]]> http://www.brmecham.com/internet-marketing-101-presentation-today/feed/ 0 http://www.brmecham.com/seo-internet-marketing-tips/ http://www.brmecham.com/seo-internet-marketing-tips/#comments Tue, 30 Dec 2008 23:54:28 +0000 Brian Mecham http://www.weblifellc.com/?p=131 A Blog is a great way to market yourself, share your knowledge and put yourself out as an expert in your field.

Most bloggers gain their traffic from 3 sources, inbound links (other websites linking to yours), search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) and social media (Facebook, MySpace, Squidoo, Digg, etc.).

Take your content to where the traffic is (Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and use your Blog/Website to bring it all together for those find you on the social networks.

Link Building

Link building allows your website to be more easily found by others. The more websites that are linking to you, the more potential you have for getting higher rankings by the search engines. It’s not just quantity that is important, but the quality of the links coming in to you.

Just remember, the best links don’t come from submitting your site to a link farm or blog directory. Quality links typically come from the genuine interest of others in your website or blog, in other words, if you are offering interesting and valuable content through your site others are more likely to link to you, naturally. You may also want to consider purchasing link space on websites with high Google Page Ranks.

Content is King

Great content is an important key component of search engine optimization. After-all, you want people to look up to you as the expert. With lots of original, valuable, entertaining, and inspiring content you can dominate your market.

Keywords and Key Phrases

Something to consider. What keywords and key phrases are people going to search for to find a website/company like yours?  Once you have answered that question you can optimize your site and content to those words/phrases.  Use them throughout the content of your website, but don’t over-do-it. Be wise.

1. Start a controversy. Just remember not to cross the line.

2. Start a contest. Make sure to end it too.

3. Give away free goodies. People love them.

4. Write about other bloggers to interest their visitors to read your blog. Keep it positive.

5. Dress up your blog often (By dress-up I mean tweaking the design)

6. Interview other bloggers and post the interview.

7. Write about your personal life sometimes.

8. Ask questions to your visitors.

9. Share some secrets.

10. Celebrate your birthday with your visitors. Think of innovative ways for doing this.

11. Celebrate your blog’s birthday too.

12. Write something funny or disgusting. (Don’t make it a habit)

13. Make a bumper sticker with your blog’s name and stick it on your car. (Just make sure you drive often)

14. Write an e-book and distribute it to your visitors for free.

15. Introduce a commission based affiliate program.

16. Tell your visitors about your latest fad or obsession.

17. Post interesting pictures of your pets.

18. Congratulate the top commentators occasionally.

19. Encourage sharing of opinions.

20. Donate for a cause or become a volunteer for a non-profit organization. Ask your visitors to join you.

21. Put your blog’s ad in the local newspaper or the yellow pages.

22. Hold blog competitions.

23. Create polls.

24. Hold an auction and let people bid for something useful (For example, advertising space on your blog).

25. Write about your blog achievements.

26. Share your hopes and aspirations about your blog.

27. Start an award distribution system.

28. Make contact with your local visitors and hold a get-together or a bloggers’ meet.

29. Start a blog comic strip.

30. Dig up some old article that you wrote on your blog which became famous and start a discussion.

31. Try and get a photograph clicked with a real celebrity and post it on your blog. (Hold on Tiger..don’t rush to that Photoshop button!)

32. Post videos that will help your visitors learn something new. Also submit them to video sharing websites like YouTube.com.

33. Write about your hobbies and interests. (For example, if you like cooking, post a new recipe)

34. Post about one of the weirdest thing that you ever did.

35. Get featured in a print magazine.

36. Buy a paid review from any famous blogger(s).

37. Brand your blog with a catch phrase along with a logo.

38. Distribute T-shirts or merchandise with your blog name on it.

39. Join Yahoo! Answers and put a link on your website to your answers.

40. Keep a track of websites that pick up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

41. Do surveys and publish the results to your visitors.

42. Build tools that your visitors might find use for.

43. Start a newsletter.

44. Podcasting is another good way to make your blog popular.

45. Publicize your blog to your friends and relatives and let them do some work for you.

46. Be active in Social Bookmarking websites.

47. Share Link Love and you will get it back.

48. People like to read about Web 2.0. Write about it.

49. Write about something that’s already famous.

50. Last but not the least, be yourself.

The effect your blog has on the your search engine rankings can vary depending on what you are blogging about, how valuable it is and how much you are blogging.

If you are blogging about a specific topic, and are providing useful information, people are likely to check it out. They may even link to your blog posts. This, along with many other factors, can increase the popularity and page rank of your website. A proven method to keep people coming back for more is to provide them with new and useful information for free. Offer a little something, Give’em The Pickles. Let them see you are the expert but you’re also not afraid to share some of what you know. You’ll probably end up getting more business.

Don’t worry if some of this is like a foreign language to you. With Weblife as your website designer you are in good hands.

Some Do’s:

tag:Keywords in
tag shows in search results as your page title. The title tag must be short (6 or 7 words at most) and the the keyword must be near the beginning. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword because what is written inside the

Keyword density in document text:
Another very important factor you need to check. 3-7 % for major keywords is best, 1-2 for minor. Keyword density of over 10% is suspicious and looks more like keyword stuffing, than a naturally written text.

Keywords in anchor text:
Also very important, especially for the anchor text of inbound links, because if you have the keyword in the anchor text in a link from another site, this is regarded as getting a vote from this site not only about your site in general, but about the keyword in particular.

Keywords in the beginning of a document:
Also counts, though not as much as anchor text, title tag or headings. However, have in mind that the beginning of a document does not necessarily mean the first paragraph ? for instance if you use tables, the first paragraph of text might be in the second half of the table.

Keywords in tags:
Spiders don’t read images but they do read their textual descriptions in the tag, so if you have images on your page, fill in the tag with some keywords about them.

Keywords in metatags:
Less and less important, especially for Google. Yahoo! and MSN still rely on them, so if you are optimizing for Yahoo! or MSN, fill these tags properly. In any case, filling these tags properly will not hurt, so do it.

Keyword proximity:
Keyword proximity measures how close in the text the keywords are. It is best if they are immediately one after the other (e.g. ?dog food?), with no other words between them. For instance, if you have ?dog? in the first paragraph and ?food? in the third paragraph, this also counts but not as much as having the phrase ?dog food? without any other words in between. Keyword proximity is applicable for keyword phrases that consist of 2 or more words.

Keyword phrases:
In addition to keywords, you can optimize for keyword phrases that consist of several words ? e.g. ?SEO services?. It is best when the keyword phrases you optimize for are popular ones, so you can get a lot of exact matches of the search string but sometimes it makes sense to optimize for 2 or 3 separate keywords (?SEO? and ?services?) than for one phrase that might occasionally get an exact match.

Secondary keywords:
Optimizing for secondary keywords can be a golden mine because when everybody else is optimizing for the most popular keywords, there will be less competition (and probably more hits) for pages that are optimized for the minor words. For instance, ?real estate new jersey? might have thousand times less hits than ?real estate? only but if you are operating in New Jersey, you will get less but considerably better targeted traffic.

Origin of inbound links:
Besides the anchor text, it is important if the site that links to you is a reputable one or not. Generally sites with greater Google PR are considered reputable.

Links from similar sites:
Having links from similar sites is very, very useful. It indicates that the competition is voting for you and you are popular within your topical community.

Links from .edu and .gov sites:
These links are precious because .edu and .gov sites are more reputable than .com. .biz, .info, etc. domains. Additionally, such links are hard to obtain.

Links from directories:
Great, though it strongly depends on which directories. Being listed in DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and similar directories is a great boost for your ranking but having tons of links from PR0 directories is useless and it can even be regarded as link spamming, if you have hundreds or thousands of such links.

Unique content:
Having more content (relevant content, which is different from the content on other sites both in wording and topics) is a real boost for your site’s rankings.

Adsense will boost your ranking, or will it?:
Adsense is not related in any way to SEO ranking. Google will definitely not give you a ranking bonus because of hosting Adsense ads. Adsense might boost your income but this has nothing to do with your search rankings.

Adwords will boost your ranking, or will it?:
Similarly to Adsense, Adwords has nothing to do with your search rankings. Adwords will bring more traffic to your site but this will not affect your rankings in whatsoever way.
Don’t:

Keyword dilution:
When you are optimizing for an excessive amount of keywords, especially unrelated ones, this will affect the performance of all your keywords and even the major ones will be lost (diluted) in the text.

Keyword stuffing:
Any artificially inflated keyword density (10% and over) is keyword stuffing and you risk getting banned from search engines.

Inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites:
This does not affect you in any way, provided that the links are not reciprocal. The idea is that it is beyond your control to define what a link farm links to, so you don’t get penalized when such sites link to you because this is not your fault but in any case you’d better stay away from link farms and similar suspicious sites.

Excessive linking, link spamming:
It is bad for your rankings, when you have many links to/from the same sites (even if it is not a cross- linking scheme or links to bad neighbors) because it suggests link buying or at least spamming. In the best case only some of the links are taken into account for SEO rankings.

Outbound links to link farms and other suspicious sites:
Unlike inbound links from link farms and other suspicious sites, outbound links to bad neighbors can drown you. You need periodically to check the status of the sites you link to because sometimes good sites become bad neighbors and vice versa.

Cross-linking:
Cross-linking occurs when site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site A links back to site A. This is the simplest example but more complex schemes are possible. Cross-linking looks like disguised reciprocal link trading and is penalized.

Single pixel links:
when you have a link that is a pixel or so wide it is invisible for humans, so nobody will click on it and it is obvious that this link is an attempt to manipulate search engines.

Invisible text:
This is a black hat SEO practice and when spiders discover that you have text specially for them but not for humans, don’t be surprised by the penalty.

Cloaking:
Cloaking is another illegal technique, which partially involves content separation because spiders see one page (highly-optimized, of course), and everybody else is presented with another version of the same page.

Doorway pages:
Creating pages that aim to trick spiders that your site is a highly-relevant one when it is not, is another way to get the kick from search engines.

Duplicate content:
When you have the same content on several pages on the site, this will not make your site look larger because the duplicate content penalty kicks in. To a lesser degree duplicate content applies to pages that reside on other sites but obviously these cases are not always banned ? i.e. article directories or mirror sites do exist and prosper.

Frames:
Frames are very, very bad for SEO. Avoid using them unless really necessary.

A Flash home page:
Fortunately this epidemic disease seems to have come to an end. Having a Flash home page (and sometimes whole sections of your site) and no HTML version, is a SEO suicide.

Bans in robots.txt:
If indexing of a considerable portion of the site is banned, this is likely to affect the nonbanned part as well because spiders will come less frequently to a ?noindex? site.

From the obvious to the “Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before”, here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the <b> </b> tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site. Here is an example of deep linking, in this case to my personal happiness workbook.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won’t follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You’ve heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else’s article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don’t overdo the anchor text. You don’t want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation – something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, “Gumbo Pudding Pop” occasionally, “Get gumbo pudding pops” as well, “Gumbo-flavored pudding pops” some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It’s called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

There you have it: 10 of the 52 Top SEO Tips, a free tip sheet that comes with Don’t Get Banned By the Search Engines:

There is a lot more to search engine optimization, and there are always more details when looking at an individual site. But these tips should help any website significantly improve its rankings.

First of all a big ‘thank you” for every one who participated. As I said before the number of entries surprised me (and the quality as well, I will definitely apply some of those tips myself).

Now, without further delay, the 30 Traffic Generation Tips:

1. Sridhar Katakam
Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.

2. Ian Delaney
Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.

3. Scott Townsend
Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources. (check the List of Ping Services)

4. Kyle
Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter ‘for dummies’ version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.

5. Grant Gerver
Try to be polemic. I write obsessively about all-things political from the left-wing perspective in the form of humorous, sarcastic one-liners.

6. Daniel
A simple tip that will probably boost your page views: install a translator plugin. I decided to use a paid plugin for this, but if I am not wrong there are some free ones as well. The translation is not very good, as you can imagine, but it helps to attract readers that are not fluent in English.

7. Rory
Submit articles to blog carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com) that are related to your niche. Your article almost always gets posted, and it must generate a handful of visitors, at least.

8. Ramen Junkie
Newsgroups. I always see a spike when I post a review to a newsgroup.

9. Eric Atkins
Create a new design for your website. Not only will it be more attractive to your regular readers, but you can submit it to some CSS gallery showcase sites that feature great designs. This will give you exposure on those sites while generating a lot of traffic and backlinks from those types of sites.

10. Megan Taylor
Participate in conversations on related blogs. Start conversations on your own blog. Don’t just post about a story and leave it at that, engage your audience, ask questions and call to action.

11. Guido
Comment on blogs, write useful content and make good friends on forums.

12. Brian Auer
You must be active to generate traffic. I post comments on other blogs that are related to mine, and I post my site link in my signature at the forums. Spread the word about your blog and it will certainly attract readers.

13. Shankar Ganesh
Just browse around MyBlogLog.com and you will surely get visitors to your blog. Also try to join as many communities as possible that are related to your topic.

14. Andrew Timberlake
A great tip for generating traffic is off-line by including your url in all your off-line liturature from business cards, letterheads, pamphlets, adverts through in-store signage if applicable. I even have our website on my vehicle.

15. Cory OBrien
Read lots of other blogs. Leave trackbacks. Make sure your blog is optimized for search engines. Leverage social bookmarking sites like digg (both for new ideas and for traffic).

16. Jester
Leave comments on other blogs. If you’re already reading them, it takes
just a couple of seconds to leave a message agreeing or disagreeing
with the author, you get to leave a link to your site, and you will almost
ALWAYS get traffic from your comments.

17. Goerge Manty
Post 3-5 times a day. Use ping services like pingomatic or set up wordpress to ping some of the ping services. Engage your readers. Put up polls, ask them questions, give them quizes, free tools, etc. Make them want to come back and tell their friends about you.

18. Engtech
Community. It’s one word but it is the most important one when it comes to blogging. The only ‘blog metric’ that makes sense is the vibrant community of readers it has. Building a community around your blog will bring you increased traffic, but how do you start? The boilerplate response to building traffic is always ‘SEO, social networking sites, and commenting on blogs’ but it can be simplified to ‘be part of a community’. The easiest way to seed your blog is with an already existing community. But the only way to do that is to be part of the community yourself.

19. Chris
Squidoo Lenses are a good way to generate traffic. By using a lense,
you can generate your own custom ‘community’ of webpages, including some
of the more popular pages in your ‘neighborhood.’ Including your own
webpage in such a list is a good way of generating traffic.

20. Splork
I’ve had good success writing articles and submitting them to EzineArticles. Articles that have been written from well-researched keyword phrases and accepted by EzineArticles tend to rank very high in Google for that search term. Placing anchor text in the footer of those articles so the reader can visit my relevant website has always increased my site traffic.

21. Jen Gordon
I came upon some unexpected traffic when my blog popped up on some css design portals like www.cssmania.com and www.webcreme.com. If you can put some time into the concept behind and design for your blog, I’d recommend submitting your site to a design portal not only for
additional traffic but to build an additional community around your site.

22. Kat
I’ve recently gotten involved with several ‘MySpace-like’ community sites that focus on my target audience. I share my thoughts in their forums, post intros to my real blog on their system blog and I’ve even created a group for my specific niche. It’s been very, very successful for me.

23. Inspirationbit
Well, obviously everyone knows that social bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, etc. bring lots of traffic. But I’m now submitting some of my articles to blogg-buzz.com (a digg like site for bloggers), and I always get not a bad traffic from there.

24. Mark Alves
Participate in Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Answers where you can demonstrate your expertise, get associated with relevant keywords and put your URL out there.

25. Tillerman
Be the first to write a post about the ‘Top Ten Blogs’ in your niche. The post will rank highly in any general search for blogs in your niche and other bloggers in your niche write about the post and link to it.

26. Nick
Participating in forums is a great way to get loyal readers. Either link baiting people in your signature or posting great advice and tips will give you high quality traffic, which will result in return visitors.

27. Brandon Wood
A simple trick I’ve used to increase traffic to my blog is participate in group writing projects. In fact, that’s what I’m doing right now.

28. Alan Thomas
Don’t forget your archives. I just posted a roundup of all interviews I did over the past seven months. One of them generated a new link and a big traffic spike from a group of users that look like they will be loyal readers now.

29. KWiz
Write something controversial. I don’t think it’s good to write something controversial just for the purpose of getting traffic necessarily (especially if it’s only for that purpose and you’re being disingenuous), but it works.

30. Dennis Coughlin
Find the best blogs on your niche and contact the authors. Introduce yourself and send a link of your blog. This might help them to discover your blog, read it and possibly link to it.