• Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
• Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
• For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
• Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
• Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.
• Build community platforms around real communities of shared interest.
• Help companies participate in existing social networks, and build relationships on their turf.
• Check out Twitter as a way to show a company’s personality. (Don’t fabricate this).
• Couple your email newsletter content with additional website content on a blog for improved commenting.
• Build sentiment measurements, and listen to the larger web for how people are talking about your customer.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
What are meta tags?
The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you're creating your web pages; many pages don't use the tag at all, and I must confess that I've not used it on my home page, although I put it into this page by way of demonstration. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Sometimes.
If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will (eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its description. Consequently, if your site included say, 'Thanks to:....' right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn't give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way; I'd suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers.
However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. (I should however point out that not all search engines will use this tag - Altavista does, but Excite doesn't, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won't miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.
If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will (eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its description. Consequently, if your site included say, 'Thanks to:....' right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn't give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way; I'd suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers.
However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. (I should however point out that not all search engines will use this tag - Altavista does, but Excite doesn't, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won't miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Stop Worrying About Meta Tags And Learn What REALLY Matters
If this meta tag were a child, it would be put into a foster home due to all the abuse it has received over the years! Once upon a time, in the prehistoric days of the Internet (1995?), meta keyword tags were a great little tool for the search engines to use to help them determine how to rank sites in their search results. When the engines' databases were small, this meta tag was a quick, easy method to help decide which keywords might be important on a site.
However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.
Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.
Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?
Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients' Web sites, but don't bother with them on my own sites.
What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?
First let's recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever created):
• Choose your relevant keywords.
• Write the site's content based on these keywords.
• Create a title tag using the same keywords.
• Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.
• Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.
What About Keyword Repetition?
Another common abuse of meta keyword tags was -- and still is -- the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would "think" they were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you're using different variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag, even if you're using different variations of it.
However, as always happens with anything this simple, people began to abuse it. People (spammers) began to put keywords into the meta tag that had nothing to do with the content of their site. Because they knew lots of people were searching with the keyword "sex," for instance, they'd put that word in their meta tags a number of times to bring visitors to their site, even though their site had nothing to do with sex! Personally, I don't quite understand that logic, because it brings in untargeted visitors But apparently the goal was to bring in traffic, period.
Over time, less and less weight was given to poor abused meta tags, and more and more weight was given to the actual content of the pages. Today the meta keyword tag is quietly living in its foster home and is fairly irrelevant to getting a page ranked high. If you were pressed for time and had to give up one meta tag, this would be the one to give up. To be sure, some engines still do index the words within these meta tags, but it appears that they use them as a minor supplement to the text in the body copy and title tags of your Web pages.
Should I Bother With Meta Keyword Tags?
Since the search engines use a wide variety of factors to determine site rankings, optimizing a page to rank high is a cumulative effort. You should use everything available to you that the engines might give some weight, and therefore you should certainly use meta tags (including the meta keyword tag), along with every other legitimate, acceptable technique available. At best, it may help boost your site a bit in those engines that still read them. At worst, it won't hurt your rankings (unless you brazenly keyword stuff them). I still use these meta tags on clients' Web sites, but don't bother with them on my own sites.
What Should I Put in these Meta Tags?
First let's recap what needs to be done before you attempt to create meta keyword tags (ideally these things should be done before the Web site is ever created):
• Choose your relevant keywords.
• Write the site's content based on these keywords.
• Create a title tag using the same keywords.
• Create a meta description tag as a marketing sentence, also based on these keywords.
• Once you do the above things properly, putting together your meta keyword tag is a very simple procedure.
What About Keyword Repetition?
Another common abuse of meta keyword tags was -- and still is -- the repetition of words. Spammers found that if they repeated keywords enough times in this meta tag, the search engines would "think" they were relevant to the page and perhaps give it a high ranking for those keywords. Because of this abuse, too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. Never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you're using different variations. (Plurals, ALL CAPS, different tenses, etc.) You can use the same word in different phrases, but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag, even if you're using different variations of it.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
pay per click in internet marketing
Pay per click:
Pay per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Cost per click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.
Determining cost per click
There are two primary models for determining cost per click: flat-rate and bid-based. In both cases the advertiser must consider the potential value of a click from a given source. This value is based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, and what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. As with other forms of advertising targeting is key, and factors that often play into PPC campaigns include the target's interest (often defined by a search term they have entered into a search engine, or the content of a page that they are browsing), intent (e.g. to purchase or not), location (for geo targeting), and the day and time that they are browsing.
Flat-rate PPC
In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In many cases the publisher has a rate card that lists the CPC within different areas of their website or network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more valuable visitors having a higher CPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors. However, in many cases advertisers can negotiate lower rates, especially when committing to a long-term or high-value contract.
Bid-based PPC
In the bid-based model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. All bids for the keyword that target the searcher's geo-location, the day and time of the search, etc. are then compared and the winner determined. In situations where there are multiple ad spots, a common occurrence on SERPs, there can be multiple winners whose positions on the page are influenced by the amount each has bid. The ad with the highest bid generally shows up first, though additional factors such as ad quality and relevance can sometimes come into play.
Pay per Click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Cost per click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.
Determining cost per click
There are two primary models for determining cost per click: flat-rate and bid-based. In both cases the advertiser must consider the potential value of a click from a given source. This value is based on the type of individual the advertiser is expecting to receive as a visitor to his or her website, and what the advertiser can gain from that visit, usually revenue, both in the short term as well as in the long term. As with other forms of advertising targeting is key, and factors that often play into PPC campaigns include the target's interest (often defined by a search term they have entered into a search engine, or the content of a page that they are browsing), intent (e.g. to purchase or not), location (for geo targeting), and the day and time that they are browsing.
Flat-rate PPC
In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In many cases the publisher has a rate card that lists the CPC within different areas of their website or network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more valuable visitors having a higher CPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors. However, in many cases advertisers can negotiate lower rates, especially when committing to a long-term or high-value contract.
Bid-based PPC
In the bid-based model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
When the ad spot is part of a search engine results page (SERP), the automated auction takes place whenever a search for the keyword that is being bid upon occurs. All bids for the keyword that target the searcher's geo-location, the day and time of the search, etc. are then compared and the winner determined. In situations where there are multiple ad spots, a common occurrence on SERPs, there can be multiple winners whose positions on the page are influenced by the amount each has bid. The ad with the highest bid generally shows up first, though additional factors such as ad quality and relevance can sometimes come into play.
Monday, May 3, 2010
10 Linking strategies in SEO
Two of the three biggest search engines (Google and Yahoo) place great importance on internet more than ever, if you want to own a successful business needs a successful website you should know what it means to be friendly to search engines. And one of the main rules for optimizing your website for search engines is to create inbound links - links (links) from other sites pointing to your site. 10 years ago, when Google started changing the code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining the "relevance" of a website, the world changed. Webmasters immediately began trying to capture every link they could get. But this no longer works well although the inbound links are still important. In many ways are more vital than before. How then, got to get those precious links with text link? We are those 10 strategies:
1. Comments on Blogs Change the way you read blogs of other people. It was always said that reading is good. But it's better if it interacts with bloggers. This makes them feel good. Validates what they are writing. Start a relationship between the two. And, here's the best part, gives an inbound link to your site.
2. Blog Trackbacks Start a blog and relate to all those blogs you're reading in the form of a "trackback" in their post. Do not know what that means? Search for "trackback" on Wikipedia, or go deeper with a Wordpress.org tutorial. Implement this strategy, is an elegant way, easy and effective way of getting inbound links.
3. Pay Per Click Ads PPC advertising is in fact an aggregate cost of marketing. However, it is a controlled environment for building reliable ROI, and a great way to build inbound links where you have control over the text used in the link text.
4. Forum comments: Similar to participate in forums comments and trackbacks to blogs, participating in forums in your industry will enable relacionarce with other professionals, we keep abreast of current trends, and allow you to build inbound links in line with the signing of their posts.
5. Build Other Pages some social sites allow you to create content and post it on their domain as new pages. A great example of this is Seth Godin's Squidoo.com. Creating content that focuses on a particular subject will engage readers and create more inbound links to your main site.
6. Wikis The concept of a wiki (like wikipedia.org) is that readers are also contributors of content. Anyone who is logged can log in and change content. Understand that other readers of this content have zero tolerance for advertising and sales tactics, be careful with this. Be purely informative and helpful to its content. If the content passes the screening, you will have a small link at the outset that potentially will be seen by millions.
7. Social networks MySpace and FaceBook in fact, but there is an explosion of social sites on the web. Come in and participate. Doing this allows you to interact and interact with other professionals, build inbound links.
8. Social Bookmarking Different than social networking, social bookmarking is similar to how you add sites to your browser bookmarks with the difference that you add your favorite sites in one place, at sites like de.licio.us, ma.gnolia. com, spurl.com, rojo.com, Google bookmarks ... The goal is to help people discover these bookmarks, and find your site. An additional advantage of social bookmarking (and blog posts) is that you get "tag" their content with label words and phrases that are relevant to the content. These tags are used to identify the content in the search process.
9. Sites organized navigation This is a variation of social bookmarking. There are sites that organize how people surf the web in an effort to make the process of finding content quickly and focused. StumbleUpon.com (available as Firefox plugin) is one of my favorites but others like Technorati (blog content), Digg (blogs, articles and news stories) and newcomer Trailfire (another Firefox plugin) allow a power surfing users, finding your site via inbound links.
10. Request a link will not discard it yet. Asking another webmaster a link still works. (Always good to have a link page) However, with all the other options listed above, you quickly learn that this tactic is largely a waste of time and unproductive. There is a saying that goes: "Plan your work and work your plan" and this applies in the creation of links. The success of your website - and ultimately your business - depends on it! INKS-way to determine your ranking. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher ranked. In this article I will share important information and strategies to help you in the art of creating inbound links.
1. Comments on Blogs Change the way you read blogs of other people. It was always said that reading is good. But it's better if it interacts with bloggers. This makes them feel good. Validates what they are writing. Start a relationship between the two. And, here's the best part, gives an inbound link to your site.
2. Blog Trackbacks Start a blog and relate to all those blogs you're reading in the form of a "trackback" in their post. Do not know what that means? Search for "trackback" on Wikipedia, or go deeper with a Wordpress.org tutorial. Implement this strategy, is an elegant way, easy and effective way of getting inbound links.
3. Pay Per Click Ads PPC advertising is in fact an aggregate cost of marketing. However, it is a controlled environment for building reliable ROI, and a great way to build inbound links where you have control over the text used in the link text.
4. Forum comments: Similar to participate in forums comments and trackbacks to blogs, participating in forums in your industry will enable relacionarce with other professionals, we keep abreast of current trends, and allow you to build inbound links in line with the signing of their posts.
5. Build Other Pages some social sites allow you to create content and post it on their domain as new pages. A great example of this is Seth Godin's Squidoo.com. Creating content that focuses on a particular subject will engage readers and create more inbound links to your main site.
6. Wikis The concept of a wiki (like wikipedia.org) is that readers are also contributors of content. Anyone who is logged can log in and change content. Understand that other readers of this content have zero tolerance for advertising and sales tactics, be careful with this. Be purely informative and helpful to its content. If the content passes the screening, you will have a small link at the outset that potentially will be seen by millions.
7. Social networks MySpace and FaceBook in fact, but there is an explosion of social sites on the web. Come in and participate. Doing this allows you to interact and interact with other professionals, build inbound links.
8. Social Bookmarking Different than social networking, social bookmarking is similar to how you add sites to your browser bookmarks with the difference that you add your favorite sites in one place, at sites like de.licio.us, ma.gnolia. com, spurl.com, rojo.com, Google bookmarks ... The goal is to help people discover these bookmarks, and find your site. An additional advantage of social bookmarking (and blog posts) is that you get "tag" their content with label words and phrases that are relevant to the content. These tags are used to identify the content in the search process.
9. Sites organized navigation This is a variation of social bookmarking. There are sites that organize how people surf the web in an effort to make the process of finding content quickly and focused. StumbleUpon.com (available as Firefox plugin) is one of my favorites but others like Technorati (blog content), Digg (blogs, articles and news stories) and newcomer Trailfire (another Firefox plugin) allow a power surfing users, finding your site via inbound links.
10. Request a link will not discard it yet. Asking another webmaster a link still works. (Always good to have a link page) However, with all the other options listed above, you quickly learn that this tactic is largely a waste of time and unproductive. There is a saying that goes: "Plan your work and work your plan" and this applies in the creation of links. The success of your website - and ultimately your business - depends on it! INKS-way to determine your ranking. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher ranked. In this article I will share important information and strategies to help you in the art of creating inbound links.
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