Google has begun the rollout of its Social Search product, a way of seeing customized search results based upon the people in your social network. Social Search has been an opt-in Google Labs experiment since its debut in October, but will be available as a beta product in the “next few days” to all users on Google.com.

Our article on the initial debut, Google Social Search Launches, Gives Results From Your Trusted “Social Circle,” provides an in-depth guide to how Google Social Search, including:

• how to access Social Search (reminder: it’s under the “Show Options” link on the search results page)
• how it determines your social circle
• how it finds and presents content created by people in your social circle
• how it ranks the content it shows
• and more

With today’s rollout to Google.com, there are a couple interesting additions to Social Search since our previous coverage that deserve mention.

What’s New with Google Social Search

First, a Social Search “dashboard” — Danny suggested this in his October article. The dashboard shows two elements of what’s happening behind the scenes:

1. a list of everyone in your social circle and how you’re connected to them
2. a list of all of your own content that might appear in other users’ social search results

Google provided this screenshot of this dashboard:

This is a great addition to Social Search, but it’s still missing a way to remove people from your circle or cleanup the list in any way. In my circle, for example, I’m connected to both “Jeffrey Quipp” and “Jeff Quipp.” It’d be nice to be able to combine those into just one Jeff.

When using Social Search, you’ll be able to access this dashboard by clicking either of the “My social circle” or “My social content” links that appear next to the heading that tells you that you’re seeing Social Search results, like this:

And that’s the second addition Google has made to Social Search: It now includes image search as well as regular web search. Google says you’ll be able to see images that your social circle has shared on sites like Flickr and Picasa.

Social Search Optimization?

While playing around with Social Search for a couple hours last night, the marketer in me came to the conclusion that I need to optimize for Social Search. Off the top of my head, here are two quick ideas:

• Build out my Google Profile with additional information about the other social networking sites I use.
• Make connections with more friends via Gmail and Google Chat (which gets top-billing on the dashboard’s list of contacts in your circle).

If I’m hoping my content shows up more often when others use social search, these things seem pretty obvious. Theoretically, they should improve the content I see when using Social Search, too.

Read more…

If you’ve ever thought about freelancing part-time but never done it, this post may help you. Most people never follow through on those thoughts because they are overwhelmed and confused by the process of starting a freelance business. The aim of this post is to provide a step-by-step guide to launching a part-time freelance business in 30 days, going from zero to taking on your first client.

The format for this challenge was inspired by the excellent 31 Days to Build a Better Blog program, which concluded recently. I really like this approach because it offers concrete, practical steps with a measurable result. Sometimes ‘do this, do that’ advice is more useful than theory. My hope is that you can follow the steps here, putting one foot ahead of the other, and find yourself with a little freelance business at the end of the process!

The program is designed to be completed while you are working full-time, either by dedicating a couple of hours in the evening or mornings, or working on the program over the weekend. It should be combined with daily hands-on practice in the skill you want to freelance in, particularly if you are a novice in that skill. If you are a novice, don’t delay the program until you feel you are ‘good’ enough. The emphasis is on selling a very specific skill that you can become good at in a short period of time. 30 days practicing one hour a day is more than enough time to develop a specific service that you are good enough at to sell.

The main aim of this program is to help you learn how to monetize a skill that puts you into flow. This will make you a happier and wealthier person!

If you’re going to create your freelance business in 30 days, you can’t afford to waste any time - so let’s get started.

Day 1

Decide on the one service you will offer. I emphasize picking only one specific service because without freelance experience, you are probably not already highly skilled in the area you want to freelance in. Even if you have been practicing it as a hobby for a long time, providing that skill as a service is a different challenge.

If you are wanting to freelance in web design, don’t offer everything and the kitchen sink to begin with (complete design + front-end code). Provide PSD mockups only. If you’re more on the dev side of things, start with some code slicing jobs. If you want to write, start with one specific kind of writing.

This approach will help you become skilled in the service you provide very quickly. Since you want to be taking on your first client in 30 days, it’s crucial that you develop your skills to an adequate level. Once you become comfortable with providing that one service, you will naturally expand what you offer.

Day 2

Gather learning materials to help you practice your service before taking on a client. As I mentioned in the introduction to this list, you should spend at least 1 hour per day just developing your skill. While this should be mainly direct practice (doing rather than reading about), you will need to gather materials to guide you here. This includes articles, interviews and tutorials. Focus mainly on developing techniques you could actually see yourself using in client work.

Day 3

Decide on a business name - are you a studio or individual? Then, buy the domain name and hosting. You can freelance under your real name, a pseudonym, or a business name. Here are some example business names I generated with this cool little thing:

• Flying Dog Design
• Green Ant Productions
• Scarlet Zebra Interactive
• Blue Cat Labs
• Chestnut Rabbit Solutions
• Golden Lemur Studios
• Friendly Kangaroo Ltd
• Evil Pencil Media

Of course, some of these are really absurd, but they do give you an idea of some common naming conventions.

Once you’ve picked a name, it’s time to buy the domain for that name. If there’s no domain available for that name, pick another one. Your domain branding is really important.

Buy a domain name that comes with web hosting, as the next branding step is to create your portfolio.

Further reading: Naming Your Freelance Business - To Personalize or Not (With a Poll!)

Day 4

Design your products. This is different from the service you are going to offer - here you decide how it is going to be packaged. Are you going to sell blocks of time? Completed projects? What will your rates be?

Your goals should be modest as you are only starting out, both in terms of how much you will work and how much you will charge. For your first job, I would suggest an hourly rate between $20 - $30. Keep in mind that you don’t publish these rates online and can therefore change them from client to client. Just because you do one job at $20 an hour as you’re starting out doesn’t mean you can’t be charging $50 an hour a few months later.

Per-project rates are a great option down the track as they decouple the direct exchange of time for money. I don’t recommend them to a beginning freelancer, though. It will be extremely difficult to come up with an accurate price estimate before you have the experience you’d need to look at a project and quickly have a reasonable idea of how long it is going to take. That’s something that will only come with time and experience. (Note that this advice doesn’t necessarily apply to smaller jobs like article writing.)

Day 5

Set up a business email address and PayPal account. While your friends and family might not mind receiving email from ronny69@hotmail.com, prospective clients might! Create an email address linked to your new domain name. Forward it to a free Gmail account, then under your Gmail settings, put your domain email address as your default ‘Send Email As’ address. This will allow you to manage your domain email through Gmail, rather than the dubious email UIs provided by most webhosts.

A good format is @yourdomain.com. This will make it easy to give new people email addresses at your domain if your freelance business expands in the future.

Next up you should create a PayPal account if PayPal is available in your country. If not, try Moneybookers. Most online freelancing is paid via PayPal and I consider it a must-have. If you dislike the fees, you can build them into your rates.

If you already have a PayPal account, it might be a good idea to think about changing your address to something linked to your business, i.e. ‘accounts@yourdomain.com’ or ‘paypal@yourdomain.com’.

Day 6

Set up Wordpress under your freelance business domain. Every freelancer should have an online portfolio, even if it’s very simple. If you’re a designer with time to spare you can probably take control of this step. If you want a quick solution that is quite effective, download Wordpress and install it under your domain name.

Day 7

Select and install a portfolio Wordpress theme. This platform will give prospective clients the means to learn more about you and your services, view your work, and contact you. You can browse some great Premium options under $30 at ThemeForest.

Day 8

Write your portfolio ‘About’ page. Include your current location, any relevant qualifications you have, previous work you have done in the industry and previous clients you have worked for (don’t worry if there are none). This is particularly relevant if you’ve been working in your field before going freelance. Keep in mind that this should be mainly professional rather than personal, but you can include some personal info at the end if you want. If you’d like to include a picture, a specially taken portrait is a good option.

Day 9

Sign up at Formspring and create your ‘Contact’ form. I use Formspring often in my job and I think it’s an excellent way to create intelligent contact forms. You can use this form to find out what kind of work the client is looking for and even what their budget is. All this information will help you when it comes time to write your response and close the sale.

Day 10

Design your invoice template. If you fancy yourself a designer, create an attractive template for your invoices. As someone who spends time receiving and paying invoices, they do affect my perception of how professional the freelancer is. If you aren’t confident in your design skills then I would create an account at Freshbooks. They’re my favorite free invoice management service and I’ve used them often.

Day 11

Set up your home office space. You’re a freelancer now, so you need space to work. A room dedicated just to your work is ideal, but if you don’t have that luxury (I know I don’t!) set up a desk or table in one of the quieter rooms in your house. A bedroom is a good option, but keep in mind that you probably won’t be able to get away with late nights - or possibly early mornings - if sharing with someone else!

In my experience, the cornerstones of an effective home office are a computer that works quickly, a good chair and a large monitor, or multiple monitors, for better productivity.

Day 12

Create a logo OR commission a logo OR work more on your skills. While not every freelancer has their own logo, it’s a fantastic addition to your branding. You can use it in emails, watermarks, business cards, invoices, your portfolio and when presenting work to your clients. If you don’t want a logo or don’t have the budget yet, work more on your skills today.

Day 13

Start work on a portfolio item - you will have 5 days to complete this. More important than having items in your portfolio is the practice you will gain from completing this exercise. By the end of the 30 day challenge you will have three items in your portfolio, and this is the first. These items should involve the exact skills you will be selling to clients.

Here are some ideas for portfolio items in various industries:

• Copywriting - write an original sales page for an existing product or service.
• PSD to code slicing - purchase a cheap PSD template and convert it into a functioning demo site.
• Writing - write an article suited to appear in the kind of publication you want to work for.
• Web design - create a one-page design.

Day 14

Add a page to your portfolio describing your one service. You should call this page ‘ Services’ - for example, ‘SEO Services’. On this page you will describe the service you provide to the client. Make sure to focus on benefits, not just features. For example, your SEO services “will funnel highly targeted traffic primed and ready to buy”.

Day 15

Read Freelance Switch’s guide to Getting Started as a Freelancer. There are some great articles here that cover all aspects of getting started with freelancing in more detail. If you have questions, you’ll find answers here.

Day 16

Familiarize yourself with tax laws for freelancers in your country. In my job I often receive invoices from Australian freelancers without an Australian Business Number listed. Unknown to them, it is actually illegal for me to pay them without that 11 digit number. Luckily it only takes a few minutes for them to apply for and receive their ABN once notified about this, but your country may have stumbling blocks of its own - and they might be a bit trickier to deal with!

Make sure you’re aware of the tax and government requirements freelancers must comply with in your country. A good place to start is the website of your national or state tax office.

Day 17

Announce that you are going to be taking on freelance work soon. If you already have an audience online, whether it be blog readers, your social media network or forum buddies, let them know that you’ll be available for freelancing soon. This will build a little bit of buzz and anticipation. If you’re really lucky, you might even be able to line up your first client before you’ve officially opened for business!

Day 18

Start work on portfolio item #2, add item #1 to your portfolio. Now that contains some work, you have a genuine portfolio. Now we’re going to work on beefing it up by adding a couple more items. Item #2 should again illustrate your one service, though approached from a different angle. If your first sales letter was for skin cream, the second might be for a membership site, and demonstrate a different selling style. If your first PSD to code conversion was for a Wordpress blog, the next one might be for a business site.

Day 19

Perform some simple SEO on your portfolio. Sprinkling a little SEO-dust on your portfolio can eventually help to bring a trickle of prospects to your portfolio on autopilot. To begin with, use likely keywords in your portfolio title (i.e. ‘Jane Smith: Flash game designer - Melbourne, Australia’). Try to work keyword phrases into your copy and page titles if they seem natural. Install a Wordpress SEO plug-in like the All-in-One SEO Pack. If you want to learn more, read SEOmoz’s Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization.

Day 20

Make your portfolio public (link it up everywhere). It’s time to debut yourself to the world (very quietly). Google can’t know about your portfolio if it can’t find it, so you need to leave a trail. You give Google that trail by linking to your portfolio wherever you can. Start by linking to it on every online property you have ownership over - blogs, Facebook pages, forum signatures, email signatures, Twitter profiles, Flickr profiles, etc.

Day 21

Create free portfolios and profiles wherever you can. Yes, you already have a portfolio, but you want to get your work out to as many people as possible. Some prospective clients may never know the right keywords to find your site, but they might browse Carbonmade or LinkedIn instead.

Day 22

Sign up to job boards relevant to your industry and subscribe to their RSS feeds. The Monster List of Freelancing Job Sites is your roadmap here. You don’t need to apply for any jobs today - your only task is to gather a ‘watch list’ of job boards and sites. Browse through some of the jobs available to get an idea of what’s out there, but don’t apply for anything yet.

Day 23

Start working on portfolio item #3, add item #2 to your portfolio. Another portfolio item done and dusted - well done! It’s now time to move on to item #3, your final item in the 30 day challenge. Once again, show your ‘one service’ in a different shade. This time, create the item as if you were working for the type of client you most want to work for. If you’d love to write sales pages for high-end internet marketing products, make that item #3. If you’d love to get work as a live show photographer, go out and photograph a gig in your area. The type of items in your portfolio will affect the kind of work you get. I think this quote from freelance designer Barton Damer illustrates this well:

“A couple years ago, I began only posting projects I love. I pulled down logos, brochures, etc. off my portfolio and only posted digital art. The result, people started contacting me for digital art!” (Source)

Day 24

Announce that you are now available for freelance work. Most people prefer to hire someone they know. They could spend 30 minutes searching online and probably find somebody more talented than you are (there’s always someone more talented!), but people place a lot of value in feeling they can trust the person they’re working with. That’s why your existing network and audience is an excellent place to find work. Post about it on your blog, tweet about it, update your Facebook status. Let the world know that you’re ready to work!

Day 25

Apply to 10 jobs on various job boards. Over the last few days you’ve hopefully been keeping tabs on your jobs ‘watch list’. You may have earmarked a few jobs that looked good to you. Now is the time to really take the plunge and start applying for work.

I have advertised for freelancers before and I speak from experience when I say that by following the instructions in the job ad very carefully you will launch yourself into the top 5% of applicants. Seriously!

A friend of mine recently applied for (and won) a job in web development. The instructions in the job ad stated that the subject line of the application email had to contain the word ‘Elephants’. Though a little confused by this request, he complied. Later on after winning the job he learned that although the company had received close to 100 applications, only 7 of them contained the word ‘Elephants’ in the subject line. The company did not even open the other 93 emails. For them, the ‘Elephant’ instruction was a way to test the applicant’s attention to detail.

As a final note, make sure to only apply to jobs that match your ‘one service’. If you can’t find 10, don’t broaden your scope just to make up the number. If you end up applying for and winning a job that requires skills you don’t have, you may also end up delivering a sub-standard end product to the client. Remember: you want this job to be something you can add to your portfolio!

Day 26

Email 10 prospective clients. Erm… didn’t you just do that? Yes, but this kind of emailing is different. Here you are offering your services to people who don’t know they need them yet. If you’re a PSD to code slicer, look for the portfolio of a web developer who states that they are not taking on new work at the moment. This means they’re really busy. Send them an email presenting yourself as someone trustworthy to outsource to and help them get through more clients. (Note: this works in just about any industry, not just design.)

Next, look for people who might need your skills for other reasons. If you’re a freelancer blogger and you know a good blog that pays for content, email the owner and offer your services. If you’re a copywriter and find a lackluster sales page, offer to create something better. If you find a website that’s poorly coded, offer to shore it up with impeccably valid and clever code.

Keep in mind, though, that when presenting your services as a ‘better’ option you are often talking to creator of the original. If something looks DIY, it probably is. Rather than criticizing the original, point out the virtues of a professional service.

Day 27

Exchange your skills for promotion. Money is not the only currency a freelancer earns. They also earn promotion, referrals and reputation. Today your goal is to trade your skill for promotion and exposure. Pitch a guest-post to one of your favorite blogs. Offer to create a logo for a popular website that doesn’t have one yet. If there are errors in their web design, offer to fix them.

The key here is not to do something for free and hope that you get something in return. Negotiate this exchange like you would if you were being paid in cash. Outline specifically what you want in return. Do you want to be mentioned in a site update? Do you want a testimonial? Do you want a post written about you? Do you want a banner on the site for a set period of time?

You’re providing the client with something of value, so you should expect to receive something of equal value in return. It’s essential that this arrangement is made before you do any work at all. This guarantees you won’t waste your time and that you won’t spring any surprises on a client who thought they were getting free work without any strings attached!

Day 28

Create a Twitter account for your business. If you already have a Twitter account, consider whether it is consistent with your business branding. If not, you might want to consider creating a separate business Twitter account. The point of this is to get your clients to follow you. This is, in my opinion, the best possible way to stay in the minds of previous clients and encourage repeat work. Some freelancers are so good at generating repeat work that they don’t even need to look for new clients! If you begin working towards this goal from the beginning you will give yourself a useful head-start.

If you create a Twitter account for your freelance business, make sure the visual branding is consistent with your portfolio. You need consistency to create a ’sticky’ brand that clients remember.

Here is a quick introduction to Twitter for freelancers.

Day 29

Ask 5 people for a testimonial. Testimonials are solid gold to a freelancer, yet most of us don’t know it. Consider that more than talent, more than cheap rates, more than a slick portfolio design, prospects are looking for someone they can trust. Your portfolio items help them trust that you do good work. Your client list helps them trust that you are professional. Your testimonials help them trust that you are good to work with and deliver what you’re paid for.

Even though you don’t have clients yet, you can still have testimonials. A testimonial is, at heart, a statement vouching for you. Clients are not the only people who can provide these. If you’re a designer, get a testimonial from someone who thinks your work is great. If you’re a blogger, get a testimonial from a reader who thinks you’re talented. And finally, something anyone should be able to do: get a testimonial from a friend who thinks you’re a good, kind, trustworthy person.

If you feel uneasy asking for a testimonial, look through comments, tweets and emails about you. When people say nice things, that’s an instant testimonial you can use.

Day 30

Add portfolio item #3 to your portfolio, then buy yourself a home office gift for completing 30 days to become a freelancer! Your portfolio now contains 3 items - not bad at all! You’ve been working hard these last 30 days. Whether you have found a client yet or not, you’ve set up your own freelance business, and that’s an achievement. To celebrate, buy yourself an upgrade to your home office - something you will use to improve your business. Whether it’s a 30″ screen or a nice packet of ballpoint pens will depend on your budget, of course…

If you haven’t won a job yet, don’t worry. Your first job is always the hardest to land, and the process will get easier over time. Keep applying to any job that looks good, building your skills and your portfolio. Eventually your tenacity will be rewarded.

From Moonlighting to Daylighting

While you’ll begin doing 5 - 10 hours of freelance work a week, plugging away at it on evenings and weekends, you may eventually decide that you’d like to make freelancing your primary source of income. While much has been said on transitioning from part-time to full-time work, I can’t stress enough the importance of a financial safety net. Ideally you should use the extra income gained from part-time freelancing to build the cushion you’ll need when you go 100% solo. Having said that, most freelancers won’t make the jump until they are consistently turning down good quality job offers that they don’t have the time to complete while moonlighting. Chances are you won’t need to rely on your safety net, but it’s still an essential.

Taking it to the Next Level

What I’ve outlined here is really the most basic kind of freelance business. It’s effective and can be very lucrative, but there is still more you can do. I’ve not had the space to touch on more advanced SEO strategies, creating a launch process for your services, using a blog to funnel clients into your business, building a referral program, becoming an industry leader to charge premium rates, and other advanced business strategies. I know many Webusabilityhelp are just getting started, so I don’t think it’s appropriate to post these high-level strategies on the blog. Instead, I’ll put them in the newsletter I mentioned in the ‘flow’ post. Don’t worry - it’s getting closer to being ready every day!

Read more…

RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa.

In fact, this is the topic of a current WebProWorld thread, which was started by Dave Lauretti of MoreStar, who asks, "Are you working the RDFa Framework into your SEO campaigns?" He writes, "Now under certain conditions and with certain search strings on both Google and Yahoo we can find instances where the RDFa framework integrated within a website can enhance their listing in the search results."

Lauretti refers to an article from last summer at A List Apart, by Mark Birbeck who said that Google was beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes sites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with "rich snippets". This results in the Google results you see like this:

"It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable -- if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through," Google said upon the launch of rich snippets.

Google says it is experimenting with markup for business and location data, but that it doesn't currently display this information, unless the business or organization is part of a review (hence the results in the above example). But when review information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make it available in search results. When review information is shown in search results, this can of course entice users to click through to the page (one of the many reasons to treat customers right and monitor your reputation).

Currently Google uses RDFa for reviews, but this search also displays the date of the review, the star rating, the author and the price range of an iPod, as Lauretti points out.

Best Buy's lead web development engineer reported that by adding RDFa the company saw improved ranking for respective pages. They saw a 30% increase in traffic, and Yahoo evidently observed a 15% increase in click-through rates.(via Steven Pemberton)

Implications for SEO

I'm not going to get into the technical side of RDFa here (see resources listed later in the article), but I would like to get into some of the implications that Google's use of RDFa could have on SEO practices. For one, rich snippets can show specific information related to products that are searched for. For example, a result for a movie search could bring up information like:

- Run time
- Release Date
- Rating
- Theaters that are showing it

"The implementation of RDFa not only gives more information about products or services but also increases the visibility of these in the latest generations of search engines, recommender systems and other applications," Lauretti tells WebProNews. "If accuracy is an issue when it comes to search and search results then pages with RDFa will get better rankings as there would be little to question regarding the page theme." (Source) He provides the following chart containing examples of the types of data that could potentially be displayed with RDFa:

"It is obvious that search marketers and SEOs will be utilizing this ability for themselves and their clients," says Lauretti. Take contact information specifically. "Using RDFa in your contact information clarifies to the search engine that the text within your contact block of code is indeed contact information." He says in this same light, "people information" can be displayed in the search results (usually social networking info). You could potentially show manufacturer information or author information.

RDFa actually has implications beyond just Google's regular web search. With respect to Google's Image search, the owner of images can also use RDFa to provide license information about the images they own. Google currently allows image searchers to have images displayed based on license type, and using RDFa with your images lets the search bots know under which licenses you are making your images available (Via Mark Birbeck). There is also RDFa support for video.

Following are some resources where you can learn more about RDFa and how to implement it:

Google Introduces Rich Snippets
Introduction to RDFa
RDFa Primer
About RDFa (Google Webmaster Central)
RDFa to Provide Image License Info
RDFa Microformat Tagging For Your Website
For Businesses and Organizations
About Review Data (Google Webmaster Central)

Google's Matt Cutts has said in the past that Google has been kind of "white listing" sites to get rich snippets, as Google feels they are appropriate, but as they grow more confident that such snippets don't hurt the user experience, then Google will likely roll the ability out more and more broadly. This is one thing to keep an eye on as the year progresses, and is why those in the WebProWorld thread believe RDFa will become a bigger topic of discussion in 2010.

WebProNews would like to thank Dave Lauretti, who contributed some findings to this piece.

Read more…

SEO is experiencing an increase in popularity, as traditional marketing media decline. But as far more companies become target customers, is there a need for a change of approach?

Many sectors of the media are experiencing a decline in advertising revenue, as people fast-forward through TV ads, and wonder about the value they’re getting from magazine advertising. Online marketing is still on the increase, and as more people become aware of what can be achieved online, there’s a need to start providing different styles of offerings for the very different customer profiles out there.

SEO Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization in the US) is one area that has tremendous growth potential, but many people think it is super-technical and it needs re-positioning if it’s going to appeal to the masses.

Of course SEO is not very technical at all. The process is much more about marketing… understanding the keywords people are putting into the search engines, optimising the web site and submitting press releases, articles and link submissions. It really is a marketer’s job. If only more of the marketing industry understood that, they’d be on to a goldmine.

Then there’s the SEO offerings in the market. Many SEO ‘experts’ prefer to let people think that it is highly technical, or a black art.. something they’d never understand. What’s really needed is a response to the marketplace, which caters for all sizes of companies in all kinds of competitive markets.

Perhaps larger companies, with complex websites, and very competitive markets, require a consultancy approach where they can involve their marketing and IT people in the process and build their own in-house capability in the longer term?

Perhaps there’s also a place for the ‘Do It Yourself’ approach for some companies. Maybe they could use computer aided training to learn the fundamentals, and then have someone on hand on the phone to help when they’re stuck.

You see, the potential marketplace is huge, but there will always be a large part of that market that would be put off by large up-front fees, and on-going monthly maintenance costs. The SEO specialists are actually missing out on a large portion of the market by restricting the way they do business.

So this is a rallying call to the SEO market. It’s time for some evolution. This isn’t a time for the misguided notion that ‘knowledge is power’. Let people know what it’s about… You would ALL benefit.

Read more…

Concerned regarding not obtaining an adequate quantity of traffic to your site? Wish to spice up your visibility on internet? One answer to any or all such queries! Your web site needs SEO services.

SEO (search engine optimization) means that optimization of a web site to extend its visibility & usability to look engines like google. SEO services facilitate in generating additional traffic to your site which suggests that a lot of interested customers, which can convert to increased sales for your business.

A SEO consultant would guide you about what all ought to be done to urge a higher ranking on a probe engine. We, a seo company uk, give an entire answer to any or all your SEO services need.

Key advantages of SEO services will be summed up as below. Scan on to search out out why you need search engine optimization…

Increased Traffic – Search Engines do higher than all other media in encouraging visitors to a website. As about 85% of Net users prefer search engines as the crucial technique to begin their search. Traffic from search engines is the foremost considerable traffic as it’s comprised of experienced visitors. These are the individuals who actively explore for a product, service info or solution. Thus, your seo services uk can create sure that you’ve got valuable traffic.

Improved Competitive Edge – if probabilities of finding out your web site are more, it means your competitors are less doubtless positioned out. It directly suggests that that if you have got additional customers, the a lot of on-line market distribute you get. This is often where we have a tendency to, uk seo company facilitate you cut down your competition therefore that your profits can go higher.

Larger Client Base – a SEO consultant will facilitate you locate the simplest search terms to target that can not solely attract additional visitors to your net website, however ensures that those guests are more doubtless to be sturdy potential customers for your business. Immeasurable searches are conducted every day; sites showing at the high of the search results actually get free web web site promotion. In this method, your on-line market expands. By escalating your market online you expose your product and services to a lot of motivated and interested customers.

Excellent Come back-on-Investment – a reasonable SEO package has been proven to acquiesce a higher Return on Investment in terms of generating a lot of traffic to your web site, qualified sales leads and client acquisitions. It provides a terribly low value of internet advertising with a probable high rate of return, giving you a high Come-on-Investment.

It works Non – stop – your SEO partner works for you non-stop twenty four/7. It saves some time & effort. Once you submit your website, it can still be crawled and indexed by search engines and is maintained with minimal endeavor.

Besides being an efficient on-line marketing tools – they’re additionally price effecive. High level SEO services also build potential online selling of the site. For a SEO program which will help you find the simplest search terms to focus on additional guests that are sturdy potential customers for your goods and services, you would like to appear for a SEO partner who provides premium SEO services with own originality.

In easy terms, SEO services build a internet site generate traffic from relevant search term queries. A reasonable SEO package can be sure of aspects like effective search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), internet selling strategies and execution to bring persistent visitor traffic to your site.

Read more…

It’s a fact of life that when people hire a web designer, they don’t just want a website, they want a website that does something! There can be a world of difference between these two things. The "action" they need the website to take for them can be one of several common things: selling products for their business (an e-commerce site), generating sales leads, and/or providing free information in the hope that the visitor will make a purchase from the company at a later date.

These aims differ slightly for some sites, like non-profits, blogs and communities; however business sites in general aim to generate revenue by one of the above methods.

Sometimes the client will split up these functions between two separate businesses – the website development will be taken care of by "Best Ever Web Designers Incorporated", while the marketing is done by "Your Ad Here Pty Ltd". However, if the push towards action (marketing) is created at the web design level, rather than externally, it is much more effective. The more effective your client’s website, the happier they will be; and the happier your clients, the better your web design business thrives!

More than that, you can create an additional ongoing revenue stream that requires a little effort each month at your end but can provide a significant benefit to your client in the form of increased sales or sales leads for their business.

Here we look at how to determine which aspects of your web design work is most effective to help the client’s website achieve its aims, by a process known as split testing.

What is Split Testing?

In website split testing (also known as A/B testing), a software application splits the traffic between two or more variants of the same web page, measuring whether there is a difference in the effectiveness of that page in achieving the website’s goals. Every time a visitor takes the desired action on a website, such as making a purchase or submitting a form, it is called a conversion.

Web designers might check whether:

• A landing page with a graphic of a person encourages better conversion rates than one with a graphic of the product
• A different positioning of the shopping cart button encourages more people to click it
• A form with fewer elements, or different elements, encourages more people to finish filling it out.

Just about every aspect of a website can be split-tested.
Split testing involves a single element of a page being changed at one time. A different type of split testing is sometimes used to achieve faster improvements with a shorter number of tests; multivariate testing. In this type of testing, multiple variables are changed within a single web page. So, rather than having multiple versions of the same page, multivariate testing rotates different elements on the same page, for example, the headline, the call-to-action, the image and the opening paragraph.

The advantage with multivariate testing is that you can find the optimum combination of website elements in a shorter space of time and achieve significant improvements in the website’s performance; the disadvantage is that it takes a considerable amount of traffic to get accurate results.

For most websites, A/B split testing will be the optimum method of improving a website’s conversion rate over time.

Why Bother With Split Testing?

Split testing is what separates elite web designers from the rest because it provides them with the knowledge of which combination of website elements will produce the optimum results for the client and they can demand a higher rate as a result. Split testing can help:

• Get visitors to stay longer on the website
• Get visitors to interact more with the site
• Get more visitors to request a consultation or join a newsletter
• Get more visitors to buy from the site

It can also achieve these aims (depending on what the site is set up for) at a lower cost per action (CPA) than competing sites in the same niche. In some ultra-competitive online markets (home loans, insurance, accommodation, SEO, online dating, etc) split testing is the only way to guarantee that you will be heard above the noise of the competition.

Split testing also helps ensure that when it comes to advertising, you are maximising each and every dollar. If your website doubles its conversion rate from 1% to 2% using split testing techniques, you have just doubled your revenue using the same marketing budget. You will be able to spend more on advertising your site and earn a better return on investment (ROI) from each dollar you spend. Sounds like you’d be crazy not to, doesn’t it?

It becomes even more exciting when you start to examine the numbers. Many untested websites have conversion rates that run around 0.25%. This means that it takes 400 visitors to get one sale. With split testing, you don’t need to increase the number of visitors, just the rate at which they convert. Many success stories tell of conversion rates upwards of 10%. That would be the equivalent of a 40-fold increase in visitors, all of a sudden giving you 40 sales or sales leads out of 400 visitors, instead of 1.

Who Should Be Split Testing?

Ideally, the web designer should start split-testing as soon as the site launches, as they are the ones who have designed the site and have all of the source files on hand. Even if the owner feels that the website is performing well enough, the benchmark for "good" performance could be moved even higher through using split testing. Just keep in mind that split testing does require an established traffic flow because you need to people visiting your site to be able to split-test web pages.

Why is it ideal that the designer does it at the launch stage? Because it is much easier to keep the site as a work in progress after launch, not only visually and structurally, but in terms of its goals. It is infinitely harder for a third party to come along later and change things around, and in many cases, you wouldn’t want them to. That site’s your creation!

Doing the split testing yourself, as a designer, also gives you a real-world feel for what elements will work and what ones won’t. It adds an extra dimension to your sense of aesthetics, removing the guesswork that you necessarily engage in during the design phase. You are no longer doing what you think will create conversions, but implementing what you know produces measurable results. And this knowledge alone will increase the value you bring to your future projects.

Setting Up a Split Test with Google Website Optimizer

Google Website Optimizer is an A/B split testing and multivariate testing platform that allows you to easily see the effects that making changes to page elements has on your website conversion rate. It’s a free platform, and is robust and user friendly. One of the major advantages, though, is that you can use the Google Website Optimizer with existing web page URLs (e.g. yourdomain.com); some other split testing applications require you to use a custom URL (e.g. yourdomain.com/tracking.php) which makes it very difficult to split test non-paid website traffic, such as SEO traffic, referral traffic or direct traffic.

Google Website Optimizer serves different pages to different users, with hundreds of variations possible. In our experience, using the website optimizer tool does not affect your rankings and does not cause duplicate content issues. Here is the process for setting up an A/B test with Google Website Optimizer:

Identify the page or pages you want to test (usually the home page or pages that receive a lot of traffic).

Define which element you want to test. In A/B testing, you’ll only test element one at a time. Commonly tested elements are the headline, sub-headline, opening paragraph, image, call to action, and the submit button (look and/or placement).

Add tags to the original page, the variation page and the conversion pages to allow tracking.

Enter the website URLs you are testing into the Google Website Optimizer.

Preview how the pages will look before sending them live.

Google Website Optimizer will rotate the page that is displayed for every visitor, so that the first person sees version 1, the second person sees version 2, the third person sees version 1 and so on.

You can access the results and reports of various statistics within Google Website Optimizer to see which variant is the most effective.

What Should You Test with Google Optimizer?

These are the most commonly tested elements of a web page:

• Headings
• Sub-headings
• Opening paragraph
• Images
• Call to action
• Offers
• Hyperlinks
• Submit button
• The location of different elements
• Colors

The first six elements are the ones which generally have the most impact on conversion rates, and the ones you should test first. Google once tested 41 different shades of blue for their pages. They have the luxury of doing this because they get more traffic than any other website, and they have the drive to do this because performance is their life. They thrive on it! You don’t need to go to this extent but if Google places so much value on it, shouldn’t you?

Knowing When a Split Test is Finished

The number of conversions needed to garner a reliable indication of future traffic varies incredibly with different types of sites. If the business you are designing for is a high-customer volume, low-value spend store, you should test until you have 70 or so conversions for one variant. If it is a low-customer volume, high-value spend store, aim for 20 conversions.

If the set conversion is further from becoming an actual "profit" for the store (i.e. a conversion creates a lead from a visitor, rather than a sale from a lead), you may want to be more certain that one variant is working better than the other. You may also want to test more different variants of the same element, or do multivariate testing … within the limitations of your traffic volume.

Determining statistical significance at the conclusion of a test

For you to have a high confidence level that the test results aren’t just a fluke, you can apply a simple formula to determine whether the difference in results is statistically significant. This rule is:

The numerical difference between the two results must be greater than the square root of the sum of the two results.

Or

Y-X>√X+Y, where Y>X

Sounds like a nightmare from before your high school maths exam, doesn’t it? It is easier to understand with an example:

• If the result of page A was 20 conversions, and the result of page B was 30 conversions, then the difference between the two is 10.
• The sum of the two results is 50
• The square root of that sum is 7 (rounded down)
• The difference (10) is greater than the square root of the sum (7), so the result is statistically significant.

If the two results had been 22 and 28:

• The difference between the two is 6
• The sum of the two results is 50
• The square root of that sum is 7 (rounded down)
• The difference (6) is less than the square root of the sum (7) – the result is not statistically significant.

If the results of your split test are not statistically significant, you can either:

• Keep testing and see if a more definite pattern emerges
• Decide that the element doesn’t make a difference to conversion in this case, and test something else.

Tips for Ongoing Split Testing

Either you, as the designer, or the website owner, should be implementing split testing constantly, on all your high traffic web pages. It takes time to get test results, and in the meanwhile customer preferences and market sensibilities are changing, along with the season and your stock.

It is important to note that not all split tests will be successful. In fact, if you have a 20% success rate where one in five split tests improve the overall conversion rate of the site then you are doing well. The key point to remember with split-testing is that every success forms a new baseline, with considerable website performance improvements achieved after a number of different split tests.

The easiest way to manage all of the split tests is to set one day per month when you review results and then set up tests for the coming month based on those results. Every month you should track your results in a spreadsheet to avoid accidentally re-testing the same elements over and over again. This also provides a point of reference for when you are starting new projects – you can see which placements and copy types are most effective in which industries.

If your website grows to the point where you have upwards of 1 million visitors per month, you can use multivariate testing.

And don’t forget to check what competing sites in the same niche are doing, and test the same elements on your site!

Once you start split testing you’ll find that what you thought would perform better doesn’t and you’ll be very surprised with some of the results. The best part about split-testing is that the confidence you will gain from split testing will help you with your future web development projects because you will have an increased knowledge of what produces results and what doesn’t. Consumer behavior is a specialized field and web designers can get on a steep but exhilarating learning curve for it by engaging in split testing on their own and their clients’ websites.

Read more…

The 10 Most Expensive Industries to Advertise Online

Sr. No	Business/Industry	Keywords in Top 25	Average Cost Per Click
1	Structured Settlements	2	$51.97
2	Secured Loans	2	$50.67
3	Buying Endowments	1	$50.35
4	Mesothelioma Lawyers	5	$50.30
5	DUI Lawyers	4	$49.78
6	Conference Call Companies	1	$49.64
7	Car Insurance Quotes	3	$49.61
8	Student Loan Consolidation	3	$49.44
9	Data Recovery	2	$49.43
10	Remortgages	2	$49.42

Source

Fifty bucks! Are you serious? How can anybody justify that expense?

Four words: high lifetime customer value.

Buying a structured settlement nets a lot of money over a long time period for the advertiser. The same goes for refinancing student loans and remortgaging a house.

DUI and Mesothelioma lawyers make a killing in settlement money, so paying $50 per click is really pocket change.

Data recovery and conference calling software fosters long term client-vendor relationships. One new client can mean millions of dollars in recurring revenue over the years of the contract.

You don’t see any one-time purchases on this list, and for good reason.

It’s simply not worth it to pay a fortune in the hopes of selling one product once.

These big spenders are aiming high: millions of dollars in a lawsuit or hundreds of thousands of dollars in a high-interest loan.

With this in mind, how much is a click really worth to your business?

Read more…

We gonna talk here about the direct advertising and alternates to google adsense or how can you increase revenue using google adsense. I would be writing directly which is coming outta Amit’s mind in his presentation.

Stop Feeling Shy

No social service. You can only survive when you have advertisements on your blog.

Big is Better

160x600is better for maximize ad revenue and 300 x 250 px advertisements are good cause you can include, videos pictures and slideshow of images.

Where to put Ads

Users see the page as a “F“. Brighter colors are prefered as suggested by google.

Experiment with colors

You can do it with A-B testing like try different colors and all.Can match font color, style with your content.

Color Schemes

You can Blend,complement or contrast the Ad color. Dark color will go with contrast color scheme.

Improve Relevance

Section targetting in adsense.

Heading

Sub heading

Content

Reader Comments

Comment 1

Comment 2

Comments usually do not have stuff about the content, instead it has lots of adjectives. So we need to optimize in such a way so as to avoid the comments, ajectives. Now how to do it ?

Do not put ad tags near comments and the content which is repeating like subscrive to buttons etc.

Site Search

• Do not assume that readers know how to search. Make the search button look prominent or easily viewable.
• If you write long articles, try putting the search button at the end of the article.
• Host search on a seperate domain like search.labnol.org

CPM, CPC or Link Units ?

The best performing ad units are Text Ads, after that are CPM based , multimedia ads, like videos , images etc. CPM ads pay you even when the user do not click. “CPM ads let you earn from the users who think you are a moron” Amit says so

Placement Examples

Search on the top. Link unit near the header or after the post. You can have a sky scrapper displayed in your bottom right corner of the sidebar.

You can use CrazyEgg

Your Images

Do not ignore image search by google. They really bring you lotsa revenue. You can get lotsa CPM from images sometimes even more than your content.

Flickr for traffic

Post images on the flickr, interesting once and you can actually convert those users to your blog readers.

Why Link ?

• Help Search Engines
• Authority
• Good Anchor Text
• The Dreaded Back Button

A good anchor tag helps a lot to search engines and link exchange. When the user comes to your site and hits back button to go back to the search engine results, then its a bad bad thing for you, because search engines register this action and that is bad for your page rank.

Learn Analytics

Use Google Site Analytics.

Typical Mistakes

• Diluted title/slug
• Too many pages with similar titles/content - Make life easy for advertisers
• Wasting Visit - NOINDEX, FOLLOW for tag pages
• Allowing Stop Words in Comments
• Smart Pricing
• Feeling Complacent

Steal Ideas

Continue to experiment.Examples

• Adsense Case studies
• Media Sites - CNN, NYT, Network i8, etc.
• Premium Publishers
• Webmaster World - Seniors and Preferred Members
• Official Google Guides jensense, problogger, barry schwartz ,chris pirillo

Adsense Alternatives

• ADiFY
• Blogads
• amazon.com
• technorati
• tradepub
• nautanki.tv
  

Selling Direct Ads

It takes lotsa hard work and time. Spot the area where u want to display direct ads and experiement that area with google ads and then calculate what you are earning from there and then you can decide the price for direct ads.You can use Google Ad Manager to manage ads.

ok that was all from Amit Aggarwal.

Thanks to his wonderful session

Cheers!!
Sanjeev

Read more…

The Delhi Bloggers Bloc along with Blog Design Studio are organizing the first ever WordCamp in India for all WordPress enthusiasts and for those who want to know more about WordPress! This event is being held on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of The Delhi Bloggers Bloc.

For those who don't already know - WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. This blogging platform is so feature rich and easy to use that it's proving to be competition to full fledged content management systems.

Matt Mullenweg (Founder of WordPress) is going to be a part of this event. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to meet him in person and find out what exactly WordPress can and will do for you as a blogger. Another surprise the organizers have just sprung on us is that Om Malik of GigaOm would be joining the event.

As if Matt and On Malik were not enough, you can also meet Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration there.

Agenda -
A two-day conference which brings together stakeholders and audiences of social media and blogging, centered around WordPress.

Date & Place -
21st, 22nd Feb'09 (Saturday, Sunday), 9:00am - 6:00pm

Venue - I-1A, Sector 25A
Noida, U.P. 201301
India
Tel: +91 120 244 4711

Read more…

Adsense is the best Pay Per Click(PPC) advertising program we had.Every bloggers aim is to make some bucks at the end right? For that we read so many sites,articles and books around the web daily.Apart from blending ads,writing good content,quality and lot more things daily we read on every blog,we need to concentrate more on keywords to get good amount into your pocket.

Keywords are the words that people using on search engines to find their desired stuff.Advertiser will use the same keywords to advertise on sites.Advertisers will buy the keywords with Google to display their ads on sites across who are using Adsense.Finally am saying,ads appearing on your sites will depend on the keywords you’re using in your posts.

If you target using high paid keywords in your posts,then Google will show high paid ads in your site.This way you will get more bucks per click.The formula is simple, High paid keywords target = High you will receive.Finally all you have to do is,just spend some time to search the high paid keywords on the topic you are writing post.Then try to use those keywords to design your post.

Where to find high paid keywords? Ha,here are some of the best tools in the market which will tell you the keywords for free.
Best Keyword Selection Tools:

1. Overture Inventory Keyword Selector Tool


2. WordTracker keyword research tool


3. Google AdWords Keyword Tool External


4. Digital Point Keyword Suggestion Tool


5. Submit Express Keyword Suggestion Tool


6. Keyword Country free keyword tool

Read more…

From the very beginning of the Internet, the number one challenge which all of us have faced is how to attract qualified visitors to our websites. Throughout the boom years, one of the most popular solutions was to get massive funding, relatively easy to get in those days, and "buy" traffic, by various means.


As an iconoclastic young developer, with ambitions of beating the "big boys" at their own game, more time than money or the connections to get it, I sought a less capital intensive methodology to achieve the same results. Years of study and rapt attention to the pertinent forums, trying everything that even seemed to make sense (making many mistakes along the way, and learning much from each one), then carefully monitoring the results, has lead to many highly workable tools in our SEO bag of tricks. The outcome of these trial and error methods, (lots of both) lays the foundation of our SEO services and the basis for the ongoing growth of traffic to your website and ours.


The simple fact of the matter is this: Expertise in any other form of writing in no way qualifies one for the type of writing required to optimize a website for the Internet. There are many sites which have less than correct punctuation, grammar, and even spelling which rank #1 in their optimized search phrases. This is not to say that I don't think these things are important, only that to be found in the search engines, they are not the most important consideration.


The flip side of this argument is equally true. Just because someone knows all the ins and outs of all of the search engines, can write algorithms in their sleep, has lunches with Dr. Eric Schmidt and is on a first name basis with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, does not, in any way, make them a writer. All of the writing on this site was done as a collaborative venture between Susan K. Thompson, a professional writer with strong academic credentials and real world experience, in both business and marketing, and myself. Was there a lot of editing and re-write? Yes. Were there disagreements? You bet! Was it worth it? Look at the record.


Emerald Coast Entrepreneur was launched on May 1, 2005 with most site optimization in place and submission to the directories just beginning. With a total monetary investment of less than $100.00, and a time investment, I'd rather not think about, but which approached 300 hours, the site was given a PR5 ranking by Google on it's first update, less than 2 months after our launch.


Studies show that over 90% of all online users use search engines to find what they are looking for, whether products/services, or just plain old information.


The following twelve points will, I hope, summarize a philosophy, approach and methodology to the SEO question which is both sound and effective, along with giving some helpful insight into the industry itself.



1. Content. Content. Content.


Effective, professional, optimized Copywriting is the single, most important factor in any SEO campaign. Search engines index websites based on the content found on each page of the site. With a thorough understanding of the language and grammatical conventions combined with intensive research, to find and exploit the market focus, one can move a website to the upper echelon of the "SERP's" (Search Engine Results Page) in a methodical as well as ethical manner.


2. Analyze Web Logs.


Measure everything, at least twice, and then check again. While I would be the first to say that many of the procedures that make up website optimization are more art than science, one needs to take a very scientific approach to the results of the effort. This is done by methodically keeping a record of, and making an analysis of the sites web logs. There are a number of specialized software which make the job easier but at the bare minimum, one needs to keep a close eye on the site visitors and their activity while on the site. No matter how well planned the strategy, it is largely theoretical until proven by the results, which can only be measured by the logs, and a thorough analysis of their content.



3. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google, or any other search engine.


Those who promise such feats will either optimize for such vague search term phrases (such as, "green stunted widgets with purple Polka-dots and icing") that no one will ever likely look for, or they are making a false claim, which they have no intention of keeping, or they have an inside edge at Google, something which they will loose, quickly, when the honest folks at Google find out about it. The other option, that they will take the money and run, is worth mentioning here but I'll be polite.


4. Some things are just plain silly.


You don't need to submit your site to 50,000 search engines. Businesses which offer this service are suspect, at best. 85% of the search results on the Internet come from one search engine, which, if you have one link from an established website, or better yet, a directory, will find your site just fine, on it's own. Four (4) search engines account for over 90% of the traffic on the web. As for any supposed benefit which may accrue from being listed in an obscure search engine in Botswana which specializes in safaris to the Kalahari Desert and receives 7 hits per day; well, you figure it out.


5. SEO is not Pay-per-Click.


While no one would argue the effectiveness of getting increased traffic and sales, through a well planned, pay-per-click campaign, the fact remains that the conversion rates are generally low and they cease the moment the "pay" stops. With a well planned and executed SEO campaign, while results may take a bit longer, they continue to produce, and in fact grow, long after the work is done and paid for. Quite often we have found that after a thorough optimization of a site, only minor adjustments are needed on an ongoing basis, primarily related to new content and/or new items of sale or service.


6. SEO is not witchcraft, Druidism, shamanism.


Neither does it require any special chants, ceremonial fires, or vestments, though some of us do like to howl at the full moon, on occasion. There are no "Top Secret" practices which a reputable SEO can not tell a client, a judge, or his mother, for that matter. The very nature of the Internet has always been cooperative and there is nothing about SEO that can't be learned, with a heavy dose of time and money. A reputable SEO firm will give you an item per item breakdown of just where the money goes. Be wary if you sense a secretive atmosphere or any unwillingness to answer questions. While there are technical points which might take some background to fully understand, if one has a solid overview of the entire situation, a simple explanation should be easy enough to come up with.


7. Do-it-yourself SEO.


Yes, you can execute your own SEO campaign and find a reputable SEO firm to help plan and organize it for you. About one half of my own clientele do some part of the actual work themselves, or have their in-house dedicated personnel do it, after discussion of the goals and aims of the business/website, a thorough website analysis, comprehensive search phrase research, and focused instruction on the ways and means of achieving high SERPs. These preliminaries are followed up with a detailed program of suggestions and methods which the client can then implement themselves or hire others to perform. Average savings; 30-40%.


8. Phased Implementation.


While many companies spend thousands of dollars per month on Search Engine Optimization, an alternative is available which will pay dividends to you in increased sales and leads without the high initial investment. The most important consideration is to have a reputable firm handle the initial evaluation and suggested optimization planning first. The trial and error method will cost much more, in the long run, with or without the desired result. After studying the plan and establishing a workable budget you may implement the plan as finances allow.



9. Remember the old saying, "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Never was this more true than in the realm of SEO. While concrete and measurable gains will always come from a well thought out and executed optimization strategy, the Internet is a competitive media and we all want to be number one. Accept that a steady upward movement, over time, will place you worlds ahead of a flash followed by a crash.


10. A thought to ponder.


At stake, in the race for the top, is the very existence of your website, your business, and quite possibly your reputation. Beware of any "shortcuts" or less than ethical schemes that anyone might suggest to further your business goals. When it's all said and done it is you, the business owner, who bears the responsibility for any company or individual you hire. Insist on knowing exactly what the strategy is and what steps are being performed to implement it. If it seems, in the least, suspicious, ask for and get an explanation. In this case, not only is Ignorance not bliss, it could very well be the beginning of the end for your business.


11. All incoming links are not created equal.


Both the relevance to your line of business and website subject matter and the PR value of the incoming link determine how valuable they are to your own PR ranking. With Google starting the trend, nothing new there, and most of the others following close behind, the days of grabbing all the inbound links, in any way possible, are gone. Not only will low ranked and/or irrelevant inbound links not help, they will, in fact, cause a penalty. Link farms, free-for-all link schemes, automated link accumulation software, or any other fad that doesn't carefully screen the links and websites they are coming from will, in the long run, do more harm than good.



12. It's more than just facts and figures.


The relationship between an online business and SEO is, perhaps, one of the closest of business relationships. In order to be effective, a SEO must know not only the facts and figures pertaining to the endeavor, but s/he must know something of the dreams and aspirations of the business principals. Things which don't normally come out in a prospectus are often invaluable information when searching for the "right fit" into the complex world of the Internet. My own clients sometimes ask, due to the frequency of my calls and email in the early phases, "Am I your only client?" I usually laugh and say something to the effect that until I know your business almost as well as you do, yes, you are the only one that counts.

Read more…

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.



Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”



Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.


The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is…well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as “Europe travel”, there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.


Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for “Europe travel”? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.



The Big Three



There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo – Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.


There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.


The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.


You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.


Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.


Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

Read more…

Search engines and directories are the main way Internet users discover web sites. Various resources confirm this statement, and the percentages generally range from 42 percent of Internet users to 86 percent.

A January 2001 study conducted by NPD Group, a research organization specializing in consumer purchasing and behavior, tested the impact of search engine listings and banner advertisements across a variety of web sites to determine which marketing medium was more effective. In each situation, search engine listings came out on top. They found consumers are five times more likely to purchase your products or services after finding a web site through a search engine rather than through a banner advertisement.

Jupiter Media Metrix, another Internet research firm, determined that 28 percent of consumers go to a search engine and type the product name as a search query when they are looking for a product to purchase online.

Search engines and directories average over 300 million searches per day. Therefore, regardless of whether the percentage value is as low as 28 percent or as high as 86 percent, millions of searches are performed every day. Properly preparing your web site for search engine visibility increases the probability that web searchers will visit your site.

Additionally, think about your own personal experience. Where do you go to search for information about a company or a product on the web? Where do you go to find a site whose web address you do not know or cannot remember? In these cases, you probably use a search engine or directory to find the information.

Web searchers are not random visitors. When searchers enter a series of words into a search engine query, they are actively searching out a specific product or service. Thus, the traffic your site receives from the search engines is already targeted. In other words, web searchers are self-qualified prospects for your business.

Of course, search engines are not the only way in which people discover web sites. People may find a web address in offline sources such as print, television, or radio. They might click a link to a web site in an email document or a banner advertisement. Word of mouth (referral marketing) also is a popular method of bringing visitors to sites. In addition, people locate sites by clicking links from one site to another, commonly known as surfing the web.

Because millions of people use the search engines and directories to discover web sites, maximizing your site's search engine visibility can be a powerful and cost-effective part of an online marketing plan. A properly performed search engine marketing campaign can provide a tremendous, long-term return on investment (ROI).

Read more…

The Different Types of Profesional Internet Marketing Services



Search engine marketing can only be done in two ways; natural rankings and advertising. Top natural search engine rankings in competitive keyphrase environments usually demands the employment of an SEO Service. That is what this article is all about : SEO Services that offer organic results.Pay-per-click searchengine advertising does not require a search engine optimizer at all. It requires a person that can modify an advertising account. There are very few skills involved. Practically anyone can change a bidding campaign.On the other hand, the expertise involved in search engine optimisation requires a unique skill set. Difficult niche SERP ( search engine results pages ) competitions generally demand for the kind of high caliber web site optimization that only a small portion of SEOs are able to actually perform. These extremely powerful optimizing services come in three types : Ethical, Unethical and Somewhere in the middle. In SEO terms : White Hat, Black Hat and Grey Hat.



White Hat SEO Services




These are web site promotion artists, the true SEO masters. Theirs is a craft. Whitehats are long term search engine strategists. They not only follow the search engine guidelines explicitly, they attain and sustain top rankings in competitive search term arenas. Their involvement with a web site only enhances the corporate image of the website owner. These are usually very classy people with high moral values and sound ethical fiber.These are the types of people you can trust explicitly.




Black Hat SEO Services




These are the searchengine manipulators. They follow the trendy search engine manipulation techniques. Their successes are generally short lived. Blackhat SEO experts get web sites penalized and in extreme cases, banned altogether from the SERPs. They care not how their work reflects upon the web site owner. Usually, unethical optimizers like this have little class.Some of these people are truly bad characters.




Grey Hat SEO Services




These are Internet marketing experimentalists in a way. Most of them know they are manipulating the search engines. They often have a clear comprehension of the SE Guidelines but choose to push the limits of what the search engines deem to be acceptable; often surpassing the limits. These expert SEO services don't usually get a web site banned from the results pages, but their work is frequently slapped with penalties or non-rewards for misbehaving. Fortunately, they are skilled enough to reel in their misdeeds and re-establish a web site's credibility fairly quickly.


Greyhats care about how their work reflects the owner of a web site to a certain extent, but are driven to be cutting-edge ( trendy ) so much that they often loose focus on the rules of good behaviour. Thankfully, SEO expert services of this nature are capable enough to rectify their misdeeds. Optimisation specialists of this genre are chameleon in nature, they care deeply about achieving web successes for their clients but clearly have some character imperfections when it comes to playing by the rules.


These are the average Joe web optimizaters, often leaving their sloppy work behind and usually leaving a bad taste of SEO in their client's mouth.

Read more…

If you use flash animation you may find yourself asking:


"What the #!@#%! happened to my website?"


The answer is clear. FLASH ANIMATION IS BAD FOR BUSINESS.

Flash is bad for usability, accessibility and search engine marketing. So why do I care if you use flash animation on your website?

My business is built on helping businesses get high search engine rankings and quality traffic to their websites so they can increase their sales and get better awareness for their products and services.

Yet, we still get customers who want Flash Animation rather than providing good search engine friendly content.

THE FACT IS: Flash animation forces search engine spiders to understand and rely on Meta Tags to rank your website and you risk annoying your website visitors.

It's true, however, that some search engine spiders will index some flash file content, but it has significant limitations.

The Goal for Your Business is to get found and sell your products or services.



So be honest and ask yourself:



(1) "When I visit a flash website does that make me want to purchase anything?"

Sure flash animation looks neat and maybe it's cool but do you want to keep having to go through the process of navigating that flash website over and over and over again?

More to the point, do you want to force your customers to be distracted and even get annoyed by your flash animation?

If your website visitors have opted for a semi-broadband internet connection to save money or worse they still have a dial-up connection then you can forget about their business because they will forget about you.


(2) "Do I want my website to be found in search engines like GOOGLE or YAHOO?"


80 to 90% of all website business comes from search engines so you do not want to ignore this fact.


When building a new website you should first ask: WHAT DO MY CUSTOMERS WANT?

The simple answer is that they want information about your products and services immediately. It should be clear and obvious from the moment they visit the first page.

Remember you have LESS THAN 7 SECONDS to convince them to stay on your website.

Thus, flash animation might be the fasted way to loose your customers - especially if they are annoyed by flash animation in the first place...




THE TOP 5 REASONS TO SAY NO TO FLASH ANIMATION



(1) LOAD TIME: Animation is slow and visitors generally have little patience.


(2) ACCESSIBILITY: Not everyone has the Flash Plugin installed and may not be willing to wait for the installation.


(3) USABILITY: Some people don't know how to operate flash and some would not bother.


(4) SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: Flash Animation is Bad for search engines. There is a good chance you will render your website invisible and thus your website will be a good collector of dust rather than customers. Flash Animation takes away your most powerful search marketing tool: GOOD Content.


(5) REALITY CHECK: People generally dislike flash animation. People want to get to the point and see what you have to offer... they don't want the song and dance. And, when was the last time you purchased anything from a Flash website? There is a good chance you never did. At most is was it was probably once or twice.



SIMPLE RECOMMENDATIONS?



(1) Consider what your target customers want and what they look for.


(2) Consider the fastest and easiest way is to sell your products and services.


(3) Consider focusing on good content rather than flashy animation.



There is a time and place for flash but 99.9% of the time it is not a good idea to build a flash website for your business.

Read more…

As the web moves into its second generation, sites are making more use of CSS, AJAX and other advanced and interactive design techniques. But how are the largely Web 1.0 search engines reacting to these, from an SEO perspective. This session explores issues and solutions.

Moderator:• Jon Myers, Head of Search, MediaVestSpeakers:• Jonathan Ashton, VP of SEO & Web Analytics, Agency.com• Ben D'Angelo, Software Engineer, Google• Chris Humber, Director of SEO, 360i

Jonathan Ashton

I would like to talk about the issues of standards in web development, and ultimately presenting the right experience to all web users.

You guys remember when Flash came and brought the whole idea of life into the static environments of the web. Ren and Stimpy was one of the first automated cartoons built in Flash. When Flash emerged, it was something that gave us an added layer to bill our clients extra for! But today, we have so many amazing tools that now our clients are paying us for our ability to measure proper use of these elements.

Usability standards for optimizing in web 2.0:

AOL still has 9 million + users on dial up! You have to realize that if you are going to be a good internet citizen, you cannot leave these people behind! Now, 35% of people use Firefox to explore the web without JavaScript! If your intention is to reach every human, you will also reach every search engine bot!

If a person who is blind visits a web page, they can’t tell a picture of a horse unless it has an alt tag. So by taking yourself out of the perspective of someone who is marketing, and into the shoes of someone trying to create a good community, you will benefit.

I have met SEO’s who have not taken time to read the Google guidelines and recommendations. If you are spending any time messing with your site on trying to get more traffic, please take the time to read this stuff! Google is showing you as much of their hand as they are willing to show!
Google tells you that certain technologies are not crawlable! It also suggests you download an old school browser and look at your site in it! We need to help our clients achieve that level of interactivity.

What does index actually mean? Just because it’s indexable does not mean it’s going to win for anything meaningful. I know search engines are focusing on more content in these dynamic environments, but indexability does not mean winability! So leave semantics behind. You need the layer underneath for the non-Flash enabled user, or spider.

Information architecture is core to usability. It is also required for a usable site. Optimizers should get involved early and often. If the content needs to be indexed, don’t hide it. As optimizers we need to bring this level of rationality to the IA process.

Is dynamic content really required? Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it a valid reason to do it. If there is a valid reason, go for it. But if you can accomplish everything without using the newest technology, then great, don’t use it.

So what’s the A in Ajax? It stands for asynchronous! It may look cool but it’s ultimately a challenge to index.

Validate your HTML and CSS. Careful development means good optimization, a browser is designed to interpret what it sees and is forgiving of mistakes, but what a search engine sees is a much more literal engagement.

So, how do you finish first? Develop for the highest common denominator and the lowest. Make sure your tools are still 2.0 plus, in a 1.0 environment.

Ben D’Angelo

A lot of content is already easily accessed by search engines. Blogs, wikis etc. use HTML markup. It becomes more challenging introducing other ways of interaction. The 2 main technologies I will talk about are Ajax and Flash.

What is 2.0 about? It’s about richer and more complex systems relating to the management and interdependence of content, presentation and navigation.

Ajax maybe content and navigation. Flash – all 3 of these are tightly coupled.

Most people have Flash enabled. Why should I worry about the tiny of fraction of those who don’t have Flash enabled? You can say a similar argument about images back in the day! Of course now we know, images are great but at the same time, have alt texts, etc it’s much more accessible. So it’s similar argument to Flash.

When you think about accessibility for all users, it will become much more available for search engines. If it’s viewable for the blind reader, great. Some tech savvy people have plug-ins to disable Flash. Cell phones and low-bandwidth devices also don’t support Flash and is a market you likely want to target. Bookmarking is something you might not think about, but it’s important. It’s good for your site to attract links but can they link to your site if you have Flash – can I link to this cool game I played if the entire site is in Ajax? If a user can bookmark it, it will be accessible to search engines.

A simple thing – make static links and they will automatically be recognizable by search engines.
CSS – it allows you to isolate the content from the presentation. You can try turning off CSS to see if your site still looks reasonable. Avoid abusing techniques like hiding text in CSS.

Start with traditional HTML, add a little embellishments like rich media elements. You Tube is a good example.

From an Ajax perspective: URL parameters vs. fragments. Googlebot can ignore fragments in a URL. If you want to use some Ajax, use together with HTML.

Flash – Google does try to read some of it in URLs but not all, so use regular HTML for primary content and navigation and then compliment it with Flash elements.

A little more advanced technique – SIFR – takes content in HTML elements and will replace t with a little Flash – primary use is for different fonts. If a user does have things installed and enabled they will see it, if not, they will see regular HTML.

Useful links: Google webmaster central blog, webmaster help center, webmaster discussion group.

Chris Humber

Flash is a restrictive technology. Why, because the content is invisible to the spider and spiders can’t navigate it. I personally am waiting for the day where I can see a great article when Google can incorporate Flash! Unfortunately, the engines operate in a 1.0 space.

TheBar.com – great website where the bartender will respond to your questions. They have a great margarita recipe. This site is built entirely in Flash. This is great info that would be extremely useful in the search engines, unfortunately when you search for a margarita recipe, it cannot be found. The user perspective gets a rich interface, but the spiders get nothing.
Some best practices to incorporate if you must use Flash:

Adobe Search Engine SDK – extracts texts and links from a SWF file. It’s a direct sort of output of a Flash file, never use alone, can’t be indexed.

SWF address is a code library that allows you to create URLS in a Flash environment.
An SWF object is a great way to embed Flash into your HTML code, it’s compatible. Plenty of sites use it. Allows for content integration. A DIV layer allows you to provide static text in a Flash environment.

You have to privde the navigation if you use a SWF address or SWF object. The spiders need enough navigation to find the content. Also think about inbound linking. Otherwise you wont rank very well.

sIFR – short text vlocks, page editors, carousels – ensures content is accessible. Uses combo if CSS, java, Flash. ABC News uses it for their website. Very useful if you have a dynamic lead on the website.

If you apply the above best practices, you should see an improvement in search visibility and increase traffic via natural search in a Flash-based environment.

Read more…