Archive for March, 2009

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The SEO Rip-off Search Engine Optimization

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009



I decided to write this article as a result of many e-mails. It seems more and more people are victims of bad SEO. The main complaint is that they are paying entirely too much for little or no results. In addition, many are in the grip of bad SEO practices. If you plan to rent a pro SEO in the future, I suggest you use this article as a set of guidelines.

Before going to any person or business Seo Services , proceed as follows:

A) Learn how to set up and tested an SEO firm before you negotiate.

Do they have a strong client list under their belt?

Are they published?

B) Consider their portfolios.

What kind of results have they produced?

Contact a few of their customers. Are they satisfied with the work done?

C) To review and confirm their methods?

How are they going to optimize your site to access your keywords?

Did they use organic methods? Some individuals or companies use doorway pages, hide text in the background, use the re-orients the blacklist and other methods. Stay away from these values.

D) Get at least three different proposals for SEO.

Look carefully each. Are there any similarities? Proposals will help you to see which companies are honest and who are trying to sell you something you do not need.

What is the cost? The cheapest is not always the best, however, the highest price may not be attached to a comprehensive and viable course of action. Try to find to find a person or organization that will give you what you want in your SEO budget.

E) of the contract, contract, contract.

Get everything in writing. Search on the document carefully. Make sure it covers everything you mentioned, including methods of achieving your desired results. Have copies signed by the two sides. If employment is a big, you may want to consult a lawyer.

F) Clearly state the terms of payment.

While most SEO shall do no work for free or agree to a salary scale for results, many SEO professionals will not shy away from a more performance series of incentives. I am not a strong supporter prepaid contracts .. Most SEO professionals will abide by the 50% front, 50% on completion norm. Make sure that all the financial terms are clearly set out in your contract that the real work. This will protect all parties involved in a case where the expectations are not met.

In all, try to do your best to educate you on SEO. Have a basic knowledge of the terminology and SEO Expert SEO methodology. Anyone offering SEO should not have a problem explaining how they intend to achieve results. If they fail earn your trust or raise a red flag for whatever reason, keep searching. You will eventually find someone who will help you achieve your goals for a fair price. Happy hunting.



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Do You Have a Bad SEO Company, or Are You Just a Bad Client?

Monday, March 16th, 2009



Many people are often heard complaining about a bad experience with an SEO that cost them thousands of dollars. The thought never occurred to them that there might be more to that story.

Speaking of things that are bad, the Beatles couldn’t sing a tune, John Grisham has never written a decent novel, Dell makes crappy computer’s, TiVo’s and iPods suck, the Lord of the Rings movies lacked imagination and video killed the radio star. (OK, that last one might actually be true!)

Do you see where this is going? To somebody, one or more of the above statements are true. Not to the vast majority, but some people do feel that way. No matter what the product or service there will always be those that are dissatisfied. Have you ever heard of a company with a 100% customer satisfaction rate (outside of their own marketing gibberish)? I haven’t.

There have been a number of blog and forum posts and articles recently about what to do if you’re with a bad SEO company. All good advice, but sometimes it’s not the SEO that’s bad, its the client. Yeah, that’s right, sometimes the clients are just plain clueless, have unreasonable expectations, or fall prey to the “grass is greener” scenario presented by competition. Yes, sometimes clients are bad.

It’s Not You, It’s Me!

Like every other company, product and service on the planet, search engine optimization firms will always have dissatisfied clients.

Our firm has a significant number of very satisfied clients since 1998. We have also had a handful of clients that walked away dissatisfied with our services. I’m sure the same is true with every other SEO company out there. Does that make them bad SEOs? No, not necessarily.

Can good SEOs sometimes produce bad results for their clients? Absolutely. Happens all the time. Let me give you a few examples.

We worked with one client for several years. In the early phases of their campaign they selected some really poor keywords. We let them know this but they were insistent that we move forward. We were able to get most of their keywords ranked very well on the search engines, but as we suspected, sales did not increase. Every few weeks the client would call us asking if there was anything else that can be done to increase sales. We often made suggestions on how to improve their site along with recommending they change their optimized keywords. The site improvements they considered and often made. The keyword changes were considered but never approved. Eventually they left us.

We often find clients changing their website causing our optimization efforts to be overwritten with un-optimized versions of their pages. Those clients will then call us wondering why their rankings dropped. Duh! When this happens repeatedly with the same client you start to realize that you’re just not going to get any good sustainable results. [Shameless plug: our new CodeMonitor tool notifies SEOs and/or clients when page changes are made.]

Still other clients have limited our ability to optimize their websites with all kinds of restrictions. Don’t change this, can’t change that. There is always a “good” reason, but when your hands are tied there is only so much that you can do.

So What’s the Problem?

I recently had a client leave dissatisfied because his rankings dropped for a couple of weeks and he felt we just were “not working for him” anymore. The worst part about it is that he just canceled the contract without talking to me or anyone on our team to find out what’s going on. I took me several emails and phone messages to find out why he left.

We often get calls and emails from clients asking why rankings dropped which affords us the opportunity to explain things and usually ask for patience as these type of fluctuations occur every now and then. One client did just that and once his rankings popped back into the top positions he emailed me just to say, “hey, you were right!”.

We get a lot of calls (and clients) that come to us from other SEO firms that just didn’t pan out for them. Before I go off telling them that their SEO company is bad I try to find out a few things. How long have they been optimizing your site? What changes have they made? Is their name Traffic Power? Etc., etc. A few such questions will usually give me what I need to know to determine if they have cause to jump ship or not. If they have been with the company only for a few months I usually tell them to hang tough and give them a chance to produce results. Unfortunately SEO does take time, especially when a site gets sandboxed, and you won’t always know that you’re with a bad firm for quite some time.

Talk to Me, Baby!

Communication is the key. If you have difficulty getting calls and emails returned, or are not quite sure what your SEO company is doing for you, then there is a good chance you’re not with a great firm.

One company came to us from one of the largest SEO firms after their one-year contract expired. We checked their rankings only to find sub-standard results. There were no penalization or sandbox issues, just lack of good performance. I was able to determine that their current firm simply wasn’t doing a good enough job. Once this client signed with us we were able to get most of their keywords on the first page within the first two months.

Another firm came to us after their previous SEO got them banned from Google. Coming to us we couldn’t guarantee any more than we would fix their site to make it compliant with search engine guidelines and work aggressively to get them back into the index. After fixing the spam issues, and several months wait… and several phone calls asking “when”, Google finally re-included them, and with great rankings on top of it.

Denial is Often the First Sign of a Problem

Nobody wants to think they are a bad client, but here are some signs:

Does not communicate concerns to their SEO firmDoes not listen to advice givenRefuses to change their site based on SEO recommendationsDemands optimization for poorly targeted keywordsConstantly overwrites optimization efforts with page changesExpects rankings to appear overnightCalls all the time to complain about lack of progress due to the above

The signs of a bad firm are pretty obvious, bad communication, spammy optimization, getting your site banned, etc. If you work with one of them then run away as soon and as fast as you can. It’s usually pretty easy to tell a good one from a bad one. Communicate with (don’t harass) your SEO firm. A trustworthy and respectable firm will keep open lines of communication. Just be ready to listen to what they have to say and implement recommendations that they provide, even if those recommendations are to be patient.

Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s them. Get the facts before you do anything. You definitely don’t want to be stuck with a firm that’s just sucking your money away and doing very little work for it. On the other hand, you don’t want to jump ship mid-way in what will turn out to be a substantially rewarding campaign just because things didn’t happen fast enough. Before you dump your SEO, make sure the problem isn’t you!



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The Worst SEO Mistakes You Can Make

Monday, March 16th, 2009



Everyone wants their websites to be search engine optimized, or SEO-friendly. However, there are some common errors that people make when they’re doing SEO work on their site, and these errors can actually cost them that highly coveted top ten ranking that everyone wants. Here are some things to avoid when doing SEO work on your website.

Remember the ALT tags! Almost every image on your website (not including the background and any images that serve as buttons and the like) needs to have ALT text. This is the text that shows up if the image doesn’t load. More importantly, however, it’s the text that tells search engines what the image is since the programs can’t actually see the picture. A good ALT tag will include two or three of your keywords, and it’s a great place to stick in extra keywords that the viewer will (hopefully, unless your image is missing) never see.

Don’t use the same title tag on every page of your site. While it may be easy to simply write one title for your homepage and then leave it on every page, this is another place where you’re losing out on a place to stick keywords. Vary the title for each page so that search engines will notice the difference, and try to include different keywords for different pages.

Avoid scripts! While Flash and the like are becoming more compatible with search engines, it’s still difficult for more search engines to see inside Flash objects. This means you’re losing places to put meta tags, ALT tags, and more.

Don’t just write for robots. While writing articles with a high keyword density might get your page ranked higher by the search engine, it’s going to send actual human readers away. They don’t want to read anything redundant or clumsy. “Our furniture store in London provides great furniture for London residents looking for furniture designed specifically for London” is going to either annoy readers or make them laugh at the horrible writing. Be sure your SEO phrases and such can be integrated into the text seamlessly so they don’t stand out and don’t over-use them.

Also, actually write your website text yourself (or hire someone to write it). Don’t plagiarize – don’t copy and paste text off of one website and put it on yours without making it clear where the text came from. Too much duplicate text on your page will be flagged by search engines.

Likewise, avoid any bad SEO practices like hidden text or keyword stuffing. Hidden text refers to adding a ton of keywords at the bottom of a website and then making them the same color as the background, effectively hiding them from viewers. Search engines still see them, however. In the past, this was a technique that did actually make search engines rank sites higher, but today’s robots are smart enough to recognize this technique and ignore it. Likewise, keyword stuffing, or making a webpage that’s almost nothing but keywords, raises a number of flags in search engine robots and may actually get your pages ranked lower.

Finally, make certain all of your links describe where they’re going. No one likes to click links that aren’t clearly described by the surrounding text or give a good idea of their target. Plus, links are another factor a search engine uses to determine site relevancy, so not clearly marking them is detrimental in several ways.



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Seo – Keyword Flooding Is Bad Seo

Sunday, March 15th, 2009



Trying to cram as many keywords as you can into your home page is called keyword flooding. This includes the type of pages where there is a Title Tag loaded with scores of keywords. Using over twelve keywords per title tag is considered to be too much when it comes to keyword tags but some optimistic web masters will load them with as many as a 100 keywords in an attempt to increase sales.

The problem with cramming too many keywords on your home page is that they encompass a too big of a span theme wise for the search engine spiders to see your site as specific. Individually they can never get the keyword density or repetitions need to order the site highly. When it comes to SEO keep your keywords short, sweet yet targeted for best results. If you load it with popular, generic or “most visited” terms you are going to end up with a lot of visits from people on the internet who are not intent on buying a thing.

The solution to this is to focus the content on your home page on three to five of your top keywords or key phrases. For instance if you have a site about search engine optimization don’t use keywords like SEO or search engine optimization. You need to find sub keywords that are a little less general such as SEO home page techniques or SEO top keywords to get the attention of targeted visitors. As a rule of thumb the more competitive your site is the less keywords you should choose. Choose only two or three excellent words or phrases and use them three times in each block of text on your site to bring you the most business and try to keep your title copy to less than seven words (but ideally five words!)



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Bad SEOs? What about Bad SEO Clients?

Sunday, March 15th, 2009



You hear all the time about bad SEOs. Bad SEOs are offering worthless services, failing to deliver on their internet marketing promises, polluting the search engine results—well, a lot of bad things. But how much ever gets said about bad SEOs’ spiritual counterparts: bad SEO clients?

As an SEO, I can see things from the other side of the table. You see, despite trying hard to make it clear I’m a good, ethical, results-oriented, smarter marketing, white-hat SEO, I have gotten no end of inquiries from bad prospective SEO clients. Sure, no one who gets cheated is ever entirely to blame, and some cheated businesses are entirely blameless. But the bad SEOs would have too small a market to stay in business if it weren’t for almost-as-bad clients.

Shades of Bad SEO Clients

First, let me make clear what I mean by “bad” SEOs. Bad SEOs are bad because they either do unethical things to get e-marketing results, or because they consistently fail to deliver results. A good SEO delivers results and does it without trampling over other people’s rights (like submitting automated comments to their websites or trying to get good sites de-indexed).

A bad SEO client, in turn, is someone who will only be satisfied (albeit temporarily) with a bad SEO. Because they refuse to consider ethical web consultants or smarter marketing strategies, they are creating markets for the e-marketing charlatans and black-hats. There are two basic types of bad SEO clients: crooks and fool–oops, I mean, ethically challenged and judgmentally-challenged.

Ethically-Challenged SEO Clients

I haven’t gotten so many inquiries asking for out-and-out unethical services. Still, I’ve been asked about blog-sp@mming software and other shady internet marketing tactics a couple times. A colleague shared this gem with me: “Have you thought about just scanning a book from the library and using it for web content? Or is that too high-risk?” (Seriously, someone asked him this.)

Of course, judging from the amount of comment sp@m and SEO-motivated hacking on the web, there is plenty of demand for this stuff.

Judgmentally-Challenged SEO Clients

A much larger group of bad SEO clients are simply those who insist on putting themselves in the way of fraud. Yes, that’s right: I’m blaming the victim. Someone who goes looking for a $5 gold watch can’t cry too long if the watch turns out to be fake or hot. With SEO, there are a few more nuances, but it’s the same essential idea.

The overwhelming majority of these judgmentally challenged souls are private individuals whose only business is the business-in-a-kit variety. Yet they are also sometimes representatives of actual successful companies. The real businesspeople tend to be quicker to let their misconceptions go (after all, they can afford the real SEO alternatives), but not always. Let’s look at some representative types of this group, straight out of my own inbox (note: these are inquiries from prospects, not actual clients).

1. Something-for-(Little More than)-Nothing Clients

Really, I tend to think these people should be in the ethically challenged group, but maybe that’s just the remnant of my work ethic making me be mean There are actually two kinds of these clients:

* The ambitious but cheap client: “I’d like to get to the top of Google for the keyword, ‘mortgage’ so I can turn over $100,000/month in revenue. I can spend up to $1,000.” * The Adsense-is-my-business-plan client: you wouldn’t believe the numbers of inquiries I get from people who only plan to make money off Adsense or other on-site advertising—they don’t even have a plan for getting repeat traffic, nor do they have content to synergize with the SEO effort. By buying promotional services, they would essentially be buying advertising in order to make money off advertising—you see where that could be a problem?

Another way of looking at it: why wouldn’t I just create a site myself and keep all the profit from my efforts? In fact, most SEOs do have their own project sites, which are often monetized by Adsense. The money we could otherwise get from Adsense is one very low baseline for pricing our services. Legitimate SEO clients are typically selling goods or services at a profit rate that works out to ten or more times what they could get from Adsense.

In addition to the greedy, I also see a few other kinds of less common, but still problematic prospective SEO clients:

2. SEO-Starry-Eyed Clients: “Search engine traffic is definitely the best way for me to get pet-sitting clients in my tiny Himalayan village.”3. The Little-Knowledge-Is-a-Dangerous-Thing Client: “Don’t tell me about keyword research, content, anchor text, or natural linking strategy, just get me the PageRank (or links, keyword density, or whatever the fad is).”4. Gullible-and-Not-Letting-Go Client: “I know of at least two services that will submit my site to thousands of search engines for $29.95. If you can’t do that, I’ll take my business elsewhere.”5. I-Will-Never-Trust-SEO-But-I’ll-Consider-It-Anyway Client: “No one can guarantee a good search engine ranking so this is all pointless—I’ll just go with that $29.95 search engine submission package someone just emailed me about. At least it’s cheap.”

In short, if you are going to find good SEO web consultants, you need: 1) realistic expectations; 2) a realistic budget; 3) solid information. Don’t expect something for nothing, do a little reading, and it’s much less likely you’ll fall victim to bad SEOs.



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Does Web Hosting Fraud Exist, if it Does How it Works?

Friday, March 6th, 2009



If it is to good to be true it probably is!

Maybe you are looking to host your website or you are already hosting your site with a web hosting provider at this time.

In Todays world finding reliable partners online has become a huge task. The only way to avoid this is by acquiring trustable knowledge.

Avoiding the never ending talk about bad hosting services or low cost hosting providers with non existent support I would like to focus now in one of the dirtiest things you will ever hear about several web hosting providers overselling their real web space to several people like you with few or non previous experience in this Industry.

What is web hosting overselling?

This is when a Web Hosting provider sells the same space of Server space to several costumers. so they share this space, traffic or bandwidth with as many deceived costumers as they want, but you the costumer will never know the true unless you start to reach your “real” web hosting account limits.

For example:

If they say in your hosting account that you got 1500 GB (In reality you hare “sharing” 150 GB or less) – This 150 GB are being shared with as many costumer they can oversell from 1500 to over 15.000 costumers in many cases. if each costumer has only one site (many offer unlimited sites to host) Just make the numbers: 150GB for 1.500 people your site is literally surrounded by sharing sites all struggling and growing daily and you in the middle.

Finding a reliable Web Hosting is not different.

Many Hosts lie to you with empty promises and you even have to compromise to pay for something you really do not own at all.

I will not go into unnecesary technical stuff here but only the facts you need. This way the next time you will avoid falling deceived.

Still confused? no problem…

Let´s put it this way with an practical example:

Mr J.J Is offered to lend/buy for his new factory, farm or business

over 100.000 acres of land in south Florida, for only 100 usd/month! WOW This Sounds like a dream come true for him!

He closes the deal and rapidly moves to the new location. After only 3 weeks he decides it is time to use the space he owns and built a big factory, but after he has built it Mr JJ starts crossing the field he believes owns and suddenly starts to see not one but Hundred of farms and factories around him all sharing the space the he paying for!! What?

Mr JJ thinks, Hey! I don´t want anyone to use My land am paying for it, but all the others people say the same they all have been deceived! Sadly Mr JJ realize he has its factory already installed and worst just next to him there is a Huge Factory complex really close to him growing and expanding fast..! Eating all Your land and space..!

You have nothing to do you have built your farm there already you dot fell confident enough to move again and Go. You just sit and have to shut up and wait for the others not to overload the few acres you got and kick you out of “your” land/place.. Guess what?

You are have been deceived by this Land Lender/Seller! – Will you continue paying to them after all the lies they have made you eat by force? No I say!

I will run away and the minimum I´d do is to Stop giving my hard earned money to this people!

Here you have it.

So if you think you own a huge web hosting account for a low sum below $10 usd Think Twice on the example I provided above. This is the sad true you had to know and now you know it. what you do with this knowledge depends on you only now.

Not all, but a Lot of Web Hosting Providers are overselling the same Fancy Numbers to their costumers telling them nice lies while they hide the ture in their small servers They will try to sell you things like:

1850 GB Web Space, 255500 GB Web Traffic for only 3,99 usd / month ( Common sense is so important in life!)

Will you believe this? Hey I know several BIG Internet hosting and servers headquarters but they still use servers similar to your or my personal computer! I don´t know yours but mine has 120 GB hard disk space and Win Vista. – But I guess I can start selling 1500 GB web accounts by tomorrow.. $$ Heck I could make a fortune fast, unless someone realizes I am overselling… shhhhhh! – lol

Many are just resellers getting (fake) unlimited accounts and putting any numbers they like to attract

non-educated costumers to them.

Once you pay and move your site or business there you are trapped in this spider net and will not be easy to move on after that.

Well you still can move your business to a more reliable web hosting service if you want to stop this. and it will not be complicated for expert staff never mind how big your website is. You must be in the safe side if the harbor.

But this is only up to you and how comfortable you feel after knowing you are very probably being deceived by your hosting provider. Remember

Hope I have helped you to realize in how profitable this fake web hosting business can be for many so called hosting companies.

I urge you to choose a service where you can rest assured that you get what you paid for. Hope my honest and clear advice helps you not to fall victim of any fake hosting provider in the future and to give you the courage to move on if you have felt into one already.

The only service I could recommend at this time after my research online is this: Their services are still affordable for real web hosting services here is the link: http://www.BullionHost.com – Tel 206 338 3393 – USA

Think twice before ordering and buying empty words and promises.

Sincerely!

David V Mach.

Vima Consulting.



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Search Engine Friendly

Friday, March 6th, 2009



“Search engine friendly.”

Search engines all have their own confidential algorithms that determine which Web pages are to be shown first. The algorithms assign weights to certain components or variables that it finds within a page. There are MANY people who can design web pages but not many can built a search engine friendly and functional web sites.

3 Important Meta Tags.

META tags are HTML Tags that describe the contents of a web page. The primary purpose of Meta tags is to help catalog and categorize the contents of a web page. If your pages do not contain them then they may not get categorized the way you’d like by the search engines.

You should generally include a META keyword tag on your page within the section of a Web page area.

TITLE

Keep your title quite short and include words relating to your subject area and should include your targeted keyword

Work at home business resources for all

DESCRIPTION

The description tag should be kept between about 100-200 characters. The description should also include words about your subject area and should not simply restate the title of the page, as it should also describe the page.

KEY WORDS

Key words and/or phrases relating to your subject will also be inserted (comma separated), they should be between 200-500 characters long.

Meta tags are hidden in a document’s source, invisible to the reader. Some search engines, however, are able to incorporate the content of meta tags into their algorithms. No engines penalize sites that use meta tags properly, so it’s recommended that you always include them.

The tag of your Web page is the most important HTML tag or element. All the search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a lot of importance in their ranking system. Therefore, if you were to create one page with a keyword in the title tag and another page with the same keyword in the body tag, the one with the keyword in the title will generally rank higher in most engines.

The text found in the META Description tag will be displayed to the user in the search results for many engines. Therefore, it pays to craft a good description so that you not only rank well, but so people will actually click on your link once they see it. When creating your Meta Description Tag you must adhere to the guidelines that the search engines have in place. For example, there is a limitation to the number of characters that you can use in your Meta Description. Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the search engines and directories use the keywords in the description as a way of determining if your site is relevant to the search performed. This is also where concepts and strategies like keyword proximity come into play and is a high factor for your search engine ranking.

A META keyword tag lists all the keywords for which you would like search engines to rank your site. Although not all search engines support this tag, you should use it for the ones that do.

One of the most important things that you can do for your web site and your search engine ranking to be indexed in the search engines is write a good description and title for your site. If you spend extra time on the title ,description, and tailor it so that it is definitive, concise, and follows all of the guidelines, your web site should not have a problem getting indexed and will positive for your search engine ranking.

Key element is your keywords. Keywords are the key to whether your site is seen in the search engines or not.

Most of the time when people use a search engine they search for common words or phrases like game, travel, music or business. These words are called “key words” or “keywords”. Because of this webmasters try to use key words that are likely to be searched for included within their page. The more often a key word shows up the more likely the page will rank higher in a search engine. If you over do it however you can actually be rejected by a search engine. That is why webmasters try to make each page relative to only one to three keywords. They then use those key words as the first words within their HTML meta tags, image tags, heading tags, title tag, text link tags, alt tags and even the file name of the page itself.

Target the wrong keywords and all your efforts will be in vain! Don’t waste time optimizing for words that will never bring you any traffic.

Few tips for a search engine friendly website.

Keep it simple

Make your site easy to navigate. Give a site map so visitors can see a list of everything contained on the site. They can then use this as their reference point. Search engine spider can also easily follow all your links read it content and store them in the search engine database.

All the major search engines claim to favor pages with high-quality content. They claim that to rank well on their engine that you simply need to create relevant, high quality pages. Keywords should be relevant, applicable, and clearly associated with page body content.

Cloaking is normally associated with sites doing IP and USER-AGENT serving where the internet server will present a page that will vary based upon the visitor characteristics. No matter how great the content, is considered spam by all of the major search engines.

DO keep your content current.

There’s nothing worse than visiting a website in 2008 that was last updated in 1999.

Never Spam. The following techniques are usually considered spam:

Irrelevant keywords in the title and meta tags

Meta refresh tags.

Invisible text and overuse of tiny text.

Excessive repetition and use of keywords

Overuse of mirror sites (same sites that point to different URLs)

Identical or nearly identical pages.

Submitting to an inappropriate category (for directories)

Never use link farms. Link farm are those services that generically link to your site if you agree to link to everyone else’s site that participates in the link exchange service. Theoretically, more the members of that service, more your link popularity.

Conclusions

Build a Search Engine friendly website. Do not break any search engine rules keep your site clean surely will earn a place in the search engines. Make your pages the best they can be for your users and search engines in general, and your site will do great!

About the Author: Hash is the president club member of SFIMG. A work at home business site.

http://www.work-home-business.com



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7 Steps To Leverage Social Media For Increasing Web Site Traffic

Thursday, March 5th, 2009



Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. have become popular among the internet marketers. Most marketers hawk their websites, blog, affiliate links, list building URLs, etc. all day long to drive traffic to their web sites. Not only it is annoying to the network members, but also the effectiveness of such a strategy is yet to be proven.

However, you cannot ignore this emerging medium. You need to embrace it using a different mindset. If you follow the seven guidelines discussed below, you will be able to increase traffic to your site from these social media sites without exposing yourself as a self-centered marketer who will do anything to cash in on every opportunity.

1. Create a profile page at each site and detail your interests, expertise, blogs, and websites in your profile. In Twitter, you are limited by text space and the number of URLs you can use in your bio. Facebook has more flexibility and you can pull your blog RSS into the Facebook notes.

Social network sites are pull medium where the old push marketing fails miserably. Your goal should be to pull people to your profile page by regularly posting valuable and interesting contents from other sites. You can post your blog article in Twitter occasionally but don’t submit every blog post your create.

2. The old school marketing relies on four Ps – price, product, placement, and promotion. The social media adds another dimension and one more P to the marketing philosophy and it is the participation.

You need to participate in the conversion and at the same time encourage others to participate. If you want to build a community that will trust you, you need to participate by providing expert opinions and valuable information. You need to help others when somebody has a question. Even if don’t know the answer, find it out by spending sometime on the Web.

You also need to draw others in the discussions by asking questions, giving controversial opinions, raising interesting issues that affect your niche. Passively posting your URL all over the place will not bring traffic to your site. Only concerted efforts to position yourself as a knowledgeable person in your niche will result in more visitors to your site.

3. To position yourself as an expert in your niche, you need to create contents that are fresh, interesting, and valuable to your readers. You also have to discover high quality contents in your niche for sharing with others. Subscribe to a few dozen blogs and scan them everyday for high quality contents so that you can share it with others in your network.

4. You cannot hide yourself in the social media world. If you are a fake, people will discover it fast and you will lose trust and traffic. So, be authentic, transparent and humble in all your conversations. If you make a mistake, admit it and move on.

5. To establish your credibility and expertise, you should read a wide variety of topics in your niche and explain them to others in the form of blog post, ebooks, white papers, etc. Give it all for free without any strings attached. Encourage others to distribute your materials.

If you are not sharing some valuable information, somebody else will share it. You cannot hide any information. It is better to be the first mover than wondering how did everybody find it out.

6. Be prepared to change your mind set. The old school mindset for driving traffic is posting you site links everywhere. The social media mind set is establishing yourself as an expert and sharing your knowledge. Once people know that you are a good resource for solutions to their problems, they will come to your site and you can monetize your site in different ways.

If you are wondering how you are going to make money if you give every thing for free than you need to understand this new medium before you jump into the bandwagon by posting your URLs every hour. Your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Your site may monetize using a variety of methods like, third party advertisement, selling tutorials, affiliate marketing, selling memberships, etc.

7. Social media is a marketing tool set that you leverage to drive traffic to your web site. For leveraging this new medium, you need to establish yourself as a good community member first. Don’t be farcical like Walmart who paid to Jim and Laura to blog around the country in Walmart parking lots capturing stories of Walmart employees and how they loved to work at Walmart.

You may enjoy a short-lived traffic boost to your site, but it will not last longer. When the truth is exposed, it will be a public relation nightmare for you or your brand. Build your brand by telling the truth. There is nothing wrong if you are sponsored by a corporation, just reveal the truth.



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How Many Reasons to Multiple Redirect Urls?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009



There are multiple reasons to redirect URLs. For one, your web pages may have moved but their old URLs may still live in users’ bookmarks or in search engine indexes. Without implementing some sort or redirection, that traffic would be lost to a .

On occasions, you may also want to register several extensions for your domain name: ‘mydomain.com’, ‘mydomain.net’ and ‘mydomain.org’, and have ‘mydomain.net’ and ‘mydomain.org’ automatically redirect visitors to your site, hosted under ‘mydomain.com’.

Besides, if your company sells several products, you may want to give each of them an individual domain name, and have it point to a specific subdirectory of your main site. For illustration, if you own a site called ‘businessvideos.com’ that sells a product called ‘Marketing Made Easy’, you may want to set up a domain such as ‘marketingmadeeasy.com’, and redirect it to subdirectory: 

There are several ways to redirect domains, but, most of them will get you in difficulty with the search engines.The search engine friendly way to redirect URLs is to use what is know as a 301 redirect (you can see how Google and Yahoo! specifically endorse this kind of redirection). Here is my take about the different redirection methods and their implications on search engine optimization:

Meta-Refresh Javascript Redirect

You can redirect visitors by placing a snippet of JavaScript code within the HTML code of the page you want to redirect. With this method, you can specify the number of seconds before the visitor is automatically redirected to the new page. Search engines don’t like this method, because of the potential for abuse: you could write an optimized page for a non-competitive search term, and then automatically redirect your unsuspecting visitor to whatever URL you want. For illustration, it could be relatively easy to write a page about English literature, have it indexed and highly ranked by the search engines, and then redirect your visitor to a casino or Viagra site. If search engines allowed this, users would quickly stop trust them. That is why search engines penalize this practice, and why you should avoid it.

Parked Domains

You could register an extra domain name, park it, and make it point to the DNS servers of your main site’s hosting account, so that when somebody types the additional domain, they will be transported to your main site. However, this come near may lead to search engines listing the same content twice, one for your main domain, and one for your additional domain. In the past, unscrupulous webmasters would use multiple domains to spam search engines and directories, making them list the same pages hundreds of times under different domains. Even if your intentions are good, we don’t recommend this approach to redirecting your additional domains, since search engines may penalize your site for duplicate content.

302 and 301 Redirects

When a request for a page or URL is made by a browser, agent or spider, the web server where the page is hosted checks a file called ‘.hatches’. This file contains advice on how to handle specific requests and also plays a key role in security. The ‘.hacks’ file can be modified so that it instructs browsers, agents or spiders that the page has either temporarily moved or permanently moved . It is usually possible to implement this redirect without messing with the ‘.hatches’ file directly, using your web host’s control panel instead.

From a search engine perspective, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs. In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL, but will transfer link popularity from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.

The URL Forwarding Feature

Most domain registrars offer a feature called URL Forwarding. With this feature, you can register a new domain, such as ‘mydomain.net’, and have it point to mydomain.com (or to any other URL). The problem, however, is that registrars usually do this by implementing a 302 redirect (page moved temporarily). While Google handles 302 redirects very well, passing link popularity from the additional domain to the main one, other search engines don’t do this well, diluting link popularity by splitting it between the two domains, and negatively affecting rankings. Therefore, it is improved not to use this method, and implement a 301 redirect instead



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Affiliate Marketing Scams – What Are They And How Can You Spot Them?

Thursday, March 5th, 2009

Do you fear being drawn in by an affiliate marketing scam? What is the difference between legitimate affiliate marketing and a scam?

Affiliate marketing is basically a system of advertising where you agree to feature a company’s ads or links on your website and the company agrees to pay you a percentage of any sales generated by people clicking on the links or ads.

This type of program is especially attractive to those with limited funds or to someone who is just starting to venture into the world of online marketing. The company shoulders all the expense of creating the products and providing marketing tools. All you have to do is find the customers. The company may provide buttons, banners, ads, an affiliate website, landing pages and more. Your challenge is to drive traffic to your website to expose as many potential customers as possible to the advertising.

There are many well-known companies that use this form of marketing. And, you’ll probably be happy to know that there are quite of few entrepreneurs who are making fortunes online promoting other people’s products

Finding the best affiliate programs for you may take some time. Be aware that some of the programs you see advertised may be operated by scammers who are promising you a great income opportunity when all they are looking for is a way to take your money or steal your personal information.

I want to make it clear that there may be a cost to be an affiliate. Usually you get a product or service in exchange for this cost, such as a magazine or a website. Some programs are totally free where you just enter into an agreement to put the company’s link on your page in exchange for a percentage of the profit if that link produces a sale.

Whether the program is free or not, you still have to drive traffic to your site. You cannot blame the company if no one visits your web site. You cannot claim to have been scammed if it is your own fault that you’re not as successful as other affiliates.

Being scammed means you have been deceived by a company. They have taken your money and/or personal information and given you little or nothing in return. Such companies do exist and you have to be wise if you hope to be able to separate the legitimate offers from the scams.

Unfortunately, you may not be able to identify a scam until after the fact, but there are some guidelines that may help you avoid being scammed.

Examine the Website

A really professional company should have a really professional-looking website. It should be organized and have a lot of detailed information about their product or service. It should also contain detailed information about their affiliate program.

Check to see if there is contact information. Is there a toll free number you can call or an email address to contact with questions? Do they have a FAQ page? Do the links work?

A professional-looking, informative website does not necessarily mean that a company and its offer are legitimate, but most scammers will probably not put in the time and money to produce a detailed, informative website.

Be cautious if the page does not have a lot of content, but instead is full of promises about how much money you will make with very little effort. Read the testimonials. Do the people all look like models? Are the testimonials realistic or is each about someone making a fortune overnight without any effort? Is the page full of pictures of ‘dream’ homes, cars, and dollar bills? Pictures of people’s checks and bank statements as proof of earnings are OK, but how do you know for sure the pictures are real?

Evaluate the Product/Service/Compensation Plan

Is it a real, tangible product? Is it a service? You should be able to find information online. You can start with the company itself by sending questions in to the company or by calling its toll free number. Note the amount of information given about the product or service. What kind of disclaimers are there? Does it come with a money-back guarantee? A free trial offer? Some of the companies will actually let you see their ‘leaderboards’ so you can see who their top affiliates are and some give you an idea of how much money they are earning.

Evaluate the Investment

There are many affiliate programs that are absolutely free. There are sites where you can sign up to sell e-books, or audio books, or internet courses, website services or a whole list of things. All you do is sign up as an affiliate and then you can make a profit off of every sale generated from your site.

Some affiliate programs will ask for money. Perhaps there will be a basic affiliate level that is free, but if you want more benefits and the ability to make greater profits, you might have to pay some kind of fee. This is where the long term residual income in these programs comes from.

Most companies have some sort of compensation plan that is multilevel. As you sell products, you make money. As you tell others about the program and personally sign up others as affiliates, you make a little profit off of their sales also. Ideally, your personally-sponsored affiliates will sponsor people themselves. Sometimes you can make a little profit off of all the sales of those ‘downline’ from you through many levels. This is multi-level marketing which is NOT illegal or unethical. If the company is stable and profitable, you could create a significant residual income that will continue to grow, especially if you keep generating traffic to your site.

Be very cautious if the company asks for money before they offer you any information. You will usually have to give your name, email address, maybe phone number before having access to the detailed company information. But be careful if a company demands money before they will give you information.

Investigate opportunities as thoroughly as you can and try to avoid being impulsive and you can go a long way to avoid affiliate marketing scams.

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