Press Release Pub

But when it comes time to actually start building links to one’s website, people typically pick the hardest way to accomplish the task and then they get to work.

Working Hard

People have been told about various ways to build links to one’s website, and they go through the process of picking out the method that they would prefer to use. It is kind of ironic that most people pick the method that they believe will be the easiest and least expensive to achieve, and when all is said and done, they will have picked out the hardest, least effective method of building links.

For example, most newcomers to online business choose:

• Reciprocal links;
• Directory submissions.

With Reciprocal Links, people buy a software package that helps them to search out websites that are supposedly “related” to theirs and then they send an email to the person who owns that website, proclaiming the benefits of trading links and asking for the link.

With directory submissions, webmasters can get software that is supposed to help with the process, but it takes hours just to submít one’s website to a few dozen directories. Fortunately, there are service providers who also provide submissions to web directories. Regardless of how you get links submítted to web directories, you generally have to pray that those web directories are approving submissions, since most owners have abandoned their directories.

Beyond the time required setting up links in this fashion, and the frustration of getting very few links for the amount of time spent, the worst part of the equation is that the search engines tend to ignore links gained through these methods, and few humans find and follow those links.

Internet newcomers using these methods frequently spend a lot of time trying to promote their websites, and in the end, they have accomplished nothing more than wasting a lot of their time and energy.

Working Smart

What if I could show you a better way? Would you be intrigued enough by my methods to try them for yourself?

My point in sharing this with you is not to annoy you, but to help you get better results in much less time.

When we launch new websites, we ignore reciprocal links and web directories altogether. We consider both to be a complete waste of time, effort and money.

Let me put this into perspective for you by giving you a real life example.

On November 18th, 2008, we bought and built a new niche domain: http://www.shoppingtraveldeals.com/blog/

Today is December 27th, so this site has only been active for just under six weeks.

We purchased the domain on the 18th, had it set up with content on the 19th, and then on the 20th, we started promoting this website. We released our first and second reprint articles, promoting this site on the 20th of November. We released our third article on the 24th and the fourth on the 25th. Then we released our fifth article promoting the website on December 15th.

We also set up bookmarks for the main page of the website in Stumbleupon, Digg and Propeller.

In the 39 days since we bought this domain, our website has seen 520 unique visitors. The site had 86 visitors in November and 434 so far in December.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

We got traffic from 66 unique web pages, and we drew click-through traffic from Google and Windows Live, with 86% of our search traffic coming from Google.

On our search engine traffic, we have traffic on 171 unique keyword phrases. In order to better understand this search engine traffic, we ran the top 25 search terms through Google to see where our website ranked in the search results, and this is what we came up with:

• Two #1 listings;
• Ten listings that were ranked from #2 to #4;
• Ten listings that were ranked from #5 to #10;
• Two listings on page two of Google’s search results (#11 to #20);
• One listing on page three of Google’s results (#21 to #30).

We built this website with the express intent of earning affiliate commissions in the travel industry. The prognosis is good, as we have already started earning money from this website, and in terms of our current earnings, we expect to be in the black against our initial ínvestment into this website, within about three months.

More About Reprint Articles

The concept of the reprint article is to write an article and give it to other webmasters to use in their websites and newsletters, in exchange for a link back to your website.

Those articles that seek to teach something of value typically get published more frequently than those articles geared to sell a product or service. It is our fervent belief that the Author’s resource box – the paragraph that follows the article – is the only place where a writer should try to sell his or her wares. The goal of the resource box is to get a reader to your website, and your website is where the real selling should take place.

Reprint articles provide good value to the people who use them wisely. But the online marketer must first be willing to invest the required time or money to have appropriate articles written and/or distributed.

While it is true that I work for an article distribution company, it is important to note that our guiding principle is that each article distribution company will reach a different and unique audience. As such, we always use our own service to distribute articles and occasionally we use our competitors’ article distribution companies as well.

We distribute ALL of our own articles through our own company, because we know that our service does provide real value. But for some articles, we do go to some of our competitors to expand our reach and to reach new audiences.

We actually learned to do this from some of our more successful customers, who suggest that there are certain publishers that only we can reach, while our competitors also have certain publishers that only they are able to reach. As a result, many of our customers use two or three article distribution companies, and we do too.

Working Smarter

While reprint articles is a tool that we consistently utilize to build links and to grow traffic to our websites, there remains a more long-term, yet more valuable approach to building links for our websites.

Link Bait is an idea where you create a resource that people find so useful that they feel compelled to link to it from their own websites.

Look at it this way. With reprint articles, we have to write the article, and then distribute it through the sources we choose to use to get it into circulation. All told, we will invest several hours into writing, and then we will invest another hour to distribute the article.

All told, we will have spent four to five hours to write and distribute this article. In turn, we will receive dozens or hundreds of links from related web pages (the links are from “related web pages”, because we designed the article content to look like what we are trying to promote). Writing and distributing articles typically creates a great return of value for our businesses.

But consider this. Last week, we created a resource page on one of our websites. This page is an enumeration of the +1200 article directories we know to exist on the Internet. We were not the first website to provide such a list, but we may be the first to give the Internet community an easy method to add new sites and to flag bad sites, automatically from the page where the sites are displayed.

If you are able to create a page such as this that people find extremely useful, then people are more inclined to link to your page, without you even asking them to do so. The beauty about building pages like this on the Internet is that all you have to do is to let people know it is there, and then the links will roll in steadily.

One Link Bait page we built on May 1st, 2004 has been used by the public more than 38,000 times according to its built-in counter. And according to a Yahoo search, it has more than 10,000 inbound links from third-party websites.

We built this page in a day, wrote one article to let people know it was there, and then we left the page alone for more than four-and-a-half years.

Do you see how it is much easier to build one link bait, notify the world, and then to let people link to your web page for you? The time invested in our Text To Hyperlink Converter was less than 12 hours, yet it has attracted +10,000 links with almost no promotion on our part. And this article will generate +100 links in exchange for five hours of our time.

In Conclusion

We are working smart when we write and distribute articles to promote a website. The Shopping Travel Deals site attests to the value of reprint articles to build links and traffic to a new website quickly.

But we are working smarter, when we invest the additional time to build a link bait web page that people will appreciate and link to for us, without any additional effort on our part.
About The Author
Trey Pennewell is part of thephantomwriters.com support staff. In the quest to bring more effective Internet promotion tools to their customers, The Phantom Writers is proud to announce this week that in conjunction with professional video editors and voice-over personalities, they now provide professional Video Creation Services. It has been made possible for online marketers to easily convert their promotional articles to Video Articles. Explore the unlimíted possibilities of Video Marketing at: thephantomwriters.com/video-article-marketing.html

Here are some tried and true ideas for how to select a host that will save you money, avoid technical snafus, and build your online platform for the future.

1. Choose a Service that Primarily Does Hosting

Although it might be tempting to sign-up with a firm that provides an umbrella of services in addition to website hosting, a good rule of thumb is that if a company overly-diversifies its services, it won’t deliver top quality in any of them (e.g. tech support, updates, maintenance, etc.)

2. Choose a Host with a Great Record for Online Security

Most secure hosts will provide SSL Certificates to guarantee your security. Without an SSL Certificate on your site, visitors may come and go without identifying themselves, and this could put your site at risk. Make sure your host implements best practices when it comes to maintaining security architecture, updating security software, and responding effectively to breaches if and when they do occur.

3.Excellent Technical and Customer Service Support via Phone

Does the host provide phone support around the clock? Or can you only email for help during non-business hours? You definitely want the option to call a staffer. Studies show that over-the-phone tech and customer support systems are vastly more efficient than e-mail support centers, on average.

4. Solid Add-On Services

A number of great web hosting companies provide little extras to make sites more effective and user-friendly. These can include image upload galleries, blogs, control panels, order forms, support scripts, databases, and embedded video features. When evaluating various firms, examine sample sites and note what value add-ons you like and what value add-ons you feel are missing in each sample.

5. Don’t Rely on Numbers Alone to Make the Decision

Many hosts promise uptime approaching 100%. But there’s no way of verifying that kind of claim. If your website goes down, for instance, the company can easily explain it away as a statistically insignificant outlier. Similarly, a potential host may brag about oodles of bandwidth and space on servers, but if your online small-business needs are modest, these numbers shouldn’t be your incentive. Finally, be wary of online rating systems. These figures can be jiggered and rejiggered to make a web host look better (or worse) than it actually is.

6. The Right Price for Your Needs

Sure, you can find a service for practically nothing. But there is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to web hosting. If you’re paying a dirt-cheap rate, chances are that the host is watering down services in some respect. Perhaps the host offers minimal security protections or charges clients “pay per play” for technical support. Or maybe the site charges a sky-high maintenance fee or other monthly fee. The point is, you need to read the fine print and to price-compare before making a decision.

7. Flexible Features and Enough Elbow-Room

You have no idea how your online platform might evolve. That’s why you need a hosting company that boasts flexible features, supports many different languages, offers linux and Windows options, and supports an array of scripts (PHP, Pearl, Java, etc.) A good rule of thumb for determining space is to “buy big”. In other words, even if you don’t have tens of thousands of files to upload and store, leave yourself some wiggle room to anticipate future growth.

8. An Easy-To-Use and Safe Shopping Cart

According to numerous estimates, U.S. and U.K. consumers will be spending nearly $150 billion per year online by the year 2010. Your site’s e-commerce options should be simple, safe, battle-tested, and easy-to-use.

9. Protection Against Spam, Viruses, Trojan Horses, and the Like

Most creditable web hosting sites provide solid e-mail protection. Make sure to check for compatibility, however. For instance, if you use Microsoft Outlook, make sure that the host has the tools and services to shield your Outlook e-mail effectively — without blocking key notifications from clients or suppliers.

10.Important Questions to Consider:

• Does the host provide good references and testimonials?
• Does the company employ best-of-breed firewalls and routers?
• Has anyone filed complaints against the company through the Better Business Bureau or other organization?
• What services do small businesses similar to yours use for web hosting?
• Can the company provide any statistics to back up claims regarding reliability and technical support?
• Can you use the host for a trial period before paying full price?
• How expensive is it to upgrade or downgrade plans?
• How do blogs and customer forums rate your candidate hosting services?

About The Author
Amy Armitage is the head of Business Development for Lunarpages. Lunarpages provides quality web hosting from their US-based hosting facility. They provide a wide-range of services from linux Virtual Private Servers and managed solutions to shared and reseller hosting plans.

Indeed, even frequent internet users have no idea what that little orange RSS square represents and certainly don’t realize that there is a big shift brewing in the bowels of online publishing and marketing.

But, that may change more quickly than we all used to think for 3 very potent reasons.

There are advantages to RSS that will compel most, if not all, internet users and content consumers to “learn” to use an RSS reader and start managing RSS subscriptions.

In the same way email eclipsed snail mail for content delivery, RSS will eclipse email as the consumer’s choice for opt-in messaging.

If you are an email marketer, the time for you to get engaged to RSS has come, because, whether you like it or not, the wedding bells will be ringing soon.

Here’s why…

RSS = Embedded Video (and audio)

I recently was asked to help a small business embed video into emails they wanted to send to established clients.

Their vision was clear:

1. Create a quick video email with a webcam, stick it right into their corporate Outlook email with a Youtube style preview.

2. The customer gets the email, clicks the Youtube-looking video preview and the video starts playing.

3. No landing page, they wanted everthing to happen right there inside the email client, whether it was Outlook, AOL, Gmail, Yahoo or otherwise.

Simple right? Nope…

This is simply not possible with email.

Many brilliant companies have tried various tactics to embed video into email in a way that doesn’t consistently get blocked or stripped by the various email providers.

With email, the best that can be done is mimic the embedded video look by putting a video preview image in the email which opens up the web browser and plays the video there when clicked.

Ironically, even this comes at a significant cost because of the technical knowledge needed to make it happen.

So why is this a less than perfect solution?

Primarily because none of us like to be bounced around, we want to view video instantly, seamlessly.

After all, we have been trained to expect this level of immediacy by seeing it everyday on Google’s “universal search” and countless blogs.

The good news is, embedded video and audio are part and parcel (fundamental elements) of RSS.

Adding video (and audio) that can be instantly viewed by someone receiving an RSS feed is as simple as adding text.

Readers get what they have come to expect and corporations, as well as small businesses, can provide dynamic, highly personal content without paying a coder or webmaster thousands of bucks.

RSS = 100% Deliverability

I was shocked to see the stats on email deliverability rates for the typical business. The fact is, even if you have come by a person’s email honestly (that is – you did not buy a bootleg list of emails from some guy in a dark virtual alley) the likelihood of them actually receiving that message from you is 60% or less.

So, let’s say you have a list of 1000 customer emails – which you have worked hard and paid real money to acquire. When you send a message, 400 of them (on average) don’t get it. It either automatically lands in their Sp@m Folder or gets deleted even before it reaches them.

Even companies like Aweber who make a living sending emails for other people and have intimate agreements with email providers like Gmail, AOL and Yahoo, only get a 90% deliverabilty rate – on a good day (they claim %99.4 but I use Aweber and when I factor in the whole opt-in and email management process, at least 10% of my emails are undelivered).

RSS is quite different. If someone has opted-in to your RSS “feed”, they will get 100% of your messages. No doubt about it.

This is obviously good for the company but how is this also an advantage for the customer?

Well, have you ever had the frustration of opting-in to something that you were interested in only to find (after searching for a few minutes) that it was buried in your sp@m box.

Have you ever had to “whitelist” an email address so that each email that was sent wasn’t immediately deleted?

Doing this takes TIME… the most expensive commodity any one of us owns.

Once consumers realize there is a simpler way to get 100% of what they want, 100% of the time, and 0% of what they don’t want, RSS will start to look like a (pardon the old expression) “no brainer”.

RSS = Sp@m-Free

This may be the “tipping point” that triggers the general masses toward RSS.

Yes, sp@m is annoying… it takes time to delete… it contains inappropriate messages which make parents steaming mad… and it is the constant burden of corporations and email providers.

Especially due to the last reason, email will not be free forever. You may not have to pay if you send just a few emails to your friends and family each month but if your sending out a significant number of messages… you will pay.

This will be the email manager’s final attempt at curbing the clever spammer.

In fact, email providers are already debating and tweaking a platform similar to cell phone companies where you will have a sending quota.

This will only push spamming into a “higher” art form and challenge the suprisingly intelligent geeks behind this modern phenomenon to new technical heights.

All of this will only serve to highlight the value of RSS even more and compel the average folks into opening up a Google Reader account or using the one they goofed around with more often.

However, before RSS eliminates email as we know it, a few things have to happen…

In the first part of this article we discussed the three compelling features of RSS that will lure the mases of content seekers.

Namely, embedded video, 100% deliverability and sp@m-free information management.

But, before any of us permanently trades in our email account for an RSS Reader, a few things need to happen.

Until then, we will be doing double-duty… checking both our Inbox and our latest feeds.

What RSS Needs Before It Kills Email

1. RSS Content Clients (like Outlook for RSS).
As it stands, messages which are sent via RSS are usually composed inside some sort of blog or other similar content management system and published to the world. All the folks who have requested the RSS “feed” then receive that message into the RSS reader they check whenever it is convenient for them. Generally speaking, the entire group of subscribers gets every message.

Now, imagine a software application that works like an email client such as Outlook that allows you to create a message, format it, add video and audio and then send it to just one (or a selected group) of subscribers via RSS…All without having to publish that content to the world.

This would be the silver bullet solution to all the woes of email.

2. RSS to One or Selected Groups
One of the current appeals of RSS is the fact that one can subscribe to an RSS feed anonymously. You are assured of receiving only messages from that person or website (which is hopefully run by a person) and nothing else. Neither the website owner or the RSS service knows anything about the subscriber. This is a good thing and something that will continue to make RSS valuable.

However, at some point, a more personal RSS option should appear which allows the subscriber a choice. In the future, when someone chooses to subscribe to an RSS feed, h/she will have the option of sharing personal information with the publisher, perhaps just their name and a few selected interests.

They will be glad to do this for two reasons.

1. It will allow the publisher to send only content that matches their desired interests (this is actually already possible but very few take advantage of it).

2. It will allow for private RSS communication between individuals and groups with all 3 benefits listed above – embedded media, 100% deliverability, sp@m-free.

What Killer-RSS Will Look Like

In this new more advanced world, you will have a personal RSS address. Not connected to a business or blog content, just to you personally. Yes, you may be thinking… “just like my email address”.

When someone wants to hear from you, they will go to some fancy Web 2.0 service and subscribe to your personal RSS feed. They will sign-up for their own personal RSS feed and then subscribe to yours, providing you with their name (if they are a friend) and perhaps their interests if they are a business contact.

When you want to send them, and only them a message, you’ll open up the fancy wysiwyg editor provided by the cool Web 2.0 service mentioned above, create a message and publish it.

Sounds like email right? Exactly…

The difference is, you publish the message not to your public blog but to a private space on the net and to your friend’s RSS reader.

So, your friend checks their RSS reader, sees your name on their list of subscriptions, notices that you have published a message to them (and maybe a few other friends) and either reads the message in their reader or in the private space online.

So, as this shift occurs, what we are calling Killer-RSS will be viewed as an upgrade to typical email services with the added benefits mentioned above.

What do you think – will RSS be the email killer? If not, how do you see the RSS – email relationship working out? Visit Web2Center.com to join the dialogue.
About The Author
Peter Lenkefi publishes social marketing and blog promotion tips at http://Web2Center.com .

Commandment 1: There are No Rank Guarantees. (Period)

Search Engines alone control their indexing and ranking algorithm. Do not try to trick Search Engines. The only way to improve your search engine rank is by playing by the rules. And the rule is very simple: make it logical. Web content is primarily for the site visitor and not crawlers.

If your Search Engine Optimizer sold you magic “Top rank on Google in 10 days flat”. Forget it. There are no short cuts. Top ranking in Search Engine Natural Results will take time. Hard work is imperative especially in developing the content on your website and the links to your site.

Commandment 2: Ranking is Not the End, It’s the Means.

Ask yourself what will a top search engine rank get you? Most businesses are interested in increasing sales on a website or at the least driving qualified traffic. Ranking for the right keywords (keywords used by your target audience) is important. There are SEOs who will try to show case results for keywords that occur only on your website. Beware such gimmicks.

Commandment 3: Know Your Competition.

“Rank” is relative position and more so in the Search Engines’ natural results. How well you do in the search engine results is a function of how much hard work you have done in relation to your competition. Analyze your competition’s keywords, links, keyword density and spread, but be sure not to copy your competition.

Commandment 4: Use Search Engine Friendly Design.

A search and visitor friendly design is a must for any successful website. Your website should be compelling enough for repeat visits by search engines and potential customers. Make sure you have search engine friendly URLs and avoid those long URLs with query strings.

Commandment 5: Select Keywords that are Worthy.

You must research your keywords before targeting. There are tools that give you a good idea of a keyword’s search potential for example. It is important to know the number of searches for a keyword in the last month, last 6 months and last year. You should also find out the number of web pages that are targeting the keyword. It is advisable to start a campaign with keywords with moderate competition and a high number of searches.

Commandment 6: Write Great Content.

Even if your website site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t do you any good unless you also fill it with great content. Great means it has contextual and editorial value. Great content brings repeat visits and increases the chance of conversion. Great content is factual and appeals to your target audience. Your web page should have your desired action embedded in the content and you must ensure that the content is fresh. Keep adding and editing content regularly.

Commandment 7: Use Good Hyper Linking Strategy.

Hyperlinks make your content accessible and contextual. You must hyperlink in the right context within the website and to other websites. Good links are appreciated by the Search Engines and by visitors. No one likes to be taken to a mall selling “Macintosh” when shopping for “apples”.

Commandment 8: Write Relevant and Original Meta Content.

Meta content is like a business card. Just as your business card tells who you are and what you do, Meta content tells the search engines the relevance and context of a web page. Resist the temptation to include everything in the Meta content, but make it detailed. Confused? The idea is to include only what is relevant to the page in the Meta Content but to include everything that is relevant.

Commandment 9: Acquire Relevant Links.

The links you acquire are the roads to your web page for search engine bots and visitors. Good links improve your webpage’s equity on the World Wide Web and bad links make a dent in your equity and credibility. Be selective in reciprocal linking. Both reciprocal and one way links work, if you are prudent in selecting the links. Submit your website to the relevant sections in relevant directories.

Commandment 10: Consult Experts, If You Need To.

If you have the competence, there are two ways to learn – learning from your mistakes and learning from others’ experience. You can choose either. If you have the time and can wait for the online dollars, do it yourself. If you want to get started now, it may be useful to consult the experts.
About The Author
The author is an expert in Search Marketing with over 10 years Onlëne Marketing experience. He heads www.rankuno.com, the specialist in online marketíng and Search Engine Optimization. RankUno empowers its clients around the world with high ROI onlíne marketing programs. He may be reached at bhaskar@rankuno.com.

Branding Is More Than A Pretty Logo

A lot of websites and website owners mistakenly believe that creating a brand means a compelling and relevant name, and well designed logos and web pages. While these are a part of website branding, they are far from being the whole story. In fact, every aspect of your website and online business needs to convey your brand image. This includes design, narrative voice, advertising, and marketing. Customer communication is equally as important, and provides the opportuníty to strengthen your brand even further.

Your Target Market

Branding needs to concentrate on the target market you are aiming to attract. Market research and some competitor analysis will usually garner you with relevant information regarding the people you are aiming to attract. What products and services are they looking for? What information do they want access to? Do they expect to be able to interact with you or other members of your online community? These are all important questions that you not only need to ask but answer as well.

The most effective branding will also consider the demographics of a target market. Age, sex, nationality, religion, and disposable income bracket are important factors. Again, the savvy online business owner should have at least a reasonable understanding of their target market demographics. Knowing this information ensures that you not only create a brand, but that you create a relevant and powerful brand that is attractive to the right people.

What’s In A Name? Everything

The first aspect of your brand is your company or website name. It doesn’t necessarily have to portray the products you sell, but it does need to be memorable. Brands like Google and Ebay relay little about the service they provide but they are short, catchy, and easy to remember. You can consider other aspects of branding when choosing a name – PayPal clearly conveys the fact that the service is related to paying and payments, while the addition of the word Pal implies that the service is user friendly and intuitive. It still sticks to the format of being short and memorable; the use of alliteration making the name roll off the tongue even easier.

Domain Names

Once you’ve determined a brand name and ensured that domain names and company names are available, it’s time to register domaíns. .com domaíns are the most effective because they are the ones that we, as surfers, generally remember. We may remember a company name and forget the domain extension. Nine times out of ten we would add .com as the extension and hope to find the right site. It will pay, in the long run, to purchase a number of domains including regional domains (.eu, .co.uk, etc…) and others. Some potential customers like to deal with local firms and these customers will use local extensions.

Headers And Logos

Many websites now utilize a header rather than a true logo. Whichever option you plump for, it is usually a good idea to have your graphic designed by a professional. This design can cost $100 upwards but the results should be more than worth it. A logo will appear on all communication you send to customers, every page of your website, every newsletter, brochure, and virtually any other form of communication or promotional material. It needs to be strong and instantly memorable to prove effective.

Providing The Brand Your Market Wants

The design of your website and other online media needs to be attractive, but it needs to provide the level of usability and functionality that your target market expect. Website design, in particular, needs to be easy on the eye, give simple guidance to the most important parts of the page, and appear professional. It should also cater to your target market. A younger audience will gladly appreciate a more modern design, while the older generations may prefer a classic and more simple design.

Bringing all aspects of design together in all of your media is important. If you intend to use video marketing as a tool to drive traffic and promote your brand, then you need to try and include your logo and a link to your website within that video. Emails, newsletters, faxes, and invoices should largely match the design of your site and should certainly include any logo you have.

Website Content And Narrative Voice

Narrative voice is another important facet of website branding. The main reason that we go online and search for certain terms is to find out more about that term, and not usually to directly purchase a product. As such, website content should provide the information that your visitors are looking for and throughout your website and other media you need to convey the same type of voice.

Websites that are geared towards individual consumers can adopt a more friendly and personable style. This conveys an image that you and your brand are equally friendly and personable – an attractive perception to most consumers. B2B websites can approach content in a more formal and businesslike manner. CEOs and other business executives prefer to know that their budget is being spent on a professional service that will deliver, rather than push an amicable brand.

Giveaways To Promote Brand Awareness

Offering free newsletters or promotional giveaways is an excellent way to kick start your website’s popularity. It provides visitors with the information they crave and it provides you with an opportuníty to further enhance your new brand. Blogs, forums, and web applications provide similar advantages and they convince visitors to bookmark your pages and visit more frequently. This, in turn, helps to improve brand awareness and makes your brand much more memorable to your visitors.

Start creating content for use outside of your site. Articles, videos, blog posts, and news stories are all good material that can be branded effectively and distributed in various areas of the Internet. This extra push will help to improve your brand image because it will begin to convey you as being an expert within your field. It will give you and your brand greater exposure and will also help drive traffic to your website.

About The Author
Matt Jackson is a web content writer with WebWiseWords. He understands the importance of web content to the success of your business and the promotíon of your brand.

This fact is of course raising some eyebrows in the industry. Google has consistently maintained that there is no way that people can pay for better search engine placement in the organic index, a stance that the company still claims applies despite this recent purchase. In fact, a portion of Google’s published guidelines about SEO says, “While Google doesn’t have relationships with any SEOs and doesn’t offer recommendations…” In another portion, Google says “While Google nevër sells better ranking in our search results…” However, anyone who hires search engine optimization company Performics is of course now paying Google for better search engine placement. It seems like a pretty black and white issue, but Google would obviously prefer that it was kept delightfully blurry.

A Serious Conflict of Interest

One would think that Google, aware of the controversy that would come from the fact that it now owned a search engine optimization company, would be eager to spin Performics off quickly in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety and of selling search engine placement. Not so, says the official Google/ Doubleclick acquisition FAQ:

Q. What will Google do with Performics?A. Performics is part of DoubleClick, and we are acquiring it as part of the transaction. We have no plans to dispose of it at this time.[1]

All right, so Google owns a search engine optimization company and seems prepared to hold onto it for a little while at least. Yes, there seems to be a huge conflict of interest. Yes, there appears to be a large double standard. Yes, Google appears to have abandoned its long-standing principles regarding organic search engine placement in the interests of profít. But surely, the search engine optimization company that it bought will quickly be forced to follow the guidelines that Google has published for companies that are looking for a search engine optimization company. Right? Well, no.

Here is a verbatim quote from the guidelines that Google provides to people thinking about hiring a search engine optimization company:

* Make sure you’re protected legally. For your öwn safety, you should insist on a full and unconditional money-back guarantëe. Don’t be afraid to request a refund if you’re unsatisfied for any reason…[2]

On the surface, this advice seems solid enough, but as an owner of a search engine optimization company, I can tell you how impractical it is. What would prevent a company that achieved fantastic search engine placement using my service from asking for its monëy back, claiming that it is unsatisfied? “For any reason” is a very slippery slope, and apparently Google agrees – Performics does not provide a guarantëe of any kind. How do I know? Simple — one of my employees called and asked. We also have it in writing from an email we received from one of their sales reps.

What Are Google’s Options?

Let’s be charitable and assume that in the heat of the acquisition Google has forgotten to update the page of advice that it has created for website owners. This leaves only four things that can happen:

1. Status Quo: Google keeps this advice up on the page and Performics continues to provide no guarantëe regarding search engine placement. We’ll call this the “hypocritical” scenario.2. Performics gets in line: Google leaves the advice up as is and forces Performics to provide an unconditional money-back guarantëe. We’ll call this the “free SEO from Performics” scenario.

3. Guidelines change: Performics maintains zero guarantees for search engine placement but Google modifies the advice to remove the inconsistencies pointed out in this article from its advice section. We’ll call this the “shareholder’s delight moneygrubber special” scenario.

4. Google spins off Performics and removes itself from the search engine optimization industry. We’ll call this the “sanity over dollars” scenario.

I’m not betting on which of these scenarios is most likely. Some time back I would have picked #4, but as I pointed out in a recent article, Google has already crossed an invisible line by offering free advice about organic search engine placement to its biggest pay-per-click spenders.

Google owning a search engine optimization company — a slippery slope, indeed. What does this mean for those hiring other companies and looking for great search engine placement? We will just have to wait and see.

About The Author
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue, which was recently named the number one search engine optimization company in the world by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, Organic Rankings, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Download Medium Blue’s latest exclusive whitepaper, “Adding Search to Your Marketing Mix,” for more insight.

There are things you can do when developing or refining your internal linking structure. If you carry out the following tactics, you’re going to achieve two things. One, you’ll make your website better from a user’s perspective. Two, you’ll rank better in Google. And it’s no coincidence that Google rewards you for doing things that make the website user’s experience easier and better. In fact, the most important thing I can recommend is that you create, design and link your website together in a way that benefits the visitor first. Your visitors are most important, not Google rankings.

One last thing before I get to the tactics. Have you heard that links from other websites that point back to your website are essential in getting top search engine rankings, especially with Google? It’s true. These links vary in their effectiveness and value depending on the website from which they’re coming. But did you also know that internal links often can have similar effectiveness and value as external links? So bear this in mind as you read on.

1) Add links in your navigation or footer as text links to all your important pages and main sections.

This is a very easy and an extremely effective tactic that not all sites do, and even fewer do for maximum results. This is the first thing I look for when reviewing a website for a client. Unfortunately, sometimes artsy Web designers add cool buttons, which are images, to all the main sections of the site, but neglect to include text links as well. Or a programmer decides to make the website’s navigation a dynamic drop down menu in DHTML or JavaScript but forgets to include text links to the same pages represented in the menus. Search engines cannot follow image links or links created in JavaScript, they can only follow simple text links, so be sure you add them to your site as well.

So if you want search engines to visit and index (or record) ALL your website’s pages, be sure there are text links pointing to all the main sections of your site and to all your important pages.

2) Make use of the rel=”nofollow” HTML tag.

This is fairly simple. Google created this tag which tells them NOT to count the link in their search engine ranking algorithm when used on a link. There’s debate that maybe Google does count them a little, or will some day in the future. But for now, this tag does greatly decrease a link’s value in Google’s eyes.

Therefore, consider using this tag on some of your links within your site. For example, let’s say you have a homepage and then create two inner pages, and that’s the extent of the site. Let’s further say that you add a link to both pages on your homepage. If your homepage has some external links pointing to it, then it has some value in regards to Google’s ranking system. When you link to each of your two new pages within your site from your homepage, each page gets only 50% of the value the homepage has. (This is all measured in Page Rank). Let’s then say that your first inner page is the one you want to rank well in Google, but you don’t care if your second inner page even gets found by Google or ranked. You could add the nofollow tag to the second link on your homepage, thereby giving the first inner page 100% of the homepage’s value. Think of the implications. Imagine if you had a website with hundreds or thousands of pages and used the nofollow tag throughout. To understand how to implement this tag, see the two links in HTML below, one without it and one with it correctly included.

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com”>Your Website</a>

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com” rel=”nofollow”>Your Website</a>

Finally, if you have pages such as a privacy page, terms page, checkout pages or contact pages that you don’t care if they rank well in Google, be sure to use the nofollow tag when creating internal links to these pages.

3) Use descriptive & different phrases to point to the same inner page.

The words that are in the text of a link (also known as the anchor text) affect your search engine rankings. For example, the anchor text in the two links above is “Your Website”. If enough of these links that were on quality and valuable sites, including your website’s inner pages, pointed to the same page, it would eventually rank well in Google when someone searches for the phrase “your website”.

Therefore, be sure to make the anchor text in all your internal links the phrases you want the pages to be found for in Google. If you have a page that sells “blue widgets”, make the anchor text in links on other pages within your website that point to this page “blue widgets”. Do it like this:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/blue-widgets.htm”>Blue Widgets</a>

Going back to the number 1 tactic above, you would be far better off making the anchor text in all your footer links as descriptive as possible. If you want to rank well in Google for “affordable blue widgets” then use this in your links that point to this page:

<a href=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/blue-widgets.htm”>Affordable Blue Widgets</a>

Finally, vary your anchor text when pointing to the same page within your website. For instance, on some of your pages you could link to your Blue Widgets page with the anchor text of “blue widgets”, then on other pages link to it using “affordable blue widgets” and then maybe use “widgets that are blue”. This allows you to get the page ranked for multiple terms and helps the user since you’re being descriptive and making your anchor text better match the content of the page it’s on.

4) Make links in your content.

If you have text on your site, make some of the words within the text, links that point to other pages within your website. For instance, if you have an article about blue widgets, or a page that describes how great your blue widgets are, make the first or second occurrence of the phrase “blue widgets” in the text a link that points to your Blue Widgets page.

5) The Home link solution.

If your website is typical, you’ll probably have a link on every page that points back to your homepage. And you should because this helps users. By doing this, you’re supplying a lot of link value to the homepage since it is getting all these internal links pointing back to it. Since in the number three tactic I recommended that you make your anchor text the same as what you want to rank for, the word “home” does you no good. I’ll assume that you’re not trying to get your homepage ranked for the word “home”, so make the anchor text what you do want it to get ranked for.

The other option is to add the nofollow tag to all your ‘Home’ links, thereby canceling out the word “home” altogether.

6) Make important pages at most 2 folders deep with your site and at most two clicks away from your homepage.

The farther away a page is, the worse it ranks. So if you put a page in a folder that is five folders deep within your website folder structure, Google will likely consider that page not as important as a page only one folder deep. Also, make the pages in your website that are most important to get ranked two or less clicks away from the homepage. This is good for users and allows Google to index these pages more quickly.

By following these top six internal linking tactics, you’ll be far ahead of the competition, you’ll rank better in Google and you’ll be making your website visitors’ lives easier.
About The Author
Jason O’Connor is the owner of Oak Web Works, LLC, an Internet strategy firm that specializes in helping businesses make monëy with their business websites. From Web design and programming to strategic Web marketing, providing free resources for Web professionals and regularly publishing The Net Gazette, Oak Web Works is a center for online strategy.

If you’re a webmaster, you will already know how vital Google is to the success of your site, especially if you rely upon organic keyword rankings for your traffic. This free organic traffic from Google is highly desired by webmasters because it is extremely targeted and delivers high conversion rates.

In trying to reach the highest rankings possible, I (like most webmasters) have to be constantly aware of what Google thinks of my site and content. As a webmaster and marketer I have always geared my onlíne marketing towards Google. I have spent years building my keyword rankings within Google; if you take out the fact that it has nearly driven me insane, it has mostly been a positive experience.

This experience has also shown me it is indeed important for anyone to know how Google views and rates your site or content. The more knowledge you have, the better able you will be to tackle any obstacles and challenges that will come your way.

SERPs Is The Only Opinion That Counts

And like most webmasters, I try to find out as much about Google as is humanly possible, but Google doesn’t give up its secrets easily. In fact, many webmasters would argue the only true opinion Google has of your site is shown in their SERPs – if your keywords/pages are ranked in the number one spots in Google’s “Search Engine Results Pages” then Google must think your site or content deserves to be there.

However, there are other ways of finding out how Google is viewing your content. Below are several Google webmaster tools and things you can do to discover just how Google views your site or pages. They will give you a better picture of what Google thinks about your site.

Checking Your Content/Keywords In Google

One handy tool that will show you what Google thinks your pages consist of is located here:

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

Just type in your URL and tick off website content and you will get a listing of the major keywords Google has for your content. If your targeted keyword or keywords are not listed, then you have to do some re-writing.

Checking Your Backlinks In Google

If you want to find out how many backlinks your site has in Google, just open up Google Search and type in:

link:yourURL

and it will show you the number of backlinks you have.

Since Google doesn’t give you all your existing backlinks, many webmasters also use Yahoo! to find a more exact number of links your site has on the web.

Just open Yahoo! and type in: linkdomain:yourURL

Now whether Google is using or considering all these backlinks is the big question? Finding the exact number of backlinks you have in Google has always been a problem because Google is not giving you the exact number or at least this is the general opinion of most SEO experts.

Another way I monitor my links in Google is to place quotation marks around my site name or my name “bizwaremagic” or “titus hoskins” and do a search in Google. This gives me the pages containing references to me or my site. This is usually 50,000 to 100,000 pages, I have also noticed my online income usually correlates as this number goes up or down.

Checking Your Indexed Pages In Google

Obviously, it is very important for you to know what content the search engines have indexed from your site. You can also check to see how your links are displayed and to see if any titles or descriptions are missing from your pages.

You can see how many of your pages are indexed in Google by using the site command.

Just type into Google Search:

site:yourURL

A little while back, having your pages indexed in Google’s Supplemental Index caused webmasters much stress as it seemed Google was judging these pages as “second class” pages. Since then, Google no longer uses the Supplementary Label in grading pages but that doesn’t mean a supplementary index doesn’t exist; just that Google has promised to crawl and consider these pages as well in any search query.

Checking Your Google Cache

You can also check to see the Google Cache of your site by using the cache command. You will also discover when it was last retrieved.

Just type into Google Search:

cache:yourURL

Checking Your PageRank Within Google

Another tricky issue is PageRank. This is supposed to be the heart of Google’s ranking system created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin; each link is considered a “vote” for your page and the higher the number of “votes” you have, the higher the PR your page receives. However, again Google is using “smoke and mirrors” to conceal your true PageRank mainly to cut out abuse and manipulation of their results. Some experts say PageRank still counts, other say it doesn’t.

You can check your Google PageRank here:

http://www.iwebtool.com/pagerank_checker

From my own experiences, I have receíved more traffic when my site was at PR4 than I receíved when it was at PR6. What’s important is getting high rankings for your targeted keywords… if you get top spots, it doesn’t matter if your main index page (site) is PR4 or PR6, you’ll still get the same amount of traffic. In other words, don’t become too fixated on PageRank because Google in many cases is not letting you see the true PR of a webpage.

I would like to add one point to the whole PageRank issue and that has to do with perception. If you’re running an online business, then having a PR8 site does matter for it will bring in more business and customers (especially if you’re in the SEO industry) mainly because of the “perceived value” of your site or business.

What Google thinks does matter!

In other words, what Google thinks of your site can play a major role in your success. Mainly because, like it or hate it, Google has become the supreme authority on the web and what they say, counts. Therefore, you should always be paying special attention to just what Google is saying about your site and acting upon that knowledge accordingly.
About The Author
The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: Marketing Tools. Everyone is profiting from Google, find out how you can too! Clíck here: Google Cash File