SEO Marketing

Validation

2008-04-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

Web pages are written in the HTML or XHTML language. Like any language there are certain ground rules or standards. The process of testing a page against these standards is called validation . The HTML standards are defined by the World Wide Web consortium (www.w3c.org).

They help web authors to write pages that can be used by a variety of different browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or even Lynx. Despite these standards the world of HTML seems somewhat anarchic. This sentiment stems from the browser wars of the mid 90s when Netscape and Micrsoft added new features to HTML with scant regard for standards. There is a feeling among some SEOers that standards are not important for search engine ranking and there is some truth in this. Point enough inbound-links at an junk page with good anchor text and Google will probably end up returning that page in its results. This feeling is reinforced by statement from Google: "Any parser which is designed to run on the entire Web must handle a huge array of possible errors. These range from typos in HTML tags to kilobytes of zeros in the middle of a tag, non-ASCII characters, HTML tags nested hundreds deep, and a great variety of other errors that challenge anyone's imagination to come up with equally creative ones.

In other words, forget standards, our search engine will sort out your HTML spaghetti whatever. hile this may have been true when Google relied heavily on its PageRank algorithm it certainly won't prove true as search engines move into better understanding of the semantics of page. It is easy for some web authors to forget that HTML is not a formatting language but a mark-up language. It describes the structure of the document in terms of Title elements, Heading levels, Lists, Quotations etc. While these are on-page elements and therefore prone to manipulation they still give the search element clues to the meaning of the page. Even worse, syntax errors with HTML tags may cause the search engine to confuse content and mark-up or to give the wrong significance to parts of the page. In order to use a validation tool to trap errors the first thing to decide is which standard you are going to follow. The most popular, partially because it is the most flexible is 4.01 Transitional . Add a Doctype element at the start of each page to tell your clients, web browsers, validation and tools and potentially robots (although they almost certainly don't use this information) that you are following this standard: !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" Some web authoring tools do this for you. Once your page is online you can go the the W3C's validator at and enter the address of your page. A common error is missing ALT text from images although some web authoring tools produce very poor code.Apart from indicating to search engine algorithms the structure of your page, validated HTML is easier for third parties such as web design companies and search engine optimization consultants to work on. It will also make the code more portable between different web authoring packages.

Although many sites rank well without adhering to standards, validation should help protect your site from changes to the way browsers and search engines work. Certainly if you are optimizing code professionally it should adhere to one of the standards.

On a related topic some web developers and optimizers like to get an idea of how their snazzy page will render on simple browsers. If validated HTML is used along with style sheets for formatting, graphically interesting pages shouldn't present any problems. The Lynx web browser is often used for this purpose as it is a text only web browser. If you don't want to install Lynx the following website aims to emulate the output and is useful for giving an idea of how readable the content is.

Google

2008-04-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

In 1998 it seemed like Silicon Valley and its dot.com phenonoma was the center of the universe. At Stanford University two graduate students: Larry Page, son of a Computer Science professor at Maryland and Sergey Brin, born in Moscow to Russian parents has been working on search engine technology since they met at a conference in 1995.

At that time search engines usually relied on on-page factors to determine the ranking of web pages in their results. Searching was a bit hit-or-miss, particularly for neophytes who had trouble with advanced search forms and their arcane boolean logic. Page and Brin developed a new way of ranking web pages based on the number of inbound-links . Effectively each inbound-link is treated as a vote for the page. Pages with more inbound-links are deemed to be more important. As a further twist the outbound-links (votes) of more important pages are also given more weight. The PageRank algorithm as a way of sifting the wheat from the chaff of search engine results was born.

The results on Stanford's computers were impressive but to launch their service Page and Brin needed venture capital to buy their own hardware and finance further development. They tried to set up a meeting with Andy Bechtolsheim, a co-founder of Sun, another successful Stanford spin-off. Bechtolsheim was interested but was a very busy man, finally they managed to grab a couple of minutes with him in a coffee shop to explain their project, now called Google.

Bechtolsheim immediately offered a check for 100,000 dollars, " we'll work out the details later... ", he told them before rushing off to another meeting. There was one big problem, the check was made out to Google Inc., a company that did not yet exist. Fortunately just the rumour that Bechtolsheim had given money was enough to get other venture capitalists running in Google's direction.

Google was launched out of a building in Menlo Park , California on the 7th of September 1998 . This was the start of the Googleplex. In addition to Bechtolsheim's initial seed money the pair raised a further $1 million dollars. The following summer two investment capital funds would put up another $25million.

At a time when other search engines were polluting their results with paid inclusion and sponsored links and wrapping the search interface inside a " portal " news of Google spread rapidly, especially amongst computer geeks. By the late spring of 2000 Google was answering 18 million queries each day and had become the biggest search engine on the Web. The interface was incredibly simple - just text box, but thanks to PageRank the results were amazingly good, invariably pulling up the requested information or website in the top ten links. Google often indexed the mass of information that had appeared on company websites better than their internal search interface. This ease of use meant that it was becoming a firm favorite with the increasingly large number of non-expert users on the Web. So much so that the term ' googling for information' has entered everyday speech. In a major coup Yahoo!, the largest website around, decided to use Google to supply its own search results.

Google has sought to extend the reach of its technology to include news sources, weblogs and personal email. The introduction of gmail proved controversial with privacy campaigners who believe that indexing personal email represents an intrusion of privacy. Its Froogle (frugal - groan! ) search engine provides price comparisons for users searching for products. Google is built using off the shelf PC hardware configured in a cluster of over 10,000 machines (some people have think they have closer to 50,000 machines) running a customized version of the Linux operating system. On the same day that Microsoft announced the beta launch of its new algorithmic search engine Google doubled the number of pages in their index to a claimed 8 billion pages. Some of these pages may not be fully indexed and return results based on URL and title keywords. This showed that Google was capable of rolling-out changes to its massive array of computers and that it was not afraid to play the marketing game with Microsoft.

For a long time Google resisted the urge to go public. Larry and Serge's leitmotif for the company is ' never do anything evil '. While some people question this the company is viewed a lot more favorably than that other behemoth of computing, Microsoft. Google instead concentrated on building up revenue streams, from selling its search technology to the more recent introduction of the Adwords and Adsense programs. The former lets websites bid on keywords, winners have a small advert placed on the same page as relevant search results or on pages of partners in the Adsense programme. Overall this form of unobtrusive advertising has been well received although some Web users run blocker software on their web browser. Post IPO Google posted a doubling of profits and revenues both of which show strong growth due to online advertising.

Freshbot Deepbot

2008-04-04T04:46:00.000-07:00

Google uses two robots to crawl web content , these have been dubbed the f reshbot and d eepbot after their general purpose. deeptbot is the once a month deep crawl of web content that results in the main Google index. The freshbot crawls the web on a continuous basis and is responsible for the Everflux effect. It finds content that is updated frequently such as news sites , forums, blogs and other websites. It appears that when Google finds a new page it checks it frequently at first to see if there are regular updates. If there are the site is added to the list of pages to be visited by the freshbot.

The freshbot results appear to be compiled into a separate database. This is overwritten every time the freshbot starts a new cycle. The freshbot and main index are merged to produce search results. The means that fresh content may appear in search results very quickly but then disappear only to resurface one or two months later in the main Google index. If the page is already in the main index the Freshbot results may appear for a few days before reverting to the older version until the site is crawled by the Deepbot.

At one time the Freshbot used internet addresses beginning with the number 64. and Deepbot addresses beginning with 216.; but since around the middle of 2003 the Google robots all come from machines in the 64.* or 66.* address range.

Figure 1: Google Robots

Figure 1 is taken from the logfiles of a website , it clearly illustrates a cycle of deep crawls with a lesser number of daily visits. The Googledance follows sometime after the deep crawl as the results are processed.

Page Rank

2008-04-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

Page Rank is the concept that enabled Google to leap-frog over other search engines during the late 1990s in terms of relevant search engine results pages and speed of search. Page Rank holds US patent number 6,285,999 granted on the 4th September 2001 to Larry Page, one of Google's founders. Page's idea is based on established practice for scientific papers where the importance of a paper is based on the number of citations made to it by other papers. The Google algorithm interprets a link from one page to another as a vote. The Google algorithm and the configuration of web pages means that page rank can be fed back so that pages that have more votes are then deemed to be more important and the votes they cast (outbound-links) are subsequently given more weight.

Many web designers' efforts to optimize their sites for search engines , if they make any efforts at all, stop at acquiring inbound-links and exchanging links with other websites in the hope that this will boost their site's PageRank. This focus on PageRank is probably due in part to the Google toolbar that can be installed on Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser. This shows a PageRank value for the current site on a scale of 0 to 10.

Getting a good site ranking is not quite as simple as getting a good score on the Google toolbar and decisions about outbound-links and site structure can have significant effects on PageRank.

Fortunately because of the patent the theory behind PageRank is known. The formula is relatively simple:

Where

∂       damping factor, given as 0.85
n       total number of inbound links
PR n     page rank of inbound page n
C n       number of outbound links from page n

So the PageRank (PR) for any page is equal to some constant value (0.15) plus the sum of all the page ranks from inbound links divided by the number of links (C) on each corresponding page multiplied by the damping factor (0.85).

Don't worry if that is too hard to visualize, we will look at some real examples below. One more thing before we do. As pages can, and usually do, feedback to other pages by way of hyperlinks the calculation has to be made iteratively. Every time Google visits a page it recalculates the PageRank based on the weights of the inbound links. Assuming no other changes it takes around 40 iterations for the figure to converge to a stable value although Google itself uses linear algebra to reduce the number of calculations. The damping factor (∂) is set at 0.85 for optimum performance.

Page Rank Theoretical

2008-04-04T04:23:00.000-07:00

The Google company was the first company to patent the system of taking into account inbound links. The algorithm was named Page Rank. In this section, we will describe this algorithm and how it can influence search result ranking.

   Page Rank is estimated separately for each web page and is determined by the Page Rank (citation) of other pages referring to it. It is a kind of “virtuous circle.” The main task is to find the criterion that determines page importance. In the case of Page Rank, it is the possible frequency of visits to a page.

   I shall now describe how user's behavior when following links to surf the network is modeled. It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The Page Rank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.

   The Page Rank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page . It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment.

   Since it is not always convenient to work with these probabilities the Page Rank can be mathematically transformed into a more easily understood number for viewing. For instance, we are used to seeing a Page Rank number between zero and ten on the Google Toolbar.

    According To the Ranking Model Described Above :
   - Each page on the Net (even if there are no inbound links to it) initially has a Page Rank greater than zero, although it will be very small. There is a tiny chance that a user may accidentally navigate to it.
   - Each page that has outbound links distributes part of its Page Rank to the referenced page. The Page Rank contributed to these linked-to pages is inversely proportional to the total number of links on the linked-from page – the more links it has, the lower the Page Rank allocated to each linked-to page.
   - Page Rank A “damping factor” is applied to this process so that the total distributed page rank is reduced by 15%. This is equivalent to the probability, described above, that the user will not visit any of the linked-to pages but will navigate to an unrelated website.

   Let us now see how this Page Rank process might influence the process of ranking search results. We say “might” because the pure Page Rank algorithm just described has not been used in the Google algorithm for quite a while now. We will discuss a more current and sophisticated version shortly. There is nothing difficult about the Page Rank influence – after the search engine finds a number of relevant documents (using internal text criteria), they can be sorted according to the Page Rank since it would be logical to suppose that a document having a larger number of high-quality inbound links contains the most valuable information.

   Thus, the Page Rank algorithm "pushes up" those documents that are most popular outside the search engine as well.

Google Page Rank

2008-04-04T04:11:00.000-07:00

Currently, Page Rank is not used directly in the Google algorithm. This is to be expected since pure Page Rank characterizes only the number and the quality of inbound links to a site, but it completely ignores the text of links and the information content of referring pages. These factors are important in page ranking and they are taken into account in later versions of the algorithm. It is thought that the current Google ranking algorithm ranks pages according to thematic Page Rank. In other words, it emphasizes the importance of links from pages with content related by similar topics or themes. The exact details of this algorithm are known only to Google developers.

   You can determine the Page Rank value for any web page with the help of the Google Toolbar that shows a Page Rank value within the range from 0 to 10. It should be noted that the Google Toolbar does not show the exact Page Rank probability value, but the Page Rank range a particular site is in. Each range (from 0 to 10) is defined according to a logarithmic scale.

    Here is an example: each page has a real Page Rank value known only to Google. To derive a displayed Page Rank range for their Toolbar, they use a logarithmic scale as shown in this table
          Real PR                               Toolbar PR
          1-10                                            1
          10-100                                        2
          100-1000                                    3
          1000-10.000                               4
Etc.

   This shows that the Page Rank ranges displayed on the Google Toolbar are not all equal. It is easy, for example, to increase Page Rank from one to two, while it is much more difficult to increase it from six to seven.

   In practice, Page Rank is mainly used for two purposes:

   1. Quick check of the sites popularity. Page Rank does not give exact information about referring pages, but it allows you to quickly and easily get a feel for the sites popularity level and to follow trends that may result from your seo work. You can use the following “Rule of thumb” measures for English language sites: PR 4-5 is typical for most sites with average popularity. PR 6 indicates a very popular site while PR 7 is almost unreachable for a regular webmaster. You should congratulate yourself if you manage to achieve it. PR 8, 9, 10 can only be achieved by the sites of large companies such as Microsoft, Google, etc. Page Rank is also useful when exchanging links and in similar situations. You can compare the quality of the pages offered in the exchange with pages from your own site to decide if the exchange should be accepted.

   2. Evaluation of the competitiveness level for a search query is a vital part of seo work. Although Page Rank is not used directly in the ranking algorithms, it allows you to indirectly evaluate relative site competitiveness for a particular query. For example, if the search engine displays sites with Page Rank 6-7 in the top search results, a site with Page Rank 4 is not likely to get to the top of the results list using the same search query.

   It is important to recognize that the Page Rank values displayed on the Google Toolbar are recalculated only occasionally (every few months) so the Google Toolbar displays somewhat outdated information. This means that the Google search engine tracks changes in inbound links much faster than these changes are reflected on the Google Toolbar.

Keyword Density

2008-04-04T03:17:00.000-07:00

Keyword page density is a measure of the relative frequency of the word in the text expressed as a percentage. For example, if a specific word is used 5 times on a page containing 100 words, the keyword density is 5%. If the density of a keyword is too low, the search engine will not pay much attention to it. If the density is too high, the search engine may activate its spam filter. If this happens, the page will be penalized and its position in search listings will be deliberately lowered. The optimum value for keyword density is 5-7%. In the case of keyword phrases, you should calculate the total density of each of the individual keywords comprising the phrases to make sure it is within the specified limits. In practice, a keyword density of more than 7-8% does not seem to have any negative seo consequences. However, it is not necessary and can reduce the legibility of the content from a user’s viewpoint.

Page Keywords

2008-04-04T03:13:00.000-07:00

Keywords must be used at least three to four times in the page text. The upper limit depends on the overall page size – the larger the page, the more keyword repetitions can be made. Keyword phrases (word combinations consisting of several keywords) are worth a separate mention. The best seo results are observed when a keyword phrase is used several times in the text with all keywords in the phrase arranged in exactly the same order. In addition, all of the words from the phrase should be used separately several times in the remaining text. There should also be some difference (dispersion) in the number of entries for each of these repeated words. Let us take an example. Suppose we optimize a page for the phrase "seo software” (one of our seo keywords for this site) It would be good to use the phrase “seo software” in the text 10 times, the word “seo” 7 times elsewhere in the text and the word “software” 5 times. The numbers here are for illustration only, but they show the general seo idea quite well.

Text Page Amount

2008-04-04T02:34:00.000-07:00

Amount of Text on a Page consisting of just a few sentences is less likely to get to the top of a search engine list. Search engines favor sites that have high information content. Generally, you should try to increase the text content of your site in the interest of seo. The optimum page size is 500-3000 words or 2000 to 20,000 characters. Search engine visibility is increased as the amount of page text increases due to the increased likelihood of occasional and accidental search queries causing it to be listed. This factor sometimes results in a large number of visitors.

Internal Ranking Factors

2008-04-04T02:30:00.000-07:00

Several factors influence the position of a site in the search results. They can be divided into external and internal ranking factors. Internal ranking factors are those that are controlled by seo aware website owners (text, layout, etc.) and will be described next.

Web page layout factors relevant to seo

Search Engines History

2008-04-04T02:12:00.000-07:00

In the early days of Internet development, its users were a privileged minority and the amount of available information was relatively small. Access was mainly restricted to employees of various universities and laboratories who used it to access scientific information. In those days, the problem of finding information on the Internet was not nearly as critical as it is now.

Site directories were one of the first methods used to facilitate access to information resources on the network. Links to these resources were grouped by topic. Yahoo was the first project of this kind opened in April 1994. As the number of sites in the Yahoo directory inexorably increased, the developers of Yahoo made the directory searchable. Of course, it was not a search engine in its true form because searching was limited to those resources who’s listings were put into the directory. It did not actively seek out resources and the concept of seo was yet to arrive.

Such link directories have been used extensively in the past, but nowadays they have lost much of their popularity. The reason is simple – even modern directories with lots of resources only provide information on a tiny fraction of the Internet. For example, the largest directory on the network is currently DMOZ (or Open Directory Project). It contains information on about five million resources. Compare this with the Google search engine database containing more than eight billion documents.

The WebCrawler project started in 1994 and was the first full-featured search engine. The Lycos and AltaVista search engines appeared in 1995 and for many years Alta Vista was the major player in this field.

In 1997 Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google as a research project at Stanford University. Google is now the most popular search engine in the world.

Currently, there are three leading international search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN Search. They each have their own databases and search algorithms. Many other search engines use results originating from these three major search engines and the same seo expertise can be applied to all of them. For example, the AOL search engine (search.aol.com) uses the Google database while AltaVista, Lycos and the entire Web all use the Yahoo database.

SEO Marketing Tips

2008-03-03T20:26:00.000-08:00

7 Small Business Marketing Tips

Don't Advertise Like a Big Business Big businesses advertise to create name recognition and future sales. A small business can't afford to do that. Instead, design your advertising to produce sales ...now. One way to accomplish this is to always include an offer in your advertising - and an easy way for prospective customers to respond to it.

Offer a Cheaper Version Some prospective customers are not willing to pay the asking price for your product or service. Others are more interested in paying a low price than in getting the best quality. You can avoid losing sales to many of these customers by offering a smaller or stripped down version of your product or service at a lower price.

Offer a Premium Version

Not all customers are looking for a cheap price. Many are willing to pay a higher price to get a premium product or service. You can boost your average size sale and your total revenue by offering a more comprehensive product or service ...or by combining several products or services in a special premium package offer for a higher price.

Try Some Unusual Marketing Methods

Look for some unconventional marketing methods your competitors are overlooking. You may discover some highly profitable ways to generate sales and avoid competition. For example, print your best small ad on a postcard and mail it to prospects in your targeted market. A small ad on a postcard can drive a high volume of traffic to your website or generate a flood of sales leads for a very small cost.

Trim Your Ads

Reduce the size of your ads so you can run more ads for the same cost. You may even be surprised to find that some of your short ads generate a better response than their longer versions.

Set up Joint Promotions with Other Small Businesses Contact some non-competing small businesses serving customers in your market. Offer to publicize their products or services to your customers in exchange for their publicizing your services to their customers. This usually produces a large number of sales for a very low cost.

Take Advantage of Your Customers Your customers already know and trust you. It's easier to get more business from them than to get any business from somebody who never bought from you. Take advantage of this by creating some special deals just for your existing customers ...and announce new products and services to them before you announce them to the general market.

Also, convert your customers into publicity agents for your business. Develop an incentive for them to tell associates and friends about the value of your products or services. An endorsement from them is more effective than any amount of advertising - and it is much cheaper.

Compensation Models

2008-03-03T20:25:00.000-08:00

Compensation Models

The following compensation models are relevant for affiliate marketing.

Pay-per-impression (PPI) / Cost-per-thousand (CPM) Cost-per-mil (mil/mille/M = latin/Roman numeral for thousand) impressions. Publisher gets from Advertiser $x.xx amount of money for every 1000 impressions (page views/displays) of the Ad. The Ad can be text (AdSense), banner image or rich media.

Pay-per-click (PPC) / Cost-per-click (CPC) Cost-per-click. Advertiser pays publisher $x.xx amount of money, every time a visitor (potential prospect) clicks on the advertiser's Ad. It is irrelevant (for the compensation) how often an Ad is displayed. commission is only due when the Ad is clicked. See also click fraud.

Pay-per-lead (PPL) / Cost-per-action/acquisition (CPA) / Cost-per-lead CPL) Cost-per-action or Cost-per-acquisition (CPA), Cost-per-Lead (CPL). Advertiser pays publisher $x.xx in commission for every visitor that was referred by the publisher to the advertiser (web site) and performs a desired action, such as filling out a form, creating an account or signing up for a newsletter. This compensation model is very popular with online services from internet service providers, cell phone providers, banks (loans, mortgages, credit cards) and subscription services.

Pay-per-sale (PPS) / Cost-per-sale (CPS)

Cost-per-sale (CPS). Advertiser pays the publisher a percentage (%) of the order amount (sale) that was created by a customer who was referred by the publisher. This model is by far the most common compensation model used by online retailers that have an affiliate program. This form of compensation is also referred to as Revenue sharing.

Pay-per-call (no abbreviation exists yet)

This is a new compensation model. No official abbreviation exist yet. Advertiser pays publisher a $x.xx commission for phone calls received from potential prospects as response to a specific publisher Ad. Recently developed call-tracking technology allows to create a bridge between online and offline advertising. Pay-per-call advertising is still new and in its infancy.

Email Marketing Subscribers

2008-03-03T20:19:00.000-08:00

Getting subscribers to your mailing list is just a matter of having something others want. You may have insight on a certain subject, offering a great download to the subscribers, running a contest where the only requirement is to subscribe, etc.

There are many ways to get subscribers but the main requirement is for you to give potential subscribers something they want or need.

There is just one rule you should follow; Be Honest. Honesty will get you a more targeted subscriber which in turn will benefit you.

Treat your Emailing Marketing subscribers like Gold.

Why? Because if you treat them with honesty, don't talk down to them and give them good information on a consistent basis, your members will repay you by not only reading your newsletter but participating in the "calls for action" within the newsletter.

A good newsletter can get a much higher return then a website and that is why many companies are now heavily focusing on their Email Marketing Campaigns.

This probably goes against everything you have learned about email marketing but don't be afraid to "yada yada". That is not to say that you can just talk about something that has no relevance to your newsletter but if you have a good story don't hold it back. Subscribers are just people and a good or funny story always can keep our attention. Your subscribers will get a better understanding of you and look forward to getting your newsletter to just see what you have to say. Happy, attentive subscribers are loyal subscribers

Should you use HTML email or plain text? This question is asked all of the time and the answer is easy, "plain text". Your newsletter should be sent in text and not HTML.

HTML email can look great and add some eye candy to your newsletter but like in real life too much candy can be bad. Plus because spammers only really use HTML emails, people are either filtering out all HTML email or finding ways so their email software will read all email in plain text, your newsletter may not get delivered.

If you want place a link on top of the text email to open an HTML version of the newsletter.

In internet speak typing in ALL CAPITOL LETTERS is the same as yelling and SPAM filters watch out for that, plus it annoys people. Avoid all caps in your subject lines and email headings.

Limit you fingers to hitting the punctuation keys only once. Email filers will definitely flag an email with more than one "!!!!!!!!" or "??????". Be careful with your punctuation and try to remember what your elementary school teacher taught you. You do not want to have to sit in the corner or miss recess. You need to test.

Before you send out a newsletter you need to test it to make certain that everything is formatted correctly. Test your hyperlinks and make sure you have included the http:// and do not use IP address numbers in place of actual domain names.

If you have a lot of subscribers with AOL.com email addresses you need to set up a special hyperlink for them.

In a plain text email a hyperlink such as http://www.anydomain.com would be able to be clicked on and open a browser to the URL but because the way AOL's email software handles email it would not. You would have to add this line http://www.anydomian.com to allow AOL subscribers to make the link clickable.

Send a test newsletter to yourself so you can see it just like your subscribers will. Any successful Email Marketing Campaign needs to come from a person and sent to a person, so test it to make sure it comes across that way.

The Google Toolbar is more powerful than just helping you to Search the Web and block pop-ups. It is a great tool to use to help your website get spidered and thus listed on Google. Go and download the toolbar and select the advanced setting option. Once the toolbar is installed go to your website a few times a day for a week or so and before you know it the Googlebot will be making visits to rank your website.

Search Engine Principles

2007-11-23T02:47:00.000-08:00

To understand seo you need to be aware of the architecture of search engines. They all contain the following main components: Spider - a browser-like program that downloads web pages. Crawler – a program that automatically follows all of the links on each web page. Indexer - a program that analyzes web pages downloaded by the spider and the crawler. Database– storage for downloaded and processed pages. Results engine – extracts search results from the database. Web server – a server that is responsible for interaction between the user and other search engine components. Specific implementations of search mechanisms may differ. For example, the Spider +Crawler+ Indexer component group might be implemented as a single program that downloads web pages, analyzes them and then uses their links to find new resources. However, the components listed are inherent to all search engines and the seo principles are the same. Spider. This program downloads web pages just like a web browser. The difference is that a browser displays the information presented on each page (text, graphics, etc.) while a spider does not have any visual components and works directly with the underlying HTML code of the page. You may already know that there is an option in standard web browsers to view source HTML code. Crawler. This program finds all links on each page. Its task is to determine where the spider should go either by evaluating the links or according to a predefined list of addresses. The crawler follows these links and tries to find documents not already known to the search engine. Indexer. This component parses each page and analyzes the various elements, such as text, headers, structural or stylistic features, special HTML tags, etc. Database. This is the storage area for the data that the search engine downloads and analyzes. Sometimes it is called the index of the search engine. Results Engine. The results engine ranks pages. It determines which pages best match a user's query and in what order the pages should be listed. This is done according to the ranking algorithms of the search engine. It follows that page rank is a valuable and interesting property and any seo specialist is most interested in it when trying to improve his site search results. In this article, we will discuss the seo factors that influence page rank in some detail. Web server the search engine web server usually contains a HTML page with an input field where the user can specify the search query he or she is interested in. The web server is also responsible for displaying search results to the user in the form of an HTML page.

Email Marketing

2007-11-23T02:32:00.000-08:00

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is a very inexpensive, highly rewarding form of Internet Marketing. Having your own double opt-in mailing list is almost like having the goose that lays the golden egg and whenever you need another egg all you have to do is go out and get one.

Maybe that analogy is a little exaggerated, but the principals behind a successful email marketing campaign are the same.

A double opt-in email marketing campaign is also rewarding because your subscribers wanted to receive your newsletter and took the time to opt-in. A double opt-in list is not only more targeted and successful than a single opt-in list; a double opt-in list is much safer.

With a single opt-in list it is easy for anyone to submit any email address, even if it is not theirs and they are doing it for a friend. The persons email address they submitted may not want to be on your list and they will not know that they subscribed until they start receiving emails from you. These subscribers will probably not ever open your newsletter and may report you for sending SPAM. We all know how bad SPAM is getting, so don't contribute to the problem.

Double opt-in is an enhanced permission that tackles these issues. With double opt-in, the submitted name is not immediately added to a mailing list. Instead, an email is sent to the address, asking to confirm that your name should indeed be added. If the recipient of the confirmation email does nothing, the submitted address is deleted and never added to the Email Marketing Campaign. The name is only added to a list if the recipient responds to the confirmation email and thus double opt-in.

SEM Important Abbreviations

2007-11-23T02:26:00.000-08:00

Important Abbreviations The following abbreviations are commonly used in affiliate marketing.^[4]

AD - Advertisement, text, banner, flash, video etc.

CJ - Commission Junction (Network)

CPA - Cost per action

CPC - Cost per click

CPL - Cost per lead

CPM - Cost per mil (mil/mille/M = latin/Roman numeral for thousand)

CPS - Cost per sale

CR - Conversion rate

CTR - Click through rate

DRM - Dynamic rich media (type of Ad, technology). It has nothing to do with DRM as in digital rights management

EPC - Earnings per click / earnings per 100 clicks

LS - Linkshare (Network)

OPM - (or APM) - outsourced (affiliate) program management

PFI - Pay for inclusion

PID - Publisher ID (Affiliate/Affiliate site ID)

PF - Performics (Network)

PFP - Pay For performance

PPC - Pay per click

PPCSE - Pay per click search engine

PPI - Pay per impression

PPL - Pay per lead

PPS - Pay per sale

ROI - Return on investment

SAS - ShareASale (Network)

SE - Search engines

SEM - Search engine marketing

SEO - Search engine optimization

SERP - Search engine result page

SID - URL parameter the affiliate can pass to get tracked with sales and leads

SEO Marketing

2007-02-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

There is a considerable sized body of practitioners of SEO who see search engines as just another visitor to a site, and try to make the site as accessible to those visitors as to any other who would come to the pages. They often see the white hat/black hat dichotomy mentioned above as a false dilemma. The focus of their work is not primarily to rank the highest for certain terms in search engines, but rather to help site owners fulfill the business objectives of their sites. Indeed, ranking well for a few terms among the many possibilities does not guarantee more sales. A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic search results to pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and making sites accessible and usable.

SEOs may work in-house for an organization, or as consultants, and search engine optimization may be only part of their daily functions. Often their education of how search engines function comes from interacting and discussing the topics on forums, through blogs, at popular conferences and seminars, and by experimentation on their own sites. There are few college courses that cover online marketing from an ecommerce perspective that can keep up with the changes that the web sees on a daily basis.

SEO, as a marketing strategy, can often generate a good return. However, as the search engines are not paid for the traffic they send from organic search, the algorithms used can and do change, there are no guarantees of success, either in the short or long term. Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, SEO is often compared to traditional Public Relations (PR), with PPC advertising closer to traditional advertising. Increased visitors is analogous to increased foot traffic in retail advertising. Increased traffic may be detrimental to success if the site is not prepared to handle the traffic or visitors are generally dissatisfied with what they find. In either case increased traffic does not guarantee increased sales or success.

While endeavoring to meet the guidelines posted by search engines can help build a solid foundation for success on the web, such efforts are only a start. SEO is potentially more effective when combined with a larger marketing campaign strategy. Despite SEO potential to respond to the latest changes in market trends, SEO alone is reactively following market trends instead of pro-actively leading market trends. Many see search engine marketing as a larger umbrella under which search engine optimization fits, but it's possible that many who focused primarily on SEO in the past are incorporating more and more marketing ideas into their efforts, including public relations strategy and implementation, online display media buying, web site transition SEO, web trends data analysis, HTML E-mail campaigns, and business blog consulting making SEO firms more like an ad agency.

In addition, whilst SEO can be considered a marketing tactic unto itself, it's often considered (in the view of industry experts) to be a single part of a greater whole.^{[citation needed]} Marketing through other methods, such as viral, pay-per-click, new media marketing and other related means is by no means irrelevant, and indeed, can be crucial to maintaining a strong search engine rank.^{[citation needed]} The part of SEO that simply insures content relevancy and attracts inbound link activity may be enhanced through broad target marketing methods such as print, broadcast and out-of-home advertising as well.

Hand Book Of SEO

2007-02-24T04:47:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a subset of search engine marketing seeks to improve the number and quality of visitors to a web site from "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. The quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase or requesting further information. In effect, SEO is marketing by appealing first to machine algorithms to increase search engine relevance and secondly to human visitors. The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers", an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Search engine optimization is available as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because SEO often requires making changes to the source code of a site, it is often most effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, Content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.

A range of strategies and techniques are employed in SEO, including changes to a site's code (referred to as "on page factors") and getting links from other sites (referred to as "off page factors"). These techniques include two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who utilize them, as either "white hat SEO", or "black hat SEO".^[1] Other SEOs reject the black and white hat dichotomy as an over-simplification. noframe noframes noframes noframes noframes /noframes

SEO Tools

2007-02-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

SEO Tools Search Engine Spider Simulator http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php Similar Page Checker http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php Backlink Builder http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-builder.php Keyword Density Checker http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker http://www.webconfs.com/redirect-check.php Link Price Calculator http://www.webconfs.com/link-value.php Reciprocal Link Check http://www.webconfs.com/reciprocal-link-checker.php Check Yahoo WebRank http://www.webconfs.com/check-yahoo-webrank.php Domain Stats Tool http://www.webconfs.com/domain-stats.php Domain Age Tool http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php Keyword Playground http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-playground.php Website Keyword Suggestions http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php URL Rewriting Tool http://www.webconfs.com/url-rewriting-tool.php Keyword-Rich Domain Suggestion Tool http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-rich-domain-suggestions.php Website to Country http://www.webconfs.com/website-to-country.php Alexa Ranking Tool http://www.webconfs.com/alexa-ranking-tool.php HTTP / HTTPS Header Check http://www.webconfs.com/http-header-check.php Advanced Domain Whois Lookup Tool http://www.webconfs.com/whois-lookup.php IP to City http://www.webconfs.com/ip-to-city.php File Search Engine http://www.webconfs.com/file-search-engine.php Web Page Screen Resolution Simulator http://www.webconfs.com/web-page-screen-resolution.php Mata Tag Creator http://vancouver-webpages.com/META/mk-metas.html Similar Page CheckerSearch Engines are known to penalize websites that contain Duplicate / Similar content. Your content could be similar to other websites on the Internet, or pages from within your own website could be similar to each other. This tool allows you to determine the percentage of similarity between two pages Search Engine Spider SimulatorThis tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the specified webpage. Backlink Anchor Text AnalysisIt is not enough just to have a lot of backlinks, it is the Quality of backlinks along with the Quantity that help you rank better in Search Engines. This tools help you determine the backlinks of your website and the link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite. Backlink BuilderThis tools help you build a LOT of quality backlinks, it searches for websites of the theme you specify that contain keyphrases like "Add link", "Add site", "Add URL", "Add URL", "Submit URL" etc. Most of the results could be potential backlinks. Backlink SummaryThis tool will give you get a summary of your competitors backlinks. Keyword Density CheckerKeyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords to the text in the rest of your webpage. This tool will crawl the specified URL, extract text as a search engine would, remove common stop words and Analyze the density of the keywords. Redirect CheckIt is very import that when a search engine comes to crawl your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up. This tools help you determine if the redirect you have created is Search Engine Friendly. Kontera Ads PreviewAllows you to preview Kontera ads on your website. Link Price CalculatorThis tools will help you determine the appropriate amount you should be paying (or charging) per month for a text link (ad) from each and every page of the specified website. Reciprocal Link CheckThis tool helps you ensure that your link partners are linking back to your website. It also determines the anchor text used by your link partners to link to your website. Check Yahoo WebRankThis tool help you evaluate the importance of a URL as perceived by Google and Yahoo. Domain Stats ToolThis tool helps you get all kinds of statistics of your competitor's domains. The statistics include Yahoo WebRank, Pages Indexed by various Searcb Engines, Backlink count, Alexa Taffic Rank, and Age of the domains. Domain Age ToolThis tools displays the approximate age of a website on the Internet and allows you to view how the website looked when it first started. It also helps you find out the age of your competitor's domains, older domains may get a slight edge in Search Engine Rankings. Keyword PlaygroundUsers enter keyphrases in Search Engines to get information they need, It is VERY important that you optimize for such keyphrases. This tools help you determine key phrases and report on its monthly search estimate. Website Keyword SuggestionsThis tools tries to determine the theme of your website and provides keyword suggestions along with keyword traffic estimates. URL Rewriting ToolThis tool helps you convert dynamic URLs into static looking html URLs. Keyword-Rich Domain Suggestion ToolHaving a KEYWORD-RICH domain name is an important factor of Search Engine Optimization. This tools will suggest keyword rich domain names. Website to CountryMany people wonder why their websites dont rank well in Country specific Search Engines, most of the Search Engines determines country of the website based on the physical location of the website's IP Address. You would probably rank well in a Country Specific Search Engine if your website is hosted in the same country. This tools helps determine the Country in which the specified website is Hosted. Alexa Ranking ToolThis tools allows you to get the Alexa Traffic Rankings of you and your competitors.

SEO

2007-02-22T21:13:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimization (SEO), considered by many to be a subset of search engine marketing, is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a web site from search engines, usually in "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Those efforts may also be seen in more narrow vertical search engines involving areas such as local search. Many site owners and consultants engaging in SEO attempt to pursue qualified visitors to a site, and the quality of visitor traffic can be measured by how often a visitor using a specific keyword phrase leads to a desired conversion action, such as making a purchase, viewing or downloading a certain page, requesting further information, signing up for a newsletter, or taking some other specific action.
In a broad sense, SEO is marketing by understanding how search algorithms work and what human visitors might search for, to help match those visitors with sites offering what they are interested in finding. Creating web pages with SEO in mind does not necessarily mean creating content more favorable to algorithms than human visitors. Some SEO efforts may involve optimizing a site's coding, presentation, and structure, without making very noticeable changes to human visitors, such as incorporating a clear hierarchical structure to a site, and avoiding or fixing problems that might keep search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts, involve including unique content on pages that can be easily indexed and extracted from those pages by search engines while also appealing to human visitors.
The term SEO can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees of site owners who may perform SEO services in-house.
Search engine optimizers often offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a larger marketing campaign. Because effective SEO can require making changes to the source code of a site, it is often very helpful when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site, leading to the use of the term "Search Engine Friendly" to describe designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that can be optimized easily and effectively.