January « 2007 « Web Development & Site Promotion Articles

Archive for January, 2007

Blogs and Journalism

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

The world has seen the emergence of a new style of journalism, based on a ‘raw feed’ directly from the source. And the common notion that surrounds the emergence of serving ‘raw feed’ is that the journalists testing the new waters are bound to wreak havoc on institutionalized media.

Also a popular notion is that Weblogs changes the nature of ‘news’ is in the migration of information from the personal to the public. Unquestionable, a blog is a medium that gives maximum exposure to one’s creativity. Just by hitting the ‘post’ button and any personal writing becomes published writing.

Weblogging is driving a powerful new form of amateur journalism. Today, millions of Net users – young people especially – have taken up the role of columnist, reporter, analyst and publisher while fashioning their own personal broadcasting networks.

For the inexperienced, a blog consists of a running commentary with pointers to other sites. Some, like Librarian.net, Jim Romenesko’s Media News or Steve Outing’s E-Media Tidbits, cover entire industries by providing quick bursts of news with links to full stories.

Journalism and blogging together is becoming popular day by day, more than any other form of blogging. Following reasons are considered to extensively contribute to its increasing popularity:

Creative Freedom

Part of a blog’s allure is its unmediated quality. For a journalist, there’s no luxury like the luxury of publishing unedited essay. The freedom in being able to present yourself precisely as you want to is of enormous joy. It does not matter how sloppily, irrationally or erratically the content is written. The idea is to publish what you think in the way you think.

Instantaneity

To a few writers, even writing for a weekly magazine may seem like taking ages to print. With a Weblog, you hit the send key and it is out.

Interactivity

It is a kick to receive feedback from people who have taken interest to read and criticize your work. These are the people you have never heard of; who stumble on your Weblog and become a part of your thinking process.

Lack Of Marketing Constraints

When blogging it is not necessarily to tailor a work piece for a certain readership or demographic. People interested in a perspective finds its author – the blogger, instead of the blogger finding a publication that reflects people’s interests.

Most of the time, the Weblogs tend to be less about actual reporting and more about analysis and punditry and opinionated commentary. The 9/11 terrorist attacks fuelled the public’s appetite for information, analysis and news, if only to make sense of the tragedy. Bloggers rose to prominence by feeding this desire.

Blogging has taken off in remarkable fashion; in a way, it has made good where newsgroups have failed. It has kept the promise that the Internet would provide real community to Web surfers. Tuning in to some of the newsgroups devoted to the terror attacks; one may sometimes feel to be in the middle of a verbal war zone with so much noise passing for informed discussion.

Weblogs run from single person operation to large teams and communities, to business organizations spread throughout the world. They offer a great way for readers to find constantly updated news and information. It also allows authors to connect to thousands of readers in a personal way and add the honest, unedited voice of thousands to increasingly commercializing Web.

The plethora of tools that helps managing the weblog capitalizes on the ease of publishing posts to even greater extent.

These are probably the reasons why they have been widely adopted and maintained – for several years in some cases.

Gunnar Berglund has been a “internet- hardworker” for the last five years He publishes The meonit Gazette http://gazette.meonit.com and run http://www.meonit.com and http://www.visualxmleditor.com

Posted in Blogging & RSS | No Comments »

How To Use Banner Ads Effectively

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

It’s no big secret that banner ads have become less effective than text links over the years. This phenomenon is called “banner blindness”. Banners were so ubiquitous in the early years of the Internet that users simply began to ignore them.

So what did many advertisers do to combat banner blindness? They made their banners harder to ignore by causing them to flash, rotate, jump around, and all sorts of other annoying tricks.

This of course led most users to like banners even less!

Does this mean that banner ads are useless? No, not at all!

There are several things that you can do to make your banner campaigns more effective. First of all, ensure that each of your banners is pleasant to look at and blends in well with the web page it’s displayed on. Match up the design and color scheme with those of the site.

This means you’ll need to create a customized banner for each and every site you advertise on, but the results will most definitely make the extra effort and expense well worth it!

You also need to place your banners on relevant pages (not just relevant sites). For example, a banner ad for a logo design service will convert much better on an article page about web design than on a page about dog grooming.

Another technique that works extremely well is making your banners look just like regular text links. Here’s how to do it:

1 – Create a normal text link for your offer that is designed to fill up the space used by a regular 468×60 banner.

2 – Upload a blank page with the text link on it to your website and view it in your web browser.

3 – Press the “Print Screen” button (Prt Scr).

4 – Load the Windows Paint application and click “Edit”, and then “Paste”. You’ll see a screenshot of your new web page with nothing on it except for the text link.

5 – Click “File”, and then “Save As”. Save the image as a JPEG.

6 – Load the saved JPEG image into any photo editing program, then crop it to 468×60 pixels. You now have a standard 468×60 banner that looks just like a normal text link!

About The Author

Rick Rouse is the owner of RLROUSE Directory & Informational Resources, one of the fastest growing Directories on the web. Visit http://www.rlrouse.com and submit your URL!

Posted in Website Promotion | No Comments »

Advantages of an Online Site Builder

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Advantages of an Online Site Builder
by: Halstatt Pires

There are numerous choices when it comes to building web sites. One of the first choices you will have to make is whether to use an online or offline site builder.

Site Builders

Site builders can be divided into two categories, online and offline. An online site builder creates a web site with web forms over the Internet. With an online site builder, there is no need to install any special software. You only need an Internet browser.

An offline site builder is a program that you install on a computer from a disc or a download. This type of site builder requires that a site is first built on the computer with the software, then uploaded, often with a separate piece of software.

Location, Location, Location

A good online site builder has several advantages over an offline site builder. For starters, and online site builder is always there regardless of where you are accessing the Internet. You can easily work with it from home, the office or on the road. With an offline builder, you need to be on the Internet, have the builder software installed and usually have a separate FTP program installed. From this perspective, an online site builder is clearly the better choice.

Users – Get Off My Cloud

In selecting a builder, one should keep in mind the number of people who will be working on the site. If there are more than two, chaos can ensue with an offline builder. Building a site requires some tedious work. Nothing is more frustrating than uploading changes only to discover you were updating a version of the page that subsequently has been updated by others working on the site. Many a new cussword has been created in such instances.

An online site builder almost always allows for multiple users and, by definition, always contains the updated version of pages. This simple aspect limits confusion and helps avoid duplication of work. Admittedly, it cuts down on the creation of new cusswords, but we must all sacrifice something.

Other Advantages:

1. Online site builders often use databases to store web site information rather than separate files for every page. This makes web sites much more scalable in the long run and allows for different sorting techniques.

2. Good online site builders will also be backed-up on a daily basis, so your work is always double protected. Not all online site builders provide backups, so make sure the site builder you choose does.

3. Online site builders also generally offer a selection of templates to use that make it a lot easier to build sites. Instead of having to create the entire site, many online site builders allow you to focus solely on the content of your site and do not require you to learn HTML.

Online site builders are usually easy to use, don’t require much computer experience, are portable and can save you time. Before you build a site, it is worth your time to consider your online site builder options.

About The Author

Halstatt Pires is an Internet marketing consultant with http://www.marketingtitan.com – an Internet marketing firm in San Diego offering automated web site systems through http://www.businesscreatorpro.com.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Create Huge Income From Your Web Site – 10 Easy Ways

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

The cost of setting up a web site is dirt cheap nowadays. You can register a domain for less than $2.00 as I write this (for .info domains). Hosting is also very cheap, and getting cheaper all the time.

So why are so many web sites springing up? Obviously somebody’s making money besides the hosting companies, so here’s some idea starters for you:

1. Sell your own products or services. They should be related to your target audience. You want to be able to take credit cards (at least with PayPal if not otherwise) on your site and deliver your product to your customers as fast as possible.

2. Sell another company’s products. There is no shortage of companies willing to drop ship items for you, all you have to do is make the sale and place the order with your fulfillment company, they do all the work, and you profit on the difference between their price and yours. There are ways to avoid the hassles some attribute to drop shippers.

3. If you have enough activity to your site, you can sell advertising space, such as banner, classified, or text ads. Of course you need to have enough traffic coming to your site first, so that people have an incentive to want to gain exposure to your visitors. You might not make a lot from displaying small text or banner ads, but it can easily pay for your hosting fees, and enough more to invest in some software scripts that will make your site that much better.

4. Sign up with Google AdSense or another contextual advertising company, and let them place their ads on your pages. When someone clicks on an ad, you earn money. Some webmasters are making many thousands of dollars a month with Google AdSense.

5. If you have enough web space, you could rent other people web pages. You could also give them away for free and make money by including your Google AdSense ads on their web pages.

6. Charge people a fee (monthly or annual subscription, or a one time fee) to access your web site. People will pay you money for your content if it’s valuable to them. This can be ebooks, reports, interviews, software, etc.

If you find a niche market, you can spend some time researching your topic and put all sorts of articles and resources to that niche on your site. Then those who have a similar interest might be likely to want to take advantage of all the time you’ve already spent by coming straight to the site (yours) that has all the answers for them already. If you have enough articles on your topic, you might want to get a site search engine (there are free scripts available) to make it easier to find the information your visitors want.

7. Make money selling other people’s products through affiliate programs. They’ll give you a link to track your sales. If you haven’t heard of affiliate programs, you’re in for a treat, many thousands of people are making a full time income just by driving traffic from their site to merchant sites, never touching or shipping a product, letting the merchant do all the work and make the entire investment in inventory.

A good way to start with affiliate programs is to sign up with ClickBank. There are well over 10,000 different eBooks that you are then automatically an affiliate for. It’s likely that there are some that tie in with the theme of your site. Write up some reviews and recommendations and send traffic to the ClickBank merchant, and if the eBook sells, you get commissions sometimes as high as 75%.

Another benefit is that if you make a page for each of your eBook reviews, you will eventually start drawing traffic from search engines because some of your pages will get ranked well for the keywords used to describe the eBook you’re reviewing.

8. Publish an e-zine from your web site. Ask your visitors to subscribe to the e-zine right from your web site through a sign up box. You might want to find something to entice them to give you their email address, like a free report, eCourse, or eBook. Once you have enough subscribers to your e-zine, you could sell classified or sponsor advertising inside your e-zine, or you could periodically review and recommend products that you’re an affiliate for to your subscribers.

9. If you have your own business already (real estate agent, hairdresser, contractor, restaurant, etc.), put up a web page to draw in prospects. All you need is a picture, contact information, a description of what you do, and you have a cheap advertisement that will pull in customers.

10. Set up a local directory of small businesses. Give each business their own page, fix it up for them so that it’s optimized for the search engines, and charge them annually for the service. They won’t have to pay hosting fees and you do everything for them. Suggest that they put the web site address on their business card, and you’ll have virtually locked them in for annual renewals for the life of their business.

These are just some thought-starters for you. There are over a billion web sites on the Internet, there are obviously more than ten ways to earn money with them. Come up with a unique method of cashing in from all those surfers, or use one of our methods, and one day you’ll be writing your own advice articles.

Find out how to maximize your profits and minimize your expenses by using affordable web hosting and other techniques. Visit the site for more great tips.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

What In The World Is This Google Sandbox Theory Thing? And How Do I Beat It?

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Ok, so over the past month or so I’ve been collecting various search engine optimization questions from all of you. Today, I’m going to answer what was the most frequently asked question over the past month.

You guessed it… What is the Google Sandbox Theory and how do I escape it? When you finish reading this lesson, you’ll be an expert on the good ‘ole Google Sandbox Theory and you’ll know how to combat its effects. So, pay close attention. This is some very important stuff.

Before I start explaining what the Google Sandbox theory is, let me make a few things clear:

The Google Sandbox theory is just that, a theory, and is without official confirmations from Google or the benefit of years of observation.

The Google Sandbox theory has been floating around since summer 2004, and has only really gained steam after February 4, 2005 , after a major Google index update (something known as the old Google dance).

Without being able to verify the existence of a Sandbox, much less its features, it becomes very hard to devise strategies to combat its effects.

Almost everything that you will read on the Internet on the Google Sandbox theory is conjecture, pieced together from individual experiences and not from a wide-scale objective controlled experiment with hundreds of websites (something that would obviously help in determining the nature of the Sandbox, but is inherently impractical given the demand on resources).

Thus, as I’ll be discussing towards the end, it’s important that you focus on ‘good’ search engine optimization techniques and not place too much emphasis on quick ‘get-out-of-jail’ schemes which are, after all, only going to last until the next big Google update.

What is the Google Sandbox Theory?

There are several theories that attempt explain the Google Sandbox effect. Essentially, the problem is simple. Webmasters around the world began to notice that their new websites, optimized and chock full of inbound links, were not ranking well for their selected keywords.

In fact, the most common scenario to be reported was that after being listed in the SERPS (search engine results pages) for a couple of weeks, pages were either dropped from the index or ranked extremely low for their most important keywords.

This pattern was tracked down to websites that were created (by created I mean that their domain name was purchased and the website was registered) around March 2004. All websites created around or after March 2004 were said to be suffering from the Sandbox effect.

Some outliers escaped it completely, but webmasters on a broad scale had to deal with their websites ranking poorly even for terms for which they had optimized their websites to death.

Conspiracy theories grew exponentially after the February 2005 update, codenamed ‘Allegra’ (how these updates are named I have no clue), when webmasters began seeing vastly fluctuating results and fortunes. Well-ranked websites were loosing their high SERPS positions, while previously low-ranking websites had gained ground to rank near the top for their keywords.

This was a major update to Google’s search engine algorithm, but what was interesting was the apparent ‘exodus’ of websites from the Google Sandbox. This event gave the strongest evidence yet of the existence of a Google Sandbox, and allowed SEO experts to better understand what the Sandbox effect was about.

Possible explanations for the Google Sandbox effect

A common explanation offered for the Google Sandbox effect is the ‘Time Delay’ factor. Essentially, this theory suggests that Google releases websites from the Sandbox after a set period of time. Since many webmasters started feeling the effects of the Sandbox around March-April 2004 and a lot of those websites were ‘released’ in the ‘Allegra’ update, this ‘website aging’ theory has gained a lot of ground.

However, I don’t find much truth in the ‘Time Delay’ factor because by itself, it’s just an artificially imposed penalty on websites and does not improve relevancy (the Holy Grail for search engines). Since Google is the de facto leader of the search engine industry and is continuously making strides to improve relevancy in search results, tactics such as this do not fit in with what we know about Google.

Contrasting evidence from many websites has shown that some websites created before March 2004 were still not released from the Google Sandbox, whereas some websites created as late as July 2004 managed to escape the Google Sandbox effect during the ‘Allegra’ update. Along with shattering the ‘Time Delay’ theory, this also raises some interesting questions. This evidence has led some webmasters to suggest a ‘link threshold’ theory; once a website has accumulated a certain amount of quantity/quality inbound links, it is released from the Sandbox.

While this might be closer to the truth, this cannot be all there is to it. There has been evidence of websites who have escaped the Google Sandbox effect without massive link-building campaigns. In my opinion, link-popularity is definitely a factor in determining when a website is released from the Sandbox but there is one more caveat attached to it.

This concept is known as ‘link-aging’. Basically, this theory states that websites are released from the Sandbox based on the ‘age’ of their inbound links. While we only have limited data to analyze, this seems to be the most likely explanation for the Google Sandbox effect.

The link-ageing concept is something that confuses people, who usually consider that it is the website that has to age. While conceptually, a link to a website can only be as old as the website itself, yet if you have don’t have enough inbound links after one year, common experience has it that you will not be able to escape from the Google Sandbox. A quick hop around popular SEO forums (you do visit SEO forums, don’t you?) will lead you to hundreds of threads discussing various results ? some websites were launched in July 2004 and escaped by December 2004. Others were stuck in the Sandbox even after the ‘Allegra’ update.

How to find out if your website is ‘Sandboxed’

Finding out if your website is ‘Sandboxed’ is quite simple. If your website does not appear in any SERPS for your target list of keywords, or if your results are highly depressing (ranked somewhere on the 40 th page) even if you have lots of inbound links and almost-perfect on-page optimization, then your website has been Sandboxed.

Issues such as the Google Sandbox theory tend to distract webmasters from the core ‘good’ SEO practices and inadvertently push them towards black-hat or quick-fix techniques to exploit the search engine’s weaknesses. The problem with this approach is its short-sightedness. To explain what I’m talking about, let’s take a small detour and discuss search engine theory.

Understanding Search Engines

If you’re looking to do some SEO, it would help if you tried to understand what search engines are trying to do. Search engines want to present the most relevant information to their users. There are two problems in this ? the inaccurate search terms that people use and the information glut that is the Internet. To counteract, search engines have developed increasingly complex algorithms to deduce relevancy of content for different search terms.

How does this help us?

Well, as long as you keep producing highly-targeted, quality content that is relevant to the subject of your website (and acquire natural inbound links from related websites), you will stand a good chance for ranking high in SERPS. It sounds ridiculously simple, and in this case, it is. As search engine algorithms evolve, they will continue to do their jobs better, thus becoming better at filtering out trash and presenting the most relevant content to their users.

While each search engine will have different methods of determining search engine placement (Google values inbound links quite a lot, while Yahoo has recently placed additional value on Title tags and domain names), in the end all search engines aim to achieve the same goal, and by aiming to fulfill that goal you will always be able to ensure that your website can achieve a good ranking.

Escaping from the Google Sandbox

Now, from our discussion about the Sandbox theory above, you know that at best, the Google Sandbox is a filter on the search engine’s algorithm that has a dampening influence on websites. While most SEO experts will tell you that this effect decreases after a certain period of time, they mistakenly accord it to website aging, or basically, when the website is first spidered by Googlebot. Actually, the Sandbox does ‘holds back’ new websites but more importantly, the effects reduce over time not on the basis of website aging, but on link aging.

This means that the time that you spend in the Google Sandbox is directly linked to when you start acquiring quality links for your website. Thus, if you do nothing, your website may not be released from the Google Sandbox.

However, if you keep your head down and keep up with a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and keep adding inbound links to your website, you will be released from the Google Sandbox after an indeterminate period of time (but within a year, probably six months). In other words, the filter will stop having such a massive effect on your website.

As the ‘Allegra’ update showed, websites that were constantly being optimized during the time that they were in the Sandbox began to rank quite high for targeted keywords after the Sandbox effect ended.

This and other observations of the Sandbox phenomenon ? combined with an understanding of search engine philosophy ? have lead me to pinpoint the following strategies for minimizing your website’s ‘Sandboxed’ time.

SEO strategies to minimize your website’s ‘Sandboxed’ time

Despite what some SEO experts might tell you, you don’t need do anything different to escape from the Google Sandbox. In fact, if you follow the ‘white hat’ rules of search engine optimization and work on the principles I’ve mentioned many times in this course, you’ll not only minimize your website’s Sandboxed time but you will also ensure that your website ranks in the top 10 for your target keywords. Here’s a list of SEO strategies you should make sure you use when starting out a new website:

Start promoting your website the moment you create your website, not when your website is ‘ready’. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for your website to be ‘perfect’. The motto is to get your product out on the market, as quickly as possible, and then worry about improving it. Otherwise, how will you ever start to make money?

Establish a low-intensity, long-term link building plan and follow it religiously. For example, you can set yourself a target of acquiring 20 links per week, or maybe even a target of contacting 10 link partners a day (of course, with SEO Elite, link building is a snap). This will ensure that as you build your website, you also start acquiring inbound links and those links will age properly ? so that by the time your website exits the Sandbox you would have both a high quantity of inbound links and a thriving website.

Avoid black-hat techniques such as keyword stuffing or ‘cloaking’. Google’s search algorithm evolves almost daily, and penalties for breaking the rules may keep you stuck in the Sandbox longer than usual.

Save your time by remembering the 20/80 rule: 80 percent of your optimization can be accomplished by just 20 percent of effort. After that, any tweaking left to be done is specific to current search engine tendencies and liable to become ineffective once a search engine updates its algorithm. Therefore don’t waste your time in optimizing for each and every search engine ? just get the basics right and move on to the next page.

Remember, you should always optimize with the end-user in mind, not the search engines.

Like I mentioned earlier, search engines are continuously optimizing their algorithms in order to improve on the key criteria: relevancy. By ensuring that your website content is targeted on a particular keyword, and is judged as ‘good’ content based on both on-page optimization (keyword density) and off-page factors (lots of quality inbound links), you will also guarantee that your website will keep ranking highly for your search terms no matter what changes are brought into a search engine’s algorithm, whether it’s a dampening factor a la Sandbox or any other quirk the search engine industry throws up in the future.

Brad Callen
Search Engine Optimization Expert
Learn How To Get A Top Google Ranking In Under 28 Days With This Breakthrough New SEO Software!

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

The Nuts And Bolts Of Traffic Exchanges

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Traffic Exchanges. What are they? How do they work? What do they do?

First of all, a “Traffic Exchange” is exactly that, a way to exchange traffic, a way to get visitors to your site. This happens by you visiting sites, in exchange for pageviews to your site.

There are LOTS of Traffic Exchanges out there. Some good, some bad, but most of them work in basically the same ways. You join, visit sites, refer others and build up credits.

There are 2 main types of Traffic Exchanges (there`s actually a few more types of exchanges, but these are the ones we`ll concentrate on here):

Manual Surf and Auto Surf.

With manual surf, you have to click on a button to get to the next site, with auto surf, you can sit back and watch the pages change automatically, without having to lift a finger. Nowadays, the trend seems to be that the exchanges offer multiple choices for surfing: manual, auto, different timers (15, 20 or 30 seconds before next site). A lot of them now offer games while surfing, as a chance to earn extra credits.

Traffic Exchanges give out credits and bonuses in a multitude of ways. Some give bonus credits for signing up, or for referring others, or even while you`re surfing the exchange, after you`ve visited a certain amount of sites. Almost ALL Traffic Exchanges give you a percentage of the credits your referrals build up, so it`s always a good idea to build a good downline in them. Some exchanges let you use your credits in different ways too: buying banner impressions, lottery tickets, referrals, scratchcards, just to name a few

One thing to take serious note of is the timers, and how long it actually takes your page to load, If you`re using a 15 second timer, and your page takes 20 seconds to load, people won`t see it before it`s time to click on to the next site. The best pages to use in Traffic Exchanges are small, fast loading, attention grabbing so-called “splash pages”. You can link to the page you want people to see from the splashpage, or add a box where people can request more information via email. If you can make your splash page interesting enough, then getting people to click a link on it shouldn`t be too hard.

If what you need is a ton of quick hits to your sites, use autosurfers with 15 second timers. You can still get signups/requests for more info IF your site loads fast enough, and really yells out to the viewer. If you want your site to actually be seen, with maybe better signup rates, opt for the manual exchanges and 30 second timers. This forces people to stay at your site longer, which in turn could make them pay more attention to your site.

Be aware that a lot of Traffic Exchanges don`t allow the use of popups, rotators or re-directors on whichever site you`re promoting, as they are very hard to keep track of and can include very unsavoury stuff such as a virus or even porn. It`s ALWAYS a good idea to use a popup killer when you`re surfing the traffic exchanges. I personally use a program called KillAd, which is brilliant in terminator mode….hehehe. Apart from the risk of reaching “nasty” sites, popups can really drain your computers resources, making it sluggish and slow.

Most Traffic Exchanges these days have both free and paid options, where the paid option is basically just an enhancement of free, making it easier to gain credits and referrals, although some of them DO allow you to earn a commission on referral upgrades.

In closing: You will most likely come across “cheat programs/software made specifically to cheat the traffic exchanges.They work by racking up credits for you, without you having to actually USE the exchange. Whatever you do, DON`T use them! Apart from the fact that you`ll most likely lose your accounts in the traffic exchanges, can you imagine if everybody was using them? Nobody would see any sites, and nobody would get any results.

Above all, keep all your promotional efforts honest.

Anna-Marie Stewart Venton

Anna-Marie Stewart Venton publishes Not Just Another Ezine. An interactive online ezine full of marketing hints, tips and info. Win free advertising in her AdCash games. Visit http://annamarketing.com for more information or mailto:webmistress@annamarketing.com?subject=subscribe

This article is available for reprint in your opt-in ezine, web site or ebook. You MUST agree not to make any changes to the article and the RESOURCE BOX MUST be included.

About The Author

Anna-Marie Stewart Venton publishes Not Just Another Ezine at http://annamarketing.com. Dedicated to helping marketers succeed, and have a bit of fun at the same time. She also hosts weekly “Get To Know Each Other” chats for all online marketers. Download your free Money Chatter Viral Marketing Tool here: http://annamarketing.com/MC

webmistress@annamarketing.com

Posted in Traffic Building | No Comments »

Some File Naming Tricks for Your Online Home Based Business Web Pages

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Conventional Wisdom states you should use Sub-Directories to organize your web Pages. Unfortunately the Page Indexing Tools Penalize your Page Rankings when you Do this, Many of the Page Ranking Algorithms in use today deem that pages closed to your Root are of a Higher Value then pages that are further away from your root. If you have 2 Web Pages with the Exact same content (web1.html and web2.html) http://yourdomain.com/web1.html and http://yourdomain.com/articles/training/web2.html

All things being equal Web1 will have a higher ranking then Web2.html because Web1.html it is in the Root Directory.

As a Web Designer or a Home Based Business owner wearing a Web Designer Hat it seems you have 2 Choices, do what seems right and in many ways best and use a Pretty Directory Structure and Loose Ranking points or Throw out the Directory Structure and Gain Ranking Points. Many People Choose the Directory structure either because they don’t know about the page Ranking Algorithms or they feel a strong need to be organized and are willing to sacrifice ranking points.

There is a 3rd Choice. You can use what we shall call a Pseudo Directory. A Pseudo Directory is a simple tool that you can use that will not only keep you organized but has the added bonus if used properly can actually increase your ranking points because you will have file names that are extremely optimized for the Page Ranking Bots.

A quick lesson on File Naming if you have 3 Web Pages with identical content and they are named page1.html,bathroom.html and Home-Repair-Bathroom.html which file do you think will have the Lowest ranking and The Highest Ranking for the phrase “Bathroom repair”. Page1.html will be lowest ranked and Home-Repair-Bathroom.html will be the highest rank.

The Pseudo Directory takes advantage of this page naming structure to allow you to organize your Web Pages and still maximize your page ranking.

So you have a Web Page that is Promoting products and Services to Homeowners and Would be Homeowners. You want to build some content rich web pages using articles that you find and Reprint. Using the Conventional Method you would have a Directory Structure that looks like

root/articles/Home-Loan/file.html,
root/articles/Home-Repair/file.html and
root/articles/Home-Selling/file.html etc.

With the Pseudo Directory method you keep all your files in the root Directory you just name them using the Optimal naming rules. An Article on Roof Repair would be named home-repair-roof.html not roof.html. Similarly an article on Kitchen Repair would be named Home-Repair-Kitchens.html and on Bathroom repair would be named Home-Repair-Bathrooms.html

This next step is optional but it does have a few advantages and will help increase your page rank even more. Create a Table of Contents or Site Map for each Pseudo Directory. So continuing with the above example create a File called Home-Repair-Contents.html and list all the files that start Home-Repair.

Next (If you have more then 3 or 4 sub topics) Create a Page called Home-Contents.html where you have links to Home-Repair-contents.html and Home-Loan-contents.html and Home-Selling-contents.html …

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 and has Built an Online Organization of over 100,000 members. You can see My Web Page Here and be sure and Subscribe to my Newsletter

http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/viraltraffic.html

Posted in Web Design | No Comments »

Google AdSense – A Massive And Passive Income?

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Google AdSense – A Massive And Passive Income?
by: Emma Kalson

You may have seen “sponsored by Gooooogle” on many websites that you’ve looked at. This is Google AdSense – a simple way for website owners to display Google Ads on their website and earn money for each advert clicked on. Ads are targetted to the content of the page they are displayed on, so visitors to your page are more likely to want to follow those adverts. You can also use Google Search linked into Adsense on your site, so when a visitor carries out a search, search-related ads are also shown.

Obviously the best way to make money from AdSense is to have a site with lots of content. And you’re looking at the best method right now! Free reprint article directories such as this one are a fantastic source of fresh content for your website, and simple to insert. Just a few articles a week soon builds up into a huge targetted-content website.

Advantages:

(1) Adverts are targetted to each page so you know the adverts will be related to your content.

(2) You make money per advert clicked on.

(3) Anyone with a website of “reasonable content” can join the AdSense Program.

(4) Google gives you the code and plenty of customisation options (ad sizes and colours), making it really easy to put AdSense on your website.

(5) Free to generate new content – just leave the resource boxes hyperlinked and intact.

Disadvantages:

(1) You can only prevent adverts from specific websites from being displayed – not prevent a category from showing. If you want to eliminate competitors, or have a medical advice site, manually removing each competitor or “miracle cure” website can be a time-consuming and ongoing problem.

(2) Do not get involved in click fraud – once Google has identified you as a perpetrator, you will never be a friend of Google again!

About The Author

Emma Kalson

For more details on Google AdSense see http://www.littlefishwebdesign.com/shop/adsense_empire.htm.

For a competitively priced website built for AdSense content see http://www.littlefishwebdesign.com.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

If Its Done Its Done for: Make Your Website Part of Your Business before You Build

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Web sites are an Ongoing Part of Business.

All too many small business owners build a web site that is considered complete once the final copy is placed. Do not stop there, if you really want to make your investment into the Web part of a profitable marketing solution, you need to ensure that people return to your site, refer it to others, and use it as a resource in their lives or businesses.

They Will Come. Well, Some Will?

If you have a site that is ‘done’, you will certainly get new visitors to your site from links, search engines and other marketing, but those visitors will scan through your pages, get whatever information your site has to offer, return once more to see if you have anything new to offer, find nothing new and end their relationship with your site and company. How does that increase your profits?

"But I am no Writer."

No, but you are an expert at your business, otherwise why would you have started it. You already offer information, tips, and help to your customers over the phone and in person. In your real world of business, all sorts of people will ask you questions about your business and industry on a daily basis. It is these answers that people are looking for, write them down in a notebook or journal and then refer to it when it is time for your next update.

Keeping your Web site up to date is an Investment.

Ensuring that your web site is a constant resource and beacon for visitors requires you to sit down and write articles, provide links, resources, white papers, demonstrations and answer frequently asked questions. If you don’t have the time yourself designate someone from your staff or hire a writer to put together the items that will help your targeted audience.

Great web sites are not finished. Great web sites become another part of your business.

Jay Gilmore, owner of SmashingRed Web & Marketing, is a Website Developer and Marketing Consultant specializing in Small Business.

Based an hour outside of the capital Halifax, in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, Jay works with micro, home based, small businesses and organizations to achieve their business and personal goals.

If you are interested in improving your small business website or developing your first website check out http://www.smashingred.com/ for more information.

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

Niche Marketing – Assessing The Potential Of A Niche

Tuesday, January 30th, 2007

Potential niche products exist all around us, but how do you decide which ones are likely to be worth pursuing?

Here’s a quick method that will give you a pretty good indication without having to spend large amounts of time and money on the task.

Step One:

This is a fairly obvious step – find out if other marketers are spending advertising dollars in that niche. If they are, you can be pretty certain that it’s a profitable niche.

Why?

Because savvy marketers “don’t” spend money on advertising that doesn’t show a profit.

You can check this out quickly on “Pay Per Click” search engines like Overture and 7search where advertisers pay each time someone clicks on their listing.

Let’s check out an example.

For demo purposes I’m going to search on the keyword “snoring” because I have a project in progress on the subject of “how to stop snoring without surgery”.

Now go to http://www.content.overture.com/d/ and type in “snoring”. When you arrive at the results page click on “View Advertisers’ Max Bids” at the top right of the screen. A new window will open up asking you to enter a code to access the information. Enter the code and submit it. On the page that comes up you will find the bidding range for our search term – the higher the top three bids the more profitable (and competitive) the niche is likely to be.

In this case the top three bids on Overture (at time of writing) for the keyword “snoring” are : $1.50, $1.47 and $1.46 – based on this we can be pretty sure that there is a viable market for niche products on “snoring”

Step Two:

OK now let’s take this a step further and find out what search terms (keywords and keyword phrases) are being used to find our niche subject on Overture.

Go to : http://inventory.overture.com/ and type in “snoring”. This returns a list including :

snoring 27352

stop snoring 8211

snoring cure 3308

snoring remedy 2366

cause of snoring 2186

snoring treatment 1233

snoring solution 1133

snoring problem 800

prevent snoring 623

… and a whole lot more. The numbers indicate the number of times that each of those keywords/phrases have been requested in the previous 30 days.

Step Three:

Next we need to find out how many competing sites there are for each of our keywords/phrases. We’re going to do this on Google – but first we need to decide what number of competing sites is acceptable for our niche subject.

As with any subject, opinions differ widely.

Rosalind Gardner (Super Affiliate Handbook) does not consider anything under 100,000 competing sites to be a viable niche.

Jimmy D Brown (Nicheology)suggests 30,000 – 100,000 competing sites to be the ideal.

At the other end of the spectrum Andrew Williams (Keyword Results Analyzer – Word Tacker Version) looks for niches with 1,000 or less competing sites for each keyword/phrase.

For our example here I’m going to use Jimmy Brown’s criteria : 30,000 – 100,000.

Now go over to http://www.google.com and start entering the keywords/phrases from your Overture search, taking note of the number of sites which are displayed. (Enclose your keywords/phrases with ” for specific results, e.g. “snoring cures”).

Here’s the Google results from the list above :

snoring 977,000

stop snoring 121,000

snoring cure 3,850

snoring remedy 24,100

cause of snoring 2,310

snoring treatment 6,660

snoring solution 21,100

snoring problem 18,500

prevent snoring 3,510

So what does this tell us now?

The first keyword “snoring” is a non-starter. The term is well outside our competing sites criteria at 977,000 and a far too general.

There are no individual search terms in the 30,000 – 100,000 range, but that doesn’t rule it out as a viable niche, the term “stop snoring” isn’t too far out of the ball park and we can combine some of the other keywords/phrases to meet the criteria.

Result – we probably have a viable market niche.

Step Four:

Finally we need to check the ratio of “supply” to “demand” for our keywords/phrases to make doubly sure the niche is worth pursuing.

Here’s how we do it. The formula is :

Google Results(Supply)/Overture Results(Demand)

The lower the ratio the less competition. Here’s an example using our keywords/phrases :

snoring : 977,000/27352 = 35.72

stop snoring : 121,000/8211 = 14.73

snoring cure : 3,850/3308 = 1.16

snoring remedy : 24,100/2366 = 10.19

cause of snoring : 2,310/2186 = 1.06

snoring treatment : 6,660/1233 = 5.40

snoring solution : 21,100/1133 = 18.62

snoring problem : 18,500/800 = 23.13

prevent snoring : 3,510/623 = 5.63

So do we have a viable niche?

Based on the figures I would say the subject has pretty good potential. The niche is tightly focussed and the level of competition is low, so it’s worth pursuing.

Will the niche make money?

The answer to that question will be down to how effective our marketing is.

One final note : This system has it’s limitations. If you’re really serious about this Niche Marketing stuff you should invest in some specialist tools which will provide a more comprehensive range of keywords/phrases than Overture returns.

AndrÃ© Anthony owns and operates Niche Market Know-How a resource for beginning Niche Marketers. Visit http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com today to find strategies, tips, tools, products and resources for effective niche product creation and marketing. Get his Niche Market Know-how Mini Course here: http://www.nichemarketknowhow.com/course.htm

Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Archive for January, 2007

Blogs and Journalism

How To Use Banner Ads Effectively

Advantages of an Online Site Builder

Create Huge Income From Your Web Site – 10 Easy Ways

What In The World Is This Google Sandbox Theory Thing? And How Do I Beat It?

The Nuts And Bolts Of Traffic Exchanges

Some File Naming Tricks for Your Online Home Based Business Web Pages

Google AdSense – A Massive And Passive Income?

If Its Done Its Done for: Make Your Website Part of Your Business before You Build

Niche Marketing – Assessing The Potential Of A Niche

Archives

Categories