suddenly remembered that mail. Since it was so interesting, I again read it and clicked on the link but this time the same results appeared. I finally gave up and deleted that mail.

This whole episode left a question in my mind about why people don't choose their web host wisely. In fact it's the most vital part of an Internet business.

A web host is the first important step towards building your Internet business. You can get cheap or even free hosting services but I don't prefer free hosting for commercial sites. Your users are going to get blasted with annoying pop-ups every time they surf to your page, it's going to be impossible to get a decent position in a search engine, and you don't even get a real business URL. No one's going to remember your web address if they have to type www.myfreehost.com/my_site.

So the question is, what points we should consider before selecting a web host?

1. Space

It's the first point to consider - how much space your host is providing to you. If you have a one or two page website with no downloads, it's not an important point, but if you are planning to go for resale right product, you need at least 100 MB space. Most good web hosts provide a minimum 1 GB space to their clients.

2. Bandwidth

It's another important part to check. Did you know that sites with high downloads causes many people to go over budget on bandwidth and lose their host? Sometimes they have to pay fees up to hundreds of dollars. It's essential to check before buying any hosting services. Most good host provides 25 to 50 GB Bandwidth.

3. Support System

It's also a key point. If you get stuck at any point, how long does it take to get support? Do they provide 24/7 phone support?

Some Additional features you must check:

How many POP email accounts they are providing?
How many databases they are providing?
Do they have Web based e-mail?
Do they have Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus filters?
Can you Password Protected your directories?
Do they take regular backups in case a server gets crashed?
Do they have a money-back Guarantee, if you don't like their services?
Do they support Perl, PHP, Crontab and Secure Server Layer?
(You don't require these facilities in the beginning but after some time you need it.)

I personally trust "Ultimate Web Hosting Services" for my hosting needs. They have all features that a professional host must have. The most telling feature of this hosting service is
that it gives one hour response guarantee but usually I get response in 5-10 minutes. I prefer this hosting service just because of its speedy response and its tons of superb qualities. You can try their services at http://www.ultimatewebhostingservices.com

I am not saying that they are the best. There may be other companies that have even better services, but in terms of their prices they are the best.

So whatever host you choose you must consider these points so you never get in trouble.

Copyright 2005 Raamakant S.

About the Author:

Raamakant S. is owner of http://www.umtezine.com. Subscribe to his Ultimate marketing Tips eZine by sending a blank e-mail to umtezine@getresponse.com -- Learn Everything You've Been Wanting to Know about Internet Marketing. REAL Tips, Tricks and Techniques You Can Use In Your Business and Consistently Produce MASSIVE Amounts of Profits.

Blog and Boost Your Search Engine and RSS Traffic

By Kamau Austin

Blogs are much easier to use than any web design software. They can be used to change web content from a browser, email, and even simple desk top software. Blogs are web pages created with automated software that date stamps all changes to content.

One of the more recent secrets people are using to get their websites in the search engines, the last couple of years, is with Blogs. Blogs are short for web logs and are like daily dairies on the web.

Blogs started out as ways for Internet reality types to share their lives with other people on the web, without having to learn very complicated web design applications like Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage.

Dreamweaver, the standard professional web design program takes at least 6 months to master. While FrontPage on the other hand looks a lot like Microsoft Word, and therefore can be used a bit more quickly by people just starting out.

Blogs are much easier to use than any web design software. They can be used to change web content from a browser, email, and even simple desk top software. Blogs are web pages created with automated software that date stamps all changes to content.

One of the secrets the web marketers use to get their new websites into the major search engines like (Google - Yahoo! and MSN) is called blog and ping. So many Internet fortunes are being built on this simple technique.

If you want your new website to be indexed (or included in the search engine database) you shouldn't submit it to the search engines -- instead you should blog and ping.

There is a new feature with Google and Yahoo! known as sitemaps, which will also get your site indexed, but most of us will do fine with learning first to blog and ping.

Blogs index and file your web pages automatically according to the way you specify in advance.

Google loves blogs and has its own web based application called Blogger. You can set up a Blogger account for free at Blogger.com.

You should use Blogs for your business to give updates to your customers and supporters every few days on your company's news or inside information. You can also reflect on industry trends with your business blog.

What's nice about blogs if you want to get your site in the search engines or keep the search engines up to date with your latest optimization or content efforts. You can post your new website or page to your blog page and link to that page.

The search engines will visit the blog page more frequently and index your new pages or web sites some times in a day or two. Also make sure when you post a new blog in Blogger.com you set up your account to ping (or notify) the other major blog directories that your blog has been updated.

Or if you want to get your new site into Google go to a high ranked blog listed in Google. If the Blog allows comments give a good comment on the blog. Then link back to the page you want indexed in the Blog.

Make sure you give a worth while or useful comment or it will be considered blog spam by the website administrators. Sometimes blog publishers disable the comment feature for this reason, therefore it is important to have your own blogs especially if you have more than one site.

This will get the Google spider to index your new sites or web pages within a few days and consider your site for its database given the criteria of its algorithm.

If you are looking for a fast, inexpensive and efficient way to build a lot of content on your site, which the search engines will pick up, go to Blogger and open up a free blogging account and join the blogosphere.

- The Love Affair between the Search Engines, Blogs and RSS

I have been extolling the SEO benefits of Blogs since almost two years ago. Although blogs and search engines don't seem to enjoy the free for all love affair they once had, the search engines and blogs seem to still be married "for better or for worst".

The romance and infatuation phase between search engines and blogs has waned because of blog spam. However search engines dare not divorce blogs because they tend to cook up regularly updated content.

Blogs are also search engine friendly in design. As publishers we love blogs because it is an easy way for us to update our sites with new content.

Many top marketers are extolling about the power of blogs and their natural extension RSS feeds. Almost every successful Internet Marketers today is using some variation of blogs and RSS feeds.

Everywhere you go the web gurus are talking about the great upside potential of blogs and RSS. RSS for the purpose of discussing this issue stands for Really Simple Syndication.

RSS is presently being used by Internet marketers to share their blog headlines with websites and desktops all over the world. Think of RSS as giving you the ability to blog without boundaries.

People on other websites and with downloadable RSS newsreader software can read your newest blog posts without visiting your site. Sites that value your expertise will in a viral fashion feature your RSS feeds and help generate traffic to your site.

This allows you to leverage traffic from other peoples sites who feature your blog. Moreover, your subscribers who read your RSS headlines on their desktop software will avoid email filters.
Before you explore or upgrade to RSS marketing experiment with desktop newsreaders like Tristana or News Gator. If you prefer to read RSS from your browser download and install Mozilla's FireFox Browser.

RSS feeds will be the next phase in Internet marketing following the search engines, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and joint ventures.

By having people subscribe to your blog's RSS feeds, or having them syndicated on other people's websites you will be getting a running start on the explosion in blog and RSS marketing once Internet Explorer integrates RSS into its browser.

About the Author:

To learn more about Blogs, RSS, and Search Engines visit Kamau Austin's Search Engine Blog at... http://www.searchengineplan.com

Two Myths about the Search Engine Listing

By Mohamad Zaki Hussein

Getting top search engine listing is perhaps one of the hottest subjects in the internet marketing world. The problem is that many discussions on this subject are based on speculation. Almost no one knows the exact algorithms of the search engines. And what make it worse is that the search engines have a habit of changing their algorithms.

However, some people are so obsessed with top search engine listing that they tend to undermine the importance of other web traffic generation techniques. These "trances" are partly caused by some misleading myths that surround the search engine marketing subject. Below are two of those myths with some empirical facts that contradict and refute them.

Myth #1: "You can't get loads of targeted traffic without the top search engine listing."

This is completely wrong. Jack Humphrey, the power linking guy, has given us a picture that it is possible to get huge amount of web traffic without the top search engine listing. In his Special Report, "What if Google Didn't Exist?," he shared one of his sites' stat in April 2004 and guess what? From 71,444 unique visitors that he got at that month, "google search" referred only a small portion of them, i.e. 0.07%.

You can read Jack's complete report here.

I also found another similar fact from Tinu Abayomi-Paul, the free traffic chick. In her blog post, "Site Promotion is Multi-Faceted," she said that the search engines only constitute 6 - 10% of her traffic in any given month. While she didn't tell us about the monthly amount of traffic to her website, I believe that her site gets huge traffic every month, because she has an Alexa ranking of 38,371 (that's what my Alexa toolbar showed me at the time I wrote this article).

You can read Tinu's complete blog post here.

Myth #2: "The major search engines are reliable sources of sustainable, residual, traffic."

This is also inaccurate. Look at what happened to Alice Seba from Internet Based Moms. One of her websites, http://malcolmsweb.com, has been banned by Google, even though that website was full with good content. Since May 21, 2005, her visitors instantly dropped from about 700-800 per day to 200-250 per day.

You can read Alice's complete story at her blog post, 'Alice "White Hat" Seba Has Been Banned,' here.

Now I don't mean to undermine the importance of the major search engines. The major search engines are one of the biggest traffic sources on the net and so, you should do proper optimization and try to get top search engine listing.

But, don't let yourself be misled by these myths and thus ignore many other web traffic generation techniques. With the unstable nature of the search engines, it would be wise to use the search engines only as one of your traffic sources and look for other traffic generation techniques to build multiple sources of traffic.

About the Author

Mohamad Zaki Hussein is the webmaster of http://www.webtrafficideas.com . To learn how to build a perpetual traffic engine by combining Viral Marketing with RSS and Blog, grab the FREE "Instant Traffic Formula" report at http://www.webtrafficideas.com/getviral.

8 Benefits Of Helping An Online Business Newbie

By David Riewe

Do your remember when you first ventured out in the online business world? You probably had questions and problems along the way. Wouldn't it have been easier if you had help? When a newbie asks for your advice, educate them; answer their questions and help them solve their online business problems. If you do not have the knowledge to help them out, point them
in the right direction.

You'll get many benefits from helping online business newbies. Below are eight possible benefits you could receive:

1. You will feel good knowing that you had a part in helping them build their business. You can sit back and say "I had a part in their success."
2. They may become one of your best friends. Most people can use new friends, even business owners. You may even become business partners and create a totally new business together.
3. You could end up being strategic business allies in the future. You could regularly do joint venture and cross promotion deals with each other.
4. They may help you out with your business. Maybe they will give you some testimonials or endorsements for your products or services.
5. You might gain some valuable referrals from them. They may also join your affiliate program and make sales for your business.
6. They might offer you some free advertising space on their web site or in their e-zine for your help. You could also exchange advertising with them.
7. You both could end up developing a new product or service together. The product or service could be a combination of your current ones.
8. They might purchase the products you sell and become one of your best customers. You could sell them many back end products or services in the future.

There are probably many other benefits you could get from helping a new online business owner. Always remember to help them out because it's the nice thing to do and not just to benefit your own business.

About the Author:

"Not Only Will I Give You the Secret Blueprint that I Use to Make Six-Figures Per Year Online, I'll Also Provide You with the Products, Resources and Services Needed to Do It Yourself!" http://www.push-button-online-income.com

Ebook Review: "What Google Never Told You About"

By Merle

Joel Comm has released an ebook on Adsense that is causing quite a lot of commotion online these days. Joel claims to make over $500.00 a day with Google's Adsense Program. With a screenshot of his Adsense earnings on his website showing over $15,000 in earnings for one month alone, it's hard to ignore his statements.

The ebook is in PDF format and weighs in at only 57 pages. It is immediately available for download after making payment. The cover is straight text with one banner at the top of the page; no fancy graphics.

If you're looking for fluff, you won't find it here. If you need a background on how Adsense works or how to put it on your site, you won't find that type of basic information either. This ebook is for someone who's been using Adsense for awhile, not the new novice.

The ebook is broken down into 12 easy to digest chapters. Topics include: How to Tweak Your Ads to Make them Click, Successful Ad Placements, Hot New Tips to Drive Clicks, Response Tracking and more. Joel covers tips and things you may not have thought of to optimize your site for highest Google click thrus. These are things he spent time on researching and testing, so he knows what works and what doesn't.

Author Joel Comm is an Internet entrepreneur with over 20 years of online experience. In 1995 he launched WorldVillage.com and was also involved in ClassicGames.com, which was sold to Yahoo back in 1997. Since then his company, Info Media, Inc., has launched over a dozen websites such as DealofDay.com and SafetySurf.com. Joel has the Internet experience that comes with spending years online.

If you've been struggling to make Google Adsense pay off, you need to grab a copy of Joel's ebook. With solid tops and helpful resources there's bound to be some things you can utilize to increase your click thru rates that you hadn't thought of before. At $79.00 the price is a bit steep, but if you can triple your Adsense earnings by following his guidelines it will be money well spent.

There's also a free sneak peek of the ebook, revealing the table of contents and the first two chapters available at Joel's site. However, you'll have to give up your email address to download it.

Chris Knight of Email Universe interviewed Joel for an hour about his ebook. If you'd like to listen to that interview, go to ...

http://emailuniverse.com/adsense-secrets/

If you'd like to purchase Joel's book you'll find it at... http://tinyurl.com/b7nsb

About the Author:

"Must Have Marketing Resources" Ebook by Merle is loaded with VALUABLE online resources you need to know about, when it comes to running your web business. Get your copy now at ... http://mcebook.mcpromotions.com

10 Benefits Of Submitting Articles To E-zines

by David Riewe

1. You'll brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles to e-zines. You could include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address in your resource box.
2. You will become known as an expert on the topics you write about. This will give you and your business extra credibility which will help you compete against your competition.



3. Your article might also be placed on the publisher's home page. If they publish each issue on their home page this will give you some extra exposure.



4. You might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. People might want to read the back issues before they make the decision to subscribe.



5. You will get free advertising. This will allow you to spend your profits on other forms of advertising. You could buy advertisements in other e-zines that don't publish your articles.


6. You might get extra income from people wanting to hire you to write other articles, books, or even ask to speak at seminars. This is a great way to multiply your income.



7. You could allow e-zine publishers to publish your articles in their free e-books. Since people give them away, your advertising could multiply all over the internet.



8. You will get your article published all over the web when you submit it to an e-zine publisher that has a free content directory on their web site. They'll allow their visitors to republish your article.



9. You'll gain people's trust. If they read your article and like it, they won't be as hesitant to buy your product or service. You will then be able to increase your profits.



10. You could get your article guaranteed to run in an e-zine. You could agree to run one of their articles in your e-zine if, in exchange, they run yours in their e-zine. It's a win/win situation.

About the Author:

"Little Known Minnesota Man Making Six Figures Per Year Online, From the Comfort of Home, Reveals His Top Internet Money-Makers to YOU!" Click here:
http://www.push-button-online-income.net/pbi
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The Basics Of Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising

By Kirk Bannerman

Not long ago, Forbes magazine has reported that pay per click ad sales are expected to increase to at least $8 billion by 2008.

There are three fundamental elements that form the basis of a successful pay per click ad program and they are constant monitoring, response analysis, and refinement.

Pay per click search engines offer a way to buy your way to the top of search results for any term you wish. With proper management, and a clear focus, pay per click search engines can offer some of the most well targeted and economical advertising on the Internet.

Pay per click advertising works through a bidding process, and the ads appear prominently on the results pages of search engines such as Google and Yahoo. The highest bidder for a particular word or phrase receives top placement, and depending on the engine, the top three to five bidders also generally also receive placement on the first page of unpaid search results.

Fundamental questions to be addressed when formulating a pay per click search engine strategy include the following:

When is the top pay per click bid necessary for highest conversion, and when will bidding for a second or third place position create a more attractive return on investment (ROI)?

How can you keep your PPC bids from cannibalizing your search efforts on other (non pay per click) search engines?

What percentage of your pay per click budget should go to each search engine?

Does either Google Adwords or Overture work better for your particular product or service? Or, perhaps neither one is appropriate from a return on investment (ROI) perspective.

It is of critical importance to focus sharply on identifying the search terms that convert most frequently for your particular site, eliminating those that don't perform, and most importantly, calculating and maximizing your return on investment.

The cost structure of pay per click is action-driven and each time a user clicks your ad, the pay per click engine deducts the amount of your current bid from your account. Pay per click offers a high level of assurance that your ad is reaching the proper target.

Pay per click campaigns, however, are not perfect. Without CONSTANT monitoring, you sometimes risk incurring advertising costs that can spiral out of control, focusing on terms that don't convert well for your product or services, or falling way down in position during a bidding war.

PPC advertising can be a great help to a site's success, but only with very close supervision and a thorough knowledge of the unique characteristics of each PPC search engine.

About the Author:

Kirk Bannerman operates a successful home based business and coaches others seeking to start their own home based business. Visit his website at Legitimate Home Based Business for more details.

Are You Scared to Start a Home Based Business?

By Michele Miller

Every year more and more people are working from home, starting their own businesses. Men and women, even teenagers are starting their own home business ventures. In the last ten years work-at-home businesses have tripled, according to statistics. I think it's probably more than that actually. Just look at how many people make a living selling things on EBay!

It's no wonder really why so many people want to work at home and there are a vast amount of good reasons why.

The costs of traveling, including vehicle maintenance, the cost of gas, child-care, and dry cleaning, are just a few good reasons why it's cheaper to stay home and work, right?!

Not having to answer to a boss or a supervisor is another great reason too. Being able to set your own hours and work when you want to work is a definite plus as well.

Some people can't see how they are going to do it though. I mean, how are you going to give up work and replace that income and not worry about how you are going to pay the bills? It's impossible, right? -- Wrong! -- It's not impossible, and it will take some hard work at first, and some extra working hours, but you can do it if you want to badly enough.

Choose a business that will allow you to work in your spare-time and keep your job, and you have eliminated the risks. This is not possible in all circumstances, but for the small business person, it's the ideal way to go. If this is not possible, make sure you set aside enough income to live on while you get your business established.

There's going to be some sacrifice in the short term, such as working extra hours in the week building your business. But those kind of sacrifices will still allow you to sleep at night and not put you in the poor house, thereby increasing your chances of success!

A lot of people do some "side work, or extra work" at first to gain customers or to save up some extra cash to start a business or pay for inventory. I know one mechanic who did some evening and weekend work so he could save enough money to buy his own tools and work out of his garage at home, for himself. Now that garage has grown into two workshops in his back yard and he employs another mechanic to help him out.

I have two friends who do the home parties. One lady sells Mary Kay and the other lady sells candles. Both are quite successful. The lady who sells the candles has only been doing so for just over eighteen months and her income exceeds $50,000 per year. Once you have the vision of working from home, you will find a way to make it happen.

You need DISCIPLINE AND MOTIVATION. That's as important as your business idea. You need to be a go-getter kind of person to have your own business. You need to be willing to get things off the ground yourself, and often willing to work for no financial return at first, or very little financial return. It helps to have vision; you have to sow the seeds to see the flowers. Overnight success is quite rare.

You can help yourself stay motivated by making a "to do list", and "working your business" every day in some small or big way. It doesn't really matter as long as you have a "plan" and keep chipping away at it until it happens. You hear people say all the time that you need to set your goals, well that's great advice, and a "to do list" will enable you to cross off things as you work through them, giving you a feeling of accomplishment as well.

If you really have the dream of working for yourself out of your home, it is possible, you just have to be determined to find a way to do it. Millions of people are realizing this dream, - you can make it happen for you too!

Copyright 2005 Simplistic Solutions

About the Author:

Michele Miller is a home-based business owner and also the author of an ebook about starting a profitable medical transcription business at home.

Keywords, Competition and Being Number One - Uncovering the Algorithm

By John Krycek

By following these steps you will see that most closely guarded secret-- the search algorithm. Remember the movie "the Matrix?" The Matrix is there, you just can't see it. So is the search algorithm.

It's easy to pay a Search Engine Optimizer to give your pages some ranking power. Unfortunately, given the inherent time factor involved in climbing the ranks, your money may be long gone before you know if you've spent your money well.

THERE IS NO MAGIC PILL

Forget any advertisement you see for instant number one search results or automated this or that. Most are scams, and the ones that aren't might get you positioned, but it will be very short lived.

Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. Achieving and maintaining a high rank, especially on highly competitive keywords, requires constant maintenance. If you do find a legitimate SEO firm, it is well worth the money to pay their monthly maintenance fee and let them continue to help you after the initial project. At least for 6 months or a year as you establish yourself.

In this article we'll look at some of the intricate and complex tasks of optimizing a page for long term ranking power. You will learn how to read between the code and the content to find what is necessary to bring you to the top. Being number one is easy to say, but is quickly overwhelming when you stare at tens of thousands of pages you want to out rank. So how do you begin?

The starting line on the road to that first page SERP (search engine results page) ranking is not as blurry as you might think. In fact, you can uncover the starting line, the route, and all the scenery along the way to the finish line without knowing the search engine algorithm.

STEP 1- YOUR KEYWORDS ARE THE CROWNING ACHIEVEMENT OF GRUELLING DAYS OF WORK

If you have investments in the stock market you know how much research and thought goes into choosing those securities. Now take that same effort and multiply it by three. That's how much planning and revision your keywords should take.

A simple, broad key phrase like "shoes" could hypothetically bring you up in a countless stream of different searches. Women's shoes, baby shoes, sneakers, high heels, etc. If somehow you manage to settle into a good ranking (which would be difficult) you would have more traffic on your site than you could handle. But traffic is worthless is it doesn't get to it's destination. Chances are, you weren't that destination.

Your keywords must be focused and precise, specific to what you are selling. Using a key phrase like "Gucci mens black leather loafer" will bring a targeted lead to your site. You may not reach as many people as the more generalized keyword, but the people that do come to you have a much deeper interest in the specific product you are selling.

Therefore you have much greater chance of converting that targeted lead to a sale. Your keywords are your magic beans, your winning lotto numbers, your energizer bunnies, your sales force, whatever you want to call them. They must be perfect.

STEP 2- WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE? LOOK AT WHO ALREADY IS

Competition Analysis- no SEO book can give you this information.

Now take your keyword list and type them into a search engine. Who comes up in the first ten results? That company that is number one is because they have most closely matched what the search engine algorithm says should be number one. You can learn a great deal from them.

A. INTERNAL FACTORS

Take that number one page, and the other top 9 pages and study them, look at the code, break them down. You are looking at the first half of what is needed to rank in the top 10 pages for your key phrases on that particular search engine. The list of what to look for is enormous.

Studying the Internal Factors on a page is taking it apart to see how it's put together. Not how it works, but statistical research into the precise construct and layout of keywords and phrases in relation to each other within the page.

Start with these areas:

URL address, Page Title, Meta description, Meta Keywords, First sentence on the page, Body copy, Bold or Emphasized Phrases, H1 or other tags, Alt Tags, Navigation system

In each of those sections, look at:

Keyword densities- the number of times your phrase and each word in your phrase appears compared to the text around it

Where and in how many times the same phrase and words appear in different sections

The word and character position of each phrase in each

The total number of characters

The total number of words

The quality and thought of the content

Beginning with these comparisons should keep you quite busy for a while. A spreadsheet is quite useful. Some commercial products are also available that can make this daunting task much more feasible. Keep looking for other patterns and differences. You want to duplicate them in your own page. NOT copy and steal. You want to mimic the patterns that are bringing that page to the position it is. Then move onto to examining the external factors of these pages.

B. EXTERNAL FACTORS

External factors of a web page deal with the links to, from and within a web page, both inside the same site, and out into the web. This analysis usually takes more time because it involves more dissection of pages beyond the one you're trying to optimize. In this analysis as with Internal Factors, you want to compare and contrast your page versus the top 10 competitors, find similarities and differences. Here is a list of criteria to get you started.

Number of internal (to the same site) on that page

Number of external links

Number of links pointing TO that page* (see below for details)

The link/anchor text- which keywords are used and where

Google Page Rank value of incoming links

Alexa Rank of incoming links

*To get a listing of the links that point to a site, type the following into Google, MSN and Yahoo searches: "link:www.domainname.com". Google tends to only show a small portion of the links back, but MSN and Yahoo will give you much more pertinent data.

Now you want to compare the content on each of these pages to the one they point to. Is it of similar theme, in what context does the link back appear and where. Subject of much debate, the consensus is that Google Page Rank does not mean what it used to. However, if it is in some fashion a measure of how significant or "important" a site is, it is worth looking more closely at the sites that link back that are of high page rank.

EVEN A SURGEON USES TOOLS

Now, this is definitely a ton of work to do all by hand. There are software programs that can help do some of the digging and mathematical computations for you, figuring out densities and organizing information.

Tools like this are definitely ones a professional SEO will have in their arsenal. But remember, these are tools, not miracle workers. It takes a human being to evaluate and realize connections, similarities, draw conclusions and interpret the data. Then, you have to extrapolate this data.

Remember, you want to do one better than every site you just examined. To do that you have to draw some conclusions and make some educated guesses and link to even better sites.

FINAL THOUGHTS

You have access to the inner workings of every page that you want to beat. Learn from them and do one better. This process is not a one-time shot. It is ongoing. Check your key phrases every week. Do the same people still rank in the top ten?

Some have probably moved. Remember too that they're going to adapt to maintain their positions too. If you want the ranks, you have to spend the time, and not just once, or pay someone to do it for you.

Don't ever believe anyone who says they can guarantee any kind of results. And ask them how they will optimize your pages. If they explain to you something like the above, then you've probably got yourself someone experienced and honest. You money will be well spent and you'll quickly recover it.

About the Author:

John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca web design
in Toronto. Learn more about search engine optimization and internet marketing in easy, non-technical, up front English!

Business Web Site Content Strategy

By Joel Walsh

Your web site content helps you get in search engines, speak to visitors, and ultimately get visitors to buy, contact you, or follow a link. Meanwhile, your content has to be updated at least once a month if you want to get return visitors and search engine traffic. To be successful, you need to have a web content strategy.

Web Content Strategy: Sources of Content

There are four basic ways you can get content for your site:

1. Licensed content that you can publish on your site for a one-time or recurring subscription fee, or in exchange for putting a link to the author's site under the article. The main benefit of this kind of content is that you can build up your site quickly. The drawback is that hundreds if not thousands of other sites will be publishing the same content, which means you will get little search engine traffic from it. Also, within a few years, the subscription fees or the value of visitors who leave via the required link to the author's site will amount to more than you would have paid to have original content professionally written.



2. Original content contributed freely by your visitors, such as message boards and guestbook style comments. The main advantage of this content is that it costs nothing and gives you insight into your visitors. The disadvantages are (usually) low quality and the constant vigilance needed to police it for misbehavior.



3. Original written content that you allow other sites to republish in exchange for a link to your site. This content is usually informational articles, whitepapers, and sometimes, press releases. Distributing content is an essential component of getting links to your site.



4. Original, well-written content that's exclusive to your site. You should have some content that you hold back from republication, to avoid giving visitors or search engines the idea all your content can be had somewhere else. This can include FAQs, "about us" pages, case studies, testimonials, and other content that other sites would not want to reprint anyway.

What Kind of Content to Use

So, which of the four kinds of content should you use on your site? Ideally, all four. That way you'll maximize the amount of quality content your site can have.

But, the precise ratio of the four kinds of content you end up using will depend on the goals of your site. Some examples:

• Licensed content: If you have a content-based website that draws revenue from advertising, a large amount of licensed content can be useful. However, if your site's primary goal is to collect leads, too much licensed content might risk distracting visitors from contacting you, without the benefit of bringing in significant search engine traffic.



• User-contributed content: A website that handles support issues may have a lot of use for a user forum. A professional services firm would probably be better off without a forum, with all the user-contributed content in the form of testimonials.



• Original written content, exclusive and for distribution: Any website can benefit from original content since it draws search engine traffic and puts your best foot forward with visitors. The broader your potential audience and the greater the competition from other sites, the more content you need.

Scheduling Content Updates

Search engines, especially Google, seem to give pride of place to sites that regularly update their content. Regular content updates also give visitors a reason to return.

In short, if you have thirty web pages worth of content this month, it's better to post one page each day rather than put them up all at once. To make sure you do this, schedule an hour each day for updating your site's content.

One way to get regular content updates for your site is to start a blog, a "web log" in which you write your thoughts and post news. The one disadvantage is that many web users are getting tired of blogs, which are often not well written and contain more opinion than information. Search engines, too, seem to be featuring blogs in their results less often.

Identifying a Content Provider

Ever wonder how Bill Gates keeps the MSN and Microsoft sites so content-rich? Doesn't he get RSI from writing a thousand or more pages a day?

You guessed it: Bill Gates does not write the content for any of the Microsoft websites. Nor should you write all your own content. All successful website owners have someone else write a large part of their content. This person or company is often called a "web content provider" or "website copywriter."

You need to select a web content provider with proven experience writing content for the web, rather than just writing for print. Ask to see writing samples. You might even ask if you can commission just a single page to start with, for evaluation purposes. Also make sure that you are buying all rights to the content.

After all, the most important part of your website content strategy should be quality.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh, a professional content writer and founder of UpMarket Content, recommends you check out their site to learn more about what you can get from a web site content provider.

5 Strategies to Boost Your Affiliate Sales

By Diane Hughes

Are you promoting affiliate products?

This article will show you 5 strategies to boost your Affiliate Sales, so make sure you read it and put in practice what I'm about to reveal you.

The KEY to affiliate marketing is to take action!

1. STOP joining NEW affiliate programs

If you really want to generate more sales, then JOIN a reputable affiliate program and focus your marketing and promotion on a single affiliate product or service.

Unless you receive thousands of visitors a day to your affiliate links, there's no reason why you'd want to JOIN more affiliate programs.

Most do it because they think will make more money.

Others promote an affiliate product for a few days or weeks using weak advertising tactics, give up and then JOIN another 'HOT' program due to the fact the commission is a nice attraction.

That's the wrong way to play the affiliate marketing 'game'!

2. Register Your Own Domain Name

People purchase online from those they like and trust, so owning a domain name is the first STEP to building trust with your Web Site visitors.

Try to register a domain name related to the affiliate product you're promoting. If you promote mobile phones you can register newmobilephones.com.

Where to register domain names?

There are lots of places on the Web where you can register domains for less than $10 a year. Just do a search on "register domain names" or "domain name registration" on any search engine.

3. Build Your Own Web Site

You can build your own Web Site using html editors or hire others to build it for you. Just make sure you have a Web Site of your own where you can promote the product you're affiliated with; all TOP affiliate marketers own a Web Site.

If you don't know html, you can use TOOLS that help you create Web Sites by drag-and-drop (WYSIWYG editors).

Having your own Web Site is the second step to building trust with your Web Site visitors and a GREAT Way to boost your Affiliate Sales. The more CONTENT you add to your site, the more FREE targeted traffic you could attract from major search engines like Google.

4. Create Your Own Affiliate Promotion Materials

If you want to boost your Affiliate Sales you must do something different, you must stand out in the crowd.

There are other affiliates promoting the same product like you so you should think of ways to CREATE your own original affiliate promotion materials.

Let me give you 2 examples:

- create your own articles, ads, courses, ebooks, reports, etc.

- offer EXCLUSIVE Bonuses to any order that came from your affiliate link (e.g. a Special Report or ebook)

5. Get more quality TRAFFIC to your Site

You can't generate any Affiliate Sales if you receive ZERO traffic (visitors) to your Web Site.

You can generate ZERO Sales if you receive lots of untargeted visitors (people not interested in your affiliate product or Web Site).

Want more Affiliate Sales? Get more quality TRAFFIC... visitors that are 100% interested in your Web Site content/affiliate product.

Here's how to GET more quality TRAFFIC:

- register a domain name that is a perfect match for the affiliate product you're promoting;

- use a SIG file (a 3-line text description of your Web Site plus your domain name url) to all posts (answers/questions) in some popular online forums related to the topic of your Web Site;

- send testimonials to others who own Web Sites in the same category of yours and let them know that you like their ezine, product, service or Web Site.

Let them know that you appreciate what they are doing and tell them to include your comments as a testimonial on their Web Site with your name & Web Site link included.

About the Author:

Diane C. Hughes * ProBizTips.com

FREE Report: Amazingly Simple (Yet Super Powerful) Ways To Skyrocket Your Sales And Build Your Business Into A Tower of Profits! http://madmarketer.com/diane

Banned By Google And Back Again

By T. O' Donnell

The date: 29th July 2005. The time: early morning. I got out of bed and fired up my PC. Opened my browser to check my site. Had a look at the third-party Google toolbar plugin
(http://toolbar.google.com/) on said browser (FireFox). It showed grey.

Ice formed in my stomach. I opened my bugged version of Internet Explorer: my PageRank was 0. By now I was frantic. I went to http://www.google.com and typed in 'site:www.tigertom.com': no pages listed. I did this for two other satellite sites of mine: ditto.

What had happened?

TigerTom.Com (http://www.tigertom.com) had been banned by Google. I went to the WebmasterWorld forum (http://www.webmasterworld.com), and found out the awful truth. Google was doing one of its periodic updates of its algorithm, and had filtered out my sites completely.

Further research there, and a bit of soul-searching, revealed why. I had too many pseudo-directory pages with auto-generated external links. Snippets from search engine results were used as descriptions of said links. Said links were run though a redirect script. These are hallmarks of pseudo-directories and 'AdSense scraper'* sites. Google is reportedly trying to filter these from its 'SERPs'**. I say reportedly, because Google doesn't announce these purges. They are inferred.

To compound my sins, these pages were also effectively doorway pages.

The theory was that legitimate sites had been hit as 'collateral damage'. I say theory, in that Google rarely comments on individual cases. It won't tell you exactly why your site was banned. I guess this is for reasons of time, and to give no clues to spammers.

In my case the ban was justified for my two satellite sites; while not looking like spam, they were effectively doorway sites.

My main site was different. It had offending pages, but was mostly a diverse labour of seven years; a personal site on steroids.

Google bans sites algorithmically: a site that fits their 'spammer' profile gets dropped via software from their index automatically. Real spammers shrug their shoulders and move on;
honest webmasters write emails begging for mercy.

Like me.

I did some searching via Google, to find out how to do a re-inclusion request. Here's how:

1. First, you check your site is truly gone, by going to http://www.google.com, typing 'site:www.yourdomain.com' without the apostrophes. If it returns no pages at all ...

2. You check Google's webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. These are not really guidelines; you should treat them as iron-clad rules.

3. You stop the offending content from being web-accessible, permanently.

If you're familiar with Apache web-server mod_rewrite you can:

- Send a 410 'Gone' response to requests for the offending pages, or
- CHMOD them to 600, which will return a 403 'Forbidden' response, or
- Move them to a different directory if you need to keep them, or
- Just delete them.

Don't try to be clever. Just get rid of them.

4. You go to http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py, tick the relevant boxes, and type 'Re-inclusion request' in the subject box of the form.

4a. You add the complete URL of your site i.e. http://www.naughtydomain.com,

4b. You state that you have read the webmaster guidelines above,

4c. You admit what you did wrong; simply, succinctly, with no carping or special pleading.

Don't try to be clever. Don't argue. Don't lie. Don't waffle.

Google has cached copies of your site. When an engineer checks your site, he'll look for the offending content, and compare it against their cache. He'll spend about two minutes on it; don't
give him a reason to continue to exclude you.

5. You ask for re-inclusion.

6. You wait.

In my case, it took about a week; a long, unpleasant, fretful week. I sent follow up emails saying what I was doing, and a fax, and I was going to write letters if that didn't work. That
was probably excessive. Once you have a ticket number, that's all that should be necessary.

They emailed a standard reply saying "the problem had been passed to their engineers". That's good. I understand they send no reply to spammers.

A week later my site was back in. Lesson learnt. To make sure I'm not so vulnerable again, I'm splitting my content to different sites, on the principle of 'best not to have all your eggs in one basket'.

Have I learnt anything from this? Yes. Have more than one site as your 'money-maker'. Spend less time on search engine optimisation and more on traditional marketing. Come up with a unique selling proposition that compels people to link to your site. Easy(!)

About The Author:

T. O' Donnell (http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk/) is an ecommerce consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His latest project is an ebook on getting a loan in the UK (http://www.tigertom.com/personal-loans-uk.shtml). His blog can be read at http://www.ttblog.co.uk/

How To Track All Your Website Traffic For Free

By Louis Allport

Do you know:

* Exactly how many people are visiting your website?
* How long they're staying on your site before they move on?
* Exactly where those visitors are coming from, each day?
* How much of your website traffic is repeat visitors?
* The exact paths people take as they click their way through your website?

Here's what I'm getting at:

If you don't know your visitors, it makes it *very* difficult for you to improve the performance of your website and turn more visitors into customers - AND - get more quality traffic. For the simple reason that you're effectively working blind.

Without knowing how people visit your site and what they do on your site, any attempts at growing your traffic and improving the profitability of your website is working with one armed tied behind your back, at least.

And unfortunately - the web stats that come with your web-hosting are generally not enough these days.

Depending on your web host, chances are you've either got Webalizer, Analog Stats, or AWStats installed on your server. Here's how that software works:

It takes the "raw" (unreadable to the human eye) information your web server stores of everyone that visits and presents this in an easy to understand way.

Unfortunately, due to a number of technical reasons, this information is often presented in quite an inaccurate way.

And in my personal experience, these software packages don't present this information in a particularly helpful way either for someone trying to improve the conversion ratios and profitability of their website.

What I personally do, and what I would suggest you do is use a "Tracking Solution" that accurately tracks and reports all your visitors in an easy to read and understand way. These solutions come in two forms: Software & Services.

Both these options have their pros and cons, but what they both do very well is present exactly what's happening on your website right up to the minute, and in a way that's very helpful to you for making good (and profitable) decisions for your business.

To start with here's a software solution you can install and use for free on your website:

Now before you go and install it, you should of course be familiar with installing software on your server. If you're not comfortable installing software on your website, a tracking service (which I'll come to in a moment) would probably be best for you.

And it's also important to note that installing software on your website can often put more strain on the server. This is particularly true if you're on shared hosting.

I've personally used the following free tracking software and it works well. See what you think. Go to http://www.curve2.com and look for "TrackPro". As I write this, version 2 is in Beta and is downloadable from the site at the following address: http://www.curve2.com/trackpro.php

You'll also find many further free tracking software solutions at http://www.hotscripts.com.

But personally speaking, what I've found works very well and avoids putting any increased strain on my existing websites is using a third party tracking service.

The only things really to worry about when using a third party service are:

* How long will this service be around? (If they stop their service after a year, you wouldn't be able to access your past data and will have to change all your tracking codes on your pages too.)

* What is their privacy policy regarding my web stats? (Are they honest and trustworthy in other words. You don't want the service owners studying and then duplicating your successful business plan.)

Over the past month I've been using ecommStats (http://www.ecommstats.com). Now, this service isn't free, but at this time they give you 50,000 free page views per domain, and depending how busy your site is those page views can last you a very long time.

The service works great and is very easy to add to your pages -- simply add three lines of code at the bottom of each of your pages (you can easily do this with Server Side Includes if you're comfortable with that) and all your visitors get tracked accurately and in great detail.

Alternatively - an entirely free (at this time) and very established service is StatCounter (http://statcounter.com). It even has a rave review from Tucows.com (one of the largest download sites on the internet) which speaks for itself and adds a lot of credibility to the service.

And just in case you're wondering how a free service like StatCounter makes money, well - since it's such a popular service with many webmasters logging in every day (and many I'm sure even more than once a day just like me) that it's made it very easy for them to sell a lot of advertising on their site. They also offer an upgrade to their advanced paid service.

But thinking beyond free services, as your business grows you may choose to upgrade to high end paid services that provide even more in depth information about your visitors...

Services like Urchin (Urchin.com - owned by Google) or Deep Metrix (DeepMetrix.com). However, to help you grow your business to that point you need to keep a close eye on what your visitors are doing and where they're coming from, and free tracking software and services is a great way for you to start to do this.

About the Author:

Louis Allport is an online product developer and marketer. To get a FREE copy of his powerful "Viral PDF Generator" script, visit the following site: http://www.BrandPDF.com

SEO And The Outsourcing Of Inbound Link Building

By Christoph Puetz

Search Engine Optimization nowadays has a lot to do with building inbound links to your website. Building inbound links is a cumbersome tasks and webmasters have always been looking for shortcuts to do this. Webmasters buy links (as advertising as an example) or contact other webmasters to exchange links with them. The need for inbound links has created a new business opportunity in the search engine optimization industry. The outsourcing of link building emerged from the fact that many inbound links mean a high search engine ranking and/or a high Google PageRank.

There are many different ways of building inbound links. Outsourcing this tasks can save the webmaster a lot of time but it comes with a price tag. Businesses offering to take over the link building process often maintain and operate a large network of domains and websites and just add 'your' link to their sites. These sites are often referred to as link farms.

Others buy links on 3rd party websites for you. They often have build up a portfolio of websites/webmasters they work with. The quality of these links is often questionable and a long-term benefit does not exist. It either continues to cost the webmaster money to keep the links alive or his website might get punished by Google and other search engines if the linking websites are recognized as part of commercial search engine spamming. Punished means that either the link to a site does not have any value at all or depending on the situation the site linked to gets removed from the search engine index (worse case scenario) if other factors are involved that lead to the conclusion that search engine spamming is going on.

Outsourcing of link building also takes away the control of who is linking to a website from the webmaster. The webmaster usually just pays for X number of links but there is no option to have industry related websites link to his site (= increased value of a link). It is also difficult to verify how many links to a website have really been established from the service provider. Another difficulty is to verify how long the established links are staying in place. The danger of being over-charged is very high.

Since link building has become a profitable business opportunity search engines are aware of what is going on and are putting countermeasures in place. These are not things visible to the webmaster or explained on the search engines website. These are factors that are worked into the algorithm. Search engines use the human control factor more and more often to increase the value of the search index. Chances are that if a webmaster uses an outsourced link building strategy that at one point the campaign value goes south (turns sour).

Inbound link building should be an organic process that shows a slowly increasing number of links pointing to a certain website. Getting a high number of inbound links within a very short period will raise a warning flag at search engines. Honest webmasters will stay away from these tactics to avoid putting the success of a website at risk when there are better ways of building inbound links.

About The Author:

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at http://www.smallbusinessland.com and http://www.webhostingreport.net

Writing An E-Book - The How To Guide

By Peter Dobler

Whenever you're listening to one of the big names in internet marketing you hear the same speech over and over again when it comes to viral marketing. The number one advice is, write an eBook and give it away for free.

You might ask "What is viral marketing and why should I give something away for free after I spend weeks to create it?". On another note you probably don't even know how to write an eBook and what to talk about.

First things first. Viral marketing is exactly what the name implies. You create a marketing effort that spreads like a virus. No, not the kind of virus you fear on your computer. Here's an example.

You are running a home business and you're getting pretty good in attracting new customers, but you're working more and more hours to generate this traffic to your business. Well, there are only 24 hours in a day and there's only so much you can do.

No you have 2 options. Option 1: Hire an employee to help you with your workload or motivate somebody else to promote your product. I don't know about you, but the thought alone having employees gives me the creeps. If you ever had to deal with employees you know what I'm talking about.

That leaves us with option 2; motivate somebody else to do the work for us. How do you do this? Easy, the number one question you have to address is "What's in it for me?". If you can give this person something in return for their work you're off to a good start.

Now here's when the eBook thing comes into the picture. eBooks and/or software are the perfect products to sell or give away from a automated web site. No packing and shipping involved and the system takes care of the transaction without you doing anything. Don't you love this? I sure do!

What's in it for them? By giving away your eBook you break the barrier for somebody else to actually look at your product. Second, you give this person the right to distribute and reprint your eBook. This means that you give the person the right to give it to another person for consumption and the right to reprint as well. This will repeat itself over and over again. That's viral marketing in a nutshell.

Now there's the problem to create an eBook to begin with. This seems harder than it is. First you need a topic. What are your hobbies? Are you married for a very long time? How did you do this? Are you good with home improvements? Did you successfully deal with the government? And so forth...

Now you take one topic and think about what you did to make it successful or just something you enjoyed. This is the key. People want to feel better about themselves. You give them the roadmap on how to do something that they will enjoy at then end or something they can be proud of.

Once you have a topic to write about, it's downhill from there. Focus on your topic, outline the eBook first. Start very high level.

. What's the problem

. What are the obstacles to overcome

. What are the goals you want to achieve with this

. How did you do it

. What are the lessons learned

. What are you doing next

You see having these high level outlines in place will help you to drill down in each one of them. It might be a little bit strange in the beginning, but after a while you get used to it and the words just flow out of your hands.

Armed with this knowledge you should be on your way to write your first eBook. In my forum I created a folder for first time writers to advertise their eBooks.

About the Author:

Peter Dobler is a 20+ year veteran in the IT business. He is an active Real Estate Investor and a successful Internet business owner. Learn more about the concept of residual income at http://www.fl-home-biz.com

SEO One-way Web Links: 5 Strategies

By Joel Walsh

With so much talk about search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal links, the hunt for the elusive one-way inbound link is on.

As someone who works with small business website owners, I've heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In the end, I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links.

Less Effective One-Way Link Strategies

Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. They range from bad to OK, but none offer as much potential as the five major ways of getting links.

* Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, so I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line. Link farms can get you delisted from search engine indexes, so don't even try them.

* Affiliates can provide you with one-way inbound links if you use affiliate software that links directly to your site rather than through a redirect. But many, many affiliates are now placing all their affiliate links in redirects of their own invention, to help protect their commissions from pirates who will simply apply to the program themselves to get a discount.

* Posting to web forums and blogs regularly will get you one-way inbound links, but they'll only have search-engine value a small percentage of the time. Many blogs and bulletin boards use search-engine-unfriendly dynamic file formats, automatically encase links in script, or use robot instructions to prevent spiders from following links.

* Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

* Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply chain.)

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

* Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.

* Worse, there is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

* You need to have more than one website in the same general category of interest or the links won't be relevant.

* The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.

* As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that the links are mostly on "Resources" pages that are just lists of links. There's only a small chance of getting significant traffic from these links. Plus, any "Resource" page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn't happened already.

3. Submitting to Directories

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO acquaintance tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a good deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche directories--now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating "clean" links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

* The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial search engine traffic can become prohibitive.

* As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link--you are essentially renting rather than owning, with no "link equity" building up.

* Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings. A website can try to mask the fact that the links are paid, but how well it does that is out of your control.

* Given Google's mission to dampen paid links' effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid link partner is "passing PageRank." But identifying appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.

* Google also has a stated mission of dampening the value of any "artificial" links. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your links are "artificial," since the vast majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have
so little impact on a site's PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.

5. Distributing Content

All of the above four inbound-link-generating methods really do work. But it is the fifth method of getting one-way inbound links that is the most promising: distributing content

The idea is simple: you give other websites content to put on their sites in exchange for a link to your site, usually in an "author's resource box," an "about the author" paragraph at the end of the article.

The beauty of distributing content for links is that the links generally generate more traffic than links on a "resources" page. Plus, your article will pre-sell readers on the value of your site.

The downside, of course, is that it's no small amount of work to create original content and then distribute it to hundreds of website owners. But nothing good ever came easy. And on the internet, one-way inbound links are a very good thing.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh is the head content writer for UpMarket Content. Get more information on website content promotion.

10 High-Impact Viral Marketing Strategies

By David Riewe

Viral Marketing is allowing people to giveaway and use your free product or service in order to multiply your marketing quickly over the internet. The idea behind viral marketing is that you include your ad with the freebie people giveaway or use. Below are ten high impact viral marketing strategies:

1. Allow people to reprint your articles on their web site, in their e-zine, newsletter, magazine or ebooks. Include your resource box and the option for article reprints at the bottom of each article.
2. Allow people to use any of your freebies as free bonuses for products or services they sell. Include your ad on all your freebies.
3. Allow people to use your online discussion board for their own web site. Some people don't have one. Just include your banner ad at the top of the board.
4. Allow people to sign up for a free web site on your server. Since you are giving away the space, require them to include your banner ad at the top of the site.
5. Allow people to add their link to your free web site directory. Just require that they return a link back to your web site, advertising your directory.
6. Allow people to provide your free online service to their web site, visitors, or e-zine subscribers. They could be free e-mail, e-mail consulting, search engine submissions, etc.
7. Allow people to give away your free software. Just include your business advertisement inside the software program.
8. Allow people to give away your free web design graphics, fonts, templates, etc. Just include your ad on them or require people to link directly to your web site.
9. Allow people to place an advertisement in your free ebook if, in exchange, they give away the ebook to their web visitors or e-zine subscribers.
10. Allow people to give away your free ebook to their visitors. Then, their visitors will also give it away. This will just continue to spread your ad all over the internet.

About the Author:

"Not Only Will I Give You the Secret Blueprint that I Use to Make Six-Figures Per Year Online, I'll Also Provide You with the Products, Resources and Services Needed to Do It Yourself!" http://www.push-button-online-income.com/pbi

Online College Programs - How to Apply

By Katie Robbins

The first step to getting your online degree is to apply to colleges. Research several colleges offering the degree program you need. Once you have decided on a school, you are ready to begin the application process. While the requirements may vary slightly, most colleges have similar processes. You will need to fill out an application, either online or on paper. Check with the university for application deadlines. Just about all schools charge an application fee; these fees are usually small.

You will need to include any supporting documentation required by the school where you are applying. You will find this information included with the application. All schools require original transcripts from all schools previously attended. This will include both high school and college transcripts. A few schools look for college preparatory courses in high school. Send your requests early to allow enough time for transcripts to arrive at the college. Some schools will require SAT test scores and immunization records as well.

You will have to meet the admission requirements of the college you will be attending. The requirements vary by school and in some cases can be different based on your major. Be sure to check with the university to determine the requirements. Many schools have a minimum SAT score requirement for admission, although some waive this for some programs or for non traditional students. Non traditional students are defined as older students who have been out of high school for at least five years and have work experience. Students transferring from other institutions are in this category as well.

Many schools require students pass placement tests prior to registering for classes. These tests usually have English, math and writing components. This is to determine if potential students have the reading, writing and math skills necessary to succeed in college. If you don't pass one of the placement tests, you may be required to take remedial courses prior to starting
your degree; this is not unusual for people returning to school after many years. Graduate programs will usually require additional testing, such as the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).

When you apply to the school, you can also apply for financial aid. Talk to a representative about programs available to students in the form of financial aid and scholarships. Start the process by filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). Complete the application even if you don't think you will qualify for federal aid. Most other student loan programs use the same application. To be able to accept federal financial aid, the school must be regionally accredited. Accreditation is a voluntary process and matters mainly for financial aid and transferring credit to other universities. Check with an admissions counselor if you're not sure about accreditation.

Once you have completed all applications and testing, you will find out if you have been accepted into the program. Once you have been accepted, you will be eligible to register for classes and begin the journey toward your college degree. The admissions counselor at your university can assist you in scheduling your courses. There is often an order in which classes should be taken. Once you have registered, you pay for your classes, get your books and attend orientation, if required.

About the Author:

Katie Robbins is an educationally focused writer, providing content to help the online student. Check out her other articles at:
http://www.degreeclick.com/
http://www.degreeclick.com/master-degree-education-online.html
and
http://www.degreeclick.com/criminal-justice-online-degrees.html

Ten Great Reasons to Create an eBook

By Tim Spencer

According to some sources, it is estimated that the Information industry is going to be worth over $7.8 billion over the next 3 years.

If you could tap into just 0.0000001% of that $7.8 billion, you could rake in $78,000!

Isn't that a good enough reason to create your own information laden ebook?

If it isn't, here are 10 more great reasons to create your own ebook:

1. If you create an ebook that solves peoples problems, you will feel great knowing that you are helping a few, possible thousands of people improve their lives.
2. A well written and presented ebook will bring you notoriety, prestige and even fame! People will respect your opinions and want to read more of your work.
3. You don't need to carry any inventory or have delivery costs. Your work can be instantly downloaded by your buyers.
4. You do not have to work hard to please an ever increasingly picky editor.

   Traditional publishers will require your work to be 110% before they will even consider publishing it. This takes time and money. Publish it yourself and you only have your readers to please.

5. It's easy and fun. With the software tools available today, creating an ebook is simple, all you need to do is provide the words and pictures to fill it!
6. Ebooks are a great way of advertising products or services. In context advertising could be your ticket to high earnings with your own products or through affiliate programs.
7. If you own a website, and people like what they read in your ebook, they will come to your site to find out more.
8. It costs next to nothing!
9. People are willing to pay for information that entertains them or solves a problem that has plagued their lives, or better still, solves a problem in an entertaining way!
10. You keep all the profits! What better reason is there than that?

So what will you write about today?

About the Author:

Learn how to quickly create your own information cash machine and get your slice of that multi-billion dollar cake! http://www.create-an-income.com/info/l/infoaa

Five Benefits of Article Writing

By Nicholas Dixon

A few years ago as a webmaster with no money, I looked around for the best free methods to drive traffic to my website.

Search engines were my primary source of traffic and due to the fact that this source took time to gain momentum, visitors were in spurts at best. Then I found a powerful technique that I could use to boost my marketing efforts for free.

These are some benefits that I have gain from writing articles:

1. Name Branding- If you type "Oceanroc' or my name in any search engine you will likely find hundreds if not thousands of returns. If you look at bit closer chances are those search results are pages which contain my articles.
2. Link Popularity- Last October I started a website Oceanroc.com and by April of this year it had a PR5 rating. Articles are the main source of the one way links pointing to my
   website.
3. Traffic- If I write an article that is interesting, then the reader may click on my link in the resource box to visit my site to find similar content. Imagine being on websites and in newsletters with lots of readers and think about how much traffic you could get.
4. Prestige- Up to a few months ago I was a Platinum writer over at Ezinearticles.com, the 1000 lb. gorilla of article sites. Heck I lost my status because of an affiliate link, so now I am down to Expert status. Seeing your writing being published especially without you submitting it to that source helps to reassure that you are a quality writer.
5. Free Advertising- I have had my ads placed for free in places that normally would have cost me hundreds of dollars. My resource box is my ad spot and publishers are required to include it if they use one of my articles. The resource box is the medium through which you generate traffic from you articles.

If it was not for article writing I don't think that I would receive some of the Joint Venture offers that I get. And the thing is that many writers share these same benefits. And there
are even more...

© Oceanroc Web Publishing

About the Author:

Writing tips, tools and techniques for the new and seasoned writer can be found at ttp://WWW.Oceanroc.blogspot.com

How to Add a Search Engine to Your Site

By Herman Drost

When visitors arrive at your web site you want them to find the information quickly otherwise they will lose patience and move on. A great way achieve this is to add a search engine or search box to your web site. Since most visitors are already familiar with using search engines such as Google, they can easily use the search feature on your site.

In this article I will discuss:

A. The benefits of adding a search engine
B. Types of search service providers
C. Where to place a search box on your site
D. How does the search engine work

A. Benefits of adding a search engine and types of sites where it can be used.

1. Ecommerce sites - your ecommerce site usually has many different types of products so the navigation menu is not focused enough to rapidly find the specific product your visitor is looking for. Adding a search engine to your ecommerce site will help the visitor to easily and quickly oom in on the product by entering their keyword in the search box.

2. Dynamic sites - search engines have difficulty spidering dynamically generated web pages. These are pages often generated from a database, so the information on your pages will not appear in the search engine's index. Add a search engine to each page of your site. If a visitor arrives on that page from one of the large search engines, they can then do a quick search from hat page instead of searching elsewhere.

3. Small sites - web sites that contain 5-10 pages don't need a search engine because visitors don't have to search through many pages to find the information. Instead, make sure you create simple navigation menu at the top or side and bottom of your web pages.

B. Types of search service providers

1. Atomz (www.atomz.com) - Atomz Express Search is a free service where you can integrate basic search capability on your personal web site or on one of your commercial sites. It can be used on sites with 750 total pages or less and allows customization of look and feel to match your site's design. Some third-party text ads are shown above and below the search results. You can use it for as long as you like for there is no trial period.

2. Freefind (www.freefind.com) - features include the ability to customize search and results pages. The free accounts are limited to 3,000 pages or 32MB of storage. Site search is hosted on FreeFind's server. It generates a site map for you, tracks visitors searches and indexes password protected pages.

3. Google Free site search service (www.google.com/services/free.html) - searches only the
specific domain(s) that you list when you create your search box. You can customize your results display to include background, text and link colors you select. The search box itself will reside on your web site. The search results page will be served by Google with the customized look and feel you specify. Google may serve ads on the results page. You can do an unlimited amount of searches. You must display the Google logo on the web pages that contain the search box.

C. Where to place the search engine on your site?

1. Place the search box in a prominent location on your web page...preferably top center or top right.

2. Place the search box on all pages of your web site. Visitors may enter your site from any page.

3. Make the search box large enough to accommodate all search terms the visitor would use to find the information.

4. The search box should be a type-in box, not a link so visitors don't have to wait for another page to load.

5. Limit the search results to 50 per page. Visitors lose their patience if they have to scroll through long lists of results.

D. How does the search engine work?

It works similar to the major search engines that search the web, however instead of crawling the web the search engine spider will search your site. The results of the crawl are stored in a database that resides on the search company's server.

The company provides the necessary code to add a simple form to your web page. This usually consists of a search box for inserting your keywords and a send button. When you click the button it sends the query to the search company. They process the query to create a search results page. This shows those pages in your site that match the visitor's query.

The quality of the search results the search engine spider collects depends on how much information is contained in your site. Therefore take time to correctly optimize your site i.e. provide lots of good content that includes your keywords. Optimize your meta tags, images and create an accessible navigation structure.

Optimizing your site will not only provide focused results from your internal search engine but also boost your rankings in the major search engines.

About the Author:

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his "Marketing Tips" newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. Read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Google's SEO Advice For Your Website: Content

By Joel Walsh

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScript, that you forget your site's content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing.

Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.

Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffic delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

* Updating: frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

* Spelling and grammar: few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note: spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's check feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can
already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

* Paragraphs: primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

* Lists: both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.

* Sentence length: mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

* Contextual relevance: text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

SEO Bugbears and Sacred Cows

A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content.

* PageRank. The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

* Frames. The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

* JavaScript-formatted internal links. Most of the websites use JavaScript for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.

* Links: Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contain over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes money.

* Originality: a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

* Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffic is just wasted bandwidth.

* If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

* Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.

* Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffic, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investment in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh's archive of web business articles is at the website of his business, UpMarket Content, a website content provider.

Anatomy Of A Reciprocal Linking Campaign

By John Taylor

Reciprocal linking means forming partnerships with other sites who place a link from their Web pages to yours. You then give them a similar link in return.

When you look for people to swap links with, make sure that you don't reduce the quality or content of your own site. You don't want users to click straight through without reading your content; you want them to take action on your own site rather than have them leave empty handed.

One way to stop them from running away too quickly is to create a "Webmasters Resource Page" and link to that page from your homepage. This doesn't take away from the content on your homepage and the links are just one click away rather than being buried deep within the site, giving value to your partners.

In any case, you want to be sure that your site is more than just a page full of links. If your site contains more links than content, it will look like a link farm and it will certainly not be attractive to webmasters, search engines or users.

Picking your partner

Your link partners should be sites your target market will visit. Think about your product and its subject area and brainstorm to determine where people interested in your product might be looking online.

For example, if you're trying to shift your book about blackjack strategy, it makes sense that the people visiting online casinos would make great customers. Online casinos then could be good partners. Identify top-ranked, high quality casino sites and find the email address, telephone number and snail mail address of their webmasters.

You can also identify your competitors and see where they trade links. After all why reinvent the wheel when you can use your competitors hard work!

Seven Top Tips For Requesting reciprocal Links...

1. Before you contact webmasters, place a link to their site on your resource page to assure them that you will actually provide a quality link.



2. Create a subject line that will encourage them to read your message rather than deleting it - you don't want them to think you're spamming them. (Something about their site or product is sure to capture their attention; they will open it, thinking you're a potential customer.) Hint -subscribe to their ezine and then reply using the ezine subject line as the subject of your reply.



3. Begin your message by talking about your visit to their site and what you found interesting about it. Detail your product or service in one line and ask them to exchange links with you.



4. Tell them in detail where you have placed their link, include the precise URL, tell them where to find their link on the page and emphasize that it is only one click away from your homepage.



5. Tell them that if you don't hear back from them in a specific number of days, you will consider that to a negative response and that you will remove their link from your site. Give them enough time to respond but don't leave it open ended.




6. Sending a reciprocal link request by email is becoming less and less effective due to Spam filters and the high volume of email traffic received by webmasters of busy sites. Try sending your request on a postcard or better still make a phone call.



7. Tell the webmaster how they will benefit from the reciprocal linking arrangement - explain what's in it for them and use your selling and persuasion skills!

Copyright John Taylor PhD August 2005 - All rights reserved.

About The Author:

To learn more information about reciprocal linking I strongly recommend that you visit
http://www.Link-Advantage.com

Pay Per Click Definitions

By Sharon Housley

Pay-Per-Click marketing has become an online phenomenon, with marketers only paying for traffic they receive. As Internet marketing has evolved, pay-per-click is seen by many as the middle ground between paying per impression and paying per sale. Advertisers only pay when they receive traffic that may or may not be targeted.

The pay-per-click advertisements are usually displayed with the advertisement from the highest paying bidder in the top position.

Navigating the complex web of Internet marketing, publishers and marketers are often confronted with terms that seem foreign. This simple guide will assist marketers in navigating the Pay-Per-Click marketing model.

Bid - The amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for a click on a specific keyword.

Budget - The amount of money that an advertiser sets aside for an advertising campaign. Different publishers allow for advertisers to set daily, weekly or monthly budgets.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) - The percentage of clicks on a link. This is usually a percentage based on the total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions that an advertisement has received.

Conversion Rate - The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions considered to be a "conversion", such as a sale or request to receive more information: the percentage of people whose clicks have resulted in a sale or desired action in relation to the total number of clicks on an advertisement.

Cost Per Click (CPC) - The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through to an advertiser's website.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - The amount an advertiser pays for one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of the consumer's subsequent actions.

Delisting - The removal of a listing as a result of inaction or poor performance.

GeoTargetting - An advertisement targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location.

Impressions - The number of times an advertisement is viewed by web surfers.

Keywords - Search terms or phrases that are related to an advertisement or ad copy.

Landing Page - The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

Linking Text - The text that is contained within a link.

Pay Per Click (PPC) - Advertising model in which advertisers pay for click-throughs to their website. Ads are served based on keywords or themes.

Rank - How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine or advertising results.

Return On Investment (ROI) - The percentage of profit that results in a marketing or advertising campaign. Naturally, advertisers want the amount of money made to exceed the money spent.

Understanding the above terminology will help marketers navigate the pay-per-click advertising model, which has emerged on the Internet and become one of the leading advertising models in the online world.

Copyright 2005 Sharon Housley

About the Author:

Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll http://www.feedforall.com software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for NotePage http://www.notepage.net, a wireless text messaging software company.

Easy SEO in 6 Simple Steps

By Jeremy M. Hoover

If you want to increase traffic to your website and better your search engine positioning, here is an easy 6 step process that will enable you to do so.

1. Get a free blog.

Go to blogger.com and sign up for a free account.

2. Link your website to your blog.

In your blog template, add a link to your website. Also, set up your blog so there is a link field in
every post. Set this field to link to your website. Thus, every post will contain a link at the bottom of the post to your main website.

3. Write 3 articles each week.

Even better would be one article each day (5/week), but 3 each week is a great start. Each article only needs to be 300 words, so you don't need a major essay. Just write an opening sentence, expound on that sentence in three short paragraphs, and conclude your post with a restatement of your opening sentence, reworded just slightly. Then, post your article to your blog.

4. Submit your article to EzineArticles.com.

Doing this will enable your article to be indexed by Google. This is very good for you, because once your article is indexed at Google, a backlink to your website will be generated for you. This will result in better search engine positioning and more traffic for you.

5. Submit your article to GoArticles.com.

There is software available that searches Go Articles for articles in specific niches and genres. These articles are then pulled by the software and put on websites. This generates more backlinks and exposure for you, and builds traffic to your main website.

6. Keep this process going.

Make a commitment to write one article each day, post it to your blog, and submit it to EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.

Following these 6 simple steps will increase both your traffic and search engine positioning.

About the Author:

Jeremy M. Hoover is an online freelance writer who writes promotional and content articles for website owners. Each article is $15, or you can buy 5 articles for $50. If you need articles, contact Jeremy at his website, http://jhooverwebcopy.com. Read more marketing articles by Jeremy at his blog, http://jhooverwebcopy.blogspot.com.

Build A High Profit Business With Online Affiliate Programs

By Tim Knox

Q: I am considering starting an ebusiness using affiliate programs, but there is so much hype out there I can't figure out which programs would work best for me. Everybody claims their program is best. I'd really appreciate some guidance here.

A: Affiliate programs can be an excellent way to start an ebusiness. Before we dive into the specifics, let me explain how an affiliate program works.

An affiliate program simply means that you sign on as an affiliate marketer for someone else's product. It's your job to market the product, send the company customers, and get a cut each time a sale is made from your efforts. Affiliate program commissions can range from as little as 2% for high ticket items up to 50% for ebooks and informational type products.

As an example, let's say you sign up with Amazon.com's affiliate program. You are assigned an affiliate code which you use to promote Amazon's books on your website. When someone clicks to purchase an Amazon product from your website, your affiliate code is included in the URL and you get a commission for the sale. Some folks have built elaborate websites that sell nothing but Amazon.com's books, and each time they make a sale they get a piece of the pie.

At dropshipwholesale.net we are affiliates for many products that fit our entrepreneurial niche. We market mostly ebooks and software, but we do have an Amazon page for business books.

One of the most appealing aspects of affiliate programs is how quickly you can begin making money. You can literally sign up as an affiliate and begin making money in minutes. I've done it, I know it works.

Admittedly, I am not an affiliate program expert, so I sought out the person that many call the Ultimate Affiliate Program Authority, Rosalind Gardner.

Rosalind Gardner began making money with affiliate programs in 1997. She has since grown her affiliate business into a $400,000 a year business and is now considered the authority on the subject. Her book 'The Super Affiliate Handbook: How to Make a Fortune Selling Other People's Stuff Online' has been out since March and is already considered by many to be the affiliate marketers bible.

I ordered Rosalind's book as research for this article and I have to tell you I found it to be one of the best books on the subject I have ever read. It's a hype-fr*e approach to what affiliate marketing is really all about and how to make it work. The book is 270 pages and leaves no stone unturned. For anyone serious about making money with affiliate programs, I highly recommend this book.

The bottom line is this: you can make a lot of money with affiliate programs, if you pick the right product and do your part to promote it. As for which programs would be best for you, I advise that you concentrate your efforts on one or two products instead of starting with a shotgun approach. Pick only top quality products that hold some personal interest you. Never pick an affiliate product just because you think you'll make a ton of money with it.

Remember, you are starting a business. If it's not a business that holds your interest, you won't be in business very long.

Here's to you success!

Tim Knox

About The Author:

For more information on affiliate programs: THE SUPER AFFILIATE HANDBOOK Rosalind Gardner - http://hop.clickbank.net/?tknox/webvista2 CLICKIN' IT RICH Michael Campbell --- http://hop.clickbank.net/?tknox/dmcorp My websites are dedicated to the success of online entrepreneurs. http://www.prosperityandprofits.com -http://www.dropshipwholesale.net

11 Ways to Promote Your Blog

By Chileshe Mwape

1. Ping weblogs.com and other search engines. When you ping a blog, you are telling the search engine that you have updated your blog content and that your listing should be refreshed. Weblogs.com is a blog update notification service that many individuals and services use to track blog changes. Pinging your blogs to the search engines is the fastest way to get the search engine robots to visit your blog. Also, many people browse these sites to find something new.

2. Submit your blog address to blog search sites and directories. You can submit your blog's url to websites such as Technorati, Daypop, Blogdex and Popdex. For a complete list of websites where you can submit your url, go to http://www.guidetorss.com

3. If you have some cash you can promote your blog using pay per click search engines such as Yahoo Search and Google Adwords.

4. Set your blog to display RSS feeds and submit your blog's RSS feed to the major RSS feed directories online. A good place to start is http://www.guidetorss.com/ which provides a list of the top RSS directories.

5. Put your blog URL in your email signature. If you're a regular at any online discussion forum, you can also add your url to your signature line at the bottom of each message you post.

6. Install a blogroll. A blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. Services such as Technorati spider your links to tell who's linking to you and who you're linking to. If you show
up on someone's Technorati link list for their site they're likely to visit your site to see what you said, increasing your exposure. Blog owners can also visit your site to check it out if you show up on their referral logs.

7. Be an active commenter. Try to leave comments on the blogs that you regularly visit. Most comment systems also provide a way for you to leave a link back to your blog which begs a visit at the very least.

8. If you plan to have anything printed up, put your blog's web address on it. You can print your blog URL on business cards, stickers, leaflets, etc.

9. Take advantage of blog software features that help to promote your Blog. For example, if you're using Blogger, you can do this by turning on: "Email This Post", "Post Pages" "Site feed" and the Blogger Navbar. These features will help attract new visitors to your blog.

10. Exchange Links with other Bloggers or blog owners. This is another effective strategy for generating targeted traffic to your blog for free. It involves contacting other blog owners for a possible link exchange partnership. All you have to do is locate blogs that are related to yours and contact the webmaster to swap links.

11. Write articles or free reports for other webmasters to publish and put your blog url in the byline. The `byline' is the short paragraph that goes at the bottom of each article and describes who the author is and what they do. If you write good content, your articles will be published by other webmasters and many readers who like your article will go on to visit your blog.

Copyright Chileshe Mwape © 2005.

About the Author:

Chileshe Mwape writes for Debt Consolidation Loans UK: http://www.best-debt-consolidation-loan.co.uk/ Visit our site to consolidate debts and apply for a loan online.

SEO Web Content: Good Writing, Good Business

By Joel Walsh

There's a deadly myth about search engine optimization and writing for the web: that good SEO and good writing don't go together.

As a website copywriter, I hear this myth repeated back to me all the time by new clients and prospects. "Don't bother search-engine-optimizing the content," they say. "Just make sure it is well written and the keywords will flow naturally into the content." Or, they repeat the words of so many self-styled gurus: "don't write for the search engines, write for the people who will be reading what you write."

If you're one of the people who believe there's a conflict of interest between search engines and humans, you're operating under two misconceptions:

* Misconception 1: you know more about what people want to read on the web than the search engines do.

* Misconception 2: you or your writer will just naturally write the content that people or search engines want, without consciously trying to meet their demands.

Why Search Engines Know More About Your Website Visitors than You

"I want a well-written web page, not a list of keywords." It frightens me a bit when I hear this, since it demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of what search engines do.

A search engine is not simply a massive find function, like the one in the "Edit" menu of Microsoft applications. It does not just pull up any page that has the keyword in it X number of times. If it did, all pages that show up on search engine results would simply contain a list of the keywords.

Ultimately, writing for the search engines means writing for web surfers. Think about it: services like Google thrive on giving people the pages they want to read. If they consistently failed to give people what they wanted, people would stop using them.

What Your Website's Visitors Want to Read

Most of the time, people don't want to read on the web. Reading on a screen hurts the eyes. It doesn't help that a lot of web pages make it harder with text that's too small, backgrounds that are colored rather than white, and lots of extraneous graphics.

Besides, when it comes to reading matter, there is an overabundance of choice on the web, more than any library on earth. Of that, an unfortunate amount isn't worth reading. Time must be rationed.

In fact, people treat a web page much as a search engine does: they scan it. In particular, they scan it for the keywords they entered into the search engine. If they arrived via a link from another website, they are still looking for words and phrases related to their interest--which are generally the same as the keywords people enter into search engines.

In short, Nobel-prize-winning literature makes bad web content. You have to write specifically for the web. That's why the web hasn't fueled much of a resurgence in the short story or other literary writing, dashing many hopes. Ebook versions of paper books have also disappointed expectations.

Newspapers are the only paper publications that have made a smooth online transition, precisely because they are written in short, to-the-point paragraphs that are easy to scan.

Still Think Good SEO Web Content Makes for Bad Reading?

You've just read almost to the end of a piece of search-engine-optimized web content. This article was optimized for the keywords, "SEO," "search engine," "search engines," "keyword," "keywords," "search engine optimization," and "writing."

The keywords were present in headings and throughout the content. The content itself is easy to scan: paragraphs of one-three sentences, broken up by sub-headings every four paragraphs or so.

Naturally, those keywords are too broad for this page to have a chance of ranking high in search engines for them. But this page will get some of the atypical search keywords that account for as many as half of all searches. So, if someone types in a phrase like, "keyword writing search engine optimized content," this page would have a pretty good chance of showing up.

To be sure, this article is on the long side for a web page. Most people won't even scan more than 600 words of text; 250-500 is ideal.

But this article is destined primarily to be shown in an email newsletter, where attention spans are longer since people are more confident the source of the content can be trusted to repay their investment of time. Besides, as a well-structured page, it can be split into two or three pages according to the subheadings.

In short, there's much more to writing well for the web than just writing well. If you've had enough sense to have your web content written professionally, have enough sense to take the advice of most website copywriters: search-engine-optimization for keywords and good web writing are the same thing.

About The Author:

Joel Walsh is a professional content writer and founder of UpMarket Content, whose site offers information on getting great website content.

Internet Marketing and Your Home Based Business

By Timothy Spaulding

All of you home based business entrepreneurs that are trying to make a living working from home know the problems encountered through Internet marketing and trying to get your web page noticed in order to increase traffic and ultimately revenues. Some people just blindly pay a lot of money for advertising, and those who don't have an advertising budget often times do not advertise at all. Both of these are detrimental to your business, and it does not have to be as difficult as you are making it.

There are many innovative and creative ways to market your products and services inexpensively if not free, so spending a lot of money on it could be wasteful. But if you have no money to spend you may be dooming your business to fail by not advertising. People in this situation should be diligent about searching out all the options for free advertising.

When it comes to advertising, there are many options online and offline that will help you spread the word about your Web page and your product and you will increase traffic and revenues because of it.

First, check out offline venues like local newspapers, television stations, radio stations and the like for free advertisements. Often times these mediums are looking for new local businesses to highlight in their business sections and/or discussions. This is free advertisement and something you should cash in on immediately. Also, make sure your URL is on all of the printed material you use in regard to your business whether it is stationary or free gifts. Having your URL out there will help people remember your address and be more likely to check out what you have to offer.

In addition, while you are making your URL well known, make sure your web page is professional and accommodating to consumers. Make sure that the checkout process is easy and convenient as well as secure. Using payment systems like Paypal might be a good idea for you as well because it allows a variety of payment methods in many different currencies.

Advertising online also does not have to be expensive. You can submit newsletters to online ezines and the like with a resource box with your information, trade links with other relevant web pages, and other ideas similar to this. Certainly, you can do banners and other advertising, but if you don't have much of a budget try all of the free options before you start paying money you do not have. As you grow, your advertising budget can grow as well.

As long as you are creative and proactive in finding inexpensive and/or free advertising your business will grow, your revenues will grow and you will not be spending much at all on advertising. Remember, the more people that are aware of your web page increases traffic, referrals and ultimately purchases. Make sure your URL is visible to as many people as possible in as many places as possible.

Copyright 2005 Timothy Spaulding

About the Author:

Timothy Spaulding is the owner of the Work At Home Business Resource Center which provides valuable tools, articles, business opportunities and products for the home based entrepreneur. You can visit his site at: http://www.workathomeawesomeopportunities.com

How To Select Keywords For Search Engine Optimization

By Evelyn Lim

Selecting the correct keywords can make or break your website. Potential customers search the web for desired sites, and if your website doesn't have the keywords they're looking for, they'll miss you.

Determining keywords is an art; it's best to work backwards. What would a customer search for if they were looking for your site? You literally have to put yourself in the consumer's place and let go of your preconceived notions about what you think your keywords are. You should remember when writing your site that you need to use words that are not only related to your content, but are popular search words as well. This is called keyword optimization, or choosing the most searched keywords related to your content.

Spend some time listing all of the words and phrases that are related to your website content. Get ideas from everyone you can think of and list them all. Visit competitors' sites and see what meta tags they use. After this research, you are ready to develop your own keyword phrases.

There are several sites designed to assist you in keyword optimization. Here are a few of the free ones:-

The Overture Keyword Tool (http://www.inventory.overture.com ) lists searches related to the keyword you provide. This took is great for expanding your list.

Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com) helps identify keywords that will help your ranking on search engines. Wordtracker also gives you other keyword combinations that you may have overlooked.

The Keyword Tumbler (http://www.keywordtumbler.com) takes your existing keyword phrases and mixes it up to form new phrases and variations that you can include in your meta tags.

A great website is not so great if no one finds it. Remember to research your keywords carefully from the consumer's viewpoint and then sit back and watch the traffic roll in!

About The Author:

Evelyn Lim is a publisher of the popular newsletter "Mapping You to Success" aimed at the aspiring home based internet business owner. She also hopes to educate her readers on acquiring multiple sources of online income. Please visit her site at http://www.e-BizMap.com for more information.

How To Avoid Getting Your Adsense Account Terminated

By David Riewe

Google, being the undisputable leader in search engines from then until now, is placing a high importance on the quality and relevancy of its search engines. Most especially now that the company is public property. In order to keep the shareholders and users of its engines happy, the quality of the returned results are given extreme importance.

For this same reason, doing the wrong things in the Adsense and other forms of advertisements, whether intentionally or unintentionally, will result in a severe penalty, may get you banned and even have your account terminated. Nothing like a good action taken to keep wrongdoers from doing the same things over again.

So for those who are thinking of getting a career in Adsense, do not just think of the strategies you will be using to generate more earnings. Consider some things first before you actually get involved.

Hidden texts. Filling your advertisement page with texts to small to read, has the same color as the background and using css for the sole purpose of loading them with rich keywords content and copy will earn you a penalty award that is given to those who are hiding links.

Page cloaking. There is a common practice of using browser or bot sniffers to serve the bots of a different page other than the page your visitors will see. Loading a page with a bot that a human user will never see is a definite no-no. This is tricking them to click on something that you want but they may not want to go to.

Multiple submissions. Submitting multiple copies of your domain and pages is another thing to stay away from. For example, trying to submit a URL of an Adsense as two separate URL's is the same as inviting trouble and even termination. Likewise, this is a reason to avoid auto submitters for those who are receiving submissions. Better check first if your domain is submitted already an a certain search engine before you try to submit to it again. If you see it there, then move on. No point contemplating whether to try and submit there again.

Link farms. Be wary of who and what are you linking your Adsense to. The search engines know that you cannot control your links in. But you can certainly control what you link to. Link farming has always been a rotten apple in the eyes of search engines, especially Google. That is reason enough to try and avoid them. Having a link higher than 100 on a single page will classify you as a link farm so try and not to make them higher than that.

Page rank for sale. If you have been online for quite some time, you will notice that there are some sites selling their PR links or trading them with other sites. If you are doing this, expect a ban anytime in the future. It is okay to sell ads or gain the link. But doing it on direct advertisement of your page rank is a way to get on search engines bad side.

Doorways. This is similar to cloaking pages. The common practice of a page loaded with choice keyword ads aimed at redirecting visitors to another "user-friendly" page is a big issue among search engines. There are many seo firms offering this kind of services. Now that you know what they actually are, try to avoid them at all costs.

Multiple domains having the same content. In case you are not aware of it, search engines look at domains IP's, registry dates and many others. Having multiple domains having the same exact content is not something you can hide from them. The same goes with content multiplied many times on separate pages, sub domains and forwarding multiple domains to the same content.

Many of the above techniques apply to most search engines and is not entirely for Google only. By having a mind set that you are building your Adsense together with your pages for the human users and not for bots, you can be assured of the great things for your ads and sites.

Not to mention avoiding the wrath of the search engines and getting your Adsense and site account terminated altogether.

About The Author:

Discover how to Make Your Online Business An Outstanding Success with David Riewe's FREE ezine "The Ultimate Marketing Tips" http://www.riewe.com

Designing a Website That Sells

By Sandi Clements

Would you buy meat from a grocery store that left the bad meat in with the good meat or wasn't clean? Would you buy a car from a sales lot that had totaled automobiles on the front lot? I wouldn't and neither would you. Your website is your grocery store; your car lot. You must have an atmosphere that is pleasing to buyers. One that tells that buyer that you are not an amateur, but instead a trained, seasoned professional. Your site is a direct reflection of your product and that is why that having a well designed website can make or break your sales.

The first thing to keep in mind when designing your website, is "surfability". Take a few minutes a look around at several web pages. What makes them appealing? Were there some that you closed out of immediately? Why? Take notes and do your research. Keep in mind that when a person visits your site they have a goal in mind. They are either seeking information or shopping for a product. Give the person what they want without having to search for it. Be sure that all the information on your site is relevant to your product. Make the buyer think that they need your product to solve their problem.

Your main page serves a very specific purpose. It should be an avenue by which the customer can shop your site. It should be easy to view and load very quickly. This is your first impression and we all know that first impressions can either close the deal or loose the deal. Make it simple. It is best to have links that are easily viewable by the reader that will navigate them to where they want to be. Tables are often a great choice when deciding on a way to design the main page of your site. Your main page should load very quickly, chances are if it takes the page more than ten seconds to load even on a 56k modem, the customer will click away to save time, hoping to find the information or product elsewhere. To increase the loading speed of your main page you should avoid large graphics or excessive graphics. To many banners or special effects can cause a page to load slowly as well.

To make your web site more appealing to the eyes, you should stick to mild colors. If your site is a content site where the user will be doing a lot of reading, it is best to stick to black and white. Color can be added when using tables, as a way to brighten up the page, but remember to keep the overall look of the page professional and appealing to the audience that will be visiting most often. Since screen resolutions vary among monitors, it is a good idea to set the pixels to a standard 800x600. You may also choose to set the tables in your web page to span a percentage of the page rather than a set number of inches. This will be sure to accommodate all screen sizes. You should remember that a lot of Internet users will not use the same browser as you, and therefore you should be sure that your site looks as good on other browsers as it does
your own. You can do this by downloading several browsers through which to look at your page.
Be aware of the fact that the overall look of your website is a way to make money. The appearance of the site, if designed properly, can be an excellent marketing strategy for your product or service.

Copyright 2005 Sandi Clements


About the Author:

Sandi Clements can help YOU start your own profitable business on the Internet within the next 24 hours... To learn more, visit: http://www.SandizMoneyMaker.com/pips.html

Get One-way Inbound Links: The 5 Major Strategies

By Joel Walsh

Do you know all the major strategies for getting valuable one-way inbound links?

With search engines putting a damper on direct reciprocal links, the hunt for the elusive one way inbound link is on.

As someone who works with small business website owners, I've heard just about every inbound-linking scheme there is. In the end, I've only seen five strategies that really work consistently for getting hundreds of links. Yet there's perennial interest in alternative linking strategies. Why? Perhaps because the five major effective strategies involve a certain amount of hard work, and for many people, SEO is an endless magic bean hunt.

Let's look at some of the supposedly easier alternatives:

* Link farms never seem to die. The latest variations try to pass themselves off as viral marketing, but are really a sort of endless pyramid scheme: you link to me, I link to someone else, who links to someone else, and on and on down the line. If you think this will work, let's just say I admire your ability to maintain a childlike innocence despite all the mean names I'm sure everyone calls you.

* Many one-way inbound linking strategies fall into the great-if-you-are-lucky-enough-to-get-it category, such as winning a web award or being featured on a high-PageRank website just for being so great.

* Other one-way incoming link strategies are in the this-will-take-forever-to-get-anywhere category, such as offering to provide testimonials to all your vendors in exchange for a link to your site. (Hint: If you can get more than twenty links that way, you probably need to simplify your supply line.)

* Other linking methods are slightly less practical, like engendering the hatred of billions of people so they'll all link to you with "miserable failure" in the link anchor text so that--ha! ha!--you'll show up in searches for "miserable failure"--and probably other keywords as well since you'll have such great link popularity at that point (ha! ha!).

Now, on to the five major ways of getting large numbers of one-way inbound links. Some are better than others, but they all have more potential than some of the more madcapped strategies. Of course, none is a good strategy all on its own. You have to understand all five strategies in order to really gain a distinct advantage in the one-way link hunt.

1. Waiting for Inbound Links

If you have good content you will eventually get one-way inbound links naturally, without asking. Organic, freely given links are an essential part of any SEO strategy. But you cannot rely on them, for two reasons:

a. Unfortunately, "eventually" can be a very long time.

b. There is a vicious cycle: you can't get search engine traffic, or other non-paid traffic, without inbound links; yet without inbound links or search engine traffic, how is anyone going to find you to give you inbound links?

2. Triangulating for Inbound Links

Search engines will have a tough time dampening reciprocal links if the reciprocation is not direct. To get links to one website you offer in exchange a link from another website you also control. This would seem to be a mostly foolproof way of defeating the link-dampening ambitions of Google and the rest. If you have more than one website, you probably are already employing this linking method. There are only a few drawbacks:

* You need to have more than one website. Stop laughing! There really are businesses that only have one website! In fact, they may be your clients someday.

* The work required to set up this kind of arrangement and verify compliance is not insignificant. The process cannot be automated to the same extent as direct one-to-one reciprocal linking.

* As with traditional reciprocal links, a very big drawback is that the links are mostly on "Resources" pages that are just lists of links. There's only a small chance of getting significant traffic from these links. Plus, any "Resource" page may well eventually become an easy target for link dampening, if that hasn't happened already.

3. Submitting for Incoming Links

They are the legendary fairy lands of SEO: PageRank-passing, no-fee-charging, non-corrupt and actually well-run directories of relevant links. Yes, they really do exist. An SEO friend tells me he knows 200 good ones just off the top of his head. Plus, there are other kinds of directories: directories of affiliate programs, of websites using a certain content management system, of websites whose owners are members of this or that group, of websites accepting PayPal, etc. etc.

Ah, a link in a PageRank-passing link directory: it's a good deal if you can get it. But let's say you do get links from all 200 such directories and a hundred more from the little niche directories--now what?

4. Paying for Inbound Links

Buying and selling text links on high-PageRank web pages has become big business. Buying good traffic-generating "clean" links is a great alternative to pay-per-click advertising, which confers no SEO benefit. But, there are a number of pitfalls of relying primarily on paid links for SEO:

a. The cost of the hundreds of links required for substantial search engine traffic can become prohibitive.

b. As soon as you stop paying, you lose your link--you are essentially renting rather than owning, with no "link equity" building up.

c. Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of paid links on rankings, as revealed in various patent filings.

d. Given Google's mission to dampen paid links' effectiveness, paid link buyers have an interest in verifying that a potential paid link partner is "passing PageRank." But identifying appropriate PageRank-passing paid link partners is quite a task in itself.

e. Google is actively trying to dampen the impact of any "artificial" linking campaign. Having most of your links on PageRank 3 or higher web pages would seem to be a dead give-away that your links are "artificial," since the vast majority of web pages (note: not necessarily websites, but their pages) are PageRank 1 or lower. Meanwhile, buying PageRank 0 or 1 links would have so little impact on a site's PageRank that it would not be worth the expense.

All of the above four inbound-link-generating methods really do work. But it is the fifth method of getting one-way inbound links that is the most promising.

Distributing Content for One-Way Inbound Links

A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Usually, the backlink is included in an "author's resource box," which is a brief "about the author" paragraph promoting the author's site. If done right, content distribution is almost always the most cost-effective way to get one way inbound links.

Myths about distributing content for inbound links

Given the enormous value of distributing content for inbound links, the big question is: why isn't everybody doing it? Part of the problem is the ignorance about properly conducting a content distribution linking campaign. Here are some common myths:

Myth: The "Duplicate content penalty."

Some webmasters worry that if the content on their sites is suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this ridiculous?

* If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal website would now be de-indexed from the search engines, since they all carry "duplicate content" from the news wires such as Reuters and the Associated Press.

* Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that distributing content is an effective method of improving search engine rank.

* Even more thousands of content websites have proven that republishing this content does not carry any search engine penalty.

* True, the first website to publish an article often seems to be favored by search engines, ranking higher for the same content in searches than higher-PageRank pages with the same content. But the "duplicate" pages do show up in the search engine results, even if lower than the original site. Meanwhile, the reprint content has no effect on the ranking of a site's other pages.

* The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies
content without permission can be manually removed from search engine indexes out of respect for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.

Myth: Distribution is for article clearinghouse websites only.

There are over 100 popular, high-traffic websites that act as clearinghouses for content made available for redistribution. These websites include isnare.com, amazines.com, and goarticles.com.

Submitting content to these sites is useful since good content will subsequently be picked up by other sites from them, generating valuable backlinks.

So, what's the problem with content clearinghouse websites? Many novice content-distributors believe that these are the only websites to which content should be submitted.

These novices then are upset when the article clearinghouse websites, with tens of thousands of articles each with a backlink, pass negligible PageRank.

But to maximize PageRank-passing links, you have to submit articles to webmasters individually.

Myth: Any content will do.

* Fact: it should be obvious that many website owners, jealous of their link popularity, will only republish exceptionally high-quality content. For articles, this means a unique point of view and solid information that cannot be found just anywhere, ideally presented in compelling language in a web-optimized format by a professional published writer. You can conduct a content distribution campaign with bad content, but you'll be handicapping yourself from the start.

* Fact: A content distribution campaign requires skillful planning. The most likely relevant categories of websites to republish articles must be identified. Relevance of republishing websites has to be balanced against the number of potential republishing websites both when creating content to distribute and when targeting sites for distribution. For instance, our own article marketing campaigns target not just sites focusing on web content, but also broad categories of interest, such as: web design, webmaster issues, writing, marketing, business, website promotion, and SEO. To maximize success, articles have to be custom-written for each category, and refined for sub-categories such as accessible web design, affiliate webmaster issues, freelance writing, and web marketing.

* Fact: You need at least three different articles of varying lengths and focus to have a shot at targeting high-PageRank-websites effectively. Many experienced article marketers recommend having 25 or more articles on hand to maximize results.

Distinct non-SEO benefits of distributing content for inbound links

Content distribution in exchange for backlinks predates SEO. In fact, for many content distributors, these non-SEO benefits are the primary goals:

* Traffic generation. More than any other method of getting links, the links in distributed content generate traffic. Distributing content gets you traffic even when it doesn't get you a link. If your article gets picked up by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of highly qualified traffic.

* Authority. Distributing content is the only linking campaign method that can make the recipient website and its owners appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who owe their lucrative reputations entirely to the articles they've distributed.

* Mindshare. Distributing articles is the only linking campaign method that can help you spread an idea. This makes article distribution invaluable for launching new products or services.


Drawbacks of Content Distribution

Of course, nothing good ever came easy. Any website owners who are looking for SEO magic beans will be disappointed by content distribution:

* Results are variable. Content distribution is not quite as sure a thing as buying links. You cannot say for sure at the outset how much of an investment it will require to get X number of links with X PageRank. Of course, this variability is one reason why links from content distribution may appear less "artificial" to search engines.

* Requires significant investment. You need high-quality content, expertise in content distribution, and quite a few work-hours to distribute the content and track the results. These costs can be mitigated by outsourcing the entire process from soup to nuts to a content distribution specialist. Further, the cost has to be weighed against the cost of other link campaigns, which is also significant.

* Requires special expertise. There are numerous newbie pitfalls to distributing content, from improperly formatting articles to writing a bad introductory email to accompany content submissions. You generally have to have done numerous campaigns to truly get the feel for it. Again, this drawback can be mitigated by outsourcing your project to a specialist. And again, this requirement has to be weighed against the real-world requirement of special expertise in other link campaign methods.

In conclusion, there are a number of ways of getting one-way inbound links, and if you're smart, you'll use all of them. Still, there's only one method that carries substantial non-SEO benefits as well, and that's content distribution. I know, I know: focusing on content just feels like you're giving in to Google. But don't fight it. When it comes to getting high search engine rankings through content, you know you want it.


About The Author:

Joel Walsh is the owner of UpMarket Content, where you can get a content distribution campaign guaranteed to get you at least one hundred one-way inbound links for every three articles: http://upmarketcontent.com/website-promotion-package.htm

How to Improve Your Website's Search Engine Rankings

By Jonathan White

One of your main goals when building a site is to receive a lot of traffic so that you can make some reasonable money out of your website. One of the main and best ways of getting more traffic to your site is for you to do some seo (search engine optimization).

There are many things involved when doing seo for your website. Some of these include the following:

Designing your website

This is a very important thing to consider when doing seo. This is because the better your site is optimised for the major search engines, the better your chance will be of you getting an improved ranking for your chosen keywords within the major search engines. To optimise your site you will need to use metatags, which contains your chosen keywords. You will also need to design your site so that it is not just full of images.

You will need to add some good quality content to your web pages in the form of text. When writing text/information for your web pages you must consider using your chosen keywords throughout the content so that it has a good keyword density for your chosen keywords. It would probably be best to aim for a keyword density of around 7% - 9%. If you have a keyword density any higher than this, then the search engines may penalize you for spamming their search engines with your chosen keywords.

The navigation of your site is also very important as when people arrive at your site you will want them to easily be able to navigate through your sites content. If they can't do this then they may leave your site and go to another one, which could even be one of your competitors.

Link Popularity

Link popularity is very important in making your website rankings improve. This is because the more sites that link to your site the more important your site looks to the major search engines. But when getting sites to link to yours it is best to make sure that your link is on a page of a site that is based on the same topic as your site. Doing it this way will benefit your site much better than you having your links on pages of other sites that has topics that have nothing to do with your sites topic.

So you are probably now wondering how you can get sites linking back to your site. Well there are many ways of doing this. Some of these include the following:

1. Doing link exchanges with other sites is a good way to increase your sites link popularity.

2. Writing reprint articles and submitting them to article directories Writing reprint articles that is on the same topic as your site and then submitting them to free reprint article submission sites is one of the best ways for you to increase your link popularity plus visitors. This is because you are writing an article about your sites topic and then you are placing your sites link in the authors' resource box, which then means that your link will be on the same page as information about the same topic as your site. Placing your sites link in your articles also means that it is a one-way link, which is an advantage to link exchanges.

Some article directories have so many articles that they also include an article achieve so that your article can stay in view of the major search engines for some time and also so that you can easily navigate the articles more quickly by using the achieve. For example, the articles directory at: http://www.simplysearch4it.com/article/articledir.php has an article achieve at: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/ , which lists all of the articles listed within the SimplySearch4it! database in an easy to navigate and read format.

3. Using forums and including your sites link in your signature Using some forums will increase your sites link popularity, but using these is not as good as using some other forms of getting links to your site. This is because some forums use some sort of redirect so that the search engines can't see your link in the forum.

4. Adding your sites link to free to submit general and specialty web directories

This is a slow, but good way of increasing your sites link popularity and also increasing your sites visitors. This is because many web directories have good rankings within the major search engines, which means that your site will also benefit from it.

5. Writing press releases

This is a very good way to increase your sites traffic and link popularity. As longs as you can write a good press release you should see a good increase in your websites traffic and link popularity.


About the Author:

Jonathan White has been involved in online marketing for over three years now and is the Webmaster of http://www.simplysearch4it.com/ where he also operates a large free to play online games directory at http://games.simplysearch4it.com/

6 Ways To Get More Sales From Your Advertisement

By Paul Curran

To bring great sales success, a great advertising technique is not the only parameter. You must know what it is that your customers are actually buying. They are not buying your product or service, they are buying what it will do for them. Use the answers to this to set up your advertising masterpiece.

1. Offer an impressive benefit for the client

It must not be related to the product or service on offer. This is the most important of the 6 ways. It must be a primary customer benefit...for the person. For example a free garage inspection; emphasise the safety benefits for the family etc. If you're selling books on 'Computer Accounting Systems' focus on the reduced accounting time the purchaser will achieve and not the features of the product.

Frame the major benefit in a storyline with the customer involved. Make it really clear what is involved, i.e what's in it for them. Be specific, spell it out. It should be immediately understood. Include the product.

Attract good customers through high level benefits for them. Your main message must make the customer say. 'This is important to me, I must found out more'.


2. Make The Customer Believe Your Claims

What you state could be true, but a lot of potential customers don't tend to believe advertisers. Over bragging can kill the ad. Keep the claims honest and reasonable. It will pay off in the long run.


3. Make The Layout & Design Reader Friendly

Layout:
* Don't wrap around a photo, i.e. put blocks of text around it.
* Emphasise specific phrases by putting more white space around them.
* Base your layout on the fact that most people look at the 2nd quarter of the page from the top, first.
* Use your single most important benefit as your headline.
* Put a benfit laden caption under the photo as 80% of readers will read that first or instead of the copy.
* Don't use more than four secondary benefit messages.

Typography:
* Use Serif typeface (e.g. Garamond) for copy, stylish headings and sub-headings.
* Sans Serif (e.g. Helvetica) can be used for headlines, sub-headings, captions and labels.
* Consider larger font size if your target audience is older people.
* Print out alternatives and have them test read by others.


4. Stress What Is Unique

Re-emphasise services that are unique or may have been hidden from or taken for granted or assumed by the reader. Define your Unique Selling Point. What makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes you better than your competitors.


5. Attract Attention With Something New

Be inventive here. Is there something new that will be of interest to your customer's needs? Fresh benefits, new services or product features. E.g. 'You now have access to our outlets all over the country'. 'You can now obtain your account details online without visiting our offices'.


6. Keep The Reader Involved

Put the reader in your advertisement and get personal. Use the present tense for the customer experiencing their benefits. Don't put them in the future and use the future word 'will'. Get them feeling like they are part of your advertisment story.




About the Author:

(c) Paul Curran, CEO of Cuzcom Internet Publishing Group and webmaster at http://www.wealth-building-secrets.com/, brings you sales & marketing strategies, promotional marketing products and advice for personal and business success.

Make Your Own E-book

By Dejan Bizinger

If you have a newsletter or knowledge you wish to share with others, you might think about making your own ebook.

First of all, for those who might not know, an ebook is electronic publication that people can download as one file and later read, just like a book on their own computer.

There are some standards for making ebooks. I think that two most popular types of ebooks are ebooks with an exe extension and with a pdf extension. On the Net I see mostly ebooks made in exe abd pdf extension (I've, made my ebook in exe extension).

Why should you make your own ebook?

First of all, an ebook will represent you as an expert in your field. Therefore, people will start to trust what you have to say to them.

When you promote your ebook you will obtain some important benefits. For example, advertising. Now, you can sell ad space in your ebook, or you can swap links with others. In both cases you will get a significant benefit.

In the first case you will get some money, in the second case you will have your advertisement placed on the website or in the ezine of the person you have exchanged with, which will promote your site and your ebook to many more.

Also, making an ebook is useful tool for collecting items together, for example articles you have
published in your newsletter. Then, people who at the time of original publication had not been subscribed to your newsletter will have opportunity to read your articles in one handy format.

To sell or not to sell

When you make your ebook you have to decide whether to sell it or to give it away free. When I made my ebook, I decided not to sell it. Everyone who wants to, can download my ebook for free. Although, I don't get any money for my ebook, there are other benefits.

For example if you give out your ebook for free many more people will be able to read it. If they think that they have found quality info there, it is most likely that they will subscribe to your newsletters. Also, they can recommend your ebook to their friends. It will give you free advertising.

When you make your ebook you can place it on your web site for download. I wouldn't suggest you to put a link on your web site so that just everyone can download it. The better solution is to put a form where you will ask your visitors some info in exchange. Less is better.

For example you can ask them to tell you their name and email address. Then you will know how many people have downloaded your ebook and collecting their email addresses is very important so that you can stay in touch with them to offer them updates, etc.



About the Author:

Dejan Bizinger is a Contributing Editor for Infacta. Infacta is email messaging services company providing powerful, yet easy-to-use award-winning Group Mail, software for sending highly-personalized email messages and Group Metrics, software for email tracking. For more information visit: http://www.infacta.com/

How To Verify And Monitor Your Search Engine Listing On Google

By Christoph Puetz

Being listed in search engines and ranked high on searches is the overall goal a webmaster is trying to achieve when dealing with search engines. Search engine optimization is probably one of the most commonly used words among webmasters. In the Internet market becoming much more critical to business success this is almost natural.

While the professionals know how to verify search engine rankings and listings, the normal user or startup webmaster might not know how to verify these things. The often just type their domain name into the search engine of choice and are happy if they get a result back that includes their domain name. But there is a little more these startup webmasters should know about.

Every page indexed by a search engine is a possible landing page for visitors to enter the website. As more pages get indexed the higher number of possible entry points to the website. But how can a webmaster verify how many pages are currently in the index of a search engine?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3DomainName.com

Replace "DomainName.com" with the actual domain name that needs to be verified. A webmaster should also run the following variation to get an impression of what is really out there.

http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=site%3Awww.DomainName.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.DomainName.com

The next thing a webmaster should check is to see how many other websites are linking to his/her website at all. As almost everyone knows nowadays - the higher the number of links pointing to a website (incoming links) as higher the possible search engine ranking on search can be (and we all want that number 1 spot, right?!). The problem is that Google will never show you all incoming links to a website. But even a ball park number can be helpful in finding out if the SEO work of the past paid off. So, how does a webmaster can get this ball park number of incoming links?

http://www.google.com/search?q=link%3Awww.DomainName.com

This command will show the 'ball park' number mentioned above. It will give the webmaster a hint how successful the website is and how many people/websites are linking to it.

By researching the information of how many pages and how many links to/for a website are registered/indexed in a search engine a webmaster can gain important knowledge. This knowledge makes it easier to see what works and what does not work when it comes to search engine success for a website.



About The Author:

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Examples of his search engine optimization work can be found at http://www.webhostingresourcekit.com/ and http://www.highlandsranch.us/.

Writing Articles To Build Your Online Presence

By Jeremy Hershberger

One of the most effective (and free!) ways to get noticed on the web is to write articles. Even if you have no writing experience, it is easier than you may think, even fun. You can write an article on just about anything you want and choose how you want to publish it.

The best way to start is to write about a subject you understand thoroughly, such as the subject of your ezine if you have one.

Use a search engine to research what you want to write about, and browse some online discussion forums which relate to your subject to gain additional knowledge.

There are article-writing ebooks and other literature available on the web that can provide you with useful advice if you are intimidated to write your first article. Just do some web searches to see what you can find. Some of the literature is free, some isn't.

As you conduct your research, begin writing a rough draft immediately while ideas are still fresh in your mind. You can revise, edit and rearrange later. Your article doesn't have to be perfect, as long as it is presentable and easily readable.

Keep your lines formatted to about 60 characters. The 'Lucida Console' font uses the same amount of space for each character, so you could use it then set your margins accordingly in your word processor program.

I use Notepad which uses Lucida Console by default. I turn off word-wrap and set the window size to where I want it and hit 'enter' as my text fills a line. You may come up with a method that works better for you.

When your article is finished, you'll need to add what is called a "resource box" at the end. This is where you place a few lines which include your name, as well as anything you'd like to offer your readers.

You should make your resource box stand out by placing a line of asterisks or hyphens above and below it, for example:

*************************************************
Copyright © 2005 [your name]
[email address if you wish]
[several lines to advertise your website, ezine, offer
freebies, etc]
*************************************************

When you feel comfortable with your article and ready to publish, you can choose from several different options available to you. You can use all if you so choose:

* Article Directories
* Ezines
* Article Announcement Lists

Article directories are websites that you can submit your article to. They will review it then publish it on their site, making your name and links in your resource box available to all who are interested in the information you provide.

You get an added benefit of having your website's search engine ranking increase as your link is placed in more and more article directories! It all depends on how much time you want to spend submitting to the hundreds of available directories on the web.

You can also browse ezine directories, searching for ezines relating to your article's subject. Look for those which indicate they accept article submissions.

Send a polite email to the publisher asking to submit your article, and include the article. If you prefer, send it as an attachment.

There are also article announcement lists which you can submit your article to. These can be found by doing a web search for 'article announcement lists'. You have to subscribe to the list before you can post to it.

When posting to an announcement list, include in your email your rules for reprinting your article, such as allowing it to only be reprinted if no changes are made and only as long as your resource box is included. These rules are up to you, ultimately.

You can also use submission websites or software such as EzineAnnouncer which are designed to submit your article to a large number of places, cutting down on time you have to spend doing it manually. These programs come with a price, so look them up and decide for yourself if they are worth it to you.

Read this article again, and formulate a plan based on the advice given. The methods outlined above will get you well on your way to boosting your online presence, and you will be surprised by how effective they are.

About the Author:

Jeremy Hershberger is webmaster of his Plug-In Profit Site, a money-making website you can have built and customized just for you on your own domain, 100% ready to take orders and pull in massive residual profits. See: http://www.online-income-solutions.com/pips.html

Obstacles To Small Business Usage Of eLearning In Europe

By Colin Mc Cullough

I would like to start my article with a few economic facts
which could lay a background for the message I want to get
across.

The political agenda of making Europe the most competitive
global economy by 2010 has not been matched by developments
over the past five years. Demographics show that Europe will
continue to have a shrinking workforce between now and 2020
with older workers forming the core of the European workforce.

Currently 80 million EU citizens are low-skilled. By 2010 it is
estimated that half of all additional new jobs on the labour
market will require tertiary education and almost 40% upper
secondary level. Logically, the job prospects for the low
skilled will decline. So we are currently confronted with the
situation where half the EU workforce (some 100 people) require
upskilling.

This in my view cannot take place in the back to the classroom
scenario, Learning and upskilling must be integrated in the
workplace.

These unsettling prospects must also be seen in the current
European economic structure. Small and medium-sized enterprises
are the European Union. They account for 99% of all businesses;
they provide employment for 74 million people.

Elearning through the flexibility and facility of access it
offers is seen - at least politically - as an important enabler
of lifelong learning. However, while we can observe an increase
use and impact of elearning in large European companies - up to
60% of the training needs of key players in the ICT sector is
now provided by elearning) the uptake in SME's is at best slow
and does not meet initial hopes and expectations.

A recent study carried out by Cedefop and the European
Commission shows that elearning has had a limited impact on
SME's in terms of those who use it and what it is used for, The
use was almost always limited to managers and ICT based staff.
The case studies carried out showed that in five European
countries there were a number of factors decisive in
influencing the development of ICT for learning in SME's. The
most significant were:

- the total lack of training culture within the SME
- lack of appropriate learning materials
- the attitude of individual managers
- and lack of access to sufficient bandwidth to ensure high
quality training.

Broadly speaking and with few exceptions, despite spawning a
number of new technology companies and numerous government and
European sponsored programme's the uptake and efficacy of
learning using ICT has been less than convincing. The
development of learning in Europe has been dominated by the
metaphor of the virtual classroom and the virtual university,
it has equally been dominated with an obsession with technology
and very little attention has been paid to vocational and
occupational learning or the development of elearning
environments in less formal learning contexts.

Like it or not, research suggests today that most learning
takes place in every and work social situations, In other
words, most of our learning is informal and takes place in a
variety of social contexts. Work is carried out in a social
context - this is particularly the case in small and
medium-sized enterprises and plays a very important part in
people's lives. If elearning is to make a contribution to
changing the traditional learning paradigm - institution based
- phase and stage related) it must become embedded in the work
organisation.

The use of ICT in the broad sense for learning is considered a
major factor in implementing the paradigm of lifelong learning
and in providing staff from SME's in particular with access to
continuing vocational education and training.

The main objectives of ICT supported learning should take
forward the following objectives:

- it should increase access to learning opportunities through
increased flexibility of delivery modes and by overcoming
geographical barriers to participation,

- it should enhance the quality of the learning experience in
terms of content and teaching

- ultimately it should increase the efficiency of the
organisation by reducing costs and increasing productivity.

So what are the obstacles to making elearning happen in SME's

Firstly I believe that people are ready to learn when they
realise that they don't know something that they need to know
in order to accomplish a goal they wanted to approach. Thus
there is little use in a philosophy of one size fits all, To
date most elearning has been an attempt to put books on
computers interrupted by a multiple choice test, The advocates
of elearning have not spent time trying to understand how the
new medium changes the educational experience. They are simply
trying to replicate what is there now while leaving out some of
the important parts such as the teacher. The value of a computer
may seem at first to be its ability to deliver information
anytime anywhere but its value in education is much more
important. When the air flight simulator was invented what was
important was not the fact that it could be used in any remote
location. It enabled pilots to learn to fly without risk and to
accumulate the experience but not be harmed by it

Today, to give another example, most university courses are
lecture courses. Lectures are evidence of the inertia that
exists in education and still reflects ancient educational
considerations. ELearning needs to be about learning by doing,
also using the computer to evoke simulated experience. One
should learn to run a business by running it rather than
reading or hearing about how to do it.

The emphasis in the elearning industry has changed somewhat
over the past five years from a technological to a pedagogical
perspective.

So first and foremost there must be a broader understanding of
what elearning really is and that it impacts largely on how,
where, what and how the learner progresses.

Secondly, I would return to the issue of the learning culture.
What is the motivation of the learner in the SME. Are their
incentives - tangible or intangible for improving his/her
competences. ELearning cannot be removed from the whole debate
of the learning organisation, of managing human capital and
recognising the assets of the company are largely in the heads
of its employees. Workplaces need to be designed to facilitate
learning and learning infrastructures. This requires
examination of what forms of work organisation are needed to
support elearning in SME's and how skills gained from formal
and informal learning activities can be applied in the
workplace. In this domain current research is weak.

The third issue I would touch upon is the question of
pedagogies and learning cultures. Work is still outstanding in
defining and analysing the training and learning needs of SME's
and of its managers and employees. In an elearning context there
is a need to develop effective pedagogies, materials and
eresources,

Fourthly the issue of elearning materials and infrastructures.
We need a much broader understanding of how electronic media
and applications can be used to support elearning. This should
go hand in hand with an audit of what elearning materials are
actually available to SME's, how does it fit their real
learning needs. This would led me on to the issue of
localisation of software but that I shall leave aside for the
present.

Point number five. That elearning is a cheap learning solution
is a myth. On average US estimates put costs of one hour
elearning instructional material at 20 000 dollars - in some
cases as high as 80 000 dollars. If materials can not be
recycled, if learning materials cannot be adapted to specific
learning environments, it learning materials have not complied
with technical standards, then there use is limited and the
return on investment non-existent.

And perhaps the last point I wish to make. What about the
models and frameworks to support elearning in SME's. There are
growing national and regional initiatives, and here I would
point to Scotland as one outstanding example for networking and
support to the SME looking for elearning opportunities. For
SME's I believe in terms of financial resources, the most
convincing model is one based on learning regions and
partnerships.

The issue of open standards is essential it elearning is to be
a feasible investment = particularly for SME's. Similarly there
is a need for a lifecycle model of learning content covering all
aspects of content from creation to delivery storage and
retrieval.

The issue of the changing role of the trainer or educator is
equally important. They potentially play the key role as change
agents. Their continuous professional development is essential
and work we have carried out at Cedefop shows that there is
major concern among teachers and trainers that they are not
equipped to support technology in the learning environment

To conclude, I think I have tried to advocate the view that the
issue of how a culture of lifelong learning should be developed
and supported in SME's is a complex one. It is unsure to me if
present national and European policies promote access to
continuing learning as a pubic right or. a private good, What
is the balance between the responsibilities of the public and
private sectors regarding elearning. And this raises the vital
question of funding. Already there are substantial differences
in access to lifelong learning and elearning for different
occupational and social groups. This in turn raises the issue
of social exclusion.

I am afraid that my article raises more questions that provides
answers to the issues of elearning in SME's. But if such issues
are not addressed at all levels - European, national and
regional, the promise of elearning as a driver of economic
growth and performance in Europe could easily turn into a myth.

About The Author:

Colin McCullough works at a European level
for increasing awareness of technology supported learnng. He
has consulted for a number of companies including
http://www.modusvivendi-design.com

Start Your Home Business With The Right Attitude

By Larry McCullough

Getting Started on any business venture whether online or off,
starts with the right attitude. YOU HAVE TO WANT TO DO IT!

What goes through your mind when you sign up? Do you think that once you do the money will start flowing? If you do then you have the wrong attitude. You have to plan and then work your plan.

Let me explain. Usually when you sign up for a business you
have a sponsor. A sponsor's job is to support you and help you
with tips and tools to help you grow your business. Your
sponsor is also there to help you with prospects if you just
started and not sure of all the inner workings of the business.

But when it comes to working your business, it is up to you. It
is your responsibility to read and find out how the compensation
plan works. It is your responsibility to find out what products
are available for you to sell. It is your responsibility to
read the latest updates and newsletters from the business or
your sponsor so you will know what is going on at all times.
Get the picture?

When you signed up for a business, you did it for a reason.
What ever that reason was only you know. But if you signed up
to make money, You have to get involved and work it to do so.

I understand that a high percentage of people signing up to try
and make money online are new and do not have a clue on where to start or are afraid because they think they will be scammed or lose a lot of money. Your sponsor can help you with this. (But I also highly recommend that you do not sign up for business on
line without at least 2 years in existence.). I have not found a
business yet that do not try and help you succeed. Go to the
discussion boards, read your newsletters and the latest
updates. If you REALLY want to make money it can happen.

Working ANY business is only as hard as you make it. You can
make it easy with the right attitude and the desire to succeed.
You can Make it happen.


About The Author:

Larry McCullough Owner of two successful websites:
http://www.6fig.com and http://www.hottestebooks.com

Tips To Create A Good Looking Website.

By Jerry Goldfarb

Creating a website is something anyone can do today with the
advent of many application or website generators available
today. But, creating a appreciable and good looking website
needs a lot of thought process and skills. The following would
help:

1. Think of a theme or idea for the website.

What does your site speak about or what do you want the site to
speak about? Put yourself in the shoes of the visitor and think
why you should visit this particular site and not one of the
numerous others? Always try to offer something extra that a
visitor needs or wants. After you close your thought process on
this, proceed to point no. 2.

2. Now that you have the idea ready, what else do you need?

An idea itself is not enough to create the website. Give a
thought to web design. Design is a process of visualizing the
idea by finalizing the layout, colors and more importantly the
content. Colors and their combinations are very essential,
since if you end up using the wrong ones, the visitor may have
difficulty in reading the content which is the most important
part of the site. The visitor will leave, never to come back.
It is important to visualize the web site design on paper or a
image file to get a proper preview.

3. Finding a web-host.

You can host your site for free; there are many sites which
offer this in lieu of placing an advertisement on your site. If
you are running a business, it is advisable that you get your
own web host. It is not very expensive to do so.

4. Start off with web development.

Now that your web design has been finalized after numerous
changes, it is time to develop the site as per the design
specification. Knowledge of basic HTML becomes essential to
create a quality site. There is no need to get into the tags
and formats but it is necessary to know what HTML is and how it
works. There are numerous HTML development engines available
which work on the WYSIWYG guidelines, a basic knowledge of HTML
will help you create a better website. This knowledge will come
handy when you try to fix the errors on your site.

5. View your handiwork.

While viewing your webpage do not forget the important factors:

1. Loading speed - Is it fast? 2. Is it easily navigable? 3. Is
the content error free? 4. Is there anything that visitors would
need or find useful?

This is only the tip of the iceberg. These factors are
extremely important and most people seem to ignore them
resulting in a poor preventability. The idiom "First impression
is the last impression" holds good while you try to publicize
your site.

6. Create the rest of the pages.

Create the rest of your pages with the above points in mind.
Follow the hierarchy and don't get confused.

7. Make your site go live.

Preview your pages and after being satisfied, upload it to your
web host. The next step is to promote your site. Promoting is
required to inform others about the presence and content of
your site.

The process of web design and development is a cycle. To make
people visit your site again and again, it is important to
update your site at least every two weeks with good and latest
content available to you. Make sure the updates are
interesting.

About The Author:

For more information and tips on creating a
good looking and functional web site, please visit
http://www.cobbwebdesign.com.

How to Improve your Click Through Rate in Google AdWords

By Kalena Jordan

Like many people who earn their income via the Internet, I use affiliate programs to supplement my income. One of the affiliate products I promote (Proposal Kit) had been performing particularly well for me recently and I decided to help things along by creating a Google AdWords campaign based around my reviews of the product.

After one month, the campaign was going ok, I was getting a few sales here and there and certainly making a good ROI on the promotion. However, although my Click Through Rate (CTR) was pretty good (1.2%), it was starting to slide backwards and I thought I could do better. As you probably know, your ad position in Google relies heavily on your CTR compared to your competitors, so I was keen to turn things around and keep my high ad positions.

Around this time, I bought Nick Usborne's book Net Words and started to read it, taking notes as I went. I realized that according to Nick's philosophy, my AdWords ads were flat and boring. They were just not appealing enough to entice people to click on them. As Nick explains in his book, "Being blah guarantees you'll never be heard".

So I set about re-writing some of my ad text to speak more directly to my audience and ask them a question that required a response. Below is an example of an ad targeting the search query "business proposal before I changed the text:

Business Proposal Kit
Close the sale with a professional
business proposal template kit.

And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need a business proposal?
Create your own professional
proposal with our template kit.

The aim was to get my average CTR for the entire campaign up to around 2% from the existing 1.2% it was sitting at.

I logged off for the evening and went to bed, not expecting too much. The next morning, I had messages in my email in-box advising me that I had made 3 sales overnight! I was quite excited and logged into AdWords to see how things were going. Sure enough, my clicks were way up and two of the three AdGroups I had edited were showing an average 33% CTR! My overall campaign CTR had risen from 1.2% to 2.4%. I had never experienced CTR that high before. The ad I had changed used to show a 2.5% CTR and after a few days the changed ad displayed a 4.3% CTR.

Taking note of the ads that had attracted the most clicks, I created more around related keywords and phrases, using similar headlines to the ads that were performing the best. This time, I incorporated Nick's advice to use short and punchy copy.

Below is an example of an ad I was using to target the search query "seo contract" before I changed the text:

Sample SEO contract
Proposal Kit provides a perfect SEO
contract template. Read our review.

And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need an SEO contract?
Create yours.
Today.

After another week, my average CTR for the whole campaign jumped from 2.4% to 4% and I had a couple of ads showing 100% CTR! You can imagine how excited I was. Of course the high CTR builds on itself because the higher your CTR, the higher your ad position and the higher your ad position, the more clicks it is likely to attract. So my campaign had jumped from 1.3% in the first month, to 2.4% in the second month and after my fine-tuning, it's now showing a 4% CTR consistently. And the sales? Well I now average at least seven sales per week, up from two per week over the past 6 months and my affiliate commission is at an all time record.

The exercise just goes to show that a few thoughtful tweaks to your ad copy can make a HUGE difference to your bottom line. So what are you waiting for? Go tweak that copy in your own campaigns...

Copyright © 2005 by Kalena Jordan. All rights reserved under U.S. and international law.

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The above article may be re-published as long as the content remains unchanged and the following paragraph is included at the end of the article, including the URL links:

Article by Kalena Jordan. As well as running her own SEO business Web Rank, Kalena Jordan manages Search Engine College, an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing subjects.
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