One of the biggest movers and shakers in the SEO world is Ron Jones who is a resident blogger (perhaps more) on www.searchenginewatch.com. If you know what you’re worth in the world search engine optimization, then you should put a note down in your journal or diary to catch a bit of what’s inside this guru’s mind.
As we’ve mentioned time and time again, tirelessly yet exhausted, that the standard for SEO must be set. There cannot ever be a pluck and stick method of writing because it corrupts of the article writing standards! Nobody ever wants to buy anything because of an article that doesn’t make sense. But as with anything else on the planet, they moment something works, the moment word gets out, everyone tries to fast-track everything and forgets about the quality of things.
It’s almost like when people figure out there are gems in an area, everyone flocks to it, people talk about it, everyone wants a piece of the pie and nobody slows down to see if the rocks are actually gems. Some would even fabricate tales and try to make top-quality gems out of complete rubbish!
That’s what’s happening to article marketing and the SEO marketing world.
Some of the articles that people are writing in the name of ‘traffic’ is completely rubbish! It makes us here, at www.contentmagician.com, ashamed to be associated with the activity that we used to be so proud of, article marketing.
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VALUABLE INSIGHT BY RON JONES from SEARCHENGINEWATCH
In our last two installments, I raised the question whether we should concern ourselves with, focus on, or even want SEO standards. I received many responses in the form of feedback, e-mails and thoughts posted on Sphinn. Here’s what I heard:
The Response
Overall, people were positive about standards. Most people agree that there should be some standards in place for various reasons. One important reason was brought out by Terry Van Horne, founder of SEOPros.org, when he stated, “Standards would be one way to get over the ‘credibility’ hump.”
Another reader echoed similar sentiments, effectively saying that without a standards, without a reference, it’s difficult to sell the service to skeptical people, and it’s nearly impossible to convince them that what they’ve heard from their buddy, who read some article, isn’t necessarily “best practices.”
Note: Although this article rings of MARKETING, MARKETING, MARKETING and ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING, ADVERTISING….seriously, some of the stuff mentioned here are true. So, read it as it is. (-ed)
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In the early days of the Web, businesses and individuals wishing to register a domain had three options: .com, .net, and .org. As the Internet has expanded, many new domain extensions have become available.
You’ve probably seen some of them - .tv, .info, .ws, and .biz are good examples. In addition to these extensions, dozens more have become available. And with the explosive growth of the domain name industry, many useful domains have been registered by resellers who will often demand an unreasonable price.
Domain names are important, especially for a small business trying to create an online identity. Let’s assume that a small business, Rare Antiques, finds that rareantiques.com has already been registered. The business owner has two options - find an alternative .com name such as rareantiquesstore.com, or register an alternate extension such as rareantiques.net, or rareantiques.ws.
The best option depends on your long term goal for the site. If you choose to register the same name in a less popular extension, there are some things you should consider:
I was sitting in Starbucks chatting with a bunch of designers straight out of design school abaout logos last night. Along the way, we discussed the latest Jimmy Choos, the current economy crisis, rising gas prices, etc. But the amazing thing that tickled me pink was the fact that every time we mentioned something new, we would mention something about ‘googling it’. Do know of any Greek gods? Google it. Do you have pasta recipes? Google it. Do you know how to fix a broken toe nail? Google it.
You get the picture.
It nothing new. We’ve all accepted the fact that ‘google’ is now usable as a verb, as with a noun, not yet an adjective.
In the Internet business and online promotion world, businesses won’t survive for very long if they don’t have a widespread marketing campaign. Well, they don’t have to rank very high for keywords that is highly competed for but at the very least, they should make an effort to work Google for important ‘local’ keywords.
For example, if you can’t get to the top of Google with your content marketing campaign for ‘real estate’, try ‘Canada real estate’. If you can’t get to the top for ‘ladies handbag’, try ‘NY ladies handbag’…even then I think you might need to narrow down the NY bit because I think every single moving human being in NY either have their own website or blog or is somewhat in touch with the search engine marketing business. Google-ing is what they do best.
Well, that my bit today for search engine marketing and article writing.
Oh, I have something to say about writing and all of that stuff, nothing jazzy but I couldn’t quite agree with how some people are actually trying to market their stuff online via article marketing. It really miffed me off. But it’s their style, not mine and I will keep my teeth out of their shoulder.
–Marsha–
If you want to succeed in your online business, the first thing you’d need to understand is this….search engines will bring you tons of traffic ONLY IF you know how to work the game. You can be standing at the front doorstep of a local mall handing out brochures or call cards for weeks and you don’t get the same results or success rate as selling yourself or your online business through the search engines.
I’ve dabbled a little in network marketing before and even though it didn’t work out for me (time concerns), I still believe in their principles and the concepts. People selling through people, networking amongst each other, leveraging on each other, you win I win…you know, all those success talks.
Well, with an online business, it’s pretty much the same thing! Getting the word out and getting to as many people as possible is an important part of SEO and it’s an important part of your online business.
How does the law of averages come in? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out so I won’t pretend to be a really good thinker or a genius of any kind. You don’t have to own an online business to know this – in business and in SEO, it’s all about the numbers. In network marketing, they tell you that for every 100 people that you talk to, one would say ‘yes, I would love to explore that idea of yours’. (more…)
“It was just there last week!” screamed my client over the phone as I held the receiver as far away from me as possible. “Why isn’t the listing there anymore? Why isn’t it on the first two pages? Why has it fallen off the face of the earth? I thought I did the right thing already!”
The thing is that I write some stuff for this client, some search engine promotion related stuff and he’s been pumping his blog and website like mad now. Before that, when he first started his website and blog, he had some SEO guys come in and do some SEO work for him. All was fine and dandy; I have to say the SEO guys did a pretty neat job. But this is more than half a year ago we’re talking about – things change, Google change, criteria change and the website and blog needs to change too.
And SEO is a darn stressful industry – quite like the share market, really. This time, we’re not fighting for money, we’re fighting for ranking with the top SEO tactics we know and hiring of some big time guys to come in to sharpen our websites and blogs for us. And we’re watching and watching and watching….and watching, go to sleep, wake up and watching and watching. (more…)
In this article we’ll review two PDF file scenarios and how search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN index them. If you’re reading this, then you’re most likely concerned about SEO and how your site ranks. Before you reach out to a search engine optimization agency read about a few basic SEO tips to help your site rank better.
Scenario 1: PDF Files and Search Engines:
Put yourself in this situation. You’re a professional with a great idea for your company’s website. You want to reach out to your customer base by posting a PDF on your website. You picked a PDF format because you have control over how the document looks and you enjoy the piece of mind knowing the document is difficult to edit. Before you post the PDF, consider these three search engine optimization questions.
1. Can you highlight the text?
For SEO purposes there are two types of PDF files: files that the text can be highlighted and files that the text cannot be highlighted. If you cannot highlight the text on your PDF, you’re abandoning potentially valuable SEO content because search engines see your PDF as an image file and not a searchable document (please see scenario 2). (more…)
by Michael Small
Good SEO copywriters earn as much as $300 an hour. And that can be a bargain! Why? Because of something called the natural text algorithm (NTA). A few years ago Google started using NTAs to spot Web pages that were written more for search engines than real people. Correction, spot and penalize such pages is a more accurate statement.
The NTAs were clunky at first and really not much of a threat. But times have changed! Today’s natural text algorithms can interpret the natural flow of written communication at the same level as a college student. The game has definitely changed. But don’t worry. This is great news for you if you learn five simple steps the pros use to get top ranking and earn the big bucks.
Step 1: List your three top keywords in order of importance and then put the list aside. If you are interested in the technical nuts and bolts, right now we are establishing the topics of content. (more…)
It’s painful… to have a website and be sitting there waiting for people to find you and consider the stuff you have to offer there. The process of waiting can be shortened with extensive search engine optimization done to the website. This process involves working some articles into the website, tweaking the META tags of each and every one of the pages, researching on the keywords related to your industry that you think your potential customers or clients will or might use to find your website, exchanging links with others in the industry and doing some social networking.
SEO is essential to every website on the Internet
Sounds like a lot of work? Well, I won’t kid you. It’s a lot of work and some people give up simply because it takes too long. But this is the way internet marketing works. If you’re expecting a magical climb towards the top, you’re in for a sordid find. SEO is good and it’s essential to every single website; and it’s a constant thing too. You don’t stop when you get to the top. There’s monitoring work to do, researching, and changing the pages and home page time and again to make sure it appears ‘active’. Spiders don’t like ‘dead’ things, you see. (more…)
Article marketing is without a doubt one of the most effective ways to advertise on the Internet. If you don’t know what is article marketing, you really want to get started today because of the numerous advantages of this traffic generation method.
Why is writing articles so critical for your online business? Why is it important that people read your articles even before they see your products?
1. The first concept you are going to discover is that content is king on the Internet. The more articles you can write, the more money you will make. It’s a simple formula. I will go even further and say that you should put an important part of your advertising budget into content instead of simple ads.
Why? Because your content will be “sticky” on the Internet for years to come while your ads are only short lived.
2. Another important aspect of article marketing to consider is that your website will get better search engines. How is this possible? (more…)
If you think it’s easy to get a visitor to search for your website, find it, read it (meticulously) and bookmark it, well - you’re deluded. The majority of web hits these days (they don’t call it visits anymore) occur through search engine crawlers - leaving alone the ones that are referred from somewhere else (usually costs money) or if your friends and family trying their best to promote you through chain mail. The question is - how do you get the attention of the search engines?
Of the several methods purported to work well in garnering web crawler attention, putting up small, snappy articles crafted specifically for the search engines using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques is the most cost-effective and intuitively simple way to do so. Needless to say, your website must convey the impression to the reader that they are actually getting something they need or enjoy out of their time visiting you (an important principle for first dates too)!
SEO “crawlers” can be a website’s best friend, or worst enemy. If your business site contains irrelevant content or hard to digest information, then no matter how well you have optimized your key words for the search engines, your page ranking will drop faster than it rises. After all, its humans who read it, not machines. SEO must go had in hand with good, well-structured content. If you do not write well it is essential that you learn to do so or hire someone to write for you. When the crawler comes across the keywords in the content, and brings up your site, the content on that particular page must be related to the keywords you have filled it with. (more…)