philospace.com

What is SEO, really?

SEO is the process of configuring a website so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a particular phrase. In other words it is our way of telling Google, Yahoo, or MSN what we think our site is about. Many of the search engines have a slightly different formula for how they determine these results. But the short version is that they look at different factors of each website page, rank them and then give those results to you.

Why is SEO Important?

One word sums it up - competition. Depending on what study you read, there are as many as 20 billion web pages being indexed at any given time. The major search engines do their best to go through these pages and catalog them so that they can tell you about it if you use their website to search. With so many website pages out there competing for similar phrases it is absolutely critical to make sure you are using every tool at your disposal to make sure your customers can find you when they are looking.

OK, So What Should I Be Doing for SEO On My Site?

The good news is that doing SEO correctly is not complicated. The bad news is that it is time consuming and requires regular attention in order to maintain results. Our advice is to ethically follow these simple guidelines for best long-term results:

Good site structure - as simple as this sounds many people overlook this. Every day we see sites with heavy flash animation, dated frame designs, pages that don’t work and broken links. The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either. And if a search engine can’t go through your site you have absolutely no chance of showing up for a key phrase - no matter how pretty the flash.

Good meta-data - Clients often draw a blank with this one. Meta-data is geek-speak for the page titles, page descriptions and keywords that you enter for each page. Each page on your website should have a unique title and description that summarizes what that page is about.

We often see 2 problems with meta-data. The first is that it is simply overlooked. I am stunned at how many sites have www.yoursite.com as the page title for every page - that’s wasting prime online real estate.

The 2nd problem is spam. Putting in a page title or description that does not accurately match what the page is about is considered “spamming” a search engine. Doing this will get your page thrown out of the index and ruin any chance of showing up for a key phrase. Relevant content - People seem to understand that good content is really what they are looking for when they search for something. By “relevant” we mean that the content is specific to the topic in question and recently updated. More and more we are seeing sites that have regular updates or blogs showing up higher in the search results than sites which have larger quantities of older, “stale” content on them.

Our recommendation is to add well-written, grammatically correct and spell-checked content to your website on a regular basis. This ensures that, over time, your site will become a “resource” to those looking for phrases related to your business.

Responsible link building - This is perhaps the least understood part of SEO. In a nutshell search engines consider a link from another website to your website as a popularity vote. Think of it as power rankings for websites. In general the more sites which link to yours, the better; as this shows your site is relevant to the given topic.

Sadly though link building, like keywords and meta-data, have been abused by many site owners with schemes such as link farms where sites are setup simply to house links to other sites. We encourage careful and responsible link building with sites that are related to yours or through appropriate directories and article banks.

So there you have it - SEO explained for people with real jobs. Like most things it’s not really that hard but it requires discipline which is where most people get off track. If you would like help with SEO for your website, or other online business needs we would love to hear from you.

Here are three simple tip to make your website user-friendly:

1. Navigation

The navigation on your site is probably its most important element. If visitors find your site confusing or cannot successfully navigate through it, they will leave. Make your navigation bar as simple as possible. One of the worst mistakes is using an expanding navigation bar that makes the visitor scroll over it in order for the menu to reveal their options. Most often, this type of navigation bar has too many choices; your visitor doesn’t know where to go, so they get flustered and leave.

Navigation on your site is an art, and you should direct your visitors through a logical path to where YOU want them to go (not to where they think they want to go). One way to do this is through call to action buttons or CTAs. We use these buttons on all of our sites; a visitor will go to a main page, and then we can direct them to the parts of that site that we want them to be aware of. We use this method instead of an expanding menu, because we find that it is more logical for visitors. With this method, you can direct visitors to where you want them to go, allowing you to control the buying process.

Quick Tip: most “expanding menus” are created in Macromedia Flash. Search engines cannot read Flash, and therefore they will not pick up these links on your website. If the search engines do not pick up the links on the navigation bar and these links are nowhere else on your site, they cannot accurately crawl or index your site. This is search engine suicide, because without even knowing it, you are stopping search engines from understanding what your site has to offer and from driving traffic to you.
Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!

A good rule of thumb is that a visitor should be able to get to every page on your site with two clicks from your home page. Now, this is not realistic for very complex sites. If your website is complex, you can have a sitemap to help visitors navigate. Some sort of search function may also be a good idea for your site.

2. Page Load Speed

It’s hard to believe that some people are still stuck using dial up. Even if you have entered the world of high-speed Internet, no matter what you do, some websites will load slowly. (If you’re frustrated using high-speed Internet, imagine the frustration of those on good ‘ol dial up!)

Page load speed is VERY important. I know that when I am surfing the Internet and I stumble upon a site that loads slowly, I get annoyed, frustrated, and don’t browse the site for very long. If your website is loading slowly, you are probably losing out on valuable customers, no matter what business you are in.

In today’s web world, we are seeing more and more images, audio files and videos. These things are useful, but you have to be careful that they do not affect the inner workings of your site (in this case, the time it takes for a web page to load). You want to be careful about the size of the images on your website. Both large-sized images and using too many images can cause your website to take too long to load, resulting in visitors leaving. Another tip is to convert videos into a jpeg (image) that only loads and plays the video when a visitor clicks on it. Yes, you may be adding more images to your website, but these are usually small image files; in the hierarchy of the web, a video will slow down your website much more than a small image.

Another factor that can influence the load time of your website is the amount of excess code you have on your site (that is a topic for another day - but ask your webmaster, and they will know what I am talking about).

3. Information

The number one thing that visitors look for is information. They are coming to your site to be educated about your products and/or services and, most of all, how THEY can benefit. With this in mind, it is critical for the information on your website to be accurate, complete and up-to-date. Visitors will leave your site in a split second if the information you are providing is old news.

What’s that best way to provide up-to-date information on your website? The best way we suggest is through blogs and articles. By having a section on your website for blogs and articles, you can provide new, relevant and educational information to your visitors. Adding them is not only simple, but it is fast too!

So there are my three simple tips for the month on how to make your website user-friendly. Although this covered just the beginning of what your website should contain, don’t worry, I won’t leave you stranded– I’ll reveal even more tips in next month’s article!

Deciding where to park your domain or host your website can be difficult if you don’t know what to look for.  Some students have asked me whom I recommend, my answer commonly goes to whomever is having a promotion or a special at the moment.  But the decision ais a little more involved than that.  Some research need to be done to figure out what hosting plans are available and what hosting company can provide you with the service you need.

If you are a beginner you might want to look for companies with that boast technical support as their selling proposition, look for live help and chat on the website and a working 800 number. 

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing methods nowadays
simply because virtually almost all people use email. Download this essential step-by-step guide to building a responsive opt-in mailing list.

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Opt-In List Building For Beginners

How to choose a niche market is one of the toughest decisions for many newbie marketers starting out online. Many choose to enter a competitive market because the rewards are often higher but the competition is also very strong. How is it possible to succeed in one of these high sought after markets?

The problem is that there are many other marketers promoting products in the weight loss niche for example together with making money, stop smoking together with many more in the save money, credit card and mortgage areas.

If you are relying on getting your traffic from search engines then it will be almost impossible to compete in these areas for new sites as there are thousands of established sites with many links that will occupy the top positions in the search engines.

Another option is to use pay per click which is an effective way to get fast traffic, but the problem in these highly competitive markets are the costs involved in getting traffic. It is very expensive using this method and it is essential to plan a method and limit your costs per day otherwise you can easily run up massive costs with little results.

Article writing is one way of getting the news out about your product or service, which is free apart from your time unless you outsource which will increase productivity. There are many article directories to submit articles to but in reality the majority of the traffic comes from only a few of them.

Blogging is a way of promoting a product if you update often it is possible to have a chance in these popular markets as it is possible to use other methods such as the many bookmarking sites to post your content which can result in thousands of visitors.

Probably the best thing to do is choose a less competitive market to begin with and to learn the process of using all the methods to promote your products, there are many like using joint ventures where you would offer a percentage to others to help promote your offers.

Remember that there are markets where people are more inclined to spend money than others to help solve a problem, such as stop smoking, weight loss, save money, make money, relationships, and getting jobs.

Choosing a good niche is a question of doing research using various keyword tools and seeing what type of competition there is any chosen market. When you know this information you can choose whether to enter this market or not.

Even with high competition niches it is possible to find success if you follow the correct procedures, this may require outsourcing to achieve this but it can be done.

By John H Sullivan

It’s probably obvious to you by now that most people search for what they need on the internet specifically they use keywords to conduct those searches.  What webmasters have always done and now more than ever, is focus on those keywords that generate the most searches on Google, Yahoo, and other seacrh engines.  Two years ago, I remember when the keyword: “Paris Hilton” generated one million searches per month across the internet - I can imagine the kind of traffic her related websites generated. 

Now you too can figure out what keywords are generating the kind of traffic that you seek, wordtracker.com is a website that currently offers keyword tracking services for a monthly fee, but they do offer a free keyword tool on the site.  inventory.overture.com was the original keyword tracking tool I used but it seems very slow nowadays.  There are many keyword tools and seo tools out there, I’d like you to become familiar with their capabilities and most importantly how to use these tools to study the market, your competitors, or simply to see what’s popular among internet users.

The following video is for advanced webmasters and it shows some great online SEO tools  in a short 3 minute video.

MP

Affiliate ebook marketing



This is a cool video about ebook marketing. Specifically it shows you how you can profit from selling ebooks.  Affiliate marketing is a fairly popular marketing method on the internet, this video gives some tips and tricks you can benefit from.

MP

Learn to use Google Trends when doing your market research online. Its free and it offers you interesting information about different markets worldwide.