Archive for March, 2007

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Search Engine Optimization – Free Tips and Help – Part One – The Title Tag

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Search Engine Optimization is a widely misunderstood industry. Many webmasters, including myself, have been mislead by industry forums, and Internet “chatter”. Having tried many different approaches, starting in 1996: It is ironic that the methods I used back then, still hold true today, to a great extent.

Today’s article is on the infamous Title tag. Often overlooked, occasionally abused, but still effective.

What belongs in this Title? Quite simply: Your strongest Keyword, or Keyword Phrase – usually followed by your business name or personal name, seperated by a comma or dash.

You will notice that when you search for pages at Yahoo(TM) or Google(TM), you will often see the very words you used to search with, at the beginning of the result. These words are bolded, signifying relevance.

The truth is, the day and age of Meta Tags is nearly dead. What is not dead, however are the Title and Meta Description tags.

What is the best way to use the Title Tag?

Arguments will vary, but my approach follows this example: * the symbols have been replaced with [ and ].

[title]Widgets, John Smith[/title]

Perhaps, ultimately, only your main KeyWord, or Keyword Phrase should be present in this tag; however, it is customary to include your name, or business name. When deciding which link to follow, the end user is given more information when you include a business name.

Mathematically, the KeyWord weight of your Title tag is calculated as follows:

KeyWord Characters = K

Total Characters in Title Tag = T

Keyword Weight = K/T

In our example above, “Widgets” is the Keyword Phrase, and is a total of 7 characters(K). The total number of characters in the tag is 19(T).

K/T = 7/19 = .368 or 37%

35-50% Keyword Weight is about ideal. Repetition of Keywords in the Title used to a good technique, but I highly discourage it now. Make sure you research your Keywords well! Having problems with your dynamic (.asp .php) documents not being indexed. Make sure your code includes the ability to produce unique Title and Meta Description tags for each page. Meta Keyword tags, are, for most part useless and necessary. Title and Meta Description however are still crucial!

Kyle Carrington kylecarrington@hotmail.com Webdesigner for Real Estate More 100% FREE tips at: http://www.engine-optimization-search.blogspot.com

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

Why Dot-Coms Fail – a Webmasters Perspective

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Everyday we hear that another company goes out of business.

When and why does a dot-com become a dot-bomb?

After checking few dozen defunct companies, I think the main reasons for dot-coms failure are:

  • Poor business plan. In the last years, a lot of investment capital was spent on poorly planned companies that clearly couldn’t reach profitability.
  • Poor company promotion. This applies both offline and online. Two newspaper ads and word of mouth are not enough.
  • Poor financial management. Fancy offices, free food, does it ring a bell?
  • Poor Human Resources management. With lots of cash in their hands, many start-up companies hired too many people or, even worse, hired unqualified staff. The hiring of friends and relatives often returned no value on investments.
  • Errors in the company’s Web site. Sometimes hundreds of errors could be found in one Web page. Yes, those Web site builders should go back to school- if they ever went to school for HTML at all.

I’ll focus my comments on the last reason:

How Errors in the Web Site Can Affect the Company’s Health

It’s clear that you can make money on the Web if you have customers. You have customers if you have viewers- “traffic” in the geek’s language. And you get traffic if your site is easy to find — near the top — in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That’s not so easy to achieve.

First of all your site has to be indexed by the search tools: Search Engines and Web Directories.

Although some Search Engines will eventually find your site by themselves, most of the time this only happens if somebody links to your site. In the case of a NEW site, having existing links is almost impossible. Rather than wait for links to be made, start a submission campaign.

A big no-no is submitting a Web site using submission software. Using software of this type may be quick and easy, but some Web Directories and Search Engines do NOT accept automated submissions.

It’s true that manual submission is a time consuming process — you’ll have to read AND follow each Search Engines’ submission guidelines, to effectively perform the submission ? but it’s a necessary step.

Most of the defunct sites I’ve checked had only a modest presence and visibility in the Search Engines.

Let’s say that you submitted your site correctly, you waited a reasonable amount of time – usually few weeks ? for the Search Engines to process your submission, but your site does not appear near the top in the Search Engine Results Pages.

You’re wondering why, right? Well, one or more of the following reasons might apply:

1) Your submission was not accepted by the Search Engines. If you used spamming techniques, such as:

  • Repeating keywords in the keyword meta tag or using text in the same color as the background, some Search Engines might refuse to index your site.
  • Page redirection — including cloaking — or building artificial links farms can sometimes be seen as spam by some Search Engines. These links farms involve building Web pages for the sole purpose of creating links to the targeted site. For more about spam please read my article:

“Search Engine Spamming Sucks!” [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

Some Search Engines also have difficulty in indexing pages that use frames or Flash.

2) Your submission was accepted, but your site is not listed in the Top 10-30. Because very few people check pages after the first 30 results, you want to be in the Top 10-30. There are many reasons why a site is not listed high.

The most common reasons are:

  • The lack of your main keywords in the content of the page, in the Title tag and in the Description and Keyword meta tags. Ultimately it all depends of the Search Engines’ algorithm- the criteria used by the Search Engines to rank pages.
  • HTML errors. Examples include unclosed tags, unquoted attributes, improperly nested tags, missing the ALT attribute on images. Any of these will affect your site’s accessibility, reducing your potential client pool.

A Web site with HTML errors can look fine in Explorer, strange in Netscape or Opera and totally unreadable in a text browser. Although Explorer has the largest market share, an important percentage of net surfers use other browsers. Don’t forget the more than 50 million people in the USA with disabilities. Many of the latter use text/voice browsers.

Other Types of Errors in Web Sites

Proper HTML coding is very important but the structure and the layout of the pages are equally important. I saw sites without ANY way to contact the company: no email address, no “contact page”. I saw sites so crowded that it was almost impossible to find my way around. I saw sites with ugly color schemes. I saw a site so “heavy” that it took nearly three minutes to download the Home Page.

According to statistics, users have very limited patience when it comes to loading a page. If after eight seconds they cannot see the page, they leave. And we all know what that means or the success of a Web site.

I not only saw all those errors in sites that are now gone but I also found them in sites that are still alive, including, incredibly, some Fortune 500 companies’ Web sites.

So Do We Dot-Com or Not?

The answer is a resounding YES! But with one condition, learn from your predecessors.

How can a dot-com become profitable? I don’t pretend to know ALL the answers. If I did, I would be millionaire by now.

Advice for Forming and Managing Your Company:

  • Develop a sound business plan, with clear, credible ways to get to profitability. Venture capitalists are much more cautious than a few years ago. They invest less and are more selective in this risky business. They want value returned for their money. After all, statistics show that 9 out of 10 startups fail.
  • Handle your money wisely. Enough said.
  • Hire only the people you REALLY need and be sure ALL of them are professionals.

Advice Regarding the Web Site that Supports Your Company:

  • Do the right thing when you prepare the Web site. Hire reputable professionals to build and promote your cyber adventure. If you already have a Web site, remember that a Web site can easily be redesigned and properly resubmitted to search tools.
  • Have your site designed according to W3C Recommendations – the Official HTML coding rules. Yes, this takes time and it’s much easier to use an HTML editor, but the results are much better when properly coded by hand. Watch your site’s accessibility and usability. Don’t forget to test and validate the code. Talking about testing, do yourself a favor: check the spelling on your pages.
  • Do not use spamming techniques. You might not be caught today, but one day the Search Engines OR your competitors will find you. Search Engines sometimes will use this reason to ban your site FOR LIFE.

For more about spam please read my article:

“Search Engine Spamming Sucks!” [ http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com/articles.html ]

  • Avoid gizmos: JavaScripts, Flash or frames. Bells and whistles will NEVER help your page’ ranking. In fact, it will hurt your site’s indexing or ranking in the Search Engines and will annoy most of your viewers. So, just don’t do it!
  • Have interesting content in your pages, content that grabs your viewer’s attention. No matter how beautiful your site is, no matter how much professional promotion you made, if the site doesn’t grab viewer’s interest, he will leave ? you guessed it — to your competitors’ sites.

Also, use the Title tag, the Keyword and Description meta tags in your HTML coding to list targeted keywords from the contents of your pages. This helps the Search Engines rank your site higher.

  • Promote the site thoroughly. Submit the site properly to Search Engines and Web Directories and pay special attention to the link popularity issue- contact Webmasters of related sites to ask them to include a link to your site. Yes, it takes time, but it’s worth it.

So, let’s see: do we dot-com or not? You bet we do! There are tremendous opportunities on the Internet. Find your niche, follow the rules, work hard and you’ll make it.

It will not be easy but if you believe in your dream and set realistic expectations, you’ll be successful.

Good luck!

About The Author

Daniel Bazac is the Web Marketer for Web Design in New York, ( http://www.web-design-in-new-york.com ), a site design, Search Engine Optimization and promotion company. He’s been online from 1995 and he’s also a seasoned Internet Information Researcher. He can be reached at mailto:danielbazac@hotmail.com

Posted in Web Design | No Comments »

Article Marketing For Bloggers – 4 Tips To Build Traffic For Your Blog

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Bloggers blog. That’s what they do. A blog is short for ‘weblog’ and it’s really an online journal that can be updated easily and frequently without any knowledge of HTML code.

Traditionally, article marketing has been used by authors who are promoting their books or information products. Lately, I’ve noticed a growing trend of bloggers using article marketing to grow the traffic to their blog and you should too.

Three reasons why it makes sense for bloggers to engage in article marketing:

1) You’ve already got a lot of content produced in each of your blog posts. 200 words should be your floor for each article that you produce. In some cases, you already have enough words per post to create 10-50 articles instantly. If you don’t, then stitch posts together of a similar theme until you have 200+ word articles to put into article marketing distribution.

2) A blogger has the same traffic building problems that any typical website has, and therefore article marketing can help your blog in the same ways it can help a non-blog website. Benefits include qualified traffic coming to your site year round, quality backlinks being built without any messy recip-linking campaigns, and you’re expanding your reach to other experts that might not otherwise have found your blog.

3) Bloggers by nature are more Internet savvy than your typical author. With this said, most bloggers already understand how to create revenue with pay per click (PPC) advertising programs. As such, you already know how to produce keyword intelligent titles for their articles. This guarantees maximum traffic impact for each of your articles.

If you are already a blogger and are new to article marketing, here’s how you get started:

1) Produce a cache of 10-25+ articles from your existing blog content.

2) Submit them to the major article directories and any that are niche-relevant to your field of expertise. You may also wish to submit them to ezine publishers directly from your niche.

3) Rinse and repeat until you have 250-1,000+ articles in distribution this year. Hire a college student or editor if you don’t have time to get this strategy into practice as it’ll be well worth it.

4) Watch your traffic counter slowly rise, day by day as your articles work hard for you delivering qualified traffic to your website year round.

Article Marketing as a strategy will not break your traffic counter on your first month of investing in this strategy?but, I guarantee if you engage in this strategy, your blog will grow in traffic and popularity beyond the traffic you were already creating by simply blogging. You knows, you might even increase your sales, land a new job, or improve your rank in the search engines as a side-benefit from your article marketing strategy.

About The Author:

Christopher M. Knight invites you to submit your best articles for massive exposure to the high-traffic http://EzineArticles.com/ directory. When you submit your articles to EzineArticles.com, your articles will be picked up by ezine publishers who will reprint your articles with your content and links in tact giving you traffic surges to help you increase your sales. To submit your article, setup a membership account today: http://EzineArticles.com/submit/

Posted in Blogging & RSS | No Comments »

Study Your Sites Performance Via Hit Tracking

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Knowledge is power.

And undoubtedly, it is the key to making a substantial fortune online. Consider these: what if you knew the sited your visitors came from before they arrived at yours, what they were checking out before they took a look at your pages, and where they went after visiting your place? What if you knew which of your links were being clicked, how much they were being used, and how well they are performing? What if you knew which among the pages in your site attracts the most attention?

Again, knowledge is power and knowing all these things would lead to better results from your site.

Thankfully, technology has caught up with this highly particular necessity. A lot of programs have been developed to track your hits with meticulous accuracy. It is now possible to determine the things we’ve mentioned above, and more.

Of course, this knowledge would be useless if you wouldn’t know what to do with it, right? Knowing the statistics that tracking services could provide can be applied to many things that can improve the performance of your site.

With a good hit tracking program or service, you could do a lot of amazing things. Here are some examples:

? You could find the entry sites, or the sites that your visitors last visited, through a hit tracking program. This would be important for many reasons. First, you would know which area to focus on with your marketing campaign. Did most of your visitors come from a particular forum? You could promote your site there. Did most of your visitors come from a search engine page? You could intensify your search engine optimization campaign. Did your visitors come from an articles directory site? Submit more articles then, because that move is definitely working!

? You could discover your visitor’s exit sites, or the sites that they would visit after lingering in your pages. This is important in determining consumer behavior. Knowing the other things that interest them would allow you to target them as alternative marketing venues.

? You could spy in your competition. That’s right! Did a visitor visit a competitor of yours before or after gracing your site? Did that visitor make a purchase from you?

? You could determine how long a visitor stays in your site. If he spends a few seconds browsing your pages, there could be a problem. Chances are, your marketing campaign has been targeting the wrong crowd, so a review of your pertinent keyword selection is in order. Or perhaps your web design is unfriendly, hence, you would know when and where to make some adjustments.

? If your site is enrolled with Google AdSense, you could pinpoint which ads have the highest Click Through Rate, or CTR, and which ones are being neglected. This knowledge is invaluable, as you could adjust correspondingly and include the three (Google’s allowable number of ads at one given time) that could help you earn the most, and block the rest that are just eating up real estate.

? If you have specific sponsors aside from AdSense’s assignments, they would love your site as you could easily adjust their banner or link’s placement and design to produce the highest CTR possible.

? You’ll get a general feel of the actual flow of visitors through your pages. You could use this knowledge to tweak your site and lead your visitors to where you want them to go, instead of merely relying on where they want to go.

Do avail of a hit tracking program or service for your site. You’ll never know what you’re missing until you get to experience the empowering feeling of knowing what goes behind the scenes of every hit.

Dave Drake is an author of online articles relating to Internet Marketing. To look at other articles and learn about a 3-step system on internet marketing that will show you a step-by-step system to make a residual income from home using the internet visit: http://www.workathome3-stepsystem.com

Posted in Web Development | No Comments »

A Person Of Value

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

One of the “secrets” in Internet Marketing is knowing that you need to be patient enough to develop the kind of business building savvy that people want. It takes time.

Many newcomers put more emphasis on the word Internet and not enough on the word Marketing. The two are going hand in hand and a proper Marketing plan is vital to achieve success. If you do not have a comprehensive Marketing plan with advertising budget, leads, promotions, customers care, after sale service etc, the other word, Internet, is meaningless.

Internet Marketing is not only about having a website, a few products, a couple of ads with you sitting idle in front of your PC with the false hope that now your mail box will be overflowed with order.

Many newcomers chose Internet Marketing to avoid the interaction with other people. They falsely assume that with the Net there is no need to be a "people’s person"; nothing is more far from reality!

If you want to be successful in ANY business you have to master the art of mentoring and leadership. I call it value. Are you valuable enough to be around? Do you have the time and energy to support your downline, do3-way calling, and answer questions for your downline partners and their prospects? Are you prepared to spend hours in front of your PC to improve your knowledge of Internet Marketing?

If you don’t, you will suffer the indignity of being a netpreneur creampuff. The more you know, the more your business will grow. Put another way, the more you LEARN, the more you will EARN.

Its a simple formula – knowledge = success.

AND…massive action = massive results, MA=MR.

So if you’re new to this business, UNDERSTAND that it takes TIME to develop your skills as a netpreneur. Forget about making big money in your first year with ANY company.

Concentrate on becoming the KIND OF PERSON that others want to be around.

——————————

Copyright 2004 Sidney Zegna

About The Author

After several years in the fashion and textile industry, Sid Zegna has now established a profitable online business. His aim is, primarily, to assist newcomers to start and promote their Home-Based business.

http://www.bboomerswellbeing.com

http://www.sidzegna.com/

Posted in Internet Marketing | No Comments »

Leave Those Links Blue!

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Don’t mess with those links! When you’re designing your site, you should leave your text links in their natural state–blue and underlined. We all want to be creative and not do the bland, expected, normal thing. We want to change our links to red, green, yellow, even black–anything but blue. And we have the urge to take off those underlines.

Resist the temptation. It’s hard. But there’s a good reason to leave them alone.

From the earliest days of the web, text links have been blue. People intuitively recognize that blue, underlined text is a link. They know they can click on it.

The combination of blue and underlines means “If I click on this, it goes somewhere”. We’re conditioned to recognize those distinguishing characteristics. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs–we see the link and instantly know what it means. There’s no time wasted in trying to figure out whether or not that particular word or phrase is clickable.

If you mess with the natural appearance of a link, you lose that instant recognition. People have to stop and think (and often click) to figure out what your colors mean. I have watched countless people try to navigate websites and spend half their time figuring out what’s a link and what’s not. They have no way of knowing.

In addition, people scan a page for links. They like to be active on the internet, and they like to know what they can do. When they recognize a link in your copy, it’s a clear signal of someplace to go. Visitors want to know what their options are. It’s not a good idea to make life difficult. They’ll appreciate coming across a site that’s easy to use and doesn’t try to confuse them (for once!).

It is becoming more acceptable to use other colors for your text links, as long as they remain underlined. But if you can, it’s still best to use blue. This is because so many people use underlined, colored text on their sites that is NOT linked. Visitors have a tendency to get confused. They never know what to expect. With blue, it’s obvious.

Some people have brought up the point that if we stick to the status quo, there will never be any improvements in the system.

My answer: In a medium like the web, forward movement will never be a problem. The web continues to push ahead, regardless of whether your site jumps on the bandwagon or not. There will always be new growth, no matter what your site does.

The question is, when is it appropriate for your site to adopt the latest fads? To answer that question, you must keep in mind your site’s purpose and your audience.

If your site is technology oriented, and your visitors are technically-minded and on the cutting edge, then going for the latest trend is more appropriate.

But if your site is focused on an average web user, it’s different. If you’re sellling a product/service, communicating information, or driving any specific action, you need to keep your visitors focused on that goal. You shouldn’t distract them with trying to learn a new set of skills and standards just so they can navigate your site.

Never move faster than your audience is ready to move. At this point in time, people still struggle with being able to recognize links. A majority of people have a difficult time finding what they want. If they are still struggling, your site needs to accomodate them.

As more and more people become comfortable with advances in technology and design style, it will be appropriate to incorporate those advances into your site. Just wait until your audience is ready.

Final thoughts: If the context of your site makes it clearly obvious what is a link and what is not, it is sometimes permissible to use a color other than blue for your links. For this to work, your copy should have no colored text that isn’t linked (with the exception of headings) and no underlined text that isn’t linked. Only use another color if you are sure that visitors won’t have any trouble recognizing your links.

The main point: Visitors shouldn’t have to think about what is a link and what isn’t. Whatever you can do that maintains instant recognition is great. Go for it!

About The Author

There are 580.8 million people online. Can they find your business? Jamie Kiley creates powerful and engaging websites that make sure YOUR company gets noticed. Visit www.kianta.com for a free quote.

Get a quick, free web design tip every two weeks–sign up for Jamie’s newsletter: http://www.kianta.com/newsletter.php

jamiekiley@kianta.com

Posted in Web Design | No Comments »

Power Linking 2005 Redefines Web Site Promotion

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Web site owners are realizing Jack Humphrey’s Power Linking isn’t just another typical traffic generating program or another seo software application. Unlike most courses that are written in 3 days, Power linking is the culmination of 3 years of the best practices, honest, proven, tested strategies, & hard core results for thousands of customers worldwide. It is pushing the limits of web site owners allotted bandwidth each and every month.

Jack Humphrey’s Power Linking 2005 proves that most experts are completely wrong about linking. This course teaches how you can get your web site traffic in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of happy website owners have been emailing in every day with their success stories; here is what one fellow website owner has to say, “Take Action! He has given given me the secret of all secrets for anybody marketing online or offline. I put into action one simple technique that Jack shared with me in one of his amazing articles that proved successful in the first 24 hours that I used it!” These results are all possible because Power Linking 2005 is affordably priced under $100; well under real value. Unlike most traffic generating courses out on the market that run in the hundred’s of dollars. Web site owners are saving thousands by avoiding other costly promoting tools that have a much shorter shelf life and less affect.

Linking is the only constant in web site promotion. It was the first form of web site promotion & it will always & forever be the core of any successful web site promotion campaign.

The Power Linking 2005 course is nothing short of brilliant. When receiving the course you given written & video instructions that takes you by the hand & shows you step by step, the blueprints to achieving success with all the targeted web traffic any online business owner would ever want.

The new cutting edge version of Power Linking; released June 1st, is available to everyone at www.digitalbookz.net/power-linking/index.htm

Power Linking 2005 is a product created by Jack Humphrey & is available for all online busineses & web site owners.

www.digitalbookz.net is run by a online marketing firm & resource center out of Chicago.

Jonathan H. Friend
Administrator of digitalbookz.net
Marketing Resource Center

Posted in Website Promotion | No Comments »

SEO Blues

Friday, March 30th, 2007

SEO, not again!, you may groan. The webmaster world is inundated by articles and "how to’s" with regard to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you are a rookie webmaster, chances are, like me, you may have embarked on a merry-go-round on the SEO circuit, depending on which article and opinion you were first exposed to.

The role of search engines in getting free target traffic to your site is not debatable. How to get noticed in the search engines has spawned a whole industry, and gurus in tow. As should be expected, they have taken a very simple and straight forward issue and made it convoluted, a field of study at the fringes of rocket science.

What are the search engines looking for? This has become a course with a Masters degree awarded for algorithm chasing. But the answer is very simple. They are looking for unique valuable content to deliver to info hungry surfers.

Let me ask you a question. When you visit Google or Yahoo and type in a phrase in the search box, what are you looking for? I suspect you are looking for a site that does justice to that search phrase. You need information, you go to Google, you get it, you are happy. Chances are, next time you need to look for information on another subject, you will return to Google or whoever.

Just imagine for a moment, and it has happened to me time after time. You type in a search phrase, and you visit the first site that shows up in the result pages. You click on the link, and what do you find? Garbage. You return to the results page and click on link number two?unrelated content. Link number three, no content. You get frustrated, and go to page two etc. If you eventually come up with nothing useful, you head for the search engine next door. The search continues. The search engine that gives you what you want has won your loyalty, and of course, next time you go search?that’s right! You go back there. If they deliver yet again, boy! You may jolly well make that your default search engine.

The search engines know this fact. They want people to come to them.

Why?,

So that they can show them adverts. If traffic drops, so does advert revenues.

How do they increase traffic?

By serving searchers relevant content, so that you come back for more, again and again, and hopefully click on the adverts.

How do they serve relevant content?

By making sure that sites with the most relevant content to the search phrase show up tops in the result pages

How do they do that?

By developing very complex algorithms and criteria (both on-page and off-page) that weed out low content and keyword stuffed pages, so that the real deal gets to show up tops.

What are those algorithms?

Nobody knows. Some claim they do, and keep second guessing Google and co. The fact is, Google will always be a step ahead. They change the algorithms at will, and each time they do (as they did recently), the SEO world goes into a tail spin. Gurus whip out their crystal balls and try to figure out what the new secret formula is. They try to play catch up.

Fact is, Google has a battery of egg heads both from the industry and academia whose job is to develop these ultra secret algorithms. The system is wired up in such a way that each team member only knows a bit of the whole picture. Very few have the whole picture, and it is very doubtful if they will divulge it for all the gold in Fort Knox.

Chasing after Google algorithms is like chasing after the wind. It is a waste of energy, time and resources. In the unlikely event that you catch up, they leave you behind yet again, a few months later. The chase continues?

I believe it is time to step back and take a deep breathe. These guys are simply looking for unique valuable content. Why don’t we simply give it to them, and sleep well at night, instead of dreaming of algorithms?

If you have chosen a niche that is in line with your passion as your site theme, then what are you waiting for? Churn out good valuable content, and the engines will love you for that. You will get your creative juices running, keep the engines happy, and visitors satisfied. Everyone wins.

You will shoot to the top overnight. You may experience the loneliness of a long distance runner. For some months, it may seem like nothing is happening. Simply get your title and meta tags in order. Write with your audience in mind, and keep reminding yourself who your audience is. Definitely not Google! Google will not read your stuff; neither will they deliver your most wanted response (MWR). Visitors do.

Keep adding those lovely unique content, focusing on one keyword per page. Over-deliver. Get listed in good directories for valuable one-way links. Exchange a few links with very good sites that your audience will love. Keep adding those content. Your good content alone will cause other webmasters looking for good content to link to you, without necessarily asking for a link back. Such one way links from good sites are a strong endorsement for your site, and the search engines are noticing. Link to sites that inspire trust in your visitors. If you link to junk sites, they will begin to question your judgment. That will erode the trust they have for you, and that my affect your MWR.

Stay focused. Before long, you will begin to see results. As heavily SEO-ed sites begin to pant and drop off the radar due to algorithm changes, you are just warming up for the show!

Running after search engine algorithms takes you totally off course, and instead of adding content, you are forever tweaking the few pages you have. You tweak it to death, till it makes no sense to a human reader. If you manage to score high at the engines, the five seconds visitor you manage to garner click away, wondering what it is you are trying to say. Trying to beat the engines is mission impossible. Why dissipate your precious energy when you can channel it in building your business

Keep it simple. Run in your lane. Fuel your passion. Let it show on your site. The most potent form of advertisement is word of mouth, by a satisfied visitor. They will return. They will tell folks. Before long, you have built a brand, and have become a recognized guru in your niche. By this time, you are on first name basis with your bank manager.

Usiere Uko is the webmaster of the Financial Freedom Inspiration website and editor of the monthly Financial Freedom Inspiration Newsletter, a free ezine to inspire you to exit the rat race and fulfill your God given dreams. To subscribe or visit the site, please click on the URL below. http://www.financial-freedom-inspiration.com

Posted in SEO | No Comments »

CPanel Fantastico – Features and Benefits

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Fantastico is a 3rd-party cPanel add-on and can be purchased and added to the standard cPanel interface. Fantastico allows you to quickly install a variety of open-source scripts. By selecting a script and providing some basic information for each, you can install a script within minutes. Fantastico is designed so that the script you install is always the newest available.

Below is some of the scripts available for installation in Fantastico:

Blogs

· b2Evolution: A blog script featuring multiple blogs, categories/sub-categories, skins, search function, multiple languages and search engines friendly URLs.

· Nucleus: A powerful blog script featuring multiple blogs, multiple authors, drafts, future posts and bookmarklets.

· WordPress: A personal publishing tool with focus on aesthetics and featuring cross-blog tool, password protected posts, importing, typographical niceties, multiple authors and bookmarklets.

Content Management

· Drupal: An advanced portal with collaborative book, search engines friendly URLs, online help, roles, full content search, site watching, threaded comments, version control, blogging and news aggregator.

· Mambo: A professional level yet easy to use CMS featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, newsfeeds, syndicated news, banners, mailing users, links manager, statistics, content archiving, date based content, 20 languages, modules and components.

· php-Nuke: One of the most popular community-based portals with a big choice of languages and modules.

· SiteFrame: A straightforward CMS designed for rapid deployment of community-based websites. Nice-looking templates, oriented toward document-sharing, clean interface.

Customer Relationships

· Crafty Syntax: A Live Help chat system featuring monitor your visitors, proactively open a chat session, multiple chat sessions, referrer tracking, page view tracking, multiple operators, canned responses/images/URLs, multiple departments each with different icons, leave a message.

· Help Center Live: Very powerful all-in-one help center including Live Help, Support Tickets and FAQ. Features include unlimited operators/departments, monitor visitors, initiate chat, collect visitor’s information, track visitor’s footprint, auto save chat transcripts, canned messages, leave a message, auto-assign tickets to operators, unlimited FAQ topics.

· osTicket: Featuring email piping, pop3 login, unlimited email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, avoid autoresponder loops, limit maximum tickets user can have opened, accept attachments and limit size, pager alerts for admin.

· Support Logic: A support tickets system featuring multiple email addresses, admin/staff/user panels, canned responses, HTML tags support, email limit on a per user/day basis, attachments.

Discussion Boards

· Invision Board: A widely-popular open-source bulletin-board package, works well, simple user interface and admin panel, clean look, scales well, and can be customized.

· SMF: Elegant. Effective. Powerful. Free. SMF is all of the above. SMF is a next-generation community software package and is jam-packed with features, while at the same time having a minimal impact on resources.

E-Commerce

· CubeCart: An easy to use yet powerful shopping cart featuring unlimited categories and products, multiple payment gateways, downloadable products. The design is very easy to modify.

· OS Commerce: A power-user shopping cart with a big variety of modules and support of almost every payment gateway.

· ZenCart: Zen Cart is a free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart system. The software is being developed by group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers and consultants that think e-commerce could be and should be done differently.

Image Galleries

· 4Images Gallery: Unlimited categories/subcategories, web-based and FTP images upload, auto-thumbnails, comments, send a picture and rate a picture.

· Coppermine: With categories and albums, thumbnails and intermediate size pics, search feature, new and random pictures, user management and user comments.

· Gallery: Featuring albums within albums, thumbnailing specific picture area, captions, rotate, reorder pictures and album mirroring.

Mailing List

· PHPlist: A powerful mailing list featuring multiple mailing lists and attachments.

Apart from the above scripts, Fantastico has a whole load of other scripts ranging from PHPAcution to WebCalendar.

If your hosting company uses cPanel with Fantastico, you will be able to add attractive features to your website free of charge by installing one or more of the scripts mentioned above. Without Fantastico, it is still possible to add these features but you will have to manually install and configure the scripts yourself. To make life easier for yourself, make sure you choose a hosting company which offers Fantastico

Matt Bacak became “#1 Best Selling Author” in just a few short hours. Recent Entrepreneur Magazine’s e-Biz radio show host is turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories. Discover The Secrets To Unleash The Powerful Promoter In You! Sign up for Matt Bacak’s Promoting Tips Ezine ($100 value) just visit his website at http://www.powerfulpromoter.com or http://promotingtips.com

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Marketing Gurus: Do You Need One?

Friday, March 30th, 2007

Its become fashionable to bash marketing “gurus” nowadays.

There are some for whom the prospect of even looking at someone as a “guru” is a sin. They believe in being free-thinkers, unfettered by the bonds of guru-dom.

Then there are those who try to score points by “proving” gurus wrong. They think they have achieved a new high in their field just by proving that a “guru” made a false statement.

The problem with such people is that they refuse to understand “gurus” for what they are.

So just what IS a guru (marketing or otherwise)?

To put it simply, a guru is someone who has “been there, done that.”

A guru is not one who is meant to be followed like a sheep, nor one whose every word is written in stone.

Of the letters in the Sanskrit word “Guru “, the letter ‘Gu’ stands for darkness or ignorance; and the letter ‘Ru’ stands for the one who removes it or dispels it.

A guru is one who imparts knowledge that clears the path of the seeker. Knowledge that helps the seeker gain a better understanding of himself.

Unfortunately many people see gurus – and marketing gurus in particular – as successful, over-bearing, conceited boors.

Trust me, if a person was successful in this field, he’d never have got there by being over-bearing and conceited.

Why? Because to be a success, you need other people to help you get there. And no one is going to do business with you if you’re an over-bearing, conceited boor.

So just why do you need a guru?

For the same reason you need a parent – to guide you when you are young and still learning the ways of the world.

For the same reason you need a teacher – to introduce you to new concepts and ways of thinking you may never have conceived of.

For the same reason you need a football coach – to teach you the rules of the game.

For the same reason you need a mountain guide – to take you through treacherous terrain to a safer place.

Sadly, people only perceive gurus as someone to look up to with fear and disdain, or as someone to pull down so that one can feel important.

They can never understand that a guru (or mentor, or teacher, or whatever you choose to call them) is just someone who can help cut their learning curve.

Someone who can help you NOT re-invent the wheel, but continue where they left off.

Someone who could share with you a new way of doing things that could benefit you in ways you could never imagine.

Few ‘real’ gurus – at least those worth learning from – will ever want to be called that.

The ones who do are usually cocky, self-professed types, full of their own importance – and you’ll learn more by avoiding them like the plague.

The gurus to watch (note, I didn’t say follow – as in sheep) and learn from, are the ones with a long track record of success.

The ones who have repeatedly proved that their methods are legitimate and that they work.

Not the flash-in-the-pan types, who come and go faster than you can say “bestselling ebook.”

Not the ones who jump from one opportunity to the next and try to take you along for the ride.

Not the ones who endorse everything from lunar real-estate to miracle cure-alls.

And certainly not cocky little teenagers, who have never cut their teeth on real marketing.

Don’t expect your chosen guru to know everything about everything. Even gurus specialize in different areas of expertise.

Just to give you an example, I respect Corey Rudl highly for his pioneering knowledge of marketing. But I would never take advice from him on getting high rankings in search engines.

For specialized knowledge like that, I would learn from someone who is a true expert in that field, like Dan Thies or Michael Campbell.

Whether you’re a newbie starting out on the internet, or an experienced marketer who has honed his skills to perfection, the one thing you can always benefit from is an open mind.

And a willingness to be taught.

So when you do choose a guru, guide, mentor or coach, pick one whose insight can help you see yourself – and what you have to offer – more clearly.

One whose knowledge can show you how to bring out your own latent talents.

And one whose guidance can help you grow into a seasoned and successful entrepreneur.

Copyright 2003 Priya Shah

About The Author

Priya Shah is the Editor of “Be a Whiz at eBiz!” a free-wheeling newsletter on internet marketing and home business http://ebizwhiz-publishing.com. She also publishes “The Glutathione Report,” a newsletter featuring regular updates on the health benefits of glutathione. http://www.glutathione-report.com

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