I do this all the time. It’s so easy to click “Maps” on my iPhone, search for what I want, and get red pushpins indicating nearby places that match my search. I just click one of the pushpins to get crucial information that can seal the deal: phone number, website, and street address. When I’m on the go, it’s great that Google Maps lets me get directions to the business, or give them a call. (You can watch a video on how Google Maps works on the iPhone.)

A Google search for “restaurant portland” turned up the top seven results from Google Maps.

This all works the same for anyone doing a Google Maps search on a computer.

If your business is listed in Google Places with full and correct information, someone searching Google Maps for “[what your business does] [your city]” may see your listing in what is sometimes called the “7-Pack” (pictured at left). It’s a map with a list of local businesses that match the search. Best of all: The 7-Pack shows up at the top of Google Maps search results! Here’s a video Google posted about how one person used Google Maps and the 7-Pack. (Note: It was the 10-Pack at that time).

Not sure if your business is listed in Google Places?

Go to Maps.Google.com and search for [your business name] and [your city]. If you see a red pushpin on the map where your business is located, check the letter that’s on the pushpin in the list next to the map to make sure it’s your business that’s listed. If you don’t appear on the map or in the list, you can create a listing for your business in Google Places.

If your business is listed with incorrect address or phone information, you can fix that in Google Places.

How to make Google Maps more effective for your business

First off, you want to make sure that your business is listed in appropriate categories. This will help it show up when people search for those categories, or keywords. For example, if your store sells both running shoes and bicycles, you’ll want to include both “running shoes” and “bicycles” in the categories section of your listing.

Next, it’s crucial that all your relevant contact information is present and correct in your Google Places listing. On numerous occasions, I have found a business and called the listed phone number to ask a simple question while on my way to spend money there, only to discover the number was wrong. Other times I have found a business, called the number and found out they had a website that would have been very helpful — but it didn’t appear with the other information.

Ask your customers to review you on Google Maps. All they have to do is click on “reviews” or “more info” that appears below your address and phone number in your listing. Favorable, detail-rich reviews can help you attract new customers. Who wouldn’t want to visit a a business they found in Google Maps that has a 4- or 5-star rating and several good reviews?

How to edit your Google Places listing

Search for your business in Google Maps (Maps.Google.com). Click on the name of your business in the list to the left of the map, or the pushpin on the map itself. Your listing will pop up in a white bubble, like the image above and to the right of Produce Row Cafe’s listing.

Click the “more” option at the bottom right in the bubble, and then click “edit details” in the drop-down menu. Make your edits and click “Publish”. The changes will show up after they’ve been reviewed by a person at Google. Other editing options can be accessed under the “more” link as well, such as moving an incorrectly placed pushpin (marker) and adding a review.

I recommend going back into edit mode and clicking the “Claim your business” link that appears in the top right portion of the page. This gives you more control over the details of your listing, you also get access to more features, and it may help you rank better.

Need more help? Go to Google Places Help for business owners.

How do I get my listing to show up higher?

Ah, there’s the real question. Google is mum on this, but here are some of the best answers we’ve found:

Can help your rank:

• Claiming your Google Places listing
• Accurate categories
• Customer reviews
• A website that Google ranks high in search results
• Consistent contact information across your other listings around the web

Can hurt your rank:

• No address, or just a P.O. box *
• Multiple Google Places listings with the same contact information or business name
• No phone number with local area code
• Overwhelmingly bad reviews

*What about home-based businesses? Now there’s an option.

“Build it and they will come” may be an effective strategy for a Kevin Costner movie, but it won’t work in the jungle of today’s web. Mining the rich opportunities available to companies requires the right tools and techniques. Without those tools, you risk being eaten alive by your better-equipped competitors.

Like an intrepid explorer in the wild, the person searching for something in the jungle of the Internet needs a map and good directions. A properly built website and a well-designed search-engine strategy are the map and directions that will lead new customers to your website.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of directing the right people to your website, at the moment when they are looking for what you’re selling. By optimizing your site’s visibility to search engines, you’re putting your business on the Internet map, and outlining quick, easy routes to your site.

Americans increasingly rely on the Internet to help them make buying decisions. According to a consumer study by media advisory firm BIA/Kelsey, 97 percent of consumers use the Internet to research local products and services.

Making your website visible to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo is critical. If these search engines can’t find you, your prospects probably won’t find you, either.

SEO is not one thing, it’s many things

Optimizing your site for search engines starts by learning how the engines determine whether a specific web page is relevant to someone’s search.

A search engine looks for different cues on a web page to determine what it’s about. These cues must be designed into the page layout, and written into the page’s code and text.

The core concepts of SEO can be boiled down to the three Cs: content, code and credibility.

• Content must be unique, valuable to readers and filled with the words that your prospective customers are most likely to use when they search for your offerings.
• Code must be clean so it doesn’t impede search engines as they scan your site’s content. At a very high level, this includes the type, placement and amount of code.
• Credibility is conveyed by a number of factors, including:
  • How long your site has been on the web
  • How many relevant, credible sites link to your site
  • Your site’s PageRank, a value that Google assigns to convey how authoritative a site is

Ideally, you should optimize your site for search engines from the very first planning stages. But even if your site is already up and running, you can still optimize by using best SEO practices.

Top Search Engines

Google dominates the search market. In the first half of 2010, Google was used for more than 71 percent of Internet searches in the United States, and more than 80 percent of global searches.

Though other search engines are well known – Yahoo and Bing together account for almost 25 percent of U.S. searches – it’s Google’s guidelines and recommendations that are taken most seriously within the search industry. Best practices for Google are typically the best practices for all search engines.

SEO: Cost effective marketing

Properly done, SEO can cost less – and deliver better results – than any other form of online marketing. Although the initial costs of hiring an SEO agency or purchasing a content management system may seem high, the long-term payoff can be significantly higher. That’s because unlike ads, which are often perceived as an interruption of someone’s activity, search engine results are delivered to people exactly when they are actively looking for something they need or want.

SEO offers another important benefit: accountability. Using the right tools, it’s easy to track how well a given keyword performs in attracting searchers to your website and getting them to buy or opt in to a desired activity. That makes it much easier to determine return on investment and make decisions about how to spend precious marketing dollars.

You can dramatically lower your cost per lead when you employ good SEO practices. By researching and targeting the most effective keywords and keyword phrases for your audience, you can reach precisely the people you want to reach, at the moment when they are preparing to make a buying decision. That’s a much more efficient strategy than broadcast advertising, whether on the web or by traditional means.



Look if you haven’t noticed lately, everyone seems to think they are a Twitter expert. The fact of the matter is there isn’t a single person out there who is a Twitter expert. NOT ONE!

They are all selling you or feeding you information that you could find out very easily on your own. So put away your credit card, and start focusing on what really matters, and the truth is what matters.

The truth of the matter is that Twitter isn’t even an expert on Twitter. If they were an expert on Twitter, don’t you think they would’ve found a way to monetize it at this point? Every single automated direct message I’ve ever seen come from a “twitter expert” is something that I learned through my own 20 minute Google research. Trust yourself. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t even trust what I say. Seek out the knowledge for yourself. I love to teach everyone whatever I can because it’s what I’m passionate about, but even some of the big dogs that I read screw up from time to time.

I hope all of you are reading daily, not just blogs, or forums, grab this thing called a book, read it, take notes, and formulate your own ideas reflecting upon what you’ve just read. It’s weird how they say everything you need to learn you learn in Kindergarten, well here is another such example.

I’ll be here in the meantime trying to get you the best knowledge to the best of my abilities, as quickly as is humanly possible. I have a great following and I can’t thank all of you enough. You make my day that much more special. Thanks for reading. Now take a tip from your high school principle and hit the books.]]> http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/twitter-tips-from-the-guru/stop-reading-bs-tips-dominate-twitter/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/branding/marketing-4-ps-seo http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/branding/marketing-4-ps-seo#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:46:20 +0000 admin http://www.soloseo.com/blog/2007/08/30/the-marketing-4-ps-and-seo/ Much of a discussion on marketing can be broken down into what is termed “The Marketing Mix, or the 4 Ps” namely; Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Product being the service or product we sell, Price being the retail price a customer will pay for the product, Place being the locale where the product is purchased and Promotion being how we get our message out to the masses, and what we attempt to communicate in order to convince them to buy. The goal of a marketer then is to properly address the 4 Ps for their specific situation and to sell as many units of product as is potentially possible. The online world is a bit of a different marketing animal. Some of the 4 Ps haven’t changed much, and others have. Our Product essentially remains the same. The Price is also not changed too much, although with increase access to information, and more access to online resellers, economists would expect at least a downward pressure on price, if not overall lower prices altogether. Place can also can be a bit different, while many of us may still have a store front, there are some small business owners who only sell their products online. So presently, we either sell both online, and through a brick and mortar store front, or we just sell online which is a new spin on “Place.” Finally we have Promotion, which in some cases is very similar to how we promote offline. Using banners and Ads on webpages. As an example, at the top right of Andy’s Marketing Pilgrim home page, we see ads prominently displayed to Andy’s thousands of visitors. This can be a very good online advertising option, as we are able to target clients who we can predict visit sites with a certain theme, and we have a degree of control on the content, color and message of our ad. Advertising our revolutionary new socks for example, on a site developed to provide marathon running tips to novice runners would predictably be a good advertising opportunity/match. In online promotion we also have the opportunity to start an ad campaign and purchase ad space on search engine results pages. Both Yahoo and Google have programs for doing this. So if we search for “marathon running” in about any search engine, we will not only have organic or unpaid results, typically found in the center of the page, but we will also see a column of paid ads down the right hand, and sometimes even across the top of our results page. Again this type of advertising allows marketers to target potential clients they believe would be most interested in their product. However, these results page ads are frightfully limiting compared to other forms of both online and offline marketing. The ads all look the same in color and size, there are limitations on what can be stated, and on how many words can be used to get the message across. So it is much more difficult to really stand out through ads on a results page, I personally rarely look at these ads. Imagine driving down a Freeway with all the billboards having a white background, with an underlined blue heading (sometimes it may be bolded, wow!), black text of approximately 10 words, and a green URL link at the bottom, that’s it. Not many keen marketers would pay the billboard owners for such a poor advertising opportunity, but it may be a good way to get rid of all the billboards. Now, I am not a big supporter of billboards in the first place, in fact, they don’t make much sense to me at all. It has nothing to do with whether they work or not from a marketing perspective, I just don’t understand why we want these colorful distractions taking the attention of drivers moving along at 70 mph, with other distracted drivers all around them. It seems smarter to keep all the attention focused on the road, hey, maybe billboards painted right on the road? And don’t tell me these billboards are mainly for the car passengers, the HOV lanes around the country prove there aren’t many passengers in all those cars. Anyway, to make standing out or ranking well on search engines results page even seems more difficult, when we learned earlier this summer from Google’s Udi Manber, that 25% of all search queries are brand new, and never have been used previously. So how to do we target those evolving clients? In this apparent increasing difficulty in search engine marketing, we should really be seeing an opportunity to become specialists at anticipating the keywords our clients will use to find what they need. I see a very interesting research project here. It would be cool to analyze the behavior of a test group when they are all given the same, random items to search for online. It would be amazing to see how each would construct their query to best find what were looking for. It is this intellectual process we need to focus upon as online marketers and small business owners, how potential clients are conjuring up their searchers, what is the basis of their search, how do current events and trends influence their queries? With these questions in mind, creation of new keyword phrases will keep things fresh and relevant. We need to remember that due to the thousands of pages thrown on the Internet each day, the process of search has become quite different and more complex. Many of us understand that our searches need to be more detailed in order for us to truly find what we want, quickly. Searchers actually use long-tailed, localized keyword searches to get around the garbage Wikipedia like pages, and the miserable “informational” websites only created to rake in Adsense revenue. My average search queries are now at least 5 words, and usually contain a localization aspect to them. So if we are mindful that 25% of search queries are new, and potential clients are using longer and longer tailed searches to find what they need, then we understand our creative juices really need to get flowing to benefit from the new long-tailed keywords trend. And we need to be addressing these long tail keywords possibilities for all our sites on a regular basis. Whether we create a new web page, change some product descriptions, or add a blog post using our new keyword phrases, it needs to be done. It is actually quite amazing how quickly one can rank number 1 when the keyword phrases used are unique and well placed. And many will be surprised when some of these phrases not only start bringing in new clients for the specific phrase, but also start ranking well for just portions of the original long-tail phrase originally created.]]> http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/branding/marketing-4-ps-seo/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/twitter-tips-from-the-guru/twitter-24-billion-search-queries-month http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/twitter-tips-from-the-guru/twitter-24-billion-search-queries-month#comments Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:53:58 +0000 admin http://www.penn-olson.com/?p=18891 Search engine has taken a new form, where results are shown in nuggets of information kept within 140 characters each. Yes, that’s Twitter!

According to its co-founder, Biz Stone, the micro-blogging site has reached over 800 million search queries. That’s over 24 billion searches per month, more than Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) combined.

From Fast Company:

“While Stone’s company is still a long way off from Google, which supports around 88 billion search queries per month, Twitter is quickly catching up. Since last April, Twitter searches are up 33%. To put that in perspective, a study by Nielsen last year concluded that Bing was the fastest-growing search engine in the U.S. after it ballooned over 22%. Now it seems Twitter has taken the title.”

Promoted Tweets

This piece of news also helps to explain Twitter’s monetization plan. Promoted Tweets only appear in the search results page as Twitter relentlessly pursuits the fine balance between ad relevancy and profitability. It’s resonance score metrics, too, has also contributed to its early success. Given its massive amount of search queries, we’re pretty sure advertisers are getting quality impressions in quantity.

About The Site:

GarlasonsFloors.com is one of our favorite websites to date.

We created this site for a local hardwood flooring company who was looking for a way to better showcase the awesome beauty of his work.  It includes some super cool AJAX effects, which allow visitors to sort out the types of work they are interested in seeing. To see how this works, simply visit the portfolio page of their site and click on the brown boxes, which say such things as “living room”, “kitchen”, etc.

The slide show on the front page is automatically generated, and can be changed by simply uploading new static images.

This is our first WordPress 3.0 website, and we’ve used a lot of the new functionality it presents.

We hope that you like it too!

Facebook has become an incredible online community that is a gold mine for anyone interested in advertising or creating brand awarness. Not only does Facebook have over 400 Million active users, but it has many great ways for business owners to reach these users in a legit way. Below we will talk about the core advertising methods you can dabble in on Facebook and how you can make the most of them.

5 Ways to Promote Your Business on Facebook

1. Facebook Profiles

Creating a profile is the most basic thing you can do on Facebook and it is required if you want to do anything else such as create a group or page. Make sure you fully fill out your profile because a full profile looks a lot more interesting then an empty one. You can also add your website URL in several locations and be sure to talk about your business and plug your website URL in the appropriate spots as mentioned.

Then you should start adding friends to your profile each day. The Current limit is 5,000 friends but this may be lifted in the future. If you add 20 friends a day which would take you maybe 5 minutes in one month you will have 600 friends! From my testing you will have to type in a CAPTCHA or anti spam code for the first 10-15 friend adds, but after that it seemed to go away and it was a lot quicker to add friends. I wouldn’t not recommend adding to many friends each day because it will come off as spammy.

Now that you have your profile created and optimized you can create a Facebook group or even better a Facebook page, both of which we will go over below.

2. Facebook Groups

Groups were available before pages and are more of a place for users to discuss topics such as graphic design or cars. Its almost like a mini forums. The benefits for group owners is they are very viral and you can bulk invite all you friends to join your group. The problem is they are not indexed and not available to view unless you are a member of Facebook.

I recommend creating a Facebook group for your business, but honestly Facebook pages are really where its at and you should focus your efforts on your page instead of your group.

3. Facebook Pages

Facebook pages are all about business and have many of the same features available as groups, but with some extra key features available. The main benefit of pages is the fact that they are indexed by Google and available to view even if you are not a member so promoting the page is easy.

When creating your page make sure you use your most important keyword as the page name so that it shows as the page title, making your page more SEO friendly. Like you did with your profile, fill out your Facebook page with all relevant information about your business, website URLS and so on.

The best way to promote your page is to offer some sort of giveaway if you are not a major brand. This way you give a people a reason to become a fan of page. Once they are a fan you can send updates which is the best part of having a Facebook page for your business.

Groups may work well virally, but so do Facebook pages. Whenever some one becomes a fan of your page it shows up in their profile and looks something like this: Person’s Name, Became a fan of Your Business Name.

So if you give your page a good jump start it could really take off. The number of fans you can have has no limit and some pages have anywhere from several thousand fans to over 500 thousand fans!

So if you wanted to focus on one thing I would highly recommend creating a Facebook page, instead of a group and putting all your advertising efforts towards the Facebook page.

Some Example of Popular Facebook Pages

• Pizza
• Domino’s Pizza
• Pizza Hut
• MoonViper Web Services

4. Facebook Applications

The introduction of Facebook Applications is probably the most popular move made by Facebook to date. They released their API so developers and business owners could collaborate to create fun and cool applications that engage users. The applications created so far vary in purpose; some are fun games, some are useful and some are directly related and tied into businesses.

Many popular applications have hundreds of thousands of monthly active users and that information speaks for itself, so if you want to read more about creating applications for Facebook, I highly recommend checking out the Facebook Developers page. Once you have an application created, be sure to add it to your profile and to your Facebook group and page!

5. Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are a great way to really increase your exposure using highly targeted CPC and CPM Advertising. You can target users by age, gender, location, interests, and even attach friend-to-friend interactions about your business to your ads.

The best part is you can either advertise an external website or a Facebook page. So if you created a page earlier for your business and you are looking to build up your facebook fan page you can do so easily by driving the traffic form your advertisements directly to your page.

So join Facebook today and start working on your Facebook promotions, because if your competition is not on Facebook already, they will be soon!

What if you don’t have a Facebook Page?

If you don’t have a Facebook page, we can create one for you for as little as $100. Simply contact us for more information.

Getting started can be a little overwhelming so in this Tuesday Tip we’re sharing a few easy ways that you should build and promote your brand and business using free online tools.

Establish a social media presence. In addition to a MerchantCircle listing page, you should also set up Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook accounts. Talk to customers, create discussions, connect to other merchants. The opportunity to network and be where your customers are is invaluable!

Be consistent- Respond to feedback. Blog. Send updates and newsletters. Stay in touch with customers to identify wants and needs. But do it regularly. Don’t pull a Houdini on your followers! Make sure they know that you’re available.

Be Human- Use real pictures. Tell your story. Introduce your hard-working team.  Have a strong voice and be transparent. If you’re working on something talk about it. If you made a mistake, fess up. Being honest builds trust. So be real!

Pay attention- Listen to customer feedback. Set Google alerts for your business and topics specific to your business. Use your online channels to ask questions and offer solutions. And it doesn’t hurt to check in on your competitors. Read Yelp reviews for your business and businesses like yours. Learn what your customers like and don’t like.

Return the favor- If you’re sending our surveys, fill ‘em out when they land in your inbox. (Hint: Survey monkey is a great tool for that!) Posting questions? Answer some. Respond in forums. Fan local business pages on Facebook, accept Merchant invites, and don’t be afraid to click that Re-Tweet button on Twitter.

Growing your business and building your brand will take some time- but keep it up! You’ll be a social media star before you know it!

Ask the PPC (pay per click) experts and they will say that free website promotion does not work. Maybe you do not get instant traffic as with paid methods such as PPC but even though free website promotion methods take time to work, they also tend to keep on working.

Yes free website promotion is feasible and does work well but it takes time and patience to get traffic to your new website.

Here are some tips to promote your website for free.

1. Get Your Website Listed.

Find the best internet directories and have them list your website. Some will list your site quickly but most will either be slow or even decline your listing request. Make sure your website is well formatted, looks good and not like a work in progress so that you have a higher chance of being listed.

2. Participate Actively in Forums.

Select appropriate forums for your niche and post regularly because forums are a great source of free website promotion if done well. Do not spam forums and only use your signature for promotion.

3. Consider Writing a Press Release.

Write a press release to advertise your new site or latest information about your site. Submit it to press release sites which you can easily find by doing a simple search for “press release”.

4. Check Out Your Competition.

Check out your competition and be friendly to them so that in time they will link to you site because the more link juice webmasters can get the better they rank.

5. Write Great Articles.

Write articles with tips and information about your niche and submit them to article directories. Other webmasters are always looking for content for their sites and there is a good chance that well written articles will get published by them. Advertise your website in the article resource box so people can click through to your site for more information.

6. Email Signatures.

Insert your website, its URL and features in your daily emails and let them spread the word about your site. Do not forget to add your website and its URL to the bottom of your auto-responder emails so your subscribers can click through for more information about your niche.

7. Banner Ads.

Banner ads are not as effectively as they once were but if your can create a great banner for your site why not ask other webmasters to swap banners with you. If nothing else they will create links back to your site and give you a better SEO ranking.

If you are a website owner then you would aspire to take your business to the top via your website which is a fantastic medium to reach millions of potential customers. For achieving the defined targets you have to take some actions related to promotion of your website. These actions will also be helpful in maintaining long term growth and profit for your business. Some tips to promote your website are as follows:

Just like any other business, your business would also be having a name that clearly implies who you are and what you sell. In the same manner while building a website make sure to pick up a website name that is easy to remember and have a simple domain name. For a customer it is easy to remember a simple website name.

You might be emailing your existing costumers, prospective clients and others. Your website name should appear at the bottom of your email signatures for everyone you mail. This is how you can spread your name and your business even though you are not selling directly.

Your website should be ornamented with interesting and relevant articles. They should be written for people to read and should be related to the products or services you are selling. If your visitors get something worth reading then there are increased chances that your website shows up early in the web search. This is good for your business or product promotion.

By starting a blog about related things to your business you can attract attention of visitors to your regular business website. Include a link to your website at the bottom or within your web blog entries.

If you have launched a new product or service then make a press release that informs your target market about it. These press releases can be submitted to press release websites as well as local newspapers and news stations.

Getting a good organic rank for websites is the top priority today. Due to this Search Engine Optimization is increasingly been practiced by many business owners.

You can easily find a whole lot of information regarding various optimizing techniques, website architecture, crawling and indexing on the World Wide Web but when it actually boils down to the implementation process, you will be really amazed with all the nuances involved in it.

The primary question which generally bothers website owners is that how easy it is for search engines to crawl websites? Since Internet is vast and new contents are being regularly updated, it becomes virtually impossible for search engine robots to crawl the entire content present online. This means that only a percentage of this content is crawled by search engine spiders. Moreover amongst the crawled content, only a portion is indexed due to availability of limited resources.

Elaborating on this topic further, Susan Moskwa of Google, recently uploaded a presentation giving smart tips on how to optimize your crawling & indexing. She states that since URLs act as bridges between a website and a search engine crawler you should not make them complicated or redundant. In order to allow crawlers to be able to find and crawl your URLs, organize them in such a way that crawlers are directly led to distinct contents of your website. On doing this you will prevent crawlers from wasting time on going through empty web-pages and/or crawling same web content again and again via different URLs. Optimization of URLs allows crawlers to spend their time accessing the actual content of your website.

There are some important real life examples that have been categorized under a “not to do” list. These include homegrown URL hacks and encoding, parameters camouflaged as part of the URL path and infinite crawl spaces. In addition to these, you will also find some other useful recommendations like removal of user-specific details from URLs, disallowing actions which Google-bot cannot normally perform and sticking to one URL for a particular set of content.

So if you too want to make search engine crawlers trace your website faster, do make sure to follow all the above Google SEO tips next time you optimize your website.

So what are Solo Ezine Advertisements? Merely mentioned, these are advertisements revealed in ezines or news letters where no alternative advertisement competes in opposition to your promoting message. Additionally understand as Stand Alone Ads. This commercial is then sent to subscribers of ezines who have already approved to get these ezines and any accompanying promotions.

Usually referred to as the KING of ezine advertising, the solo ad permits the advertiser to succeed in her audience of keen to buy opt-in subscribers. These subscribers are already familiar with the publisher of the ezine and trust his or her suggestions.

A well made ad sent through this kind of marketing has the likelihood to create fortunes. Several online professionals have used this methodology to create huge web businesses.

While no one will assure your ad will build you a fortune, using this technique can provide you the simplest probability of getting your marketing message out to heat, willing to shop for interested subscribers.

Once you get rid of competition from other advertisers by using solo ads, it’s up to you to develop your advertising to get that supreme click and shut the sale.

How Solo Ezine Ads Work
One in all the greats of using stand alone promotions is the amount of words you are able to use. Typically publishers permit promotions to incorporate up to 500 words. This allows you to form headlines, bulleted points, and your URL. Assume of it as a mini-mini website.

Your advertisements should have an awareness getting headline (believable headline) subheadings, bullets, and a decision to action. On top of all list, advantages, advantages, edges!

Take full benefit of the quantity of house being offered. Scan your ad, let others read your ad. State a problem, then share how your product or service will resolve it for them.

Once you have a commercial ready, you would like to seek out a resource that can send your message to their readers.

If your specific market is outside of internet marketers, we have a tendency to recommend doing a hunt for ezine directories. Some require membership fees and others are free. There are 1000s of ezines and newsletters to decide on from. Not all will permit promoting. However, you’ll be able to subscribe to some to work out if they are of worth, if thus, contact the publisher and provide your product or service for his or her review. A sensible review from a credited publisher can mean profits to you.

Track Your Ads
Tracking your ads is terribly imperative. If you insert advertisements with additional than one vendor you’ll would like to understand that are pulling and that aren’t pulling.

Are Solo Ezine Ads Dead?
With the appearance of Google AdWords, and therefore the mad rush to advertise using this successful method, Web marketers left the ezine world. This leaves an old but still effective marketing door open, particularly for niche marketers.

Spend a while nowadays looking for quality ezines in your targeted market. A very well written solo commercial during a established ezine will still create the mortgage payment.

Finding people to see your brand-new website is unquestionably a hard endeavor. It takes lots of time to generate a regular flow of traffic to your websites. However these day there are various different methods you can take a look at to help you speed up the process.

Putting together an autoblog is a great demonstration of automation. It is possible to create an entire network of targeted traffic and money generating specific niche market websites in less than an hour or so. By simply seeking out related and high quality content material, auto blog software guarantees your blog is relevant towards the niche you are targeting. You will not ever need to craft a bit of content again since the autoblog program creates fresh and new posts every single day!

Despite the fact that the content material won’t be unique, as time passes your auto blog will rank adequately for countless long end key words giving massive amounts of cost-free natural and organic visitors to your blog ready for you to earn money. It may sound like very hard work but trust me it isn’t!

Web 2 websites such as Flickr and MySpace are perfect sources for eager visitors and targeted visitors. Every single social website is separated into categories so that it is effortless to discover plenty of people that are eager to look over your content, social websites makes it simple to focus on your target sector!

Mixing the auto blog method with social web traffic is a dangerous blend and can hammer your site with traffic as time passes! Even though all the content material on your autoblog will be replicated content taken from numerous locations on the net, Search engines still ranks the auto blogs highly in their search results!

I have a massive network of auto blogs running all of which utilize duplicate content material and take benefit from social media web-sites on full auto-pilot each and every day! It is one of the easiest methods to make money online, and even though it calls for a bit of time for you to startup after that you may forget about this!

You should certainly think about blogging automatically if you are wanting to generate income on-line or improve your existing web earnings!

1.Link building with commenting on do-follow blogs

Here the key is do-follow blog. Many blog comments are no-followed, which means that search engines will not give weight to the link. Followlist.com provides dofollow blogs where you can leave comments that give link weight and you will definitely find out some blogs that are relevant to your niche.

2.Link build with directories submissions

If you are serious about your website, submitting articles to article directories website is essential. Article writing is a good way for building traffic and backlinks because many webmasters and people who publish newsletters or their own blog are of high likely to get their content from the different article directories republished on their websites. However, according to the terms of service of these article directories, they must leave the resource boxes and the links within the article unchanged, which means you can expect backlinks from their visitors if your article is valuable. But the problem is that submitting articles to directories can be more time-consuming especially if you are not so good at writing. Overall, it deserves your try.

3.ink building with guest posting

Guest posting as the name suggested is posting on others blog instead of yours. Guest posting is a win-win process. As for the blog owner, it gives the blogger a chance to relax for some fresh ideas to publish unique content on their blog. As for guest blogger, guest posting has lots of benefits: you will not only see traffic overflow from that blog to your blog but also find out that it’s also a great way to get yourself known among the blogosphere around that blog.

4.Link building with using anchor text

It is widely known that using anchor text in your links will help you build quality backlinks to your site and can greatly helped the search engines more aware of them. What is anchor text? It is simply the text in a link to your page. The importance of anchor text has been defined by many SEO experts because search engines use it in their algorithms to determine their rankings. For instance, if one of your keywords of your blog is “free ebooks”, what you need to do is anchor the link to your site within those words. With each time the phrase displayed in your anchor text, you chances for increasing your ranking for that phrase will be increased. It is worthwhile to note that you should not insert the irrelevant keyword to your website or you will run the risk of being penalized by Google.

5. Link building with social bookmarking websites

Social bookmarking websites are become increasing popular these days and they can be used as a very good source of backlinks. The core here is to create good original content on your website and then submit to social bookmarking sites. After you have got your content displayed on the popular social bookmarking websites, the possibility that your article get broadcasted thousands of times will be increased.

6.Link building with forum signatures

These days, many forums offer Dofollow link via signatures of signed up users. If you can receive backlink from a popular forum, it will be very valuable for you. Whenever you know the answer to the question that other people asked it is advised simply answer it. With your signatures of every post and the link to your website, you will definitley get some backlink to your website. Compared with article writhing, forum postings can be short and do not require much effort, it is the most common and easy practice to get back links.

Creating a powerful and productive website is as easy as 1, 2, 3! (Well, really, there are seven steps, so let’s get started!)

STEP 1: DECLARE YOUR INTENTION & MAKE GOALS
A truly stellar website is created with intention. So begin the process by writing down your goals. What do you want your website to do for you? You’ll have both primary and secondary goals.

STEP 2: DECIDE ON THE WEB PAGES
Once you have your goals written down, you can rough out your website. Most small business professionals in the service industry can get by with four to six pages. At the very least, you’ll need a Home page, Services page, About Us page, and Contact Us page. If your budget allows, you should consider some other pages that will help your clients understand more about you, such as a Testimonials page and a Portfolio page.

STEP 3: WRITE YOUR WEBSITE TEXT
The next step is to begin writing your website text (also known as “copy.”) You can do this yourself if you enjoy writing and have a good mastery of grammar, punctuation, spelling, word flow, and compelling statements. If you are not a stellar writer, it may be a good idea to hire a copywriter. As you create your web copy, always keep your target market in mind. What would make them want to work with you? What do they need most? Why are they visiting your site? What kind of information can you provide that is interesting and relevant to them? And, although this may sound basic, make sure your site tells visitors who you are and what you do.

STEP 4: DESIGN YOUR WEBSITE
Your website is your company’s storefront, and it must look professional and portray the right image. It must have the perfect combination of fantastic imagery and technical functionality. If your budget will not allow you to hire a designer, you can do it yourself, but keep it simple. Companies like GoDaddy.com offer website templates you can use or you can purchase a program like Dreamweaver or Frontpage to create a site from scratch. You’ll need to purchase your domain name as soon as possible. GoDaddy.com has very affordable rates, at under $10 per year per domain name. You’ll also need to find a website hosting company, which will likely charge you by the month to “host” your website files. Shop around, because prices really vary. (Or, use the FREE website hosting company that I recommend in my Purposeful Website Planning How-To Guide.)

STEP 5: GIVE ATTENTION TO THE DETAILS
You’ll want to make your website easy to navigate, quick-to-load, and easy-to-read. Fonts, colors, photos, graphics, and links all can make or break the success of your site. Don’t forget to make it accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Visit http://www.w3.org/WAI to see a list of guidelines for how to create web sites that are accessible to as many people (and systems) as possible.

STEP 6: OPTIMIZE SO SEARCH ENGINES CAN FIND YOU
Search Engine Optimization (also called SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a website from search engines (like Google and Yahoo) via unpaid search results. Your goal is to appear earlier/higher up on a search engine results list, because most people look at the first few websites that appear as a result of their search. Your web designer should optimize your website for you. If you design your own site, you’ll have to do this yourself. For example, your website should have hidden code that lists your “meta tags.” This includes key words and phrases that your target market will use to find your type of business via the search engines. Also, add fresh content regularly. This will improve your rankings. Consider adding a blog within your site, and update it at least twice a week. (More helpful tips about optimization can be found in my Purposeful Website Planning How-To Guide.)

STEP 7: ASSESS & UPDATE YOUR SITE REGULARLY
Put it on your calendar to thoroughly review your website quarterly. Make sure all the external links still work, all your contact information is still accurate, and that the site reflects the services you offer. Consider your website a work in progress. A great website is your best marketing bet, so take the time to do it right!

SEO (Search Engine Marketing) and Internet Marketing usually go hand in hand. Both are sometimes considered dirty, or “four letter” words; however, if done correctly, good SEO and internet marketing can boost search engine results in a matter of weeks, if not sooner. If you wish to boost your website’s page rank to finally see your listing at the front of the line, following these tips is a good place to start.

1. Backlinks, Backlinks and more Backlinks: Not just any backlinks, though. Quality backlinks are the key and preferential to quantity. Your site makes a bigger showing in the search engines when it is linked to a high rated or ranked site which is popular and not blacklisted. Avoid link farms and blind linking, or your website may be penalized as a result. Any links to pages or sites known for spam or on a blacklist will almost instantly see your own site on the blacklist with theirs.

2. Outbound Links: These types are just the opposite of backlinks. These are links from your website to other reputable websites. The sites you link to should rank well, not be on a blacklist, and not link to spam sites or be a party to spamming or other bad SEO practices.

3. Deep Backlinks: Using backlinks to link directly to target pages within your website instead of to the home page. These links are considered better quality because the person linking is not doing it blindly, without having seen the content. This is achieved the same way as backlinking.

4. Unique Unduplicated Fresh Content: Fresh content makes for better indexing of your website. The more your site updates, the more it is crawled. However, avoid duplicate, plagiarized or PLR content or you will be headed to the dreaded duplicate content search results.

5. Natural, NOT Spammy, Keyword Placement: Search engine crawlers are looking for relevant keywords in relation to the content within the website. The better placed your chosen keywords, the more the crawlers will look at them and your website.

6. Keyword Density: Anything more than 2 to 5 percent keyword density is overdoing it; your site will appear as spam to the crawlers and your site penalized for it with lower rankings.

7. Title & Photo Keywords Count! Photos and titles should contain some of the same keywords as the content. If the keyword used in the article or blog post is Love, then the title and photo should also contain the same word. The same rule for keywords within content applies; no overdone or spammy keywords or the crawlers may penalize you for it.

8. URL Keyword Formatting: The URL of the page should be formatted properly using keywords as well. For example, if you have a post titled “How Do I Rank Well?” The URL matching the post title, assuming you used proper keyword placement in your title, would appear as: “(your side address).com-/how-do-i-rank-well”

9. Good Navigation & Site map: This is probably one of the most overlooked SEO techniques in history. For a website with not too many backlinks or outbound links, this strategy will ensure that when the crawlers hit your site, they will index every page.

10. Social Networking Profiles and Pages: this is an excellent way to boost search engine rankings. Facebook fan pages, Twitter followers, MySpace groups and other website groups and pages devoted to your company’s website will get your website’s name out there and noticed. All strategies used for your website should be utilized for your social networking profiles as well for best results.

Here are 3 fast ways to get a new web site into Google:

1. Get a link from a web site that is already in Google

The quality and quantity of links pointing to your web site determines its ranking in Google. Your ranking will increase in proportion to the links you get.

One of the best ways is to write an article and submit it to article directories since these are well established and get indexed by Google every day.

Visit forums or blogs related to your web site content and leave a well written and informative post. If you provide information that is valuable to others they will naturally wish to link to you.

2. Add a blog to your web site

Blogs tend to be quickly indexed by Google. Create a blog for your business then include links back to your web site in your posts. Google will find your web site by indexing your blog entry.

3. Submit a Press Release

Create a press release about your web site and submit it to:

PRWeb
http://www.prwebdirect.com/

Free Press Release
http://www.free-press-release.com/

Make sure your press release is interesting, informative to read and includes a link back to your web site. If many people read it you may get hundreds or thousands of new links which will result in an immediate boost in traffic.

Social media marketing can easily consume a large portion of your day if you are not organized or have a clear focus. The article below provides 5 easy steps you can do daily to monitor your social media sites.

How to Monitor Your Social Media Presence in 10 Minutes a Day

Monitoring your business’ social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. However, a common concern is that it takes up too much time.

The team at MoonViper spreads out the responsibilities, but it’s entirely possible for one person to keep an eye on things. If you set up a solid routine, monitoring your online presence doesn’t have to be a hassle at all.

Here are five free, easy steps you can take to get things started. Do each task in the morning when you start work, and you should be good to go.

1) Check Twitter for chatter about your company (2 minutes): Use tools like TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company in real-time. To check once a day, set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter Search to go straight to your Google Reader. Do this by clicking the little RSS icon after you complete a search. Now, ongoing search results will be sent to your reader.

2) Scan Google Alerts (1.5 minutes): Check your Google Alerts for your company name, products, executives or brand terms. To set this up, enter your search terms and select to receive updates as they happen or once daily. Now, when people blog about your products, an alert will be sent to your inbox. You can read the articles and respond right away!

3) Check Facebook stats (1 minute): Visit your Company Page’s Facebook Insights. This can be found by clicking “more” under the page’s main photo. Scan your fans and page views count. If you are a member of a group, check to see if any new discussions started.

4) Answer Industry-related LinkedIn questions (3 minutes): Search for questions on LinkedIn that you or members of your company can answer. You can set up an RSS feed for specific question categories to go to your Google Reader as well. When you find a relevant question, respond and include a link to your website.

5) Use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and others (2.5 minutes): Also set up RSS feeds for searches on your company name and industry terms in other social media sites. Similar to monitoring LinkedIn and Twitter, your Reader will serve as a great place to centralize your other searches too!

Google maps changes all this. Now local businesses can attain first page listings without paying anything. When a customer enters a keyword to find a local business Google will automatically display businesses that are closest to you. Local results are displayed above the regular listings.

Example
If a customer enters “web site design bowie maryland” they will see your company information listed at the top of the search results.

How to get listed in Google Maps

Open an account at Google’s local business center then submit your web site and company information. You can create multiple listings if you have more than one local business.

How to optimize your listing on Google Maps

1. Choose the correct category

Enter the category that best describes your business ie web design, dentist, photographer, etc.

2. Create a captivating description

This is what customers will read about your business. Describe it in such a way that will want to check it out. Include keywords customers would enter to find your business.

3. Make your listing stand out

Here are the things you can include in your listing:

• Description
• Payment
• Email
• Business Hours
• Categories
• Photos
• Reviews

Enter as much information as possible so it will stand out from your competitors (their business will be listed with yours).

4. Location

If your business location is in the center of the town, it is more likely that it will appear at the top of the list.

5. Get listed in other local directories

Google Maps gathers it’s results from other online directories and databases therefore submit your web site to online yellow pages and yahoo local. Find other local directories by entering keyword+location in the search box.

6. Optimize your web pages

Include the city and state names on the home page of your web site. Place them in the meta tags and web copy. This makes it easier for customers to find your business because you’ll a top listing in the search engines.

7. Encourage customers to write reviews

You can improve the your listing by getting customers to write positive reviews about your business. The more stars you acquire the higher your position becomes.

If you follow the 7 steps outlined above your web site will achieve a good listing in Google Maps and you’ll start attracting visitors from the search engines.

Should you submit your website to 1000s of search engines and directories?

Absolutely not! You have no idea which search engines or directories your site is being submitted to. For instance if one of the websites is about gambling your website may get penalized for linking to a bad neighborhood. Once penalized it takes a long time to get back into the search engines. Steer clear of companies that promise to submit your website to 1000s directories. Instead submit your site to specialized directories..ones that compliment or relate to your content.

How can I get my website recognized by the search engines for free?

The fastest and easiest way for your site to get indexed by the search engines is to find a website or directory that already has high rankings and receives lots of traffic.

How to get top rankings with article directories

The top article directories such as ezinearticles receive millions of visitors each day. Write an article related to your niche then include a link back to your website in the resource box at the end of the article. Make sure you include the primary keyword or keyword phrase that describes your content in your article title as well as the anchor text (linked text). Submit your article to the directory. Within a few days (or sometimes within hours) your site will get indexed and appear in the search engines.

If your keyword phrase doesn’t have many competing sites you may achieve first page rankings immediately. If it’s a very competitive phrase your site will still get indexed however it won’t appear in the top pages.

To improve your site’s rankings you need to acquire many more links from other websites. This involves a link building campaign which takes a lot of time and must be carried out consistently to be effective.

The quality and quantity of links pointing to your website will determine your rankings therefore these sites must be carefully selected to maximize your results.

Over time your site’s rankings will increase resulting in more traffic, sales and subscribers.

By earning some few dollars per click from displaying Adsense ads on it. Many are now realizing that good money is made from this source of revenue. Try the simple mathematical computation of multiplying those clicks for every page on your website and you get a summation of earnings equivalent to a monthly residual income with that little effort you have made.

Google Adsense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant and text-based Google ads on their websites content pages and earn money in the process. The ads displayed are related to what your users are looking for on your site. This is the main reason why you both can monetize and enhance your content pages using Adsense.

How much you will be earning will depend on how much the advertisers are willing to pay. It will depend also on the keywords required. If the keywords the advertiser have chosen are in high demand, you could receive more dollars per click. On the other hand, low demand keywords will earn you just a few cents per click.

How can you start making profits out of your website using Adsense?

1. Sign up for an Adsense account. It will only take a few minutes of your time.

2. When the site is accepted, you will be receiving a clip code to include in your web pages. You can insert this code on as many pages or web sites that you want. The AdWords will start appearing immediately after.

3. You will be earning a few cents or some dollars per click when someone starts clicking on the AdWords displayed on any of your web pages. Trying to earn false revenues by repetitively clicking on your own ads is a no-no. This will result in a penalty or the possibility of your site being eliminated. The money you have already earned may be lost because of this.

4. View your statistics. Adsense earnings can be checked anytime by logging into your web site account.

Once you got your account working, you may still want to pattern them to the many sites that are earning more money than you are. It is important to note that there are factors affecting how your website will perform and the amount of money it will give you.

It is a common practice that when a site earning money, the tendency is for the owner to want to make more out of what they are getting already. It usually takes some time combined with trial and error to attain what you want for your Adsense contents.

Time and some important factors that you can practice and use.

How do you increase your Adsense earnings?

1. Choose one topic per page. It is best to write a content for your page with just a few targeted phrases. The search engine will then serve ads that are more relevant which will then result in higher clickthoughs.

2. Using white space around your ad. This can make your ad stand out from the rest of your page so visitors can spot them easily. There are also other choices of colors you can use, provided by search engines, which can harmonize the color of your ad with the web page color.

3. Test your ad placement. It is recommended to use the vertical format that runs down the side of the web page to get more positive results. You can also try both horizontal and vertical formats for a certain period of time to see which one will give you better results.

4. More content-based pages. Widen the theme of your website by creating pages that focus more on your keyword phrases. This will optimize the pages for the search engines. It can not only attract traffic but also make them more relevant for the AdWords to be displayed.]]> http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/adsense-tips-from-the-guru/monetizing-website-adsense-profitable/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/adsense-tips-from-the-guru/basics-start-making-money-adsense http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/adsense-tips-from-the-guru/basics-start-making-money-adsense#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:13:09 +0000 admin http://www.wordpress-profits.com/adsense/the-basics-on-how-to-start-making-money-with-adsense/ Adsense is considered as one of the most powerful tool in a website publishers arsenal. It enables a person to monetize their sites easily. If used properly, it can generate a very large and healthy income for them. However if you are not using them rightly and just maximizing the income you squeeze from it, you are actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Something all people hate doing.

How you can start earning money with Adsense can be done easily and quickly. You will be amazed at the results you will be getting in such a short period of time.

Start by writing some quality content articles which are also keyword incorporated. There are a lot of people given the gift of being good with words. Writing comes easy for them. Why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process.

There are actually three steps to put into mind before you begin writing your ads and having an effective Adsense.

Keyword search. Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrase. Select the ones which you think has more people clicking through. This is actually a keyword selector and suggestion tool that some sites are offering to those who are just their Adsense business.

Writing articles. Start writing original content with keywords from the topics that you have achieved in your search. Take note that search engines are taking pride in the quality of their articles and what you will be writing should keep up with their demands.

Quality content site. Build a quality content site incorporated with Adsense ads that is targeting the subject and keywords of your articles and websites. This is where all that you've done initially will go to and this is also where they will prove their worth to you.

The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. Try to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites.

Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you will be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of site on a site by site, page by page, or any other basis you wanted. You should be aware oft his capability and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

Another thing you should know. Banners and skyscrapers are dead. Ask the experts. So better forget about banners and skyscrapers. Surfers universally ignore these kinds of ad formats. The reason behind this is that they are recognized as an advert and advert are rarely of any interest. That's why people ignore them.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you wanted to achieve and how you will go about achieving them. As with any other kind of business ventures, time is needed coupled with patience.

Do not just ignore your site and your Adsense once you have finished accomplishing them. Spare some time, even an hour, making adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites to quickly trigger your Adsense income.

Give it a try and you would not regret having gotten into Adsense in the first place.]]> http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/adsense-tips-from-the-guru/basics-start-making-money-adsense/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/search-engines-seo/top-search-engine-rankings-dont-guarantee-success http://moonviper.com/tips-from-the-guru/search-engines-seo/top-search-engine-rankings-dont-guarantee-success#comments Sat, 05 Jun 2010 03:20:13 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=1277 Are you always checking your web site rankings?
Is your traffic dependent on maintaining top rankings?
Do your rankings convert into sales?

Attaining top search engine rankings doesn’t always translate into a successful online business as there are multiple factors influencing a visitor’s decision.

Here are 5 reasons why top rankings don’t guarantee success

1. Search engine ranking formulas change

You may enjoy top rankings for a while when suddenly your site disappears. This is because search engines constantly change their ranking formulas.

2. Competing web sites

Your rankings may drop due to other sites competing for the same top position. If your only source of traffic is from the search engines you may suddenly have no sales and be out of business if you lose your top position.

3. Geo targeted search results

If you enter “shoes” in the Google search box local business companies are displayed in the search results in Google maps and the Google ads on the right side of the page. This is because search engines know your location by your IP address and will provide results that are beneficial to you.

The same happens when searching within your Google or Yahoo account. You’ll receive personalized search results based on your preferences. Google is always trying to make searches more targeted so you quickly receive the information you seek. The rankings you see from your desktop may not be the same as what others see.

4. Top rankings don’t mean more traffic

It’s easy to achieve top rankings for keywords no one is searching for. The search engine company you hired may give you a list of all the keyword phrases that received first page rankings. These keywords are useless if they don’t increase the number of visitors to your web site.

5. Top rankings don’t equal sales

If your web site looks unprofessional it will turn away your visitors. Some other factors that influence conversions include:

• poorly written web copy
• slow loading times
• difficulty navigating to other pages
• broken links
• cluttered web page

Instead of constantly checking your rankings evaluate the performance of your web pages to convert visitors into sales.

A good web page should appeal to your visitors as well as the search engines. I mentioned visitors first because they are the most important component for establishing relationships, generating sales and/or obtaining subscribers.

Optimizing your web page for the search engines attracts lots of free traffic. Most people will arrive at your site through searching for a specific keyword or keyword phrase.

What are the essential characteristics of a great web page?

Design

Create a beautiful design

First impressions make a big difference. If your site looks old or unprofessional a visitor will quickly leave and check out your competitors who may have a more professional design. For example, I am more attracted to a new shopping center with sharp looking stores than one with old stores with faded signs.

Make sure your web design includes lots of white space between elements, a clear, easy to use navigation and colors that harmonize well together. Use a consistent design across all pages so visitors don’t become confused where they are on your website.

Optimize your web page

If you want to generate free traffic from the search engines you need to optimize all your web pages. This means including your most important keywords in the meta title tag, and writing an attractive one sentence summary of your content for the meta description tag. The keywords placed in your meta tags should also be included in your web copy.

Other locations to include your keywords are in the header tags (h1, h2, h3), image descriptions, file names and navigation. Don’t try to trick the search engines by stuffing as many keywords as possible into your web pages. This may get your site penalized and result in lowered rankings.

Create a fast loading web page

Your website should load within a few seconds otherwise your visitor will leave immediately and probably never return.

To achieve fast loading pages:

• Reduce the size and quantity of the total images on one page. Only use images if it enhances the content. The same applies to the use of flash.
• Don’t use too many tables. Instead use cascading style sheets (CSS) to control the design of your web pages. Place the CSS in an external file instead of embedding all the code on the page. Do the same for javascript.
• Create clean html. HTML errors often cause web pages to display incorrectly across major browsers. This drives visitors away. Check for html errors by running your web page through an html validator.

Content

Offer valuable content

Some websites contain content that is timeless e.g. home page, about us or how-to articles however if you want to continually attract new visitors new content should be added on a regular basis. This keeps visitors coming back to receive more information. The information should not just be regurgitated from other sites but offer something unique using a friendly, conversational tone.

Share your content with others

Make it easy to share your content with others by offering an RSS feed, Newsletter subscription and/or free reports. Add social media icons to the end of your content and include videos within your content to attract visitors who prefer to watch and listen rather than read your content. Interacting with your visitors helps build long term relationships.

Web Hosting

Make sure you use a fast server to host your website so web pages load quickly. Beware of hosting companies that offer unlimited space and bandwidth. They are trying to maximize the number of sites they can put on one server. If your site suddenly requires more space or bandwidth it may overload the server which may result in your site becoming unavailable to your visitors. Choose a reliable web hosting company.

Website marketing

Your website will not be found if you don’t market it. Even if you do all the things mentioned above it will not appear in the search engines. Website promotion must be carried out regularly and consistently to generate a continuous stream of traffic. Once you’ve built a consistent amount of traffic continue to offer unique, valuable content so visitors keep coming back for more.

Because we’re always on the look out for new strategies to generate more traffic but often view new tools with quiet skepticism we try the tools before recommending them. We’ve begun using Twitter on an almost daily basis now and are convinced it’s a useful addition to our marketing arsenal.

Top 7 Strategies to Generate More Traffic With Twitter

1. Create a twitter account for your website

MoonViper Web Services now has the ability to automatically syndicate your content to your Twitter account within 140 characters. Every time you submit a new article your followers will see it and can respond to it.

2. Provide sweet morsels of information to your followers

People following you on Twitter are probably interested in nuggets of information they can use immediately. Provide a quick tip to help them grow their business.

3. Start conversations

Twitter is an excellent communication medium that allows you to reply directly to someone in your niche you are following. The replies are often faster than communicating with them by email.

4. Create joint ventures with online Gurus

It’s often difficult to get an email response from online Gurus however if you follow and engage them in conversation on Twitter you have a better chance of doing a joint venture with them. The key is to build a relationship with them first and have a great product that is in high demand.

5. Build a community

Building a community means following and communicating with people in your niche and attracting others that want to follow you. People with the same interests want to gather together to share information. Your community will help you build your business instead of trying to figure out everything on your own.

6. Include links to your favorite resources

Twitter allows you to include links to your blog posts, web site or others sites. Long urls are automatically shortened. This means you can send people to a favorite article by creating an attractive headline within 140 characters then include the link to the rest of the article (or blog post).

7. Research tool

You can enter a keyword in the search box at http://search.twitter.com/ and it will return a list of Twitter sites related to your search. You can also search on a Twitter username and it will return tweets (twitter messages) for that name.

Tip

Attract more followers to your Twitter account by notifying your newsletter subscribers, placing a link on your blog, social marketing sites and email messages. If you take action on all the points mentioned above you’ll build a steady flow of traffic to your web site.

How to use this tool

1. Enter text to encrypt.

2. Click “Encrypt!” button

The md5 encryption for the text will be displayed below.

What is md5?
MD5 is a one way hashing algorithm which means that once you encrypt, it is virtually impossible to decrypt.

How to use this tool

1. Enter the amount of Daily Impressions.

2. Enter a percentage amount of Click Through Rate.

3. Enter the Cost Per Click in dollars.

4. Click “Calculate” button.

The results will be shown below.
Please note that the figures are estimated, the Click Through Rate and Cost Per Click can be retrieved from your Google Adsense control panel.

About The Site:

OutGayLife.com is our technological masterpiece.

MoonViper Web Services is one of the few companies capable of employing advanced WordPress functionality into a website.  For this project, we included such technologies as Twitter integration, Buddypress installation, and more.

The site operates not only as a news website, but also has similar functionality to Facebook. Users can post profiles, upload pictures and videos, and communicate with their friends.

Future plans for this website will include adding forums, along with the ability for users to create their own blogs on the site. We will also be adding newsletter capabilities to this website.

About The Site:

RaceUwin.com is a fully functional horse racing website.

MoonViper Web Services was called in to create some advanced CSS coding, as well as optimizing the site. We employed DreamWeaver, Photoshop and CSS fixes, along with upgrading some back end technology.

This project was a built as a part of a team with several other web development companies.

About The Site:

BarterIndependent.com was built as a part of MoonViper Web Service’s barter campaign.

Working with local Public Relations companies, we were turn this site into one of the foremost authorities on barter exchanges.  The site includes an independent rating system for website visitors to rate their experiences with the over 500 barter exchange companies in America.

About The Site:

BarterSF.com is the local version of a website for a national barter exchange company, Merchants Barter Exchange. MoonViper was brought on to not only improve their website, but to make the lives of local sales offices easier.

We worked with Merchants Barter to provide them with newsletter services, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and content management services.  Though our innovative setup, we were able to help our client build a unique system, in which several different local websites actually communicate with the master corporate site. The master site syndicates content out to the local sites, which automatically generate newsletters, Twitter feeds, and much more.

This type of integration allowed MBE to save thousands of dollars in local development costs, while freeing up the resources of local sales offices.

See also:

• Google AdSense heat map – shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.

Example absolute link

<a href=”http://moonviper.com/folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a>

Example relative link

<a href=”../folder/filename.html“>Cool Stuff</a> ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/absolute-link/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/adcenter http://moonviper.com/glossary/adcenter#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:53:58 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=770

While it has a few cool features (including dayparting and demographic based bidding) it is still quite nascent in nature compared to Google AdWords. Due to Microsoft’s limited marketshare and program newness many terms are vastly underpriced and present a great arbitrage opportunity.

See also:

• AdCenter – sign up for an account
• Microsoft AdLabs – view many of the free search marketing tools Microsoft offers.

AdSense offers a highly scalable automated ad revenue stream which will help some publishers establish a baseline for the value of their ad inventory. In many cases AdSense will be underpriced, but that is the trade off for automating ad sales.

AdSense ad auction formats include

• cost per click – advertisers are only charged when ads are clicked on
• CPM – advertisers are charged a certain amount per ad impression. Advertisers can target sites based on keyword, category, or demographic information.

AdSense ad formats include

• text
• graphic
• animated graphics
• videos

In some cases I have seen ads which got a 2 or 3% click through rate (CTR), while sites that are optimized for maximum CTR (through aggressive ad integration) can obtain as high as a 50 or 60% CTR depending on

• how niche their site is
• how commercially oriented their site is
• the relevancy and depth of advertisers in their vertical

It is also worth pointing out that if you are too aggressive in monetizing your site before it has built up adequate authority your site may never gain enough authority to become highly profitable.

Depending on your vertical your most efficient monetization model may be any of the following

• AdSense
• affiliate marketing
• direct ad sales
• selling your own products and services
• a mixture of the above

See also:

• Google AdSense program – sign up as an ad publisher
• Google AdSense heat map – shows ad clickthrough rate estimates based on ad positioning.
• Google AdWords – buy ads on Google search and / or contextually relevant web pages.

AdWords is an increasingly complex marketplace. One could write a 300 page book just covering AdWords. Rather than doing that here I thought it would be useful to link to many relevant resources.

See also:

• Google AdWords – sign up for an advertiser account
• Google Advertising Professional Program – program for qualifying as an AdWords expert
• Google AdWords Learning Center – text and multimedia educational modules. Contains quizzes related to each section.
• AdWords Keyword Tool – shows related keywords, advertiser competition, and relative search volume estimates.
• Google Traffic Estimator – estimates bid prices and search volumes for keywords.

Most affiliates make next to nothing because they are not aggressive marketers, have no real focus, fall for wasting money on instant wealth programs that lead them to buying a bunch of unneeded garbage via other’s affiliate links, and do not attempt to create any real value.

Some power affiliates make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars per year because they are heavily focused on automation and/or tap large traffic streams. Typically niche affiliate sites make more per unit effort than overtly broad ones because they are easier to focus (and thus have a higher conversion rate).

Selling a conversion is typically harder than selling a click (like AdSense does, for instance). Search engines are increasingly looking to remove the noise low quality thin affiliate sites ad to the search results through the use of

• algorithms which detect thin affiliate sites and duplicate content;
• manual review; and,
• implementation of landing page quality scores on their paid ads.

See also:

• Commission Junction – probably the largest affiliate network
• Linkshare – another large affiliate network
• Performics – another large affiliate network
• Azoogle Ads – ad offer network focused on high margin / high profit verticals
• CPA Empire – similar to AzoogleAds
• Amazon Associates – Amazon’s affiliate program
• Clickbank – an affiliate network for selling electronic products and information

Fresh content which is also cited on many other channels (like related blogs) will temporarily rank better than you might expect because many of the other channels which cite the content will cite it off their home page or a well trusted high PageRank page. After those sites publish more content and the reference page falls into their archives those links are typically from pages which do not have as much link authority as their home pages.

Some search engines may also try to classify sites to understand what type of sites they are, as in news sites or reference sites that do not need updated that often. They may also look at individual pages and try to classify them based on how frequently they change.

See also:

• Google Patent 20050071741: Information retrieval based on historical data – mentions that document age, link age, link bursts, and link churn may be used to help score the relevancy of a document.

Alexa is heavily biased toward sites that focus on marketing and webmaster communities. While not being highly accurate it is free.

See also

• Alexa.com

Example usage

<img src=”http://www.moonviper.com/images/whammy.gif” height=”140″ width=”120″ alt=”Press Your Luck Whammy.” />

See also

• W3C QA: Alt Attribute

See also:

• AltaVista

Ad networks are a game of margins. Marketers who track user action will have a distinct advantage over those who do not.

See also:

• Google Analytics – Google’s free analytics program
• Conversion Ruler – a simple and cheap web based analytic tool
• ClickTracks – downloadable and web based analytics software

Search engines assume that your page is authoritative for the words that people include in links pointing at your site. When links occur naturally they typically have a wide array of anchor text combinations. Too much similar anchor text may be a considered a sign of manipulation, and thus discounted or filtered. Make sure when you are building links that you control that you try to mix up your anchor text.

Example of anchor text:

<a href=”http://www.seobook.com/”>Search Engine Optimization Blog</a>

Outside of your core brand terms if you are targeting Google you probably do not want any more than 10% to 20% of your anchor text to be the same. You can use Backlink Analyzer to compare the anchor text profile of other top ranked competing sites.

See also:

• Wolf-Howl: AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets
• [audio] Jeremy Shoemaker interviews Kris Jones and part 2
• Wikipedia: arbitrage

See also:

• ASP.net

Search engines constantly tweak their algorithms to try to balance relevancy algorithms based on topical authority and overall authority across the entire web. Sites may be considered topical authorities or general authorities. For example, Wikipedia and DMOZ are considered broad general authority sites. This site is a topical authority on SEO, but not a broad general authority.

Example potential topical authorities:

• the largest brands in your field
• the top blogger talking about your subject
• the Wikipedia or DMOZ page about your topic

See also:

• Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s home page
• Hypersearching the Web

See also:

If you want to program internal bid management software you can get a developer token to use the Google AdWords API.

A few popular bid management tools are

• Atlas OnePoint (formerly known as GoToast)
• BidRank
• KeywordMax

It is generally easier to get links to informational websites than commercial sites. Some new sites might gain authority much quicker if they tried looking noncommercial and gaining influence before trying to monetize their market position.

In many ways text ads are successful because they are more relevant and look more like content, but with the recent surge in the popularity of text ads some have speculated that in time people may eventually become text ad blind as well.

Any media channel, publishing format, organization, or person is biased by

• how and why they were created and their own experiences
• the current set of social standards in which they exist
• other markets they operate in
• the need for self preservation
• how they interface with the world around them
• their capital, knowledge, status, or technological advantages and limitations

Search engines aim to be relevant to users, but they also need to be profitable. Since search engines sell commercial ads some of the largest search engines may bias their organic search results toward informational (ie: non-commercial) websites. Some search engines are also biased toward information which has been published online for a great deal of time and is heavily cited.

Search personalization biases our search results based on our own media consumption and searching habits.

Large news organizations tend to aim for widely acceptable neutrality rather than objectivity. Some of the most popular individual web authors / publishers tend to be quite biased in nature. Rather than bias hurting one’s exposure

• The known / learned bias of a specific author may make their news more appealing than news from an organization that aimed to seem arbitrarily neutral.
• I believe biased channels most likely typically have a larger readership than unbiased channels.
• Most people prefer to subscribe to media which matches their own biases worldview.
• If more people read what you write and passionately agree with it then they are more likely to link at it.
• Things which are biased in nature are typically easier to be cited than things which are unbiased.

Search engines are not without flaws in their business models, but there is nothing immoral or illegal about testing search algorithms to understand how search engines work.

People who have extensively tested search algorithms are probably more competent and more knowledgeable search marketers than those who give themselves the arbitrary label of white hat SEOs while calling others black hat SEOs.

When making large investments in processes that are not entirely clear trust is important. Rather than looking for reasons to not work with an SEO it is best to look for signs of trust in a person you would like to work with.

See also:

• Black Hat SEO.com – parody site about black hat SEO
• White Hat SEO.com – parody site about white hat SEO
• Honest SEO – site offering tips on hiring an SEO
• SEOConsultants.com – reviewed directory of SEO professionals
• SEO Black Hat – blog about black hat SEO techniques

Most blogs tend to be personal in nature. Blogs are generally quite authoritative with heavy link equity because they give people a reason to frequently come back to their site, read their content, and link to whatever they think is interesting.

The most popular blogging platforms are WordPress, Blogger, Movable Type, and Typepad.

Automated blog spam:

Nice post!
by
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Manual blog spam:

I just wrote about this on my site. I don’t know you, but I thought I would add no value to your site other than linking through to mine. Check it out!!!!!
by
cluebag manual spammer (usually with keywords as my name)

As time passes both manual and automated blog comment spam systems are evolving to look more like legitimate comments. I have seen some automated blog comment spam systems that have multiple fake personas that converse with one another.

It allows you to publish sites on a subdomain off of Blogspot.com, or to FTP content to your own domain. If you are serious about building a brand or making money online you should publish your content to your own domain because it can be hard to reclaim a website’s link equity and age related trust if you have built years of link equity into a subdomain on someone else’s website.

Blogger is probably the easiest blogging software tool to use, but it lacks many some features present in other blog platforms.

See also:

• Blogger.com

Social bookmarking sites are often called tagging sites. Del.icio.us is the most popular social bookmarking site. Yahoo! MyWeb also allows you to tag results. Google allows you to share feeds and / or tag pages. They also have a program called Google Notebook which allows you to write mini guides of related links and information.

There are also a couple meta news sites that allow you to tag interesting pages. If enough people vote for your story then your story gets featured on the homepage. Slashdot is a tech news site primarily driven by central editors. Digg created a site covering the same type of news, but is a bottoms up news site which allows readers to vote for what they think is interesting. Netscape cloned the Digg business model and content model. Sites like Digg and Netscape are easy sources of links if you can create content that would appeal to those audiences.

Many forms of vertical search, like Google Video or YouTube, allow you to tag content.

See also:

• Del.icio.us – Yahoo! owned social bookmarking site
• Yahoo! MyWeb – similar to Del.icio.us, but more integrated into Yahoo!
• Google Notebook – allows you to note documents
• Slashdot – tech news site where stories are approved by central editors
• Digg – decentralized news site
• Netscape – Digg clone
• Google Video – Google’s video hosting, tagging, and search site
• YouTube – popular decentralized video site

A brand is built through controlling customer expectations and the social interactions between customers. Building a brand is what allows you to move away from commodity based pricing and move toward higher margin value based pricing.

Some affiliate marketing programs prevent affiliates from bidding on the core brand related keywords, while others actively encourage it. Either way can work depending on your business model and marketing savvy, but it is important to ensure there is synergy between internal marketing and affiliate marketing programs.

Example breadcrumb navigation:

Home > SEO Tools > SEO for Firefox

Whatever page the user is on is unlinked, but the pages above it within the site structure are linked to, and organized starting with the home page, right on down through the site structure.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

See also:

• Business.com

The buying cycle may consist of the following stages

• Problem Discovery: prospect discovers a need or want.
• Search: after discovering a problem look for ways to solve the need or want. These searches may contain words which revolve around the core problem the prospect is trying to solve or words associated with their identity.
• Evaluate: may do comparison searches to compare different models, and also search for negative information like product sucks, etc.
• Decide: look for information which reinforces your view of product or service you decided upon
• Purchase: may search for shipping related information or other price related searches. purchases may also occur offline
• Reevaluate: some people leave feedback on their purchases . If a person is enthusiastic about your brand they may cut your marketing costs by providing free highly trusted word of mouth marketing.

Some search engines provide links to cached versions of pages in their search results, and allow you to strip some of the formatting from cached copies of pages.

Webmasters should use consistent linking structures throughout their sites to ensure that they funnel the maximum amount of PageRank at the URLs they want indexed. When linking to the root level of a site or a folder index it is best to end the link location at a / instead of placing the index.html or default.asp filename in the URL.

Examples of URLs which may contain the same information in spite of being at different web addresses:

• http://www.moonviper.com/
• http://www.moonviper.com/index.shtml
• http://moonviper.com/
• http://moonviper.com/index.shtml
• http://www.moonviper.com/?tracking-code

Cloaking has many legitimate uses which are within search guidelines. For example, changing user experience based on location is common on many popular websites.

See also:

• The Definitive Guide to Cloaking – Dan Kramer’s guide to cloaking.
• KloakIt – cheaply priced cloaking software
• Fantomaster – more expensive cloaking software

See also

• Google Touchgraph – interesting web application that shows the relationship between sites Google returns as being related to a site you enter.

Blog software programs are some of the most popular content management systems currently used on the web. Many content management systems have errors associated with them which make it hard for search engines to index content due to issues such as duplicate content.

Leaving enlightening and thoughtful comments on someone else’s related website is one way to help get them to notice you.

See also:

• blog comment spam – the addition of low value or no value comments to other’s websites

HTML comments in the source code of a document appear as <!– your comment here –>. They can be viewed if someone types views the source code of a document, but do not appear in the regular formatted HTML rendered version of a document.

In the past some SEOs would stuff keywords in comment tags to help increase the page keyword density, but search has evolved beyond that stage, and at this point using comments to stuff keywords into a page adds to your risk profile and presents little ranking upside potential.

As the number of product databases online increases and duplicate content filters are forced to get more aggressive the keys to getting your information indexed are to have a site with enough authority to be considered the most important document on that topic, or to have enough non compacted information (for example, user reviews) on your product level pages to make them be seen as unique documents.

For example, if a search engine understands a phrase to be related to another word or phrase it may return results relevant to that other word or phrase even if the words you searched for are not directly associated with a result. In addition, some search engines will place various types of vertical search results at the top of the search results based on implied query related intent or prior search patterns by you or other searchers.

See also:

• Google AdSense is the most popular contextual advertising program.

Most offline ads have generally been much harder to track than online ads. Some marketers use custom phone numbers or coupon codes to tie offline activity to online marketing.

Here are a few common example desired goals

• a product sale
• completing a lead form
• a phone call
• capturing an email
• filling out a survey
• getting a person to pay attention to you
• getting feedback
• having a site visitor share your website with a friend
• having a site visitor link at your site

Bid management, affiliate tracking, and analytics programs make it easy to track conversion sources.

See also:

• Google AdWords – Google’s pay per click ad program which allows you to buy search and contextual ads.
• Google AdSense – Google’s contextual ad program.
• Microsoft AdCenter – Microsoft’s pay per click ad platform.
• Yahoo! Search Marketing – Yahoo!’s pay per click ad platform

Many people use CPM as a measure of how profitable a website is or has the potential of becoming.

Since searches which are longer in nature tend to be more targeted in nature it is important to try to get most or all of a site indexed such that the deeper pages have the ability to rank for relevant long tail keywords. A large site needs adequate link equity to get deeply indexed. Another thing which may prevent a site from being fully indexed is duplicate content issues.

Sites which are well trusted or frequently updated may be crawled more frequently than sites with low trust scores and limited link authority. Sites with highly artificial link authority scores (ie: mostly low quality spammy links) or sites which are heavy in duplicate content or near duplicate content (such as affiliate feed sites) may be crawled less frequently than sites with unique content which are well integrated into the web.

See also:

• Google’s Matt Cutts video on Google Crawling Patterns
• Matt Cutts post Indexing Timeline – mentions sites with unnatural link profiles may not be crawled as frequently or deeply

Note: Using external CSS files makes it easy to change the design of many pages by editing a single file. You can link to an external CSS file using code similar to the following in the head of your HTML documents

<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”http://www.moonviper.com/style.css” type=”text/css” />

See also

• W3C: CSS – official guidelines for CSS
• CSS Zen Garden – examples of various CSS layouts
• Glish.com – examples of various CSS layouts, links to other CSS resources

Most large high quality websites have at least a few dead links in them, but the ratio of good links to dead links can be seen as a sign of information quality.

When links grow naturally typically most high quality websites have many links pointing at interior pages. When you request links from other websites it makes sense to request a link from their most targeted relevant page to your most targeted relevant page. Some webmasters even create content based on easy linking opportunities they think up.

Dedicated servers tend to be more reliable than shared (or virtual) servers. Dedicated servers usually run from $100 to $500 a month. Virtual servers typically run from $5 to $50 per month.

A high deep link ratio is typically a sign of a legitimate natural link profile.

De-indexing may be due to any of the following:

• Pages on new websites (or sites with limited link authority relative to their size) may be temporarily de-indexed until the search engine does a deep spidering and re-cache of the web.
• During some updates search engines readjust crawl priorities.
  • You need a significant number of high quality links to get a large website well indexed and keep it well indexed.
  • Duplicate content filters, inbound and outbound link quality, or other information quality related issues may also relate to re-adjusted crawl priorities.
• Pages which have changed location and are not properly redirected, or pages which are down when a search engine tries to crawl them may be temporarily de-indexed.
• Search Spam:
  • If a website tripped an automatic spam filter it may return to the search index anywhere from a few days to a few months after the problem has been fixed.
  • If a website is editorially removed by a human you may need to contact the search engine directly to request reinclusion.

See also:

• Del.icio.us
• Del.icio.us Recently Popular

Some internet marketing platforms, such as AdCenter and AdWords, allow you to target ads at websites or searchers who fit amongst a specific demographic. Some common demographic data points are gender, age, income, education, location, etc.

High quality directories typically prefer the description describes what the site is about rather than something that is overtly promotional in nature. Search engines typically

• use a description from a trusted directory (such as DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory) for homepages of sites listed in those directories
• use the page meta description (especially if it is relevant to the search query and has the words from the search query in it)
• attempt to extract a description from the page content which is relevant for the particular search query and ranking page (this is called a snippet)
• or some combination of the above

See also:

• Digg.com

Some directories cater to specific niche topics, while others are more comprehensive in nature. Major search engines likely place significant weight on links from DMOZ and the Yahoo! Directory. Smaller and less established general directories likely pull less weight. If a directory does not exercise editorial control over listings search engines will not be likely to trust their links at all.

See also:

• DMOZ.org
• Submitting a Site to the Open Directory Project

Some webmasters cloak thousands of doorway pages on trusted domains, and rake in a boatload of cash until they are caught and de-listed. If the page would have a unique purpose outside of search then search engines are generally fine with it, but if the page only exists because search engines exist then search engines are more likely to frown on the behavior.

See also:

• Dreamweaver official site

Search engines do not want to index multiple versions of similar content. For example, printer friendly pages may be search engine unfriendly duplicates. Also, many automated content generation techniques rely on recycling content, so some search engines are somewhat strict in filtering out content they deem to be similar or nearly duplicate in nature.

See also:

• Duplicate Content Detection – video where Matt Cutts talks about the process of duplicate content detection
• Identifying and filtering near-duplicate documents
• Search Engine Patents On Duplicated Content and Re-Ranking Methods
• Stuntdubl: How to Remedy Duplicate Content

In the past search engines were less aggressive at indexing dynamic content than they currently are. While they have greatly improved their ability to index dynamic content it is still preferable to use URL rewriting to help make dynamic content look static in nature.

Many paid links, such as those from quality directories, still count as signs of votes as long as they are also associated with editorial quality standards. If they are from sites without editorial control, like link farms, they are not likely to help you rank well. Using an algorithm similar to TrustRank, some search engines may place more trust on well known sites with strong editorial guidelines.

If you are buying pay per click ads it is important to send visitors to the most appropriate and targeted page associated with the keyword they searched for. If you are doing link building it is important to point links at your most appropriate page when possible such that

• if anyone clicks the link they are sent to the most appropriate and relevant page
• you help search engines understand what the pages on your site are associated with

Some search marketers lacking in creativity tend to describe services sold by others as being unethical while their own services are ethical. Any particular technique is generally not typically associated with ethics, but is either effective or ineffective.

The only ethics issues associated with SEO are generally business ethics related issues. Two of the bigger frauds are

• Not disclosing risks: Some SEOs may use high risk techniques when they are not needed. Some may make that situation even worse by not disclosing potential risks to clients.
• Taking money & doing nothing: Since selling SEO services has almost no start up costs many of the people selling services may not actually know how to competently provide them. Some shady people claim to be SEOs and bilk money out of unsuspecting small businesses.

As long as the client is aware of potential risks there is nothing unethical about being aggressive.

In the past Google updated their index roughly once a month. Those updates were named Google Dances, but since Google shifted to a constantly updating index Google no longer does what was traditionally called a Google Dance.

See also:

• Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video – Matt talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to everflux.

Some people believe in link hoarding, but linking out to other related resources is a good way to help search engines understand what your site is about. If you link out to lots of low quality sites or primarily rely on low quality reciprocal links some search engines may not rank your site very well. Search engines are more likely to trust high quality editorial links (both to and from your site).

See also:

• US Copyright Office Section 107

Upload an image named favicon.ico in the root of your site to have your site associated with a favicon.

See also:

• HTML Kit – generate a favicon from a picture
• Favicon.co.uk – create a favicon online painting one pixel at a time.

See also:

• Bloglines – popular web based feed reader
• Google Reader – popular web based feed reader
• My Yahoo! – allows you to subscribe to feed updates
• FeedDemon – desktop based feed reader

For example, if a site publishes significant duplicate content it may get a reduced crawl priority and get filtered out of the search results. Some search engines also have filters based on link quality, link growth rate, and anchor text. Some pages are also penalized for spamming.

See also:

• Download Firefox

Search engines tend to struggle indexing and ranking flash websites because flash typically contains so little relevant content. If you use flash ensure:

• you embed flash files within HTML pages
• you use a noembed element to describe what is in the flash
• you publish your flash content in multiple separate files such that you can embed appropriate flash files in relevant pages

Given the popularity of server side includes, content management systems, and dynamic languages there really is no legitimate reason to use frames to build a content site today.

Many SEOs talk up fresh content, but fresh content does not generally mean re-editing old content. It more often refers to creating new content. The primary advantages to fresh content are:

• Maintain and grow mindshare: If you keep giving people a reason to pay attention to you more and more people will pay attention to you, and link to your site.
• Faster idea spreading: If many people pay attention to your site, when you come out with good ideas they will spread quickly.
• Growing archives: If you are a content producer then owning more content means you have more chances to rank. If you keep building additional fresh content eventually that gives you a large catalog of relevant content.
• Frequent crawling: Frequently updated websites are more likely to be crawled frequently.

Many content management systems (such as blogging platforms) include FTP capabilities. Web development software such as Dreamweaver also comes with FTP capabilities. There are also a number of free or cheap FTP programs such as Cute FTP, Core FTP, and Leech FTP.

Fuzzy search technology is similar to stemming technology, with the exception that fuzzy search corrects the misspellings at the users end and stemming searches for other versions of the same core word within the index.

See also

• Google corporate history
• Google labs – new products Google is testing
• Google papers – research papers by Googlers

Google has a shared crawl cache between their various spiders, including vertical search spiders and spiders associated with ad targeting.

See also:

• Google’s crawl caching proxy

Google Base may also help Google better understand what types of information are commercial in nature, and how they should structure different vertical search products.

See also:

• Google Base

See also:

• Google search: miserable failure – shows pages people tried ranking for that search query

Typically it is easier to bowl new sites out of the results. Older established sites are much harder to knock out of the search results.

See also:

• Google Checkout

Major search indexes are constantly updating. Google refers to this continuous refresh as everflux.

The second meaning of Google Dance is a yearly party at Google’s corporate headquarters which Google holds for search engine marketers. This party coincides with the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference.

See also:

• Matt Cutts Google Terminology Video – Matt talks about the history of Google Updates and the shift from Google Dances to everflux.

See also:

• Google Keyword Tool – tool offering all the above mentioned features

Please note that the best way to submit your site to search engines and to keep it in their search indexes is to build high quality editorial links.

See also:

• Google Webmaster Central – access to Google Sitemaps and other webmaster related tools.

If you do not submit a bid price the tool will return an estimated bid price necessary to rank #1 for 85% of Google’s queries for a particular keyword.

See also:

• Google Traffic Estimator

See also:

• Google Trends

See also:

• Google Website Optimizer

Heading elements go from H1 to H6 with the lower numbered headings being most important. You should only use a single H1 element on each page, and may want to use multiple other heading elements to structure a document. An H1 element source would look like:

<h1>Your Topic</h1>

Heading elements may be styled using CSS. Many content management systems place the same content in the main page heading and the page title, although in many cases it may be preferential to mix them up if possible.

See also:

• W3C: Headings

While some sites may get away with it for a while, generally the risk to reward ratio is inadequate for most legitimate sites to consider using hidden text.

See also:

• Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents

See also:

• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment [PDF]

As far as SEO goes, a home page is typically going to be one of the easier pages to rank for some of your more competitive terms, largely because it is easy to build links at a home page. You should ensure your homepage stays focused and reinforces your brand though, and do not assume that most of your visitors will come to your site via the home page. If your site is well structured many pages on your site will likely be far more popular and rank better than your home page for relevant queries.

As a note of caution, make sure you copy your current .htaccess file before editing it, and do not edit it on a site that you can’t afford to have go down unless you know what you are doing.

See also:

• .htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO

Some newer web pages are also formatted in XHTML.

See also:

• W3C: HTML Home Page

See also:

• Mike Grehan on Topic Distillation [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment [PDF]
• Jon Klienberg’s home page

Most search engines allow you to see a sample of links pointing to a document by searching using the link: function. For example, using link:www.seobook.com would show pages linking to the homepage of this site (both internal links and inbound links). Due to canonical URL issues www.site.com and site.com may show different linkage data. Google typically shows a much smaller sample of linkage data than competing engines do, but Google still knows of and counts many of the links that do not show up when you use their link: function.

When search engines search they search via reverse indexes by words and return results based on matching relevancy vectors. Stemming and semantic analysis allow search engines to return near matches. Index may also refer to the root of a folder on a web server.

It is preferential to use descriptive internal linking to make it easy for search engines to understand what your website is about. Use consistent navigational anchor text for each section of your site, emphasizing other pages within that section. Place links to relevant related pages within the content area of your site to help further show the relationship between pages and improve the usability of your website.

Good information architecture considers both how humans and search spiders access a website. Information architecture suggestions:

• focus each page on a specific topic
• use descriptive page titles and meta descriptions which describe the content of the page
• use clean (few or no variables) descriptive file names and folder names
• use headings to help break up text and semantically structure a document
• use breadcrumb navigation to show page relationships
• use descriptive link anchor text
• link to related information from within the content area of your web pages
• improve conversion rates by making it easy for people to take desired actions
• avoid feeding search engines duplicate or near-duplicate content

See also:

• Download IE

Many SEOs refer to unique C class IP addresses. Every site is hosted on a numerical address like aa.bb.cc.dd. In some cases many sites are hosted on the same IP address. It is believed by many SEOs that if links come from different IP ranges with a different number somewhere in the aa.bb.cc part then the link may count more than links from the same local range and host. ]]> http://moonviper.com/glossary/ip-address/feed 0 http://moonviper.com/glossary/isp http://moonviper.com/glossary/isp#comments Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:47:24 +0000 admin http://moonviper.com/?p=513 Internet Service Providers sell end users access to the web. Some of these companies also sell usage data to web analytics companies.

Search engines do not index most content in JavaScript. In AJAX, JavaScript has been combined with other technologies to make web pages even more interactive.

Long tail and brand related keywords are typically worth more than shorter and vague keywords because they typically occur later in the buying cycle and are associated with a greater level of implied intent.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

See also:

• The Keyword Density of Non Sense
• Keyword Density Analysis Tool
• Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?

See also:

• MSN Search Funnels – shows keywords people search for before or after they search for another keyword

Example keyword discovery methods:

• using keyword research tools
• looking at analytics data or your server logs
• looking at page copy on competing sites
• reading customer feedback
• placing a search box on your site and seeing what people are looking for
• talking to customers to ask how and why they found and chose your business

Short list of the most popular keyword research tools:

• Overture – free, powered from Yahoo! search data. Heavily biased toward over representing commercial queries, combines singular and plural versions of a keyword into a single data point.
• Google – free, powered from Google search data.
• Wordtracker – paid, powered from Dogpile and MetaCrawler. Due to small sample size their keyword database may be easy to spam.

Please note that most keyword research tools used alone are going to be highly inaccurate at giving exact quantitative search volumes. The tools are better for qualitative measurements. To test the exact volume for a keyword it may make sense to set up a test Google AdWords campaign.

When people use keyword stuffed copy it tends to read mechanically (and thus does not convert well and is not link worthy), plus some pages that are crafted with just the core keyword in mind often lack semantically related words and modifiers from the related vocabulary (and that causes the pages to rank poorly as well).

When Google AdWords launched affiliates and arbitrage players made up a large portion of their ad market, but as more mainstream companies have spent on search marketing, Google has done many measures to try to keep their ads relevant.

Most major search engines consider links as a vote of trust.

A few general link building tips:

• build conceptually unique linkworthy high quality content
• create viral marketing ideas that want to spread and make people talk about you
• mix your anchor text
• get deep links
• try to build at least a few quality links before actively obtaining any low quality links
• register your site in relevant high quality directories such as DMOZ, the Yahoo! Directory, and Business.com
• when possible try to focus your efforts mainly on getting high quality editorial links
• create link bait
• try to get bloggers to mention you on their blogs
• It takes a while to catch up with the competition, but if you work at it long enough and hard enough eventually you can enjoy a self-reinforcing market position

See also:

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 – 101 ways you should and should not build links
• Filthy Linking Rich [PDF] – Mike Grehan article about how top rankings are self reinforcing

When links occur naturally they generally develop over time. In some cases it may make sense that popular viral articles receive many links quickly, but in those cases there are typically other signs of quality as well, such as:

• increased usage data
• increase in brand related search queries
• traffic from the link sources to the site being linked at
• many of the new links coming from new pages on trusted domains

See also:

• Information retrieval based on historical data

See also:

• Information retrieval based on historical data

Log files do not typically show as much data as analytics programs would, and if they do, it is generally not in a format that is as useful beyond seeing the top few stats.

Generally link hoarding is a bad idea for the following reasons:

• many authority sites were at one point hub sites that freely linked out to other relevant resources
• if you are unwilling to link out to other sites people are going to be less likely to link to your site
• outbound links to relevant resources may improve your credibility and boost your overall relevancy scores

“Of course, folks never know when we’re going to adjust our scoring. It’s pretty easy to spot domains that are hoarding PageRank; that can be just another factor in scoring. If you work really hard to boost your authority-like score while trying to minimize your hub-like score, that sets your site apart from most domains. Just something to bear in mind.” – Quote from Google’s Matt Cutts

See also:

• Why Paris Hilton Is Famous (Or Understanding Value In A Post-Madonna World) – article about how being a platform (ie: someone who freely links out) makes it easier to become an authority.

For competitive search queries link quality counts much more than link quantity. Google typically shows a smaller sample of known linkage data than the other engines do, even though Google still counts many of the links they do not show when you do a link: search.

Links may broken for a number of reason, but four of the most common reasons are:

• a website going offline
• linking to content which is temporary in nature (due to licensing structures or other reasons)
• moving a page’s location
• changing a domain’s content management system

Most large websites have some broken links, but if too many of a site’s links are broken it may be an indication of outdated content, and it may provide website users with a poor user experience. Both of which may cause search engines to rank a page as being less relevant.

See also:

• Xenu Link Sleuth is a free software program which crawls websites to find broken links.

See also:

• Live.com

How does the long tail applies to keywords? Long Tail keywords are more precise and specific, thus have a higher value.

Notice how the nearly 10,000 unlisted terms account for roughly 10 times as much traffic as I got from my core brand related term (and this site only has a couple hundred pages and has a rather strong brand).

See also:

• The Long Tail – official blog
• The Long Tail – the book

See also:

• Looksmart.com

See also:

• Quintura Search – free LSI type keyword research tool.
• Patterns in Unstructured Data – free paper describing how LSI works
• Johnon Go Words – article about how adding certain relevant words to a page can drastically improve its relevancy for other keywords

See also:

• Inktomi Spam Database Left Open to Public – article about Inktomi’s spam database from 2001
• Search Bistro – links to Google’s General Guidelines on Random Query Evaluation [PDF] and Google’s Spam Guide for Raters
• Google Image Labeler – example of how humans can be used to review content

See also:

• Mechanical Turk
• Google Image Labeler – image labeling game
• Human Computation Speech Video at Google

A good meta description tag should:

• be relevant and unique to the page;
• reinforce the page title; and
• focus on including offers and secondary keywords and phrases to help add context to the page title.

Relevant meta description tags may appear in search results as part of the page description below the page title.

The code for a meta description tag looks like this

<meta name=”Description” content=”Your meta description here. ” / >

See also:

• Free meta tag generator – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

The code for a meta keyword tag looks like this

<meta name=”Keywords” content=”keyword phrase, another keyword, yep another, maybe one more “>

Many people spammed meta keyword tags and searchers typically never see the tag, so most search engines do not place much (if any) weight on it. Many SEO professionals no longer use meta keywords tags.

See also:

• Free meta tag generator – offers a free formatting tool and advice on creating meta description tags.

A meta refresh looks like this

<meta http-equiv=“refresh” content=“10;url=http://www.site.com/folder/page.htm”>

Generally in most cases it is preferred to use a 301 or 302 redirect over a meta refresh.