Archive for the ‘Business Optimization’ Category

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Things to Consider When Redesigning Website

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Every once in a while, there will be a need of redesigning a website so that it would make it more attractive. However, redesigning the website may coincide with the SEO of the website and that is why proper care needs to be taken care of so that the website redesign will not affect the ranking of the website in the search engine in a bad way.

The first thing to consider is 301 redirect. This is very important especially when there is a need to change a link from the new design to a new one. 301 redirects also ensure that search engines will know what the replacement of the old link would be and able to index them instead.

The next thing to do is to redirect all traffic from non-www to www or vice versa. This is because search engines find that www and non-www to be two different sites. If there aren’t any redirects, it may cause search engine to penalize the two sites due to duplicate content, etc.

Create unique meta tags for each pages so that it will avoid any duplicates. Think of the new pages as a new way of getting keywords opportunity.

If there isn’t a need of using Flash, don’t use it. Not only does the search engines unable to read the content in Flash but some users find Flash a nuisance especially legacy computer users. This is because Flash takes up a lot of computer resources that may cause hangs in their computer. The last thing a website needs is visitors holding grudge on them because of Flash contents.

Remember the 5 seconds rule: if they cannot find any useful information in 5 seconds, they will most probably bail out from the website. Keep this in mind while redesigning the website.

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Posted in Business Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Google Content Network New Tool for Brand Advertisers

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Brand advertisers are one of the two types of advertisers available at the Google Content Network. These advertisers focus on getting their products noticed and most probably focus more on cost per thousand impressions instead of cost per click. This is because the main point of their advertising campaign is not to get a lot of traffic to their website but to get public acknowledgement of their product or service.

With Google Content Network covering more than 80% of the whole Internet user, it has to deliver one of the best solutions on the Internet so that it retains its position of the number one online advertising company on the planet.

Last year, Google Content Network has made some improvement on its Google Campaign program. It gives a better measurement for display advertising. This improvement was focused solely to brand advertisers.

Recently, Google Content Network has announced another new tool for brand advertisers. The new tool filters out advertisements that are “below the fold” or those that aren’t showing on the screen without the users needing to scroll down. This allows brand advertisers to minimize the fault in their campaign and allows them to improvise it.

Google Content Network aims to give a lot more control to brand advertisers as to where their advertisements should appear at.

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Posted in Business Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

Twitter Background for Product Awareness

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

Twitter is an essential marketing tool for a lot of sites. It allows the user to post quick updates on their Twitter profile to let their followers know what is currently going on. Most users however, opt to use some of the generic themes given at their Twitter account. Instead of doing this, it is better to use a custom theme as it promotes product awareness in a good way as well.

In any twitter page, there are spaces on both the left and the right side of the page while in the middle resides the main twitter content. Users can actually create a background image that can take advantage of one or both sides of the picture. However, it is best to place all the contents wanted at the left side of the page rather than the right side as most people places more attention on their left instead of their right.

There are a few sites that the user can actually go to should they wish to create their own backgrounds. Stripe Generator is a pattern generating site on which the user may use to create striped backgrounds. Another great site to go to is ColourLovers which has an extensive control panel for the users.

Below are some examples on what the user may create for their own twitter page. Notice that for the second example, everything is blended in so well that it may seem to be an actual page without any major editing.

twitter-bg

twitter-bg2

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Posted in Business Optimization, Social Media, Social Networking | No Comments »

Make Sure Your Content Rock

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Good Content Builds CredibilityThere is one thing that propels the Internet and will continue to do so: content. Websites are powered by this. People search for this. Without content, the Internet will have never been of value to anyone.

With this, it is now time to evaluate how you are serving content to your readers. Do you think your content can be easily understood? Do people feel that your readers have learned something new when they read it? These are just some things to consider when you are evaluating your content. Content, in this regard, cannot be limited to articles alone. Videos and audio are also types of content. They only exist on different formats.

But there are lots of reasons on why content is important. Here are some reasons on why you should prioritize giving good content to your users.

Good Content Shows Your Expertise

If you continue to provide good content to your audience, they will deem you as an expert in the field. That is just how it is on the Internet. You are only as good as the content you provide.

Just think about it this way. Imagine that you have an expertise at a particular area. But you do not have the skill to write or talk about it. Then the next person who has less skill but can teach people will beat you. An audience can only treat people who can teach them as experts. If your content cannot contribute to what they already know, then you are not an expert in their perspective. This is how expertise is developed.

Good Content Builds Credibility

If you are one of those people who want to sell a particular product or service, then you will benefit from providing good content. Not only is it a good proof that you know what you are doing, it also builds trust among your audience.

People are attached to good content. That is just the way the Internet works. If you provide good content, people will believe you more and even purchase the product or service you are offering

Good Content Allows Audience Targeting

The great thing with good content is that targets a particular audience. If you keep your content focused, then people who are interested on a particular niche will keep coming back to your site. If you keep this up, you will have steady visitors in a particular niche which you can easily monetize with advertisements.

Good Content is Your Visitor’s Decision Point

Last but not the least, good content is the decision point of your visitors. It lets them decide whether or not they will return to your website. It also tells them whether or not your website is useful. These decisions will determine how valuable your website is in the long run.

I wish this article has taught you how valuable content is. I hope you will find the time to review the content you provide. The secret is to always aim to give something more. Do not merely rehash what is already out there. Provide a good resource, do something new or better yet, provide new information. You audience will be thankful for it and they will reward you with their support.

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How to Get Good DoFollow Backlinks

Monday, October 12th, 2009

DoFollow BacklinksWebsite promotion is getting harder than ever. Not only are search engines constantly changing their algorithms, anti-spam measures are also becoming stricter. Given this situation, getting a website on the front page of search engines is becoming harder and harder not only for spammers but also for honest link builders.

One such anti-spam measure is the implementation of the Nofollow attribute in links. This can be implemented by simply affixing rel=’NOFOLLOW’ on a link. When a website owner does this, people who put their own links on the page will not be given the corresponding link juice. It is done with the goal of preventing spam and it is usually done in comment pages and social bookmarking websites.

Now you may wonder what does DoFollow means. Well, it is simply the opposite of NoFollow. If the NoFollow attribute is removed by the website owner, then the links become DoFollow. There are some blogs who implement this so that they can reward their users by having them benefit from their link juice. There are also some social networking websites that implement this on their profile pages. The key here is finding these websites and putting up your links.

However, finding these blogs may take some time. That is why DoFollow link services have been very popular. But you can also do this yourself if you use certain programs or websites to look for them. The most popular ones are Comment Kahuna and Comment Hunt.

Using these programs is easy. All you need to do is type in a keyword and it will return a list of DoFollow blogs you can comment in. But it is very important that you make each comment unique and relevant to the blog post. Spamming with these tools will not get you anywhere for the website owners will simply delete your comment.

The great thing about commenting is anchor text control. You can choose your anchor text through the Name field. However, you should not get over the top and only put your keywords in your anchor text. Make it look natural and put a name beside it like “Anna – muscle building specialist”.

You may also consider searching for DoFollow lists. There are a lot of them on the Internet. All you need to do is type “dofollow blog list”, “dofollow directory list” or “dofollow directories” in the search engines and then click on the results. Visit every website in this list and put your link up. The best part is that you can get a link without paying for anything.

Another way of obtaining DoFollow links is by receiving them from people who compile them. This is how Angela and Paul’s backlinks became popular. They compile a list of DoFollow and High PR websites that users can submit to. It is very easy to do and it cuts down the search work for a monthly fee.

But if you are one of those lazy people, you can always outsource the work. There are lots of services in the webmaster forums that provide dofollow link and directory submissions as well as Angela and Paul’s backlink submissions. However, you will need to pay a higher fee.

These are just some ways on how you can get DoFollow links. But this does not mean NoFollow links are of no value. In fact, search engines such as Ask.com considers NoFollow links as ordinary links unlike Google and Yahoo. They are still as valuable in telling the search engines what keywords your website should rank for. Always mix your DoFollow with NoFollow links to make things more natural.

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How to Promote Your Site Using Watermarked Videos

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Watermarked VideosVideo marketing has been very popular because of the rise of video streaming websites such as YouTube. This website has millions of users worldwide and it gets indexed by Google by just about every second. But video marketing cannot be limited to YouTube alone, there are also other video streaming websites such as Veoh, Megavideo, Videojug and others. If you are wise, you will not pass up this opportunity to create a video centered on keywords that can easily get indexed in the search engines. All you need to do is create one and submit it to all of these video streaming websites out there.

If you are wondering how effective this method is, let us try an experiment. Type a longtail keyword like “how to bake a cake” and you will see a videos come up in the rankings. Since videos provide good how-tos because it demonstrates how something is done, Google ranks it highly.

But ranking through videos are not limited to how-tos alone. Even normal keywords will suffice if it is tagged and titled in the proper way. The secret is, of course, promoting your video and getting views. From there, you will slowly see your video go up the rankings. This is the reason why it is very important to put your link in the description of your video. You should put a link to your website so users can visit it if they find your video useful. But remember that there are limits to uploading a video. YouTube and other video streaming sites usually deactivate a video if it pertains to a movie or music video. They have to do it lest they want to face charges from the producers.

Luckily, creating a video is very easy. There are available editing programs on the Internet that does not require you to pay. Some programs I particularly use are Animoto and Screencast-o-matic. They create videos fast and I do not really want to take too much time in just making the video.

Watermarking the video can be done through softwares. One such software is the Video Watermark Factory. It is best to have a transparent image ready so you can easily watermark your video. What I love about this software is that you can batch process the files. So if you have lots of videos, you can watermark them all with a single click. No need to watermark them manually.

Windows Movie Maker can also be an effective tool. You can put texts on certain video frames so it can also act as a watermark. Editing is also very easy to do in this program. You can also alter the effects and put in some credits.

Once you are done with watermarking, it is time to submit the video. Although it will just be easy to manually submit your video to video streaming websites, there are some web applications that automates the process. Check out TubeMogul and HeySpread for that. They can help you submit your video to up to 12 video streaming websites in one click.

If you have submitted your website to all your favorite video streaming websites, then you are done. That’s it! It is a very easy process. You may think it is hard but it is not. It only entails three simple steps: creating a video, watermarking it and submitting it.

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Best Way of Writing Articles for Articles Directories

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Articles DirectoriesSubmitting articles in article directories is one way of promoting a website. The more articles you submit, the more links you gain. The secret lies in the resource box where authors can post up to three links. These links can also have anchor texts they desire which makes these links very powerful.

Writing articles for article directories is very easy. You do not really need to hire an amazing writer to do it. But if English is not your native language, you may have a hard time. Articles in article directories, after all, are being reviewed by human editors. Here are some tips to remember so you can have your article approved in article directories.

Uniqueness is the Key

Copying another person’s work will not get you into article directories. They value unique content and you should also. The Internet is a free resource. But this does not mean you should simply copy another person’s work.

To make sure that your article is unique, you can use www.copyscape.com. It is a popular anti-plagiarism online application which scans your article to see if they have duplicates on the Internet. If you have written an article, create a free page from Blogger.com and paste your article. Run it through Copyscape by copying and pasting the blog’s URL and you will be surprised that links will come up if you copied the content.

Because of the duplicate content issue in article directories, some people think that they can simply spin articles and pass it off as unique content. But I have bad news for you. Copyscape can still track spinned articles. Aside from that, your articles will also contain lots of weird sentence constructions and word usage errors which will also prevent your article from being approved. It will not do you any good if you continue to do this. Article directories will just reject your content.

Always Check Your Articles for Errors

But aside from not copying other people’s work, it is also very important that you check your own work for grammar errors. Article directories are run by human editors who can discern a good sentence structure from a wrong one. They also double check. So if you managed to get through the first check, you may not get through in the second one.

The lesson of the story is to always check your articles for errors if you want it to be approved. If there are times where you feel that your article is okay but the article directory is rejecting it for grammar errors, it is time to hire a writer. You may have been missing some grammar rules that professional writers can point out.

Write 500-Word Articles

I put 500 because that is the highest required number of words in article directories. Sadly, it is required so you have to write 500-word articles or you cannot submit them to some article directories. Although some accept articles from 200-500 words, 500 words is still your best bet. It will cut your editing time.

I hope these tips have helped you get an article into the article directories. It is not hard. So long as you stick to the rules, article directories will love you and give you that free link.

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Unique Content Distribution

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Unique Content DistributionHow Does Unique Content Distribution Work for Search Engine Rankings?

Article marketing is one of the most common ways of promoting a website online. It is really very easy to do. You can start by finding an article directory like ezinearticles.com and signing up. From there, you can just create articles and submit them for approval. The key here is the resource box where article directory members are allowed to post their links. The best part is that they can control their anchor text.

Anchor text is the text you use when linking. For example, you linked to your website with the word “Dogs” then the anchor text is “Dogs”. But this anchor text is more powerful than it seems. It tells the search engines that your websites is about “dogs” so it will rank you higher for the keyword. Just imagine if you have dozens of links with the same anchor text. This will convince the search engines that your website is really about “Dogs”. But you must take extra caution when having too many links with the same anchor text. You must still keep things natural by varying your anchor text from time to time.

Since article marketing can control anchor text, it is a very good method to use if you are looking to climb your way to the page one of the search engines. Remember that it is not only the links that count. The anchor text tells the search engines that your website is really about a particular topic and ranks you higher every time you get a new link with a particular anchor text. This is enough reason for you to use article marketing in your promotion methods.

Unfortunately, not all articles end up being accepted by article directories. There are still other factors to consider such as the uniqueness of the content, the grammar errors and the word count. Be sure to have these three things covered before you submit your article.

Also another point you should consider is that not all article directories are the same. You may choose to stick with those that have the most traffic for better results. But always be sure to read their writer or publisher guidelines before submitting an article. This way, you will save yourself the hassle of resubmitting your article when it has been rejected. Confirmation of an article usually takes a week so it will be best to keep on submitting new articles for better results.

So as you can see, article marketing is easy. It is not rocket science. You can submit an article to an article directory so long as it is 100% unique and it is error free. If you are not gifted with a writing skill, you can always outsource the job to writers. But I would suggest that you do it yourself so you can save your money.

But article marketing is only one way to promote a website. While it really helps with search engine rankings, a mixture of promotion methods is always advisable. Doing too much of one thing is always bad. Build your links naturally and you will never go wrong.

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Xrumer Blast SEO

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Xrumer BlastHow does Xrumer Blast SEO Service work? Does Google like it?

Website promotion is one of the most daunting tasks to do when you are a website owner. Not only does it take time, links must also be built in a slow manner so the search engines will not penalize your website. There are so many link building methods out there. There are blog commenting, article marketing and forum promotion. Some search engine optimization experts will suggest a mixture of these methods is a wise thing to do.

Given the number of methods available, it is inevitable for people to look for a way to automate processes. Time is very important to business people and they will give their hands and limbs to get people or a software to automate a job for them. This need bears fruit to all the softwares that are now available in the market. One such software is Xrumer.

Xrumer is a Windows software which submits links to various forums in an automated fashion. The software has been the talk of the town simply because it can pass through security measures like CAPTCHAs. Given this revolutionary technology, a lot of people have resorted to this tool to blast their links.

This blasting mechanism is what people call as the Xrumer Blast. This pertains to the process of blasting a particular link to dozens of forums and in effect, the website gets the link juice. It is quite hard to track for the software makes use of a fresh and updated proxy list to post. Given this, the forum moderators and administrators cannot solve the problem with a mere IP ban.

Getting the link in the forums is quite easy. There will be one post asking where they can buy a product or service of the link and it will followed by an answer with a link. Some forums will not treat this as spam and will just leave it be. But there is still a way to track automated forum posts. It can be tracked with the weird forum names usually comprised of random letters and numbers which are generated by the software.

If you are interested in trying out Xrumer, you are out of luck. It seems like the program’s sale has been stopped. Luckily, the few owners of Xrumer still provides Xrumer blast services for a price and this is very popular today.

But before you try out the service, you may wonder if Google like it? Well, that will depend on how wise you choose your keywords. As with any other campaign, choosing the wrong keywords always end up in bad rankings. Also, as we have tried these services it returns a lot of PR0 links which are still backlinks but not really of value in our opinion.

Also, you must remember that building links fast usually do more harm than good. Always be sure that you are blasting your links slowly or the search engines will quickly notice what you are doing and penalize your rankings. It is better to be safe than sorry.

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Blog Commenting

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Blog CommentingCan Blog Commenting Increase Your Site Rank And Position In The Search Engines?

Blog commenting is one of the most popular ways to promote a website. It is one of the free methods you can implement along with other methods such as forum posting and article marketing. Not only is it free, it is also very easy to do. It only entails entering a blog then looking for a comment form to provide feedback on the blog post.

But you may be wondering how blog commenting can affect your site rank and search engine position. Here are some reasons how blog commenting can help.

Google Love Blogs

The first thing you must remember is that Google love blogs. Maybe it is because they update on a regular basis and robots love new content. This is one of the reasons why link building with blogs has always been very popular.

It Gives Link Juice

Now once you enter a blog, you will be greeted by a blog post with a comment form. This comment form is usually open for everyone and it does not take too much effort to enter a short paragraph on what you can say about the blog post. The great thing about this is it has a URL area where the commenter can put his or her website’s URL. This generates the backlink to his or her blog.

But a blog, by all means, is not a place to spam. The blog owner has the authority to delete unrelated comments so it is better to post relevant comments to keep your link.

It Targets Keywords

Another thing that makes blog commenting special is the name slot where you can choose the anchor text of your link. This gives your site not only simple link juice but target your keywords that the search engines can recognize. Although given this knowledge some people will jump and create comments with their anchor text as their name, a lot of blog owners usually deactivate these comments. It is better to write your name with your desired anchor text like “Mike – SEO expert” for example if you are targeting “SEO”.

You Carry the PR

Another great thing about blog commenting is that you carry the website’s PR. Of course, you cannot choose the PR of the post at the moment you comment. But you carry the PR when the blog post gets it.

It is easy to understand. If you post a comment on blog post A which has no PR today, you can expect it to get PR in the next update. With this, it is also very important to consider that the blog you are commenting on is a dofollow blog. If it is, you will get a free PR backlink in the process.

Blog commenting is not only helpful if you are looking to connect and participate in your niche’s community. It also gives you backlinks as well because you can provide a link every time you comment. This is a nice method which you can employ on a regular basis which can help your website slowly go up the search engines.

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