Common Mistakes People Make With Internet Marketing
November 2nd, 2009
Getting success on the internet isn’t just about keeping learning how to earn money online so that you know the best strategies. You must also avoid doing the costly Internet marketing mistakes.
The biggest mistakes most internet businesses make are using free websites. Free websites have banners and ads on each site, which is exactly why the site is free to the consumer. The banners and ads are to attract the attention of the website visitor to those services. This is distracting since it takes the user off the original website and they lose focus.
With the banners and ads all over the free website, it looks unprofessional which defeats the purpose of having a website completely. Web sites should always look professional. They need to be easy for the site user to navigate. The banners and ads complicate the navigation of the sites. Remember to always think about the site user, keep the website user friendly.
The domain name for the free website is too long and cumbersome for people wanting to locate the site. An example of such a domain name is: www.hello.com/usernameofsite/blahblah/index.html.
Now that is confusing to have to type into the window directory for a website. To the everyday internet user a domain name as the example signifies an unprofessional site and is usually avoided completely. A domain name such as www.mytown.com is far better and presents a professional site.
Free websites have limited storage space as well as limited options including email addresses for the site owner. This limited storage space means no room for growth of the business in the future. Why build a website when in the future you will have to change to a better web host that has more of the options you need including more storage space and email addresses?
Another problem with free websites is the reliability of their hosting server. Since the sites are free, it is known the server has to be a low quality server and will have issues providing continuous uninterrupted service to the websites. Also, why even bother to fix the server when it is down when there is most likely limited funds to run the hosting service?
Yes, there are many reasons not to use free websites but the most important ones have been discussed. To use a free website for a true professional business is not the answer to saving money. In the end after all of the headaches of the server going down or offline, losing business due to poor service of the server host, and the banners redirecting the site visitor; it is far better to pay the money for a site to be hosted with better guarantees and performance.
For a small fee, as little as $10 a month, a professional websites are available. The minor expense far outweighs the negative options of the free site. Any business wanting to have a professional site needs to invest in a professional web hosting service. Do not lose customers, money, or precious time for the business.
The Absolute Basics of SEO
October 9th, 2008
Search engine optimization is the process of maximizing the ranking of you site in search engine listings. The most important factors to consider to achieve a high ranking are: the keywords you use, your title, your description, the text of your site, and the links others provide to your site.
To begin selecting keywords, consider what words and phrases the people you are trying to reach will be searching on. When placing keywords in your keyword tag, it is best to use phases rather than single words. Almost all single words are in very widespread use, thus will not tend to produce high rankings. Keyword phrases can be better tailored to your business. Also, since phrase searches produce fewer results, people are more likely to search on them. It is also a good idea to produce a list of keyword phrases for every page of your site. If you must include difficult to spell words, it is a good idea to include some common misspellings of these words as well.
The title is just as important, if not more important, than your keywords. Most search engines place the highest level of importance on the words found in the title when calculating the ranking. You should place your most important keyword phrases first in your title, as some search engines limit the number of characters you can use. Make your title a readable sentence, as this is the first text that will appear for your listing on the results page. One thing you should avoid doing is simply listing keywords. This could be regarded by the search engine as keyword spamming, and may lower your search ranking, or even get your listing removed from the site. As with keywords, it is a good idea to give each page a unique title.
In your description you should once again make use of your best keyword phrases. In this case, you can use more of them, since search engines will give you typically around 1024 characters for the description, while they will give you only around 50 to 80 for the title. Again, place your keywords as close to the beginning of your description as makes sense.
In the text of your site you should make use of, yes, you’ve guessed it, your keyword phrases. Also include any text you have used in other tags, such as meta tags, alt tags, and headings. Having a lot of content helps as well. A minimum of 200 words per page is recommended. Having many pages of content also increases your rankings.
Having many other sites link to you is another good way to increase your search rankings. Both the links themselves and the increase traffic which results will help. Also, having bloggers link to your site is a good idea.
Although these practices will boost your rankings, there are certain design elements that can interfere with your search rankings. These include frames, dynamic URLs, Flash, using image maps for navigation, and using javascripts for navigation. Also, there are certain practices that search engines regard as spamming, and these practices will get you permanently removed from the site. These include using keywords in your meta tags that do not relate to the content of your page, using multiple instances of the same tag, and listing keywords in the text of your site.
This is just the briefest introduction to search engine optimization. One book available on this topic is Search Engine Visibility, by Shari Thurow. Software packages that can assist you with SEO tasks include Bruce Clay’s SEOToolSET and Web CEO’s Web CEO. If you prefer to have someone else do your SEO for you, Marinerblue is ready to help you for free with your .ws domain.
Author : Matt Canham
Achieve & Higher Search Engine Ranking
August 15th, 2008
There are many ways in which you can improve your Google listing, and some work better than others depending on the type of website you have or on your niche. Here are ways in which you can get a higher Google ranking, or even a better search engine ranking in general.
We shall forget about onpage SEO such as use of meta tags and use of keywords since that has been done to death by now. There are other things that you can do to improve your search engine ranking, and among them are:
1. Put a site map on your website. You can generate an XML site map using any of several tools listed on Google, and a simple, search should enable you to find one. Once you have followed the instructions, you should submit the site map to Google and to Yahoo, and each will then be able to crawl your website without hindrance. It will also be updated each time the search engines crawl your site because XML sitemaps update as you add new pages to your site. Your site map should uploaded to the root directory of your website.
2. Start up a blog using one of the two main free blogging hosts, Blogger or WordPress. In fact, why not use both and get the benefit of each? Blogger is owned by Google, so a Blogger blog is of particular benefit for Google listings. Put the URL of the pages of your website that you want promote on your blog, and these pages will be visited next time your blog is crawled.
3. Open an account with Technorati, and some of the other social bookmarking sites, and submit your blog to them. Ping them each time you make a new posting, and you will get good exposure to search engines whenever they visit these sites (which is very often).
4. Use social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to advertise your blog, or even your website. In fact put both your blog and your website on these sites, and you will get one-way back-links to your site, thus improving your Google PageRank and search engine results positions.
5. Make sure that all of your links are open. Nothing ruins your Google listing than broken links, and you must test all of your links to make sure that they are all working. You aren’t expected to do that manually, and there is software available online to test your links for you.
6. Avoid reciprocal links like the plague, unless you have arranged them privately and both of you are happy with their positioning. Links farms, and large list pages on which you are at #259 on the SEO page, are not only useless with respect to any PageRank votes, but can actually do you harm. So steer clear of them. There are enough ways of securing one-way links without having to negotiate reciprocal links. These days are long gone.
7. Register with Google Webmaster Tools, and check out their analysis of your website. The software can detect broken links, but more importantly, can carry out other tasks such as making sure that only one form of your URL is recognized, and checking out your Meta tags. Although these are not used as much as previously, they are used or Google wouldn’t be checking them for you!
8. Register for a free Squidoo lens, and use your URL on that. Not simply just as a URL, but as a means of solving a problem. A Squidoo lens is like a mini-website, and you can use it to present a problem, and then your website as a solution. Not only does that get you one-way back-links to your choice of website page, but also the potential of loads of traffic: people that want their problem solved.
So there are eight methods of promoting your website and improving your search engine ranking. There e other ways to improve your Google listing, but these are very effective off site methods of doing so, other than 1 and 5 that are essential on-site techniques – even more important than meta tags and the correct html tags.
Apply each one of these and you should be rewarded with an improved Google listing, and your search engine ranking in general should be enhanced.
Author : Peter Nisbet
Books & Guides
August 2nd, 2008
Search Engine Visibility Book Review
- Author: Shari Thurow
- My rating: 3/5
- Brief Review: A good introduction to SEO. It covers the basics well.
- Read Reviews of Search Engine Visibility book on Amazon UK.
- Read reviews of Search Engine Visibility book from Amazon.com for US and international readers.
Marketing Through Search Optimization
How to Be Found on the Web
- Author: Alex Michael
- My rating: 2/5
- Brief Review: I cannot recommend this book apart for a introduction to SEO. It doesn’t give sufficient best practice on SEO.
- Read Reviews of Marketing Through Search Optimization book on Amazon UK.
- Read reviews of Marketing Through Search Optimization book from Amazon.com for US and international readers.
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