seo

SEO 101: The Basics Every Entrepreneur Should Know

by Paul Joseph November 8, 2011 Featured

The story goes that in ancient times (B.C. – and I don’t mean before computers) women of ill repute would have a symbol carved on the sole of their sandals. As they walked through the dirt and mud of the streets, the symbol would be impressed on the road, and men could follow the trail to their “business” location. This makes advertising the second oldest profession in the world. If you have a business, of course you want the world to beat a path to your door, or at least the right customers coming to buy. Advertising has long been the route businesses would take. Smart businesspeople knew that this included signage, any publicity you could get and word-of-mouth as well as the traditional paid print, radio and television ads. Well, now the marketplace has moved off the street, and tools such as marks on the bottom of a sandal or the biggest sign and best location, while still serving a purpose, have made way to finding a way onto that first page of Google when people search for your product or services. It’s all about SEO – Search Engine Optimization. You may have heard about it and even have a basic understanding of what it is and how it works, but are you prepared to focus your website to use SEO to your best advantage? Here are some basic tools and ideas you can use to start paying at least some attention to optimizing your website for Google and any other search engines your customers may be using. Pay for it: You can ensure that your website has a premium position by paying for it, as either pay-per-click or as an ad on the side when your search appears. However, this can get expensive with no guarantee of impact and savvy searchers often skip the paid sites when looking for resources. Register: Most search engines provide opportunities to register your site, but this is a long slow process with much less impact on your search position than the engine’s own search algorithms. In other words, they’d prefer to find you on their own, so help them out with tool number three below. Make your website spider-friendly: Spiders are the automatic search programs that wander through the Internet and look for sites that should be included in a search. These spiders look for certain items and including them gets their attention. Position commonly-searched keywords in your page titles: take a moment to determine what words or phrases people might use to search for your services. For example, if you sell tacos in your community, be sure your titles mention tacos, your community’s name, Mexican food, tostadas, and any other word that people may use to search for a restaurant like yours. Add content regularly: it’s good to have something new on your site at least once a week, and three times a week is optimal. This can be blogs about anything related to your site. For example, you might talk about how to make any bagged tortilla chip taste fresh (put them in you toaster-oven to get them warm just before eating) or what’s special about your salsa. It can also include something as simple as weekly specials and up-coming events. Make your content rich and readable: yes, you want to make sure your keywords are used regularly, but if your copy reads like a vocabulary list of Mexican food items, the spiders will see this as spam and boom, you go to the back of the line. Keep keywords in text form: If they are part of a picture, flash or java script, the spiders won’t be able to read them. Revel in rich links: Is there a Hispanic culture website in your community? Provide a link to them and see if they will link to you. Your community’s chamber of commerce, any restaurant associations and any other non-competing organizations. Quality is more important than quantity. Caption your photos. Those spiders can’t read your jpegs, but they can read captions. This is another good place to position some keywords and phrases. Finally, do a before and after check. See where your search position is before you make any changes, and then see if your changes affect your position. This is not a fast process, but it can reap serious rewards in better search placement and more customers at your door. Adam Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Matthew. Adam is co-author of the newly released book: Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs .

Tagged as: business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, marketing, marketing-strategies, seo, technology

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5 Things Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know about Keywords and the Art of SEO

by Paul Joseph August 3, 2011 Featured

I’m often surprised when otherwise business savvy entrepreneurs tell me they are interested in building a Web presence but can’t articulate the reasons why. Invariably, it turns out, their goals are mostly the same: driving traffic and converting visitors into leads. Sounds simple enough. However, achieving these goals takes plenty of planning and work, just like every other aspect of your business. As I always advise clients, patience and dedication to the end goal will reap you great rewards in the long run. And that first step to online success starts with implementation of a search engine optimization (SEO) program combined with an effective keyword strategy. With this combo, the return on investment of SEO is tough to beat. Why? Because a high placement in a search engine query result can mean a huge jump in targeted traffic for a business. In fact, 94.75% of all search result clicks occur on the first page of search engines, and websites experience a 143% increase in traffic when going from spot #11 (page 2) to #10 (page 1). Obviously figuring out how to rank high for target keywords should be a priority for your business. Before you begin, there are five things you should know about keyword research and the art of SEO. Best Practices Keyword targeting and SEO are often viewed as very different online marketing strategies, but in reality, if your keyword and SEO strategies are out of sync, you’re probably wasting a lot of time and money. In SEO, following best coding practices means making sure your site is adhering to search engines’ ranking factors. There are hundreds of factors that can help or hurt your rankings, and keywords play a big role in helping you take advantage of these. The following three website components must be optimized with relevant keywords: Domain name: The keyword in a site’s domain name has very strong SEO value, meaning that your site is a lot more likely to show up in search results when the term is used. For example, if you search for “NY spa” in Google, all but two results on the first page will have the word “spa” in the domain name. [picture of search results for “spa.”] However, the keyword in the domain name only has so much value, and higher value sites that are relevant to that keyword will be able to usurp your site in SERPs. URL: Having a clean URL structure also has significant SEO value, and it’s also better for the user experience. For example, the URL for the “jazz” category on cduniverse.com (rated third worst website in the world by pcworld.com) is http://www.cduniverse.com/browsecat.asp?style=music&cat=224, which tells you nothing about what’s on the page and just looks a bit off. On the other hand, a URL that looks like http://www.ragnewyork.com/blog/i-love-ny-t-shirt-origin/ is neat and makes it clear that the page is going to have information on the origin of the I Love NY t-shirt. Title tag: Title tags send signals to search engines about the type of content on a page, and search engines use that data to send searchers to relevant pages. So a page with a title tag that’s irrelevant to its content is going to receive less traffic. There are few things in SEO that are so simple to fix yet have a big impact on rankings as improper title tags. Note: The closer a keyword is to the beginning of the title tag, the more SEO value it has. Also, keep in mind that stuffing a title tag with keywords dilutes the SEO value of each keyword. High Quality Content One of the best ways to bring quality traffic to your site is with relevant and original quality content. Frequently updating your site with useful and interesting information is a successful strategy for many businesses. However, make sure the content is relevant to your goals. If you sell alarm clocks, write articles about alarm clocks. Warning: Steer clear of black-hat tactics when writing for your site. In the end high quality content always wins out over spam. Some SEOs practice “keyword stuffing,” or trying to unnaturally cram an article with a target keyword, but search engines have been onto this strategy for years now and can penalize you for it. Link Building Link Building is the process of creating inbound links to your website. It is one of the best and also one of the most difficult ways to increase your search engine rankings. For example, when Google’s algorithm sees a lot of high value sites (i.e. New York Times) linking to yours, it is an indication that your site has value and in turn boosts your rankings. This can be achieved by garnering reciprocal links, being listed in e-zines, newsletters, directories and search engines among other avenues. Often the process involves creating content for other websites such as blog postings and having them link back to your page. While this can be time consuming, it is a highly valuable method of increasing visitors to your website. Warning: Never buy links or get involved in link trading tactics that are considered “Black Hat” by the search engines. They will find you and penalize you for your elicit efforts. Pay-per-click To the lay person pay-per-click (PPC) is often a complicated affair. However, you should learn the basics before approaching a firm to outsource the project. PPC is an advertising model used to direct traffic to your websites. You need to determine which group of keywords is most applicable to your business and select ones that will help people find you. With search engines, advertisers bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. They can cost as low as 5 cents per click and upward of $50. The keywords you chose ideally should have high search volume and low competition. This is part of the formal that leads most businesses to seek professional help. Just know that that a combination of volume (lots of people search for this keyword) and low costs is what everyone is shooting for. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft ad Center are the three largest network operators, and all three operate under a bid-based model. Social Media Social media is a relatively recent advancement and many businesses don’t know how to leverage the medium properly. While some businesses are randomly spamming social networking sites with promotions and products, others are successfully using social media to build trust and manage their online reputation. The most popular search terms are going to differ from platform to platform, so don’t assume that a top search term on Google is a top search term on Facebook or YouTube for instance. Furthermore, you’ll need to move away from thinking about keywords in queries and start thinking about keywords in conversations – a totally different context. Ultimately your goal is to convert visitors, whether it’s to “like” your business page on Facebook, sign up for a newsletter, or purchase a product, so you need to know what visitors are searching for and understand user behavior across different sites. In Conclusion Keyword research and SEO are clearly an integral parts of online marketing that can be incredibly useful in promoting your business, but the fundamentals haven’t changed – you need to provide a good product or service that people need in order for your business to grow. Once you’ve accomplished that, implement an SEO program and no matter what occurs, they will find you. Gabriel Shaoolian is the founder and CEO of Blue Fountain Media, a results-driven website design and online marketing company based in Union Square , Manhattan . Read more about Gabriel here .

Tagged as: business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, internet, internet marketing, marketing-strategies, seo

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Blog Writing 101: How To Satisfy Readers And Deliver Top 10 Google Rankings

by Paul Joseph July 21, 2011 Featured

My name is Ana Hoffman , and if I learned anything after many years of building an online empire, it’s this: the online business industry is a scary place. A place where many a mighty business owner has fallen. Including me. That’s right, I’ve had some online business flops in the past, until one day I realized that my business was only as good as the number of eyes that saw it on a daily basis. That’s why I started the Traffic Generation Cafe blog, focusing on various free traffic generation methods like search engine traffic, social media traffic, networking, as well as how to convert that traffic into subscribers and buyers. In six quick months, my blog grew to be an authority on traffic generation. My blog’s traffic (I was ranked under 15K on Alexa ), reader engagement, and sales showed me that I was on the right track. This might all seem foreign to you. Stick with me and it will soon become second nature. Now let’s get down to business. Content is the main driving force behind any blog’s success. That’s it? That’s the premise for my post? You bet. And if all of us already know that and are putting it into practice back on your blogs, then why are so many blogs still failing? Why are so many blogs not generating even measly amounts of traffic? Why are you here looking for answers or pearls of wisdom to take back to your business? Your content is the single most important driving force that will determine whether your readers stay, share, and convert into buyers or subscribers, period. But that’s not the only thing that matters. Your readers are the ones to determine if your content is up to par, but the search engines, Google in particular, are the ones to decide if your content is good enough to bring you those readers to begin with. So you see, our goal as bloggers should clearly be to always serve two masters: Google and our readers . I can already hear the objections coming in. Isn’t it an oxymoron, you say? Writing personable content that attracts human interest, brings about discussions, connects with the reader on a deep personal level and keyword-stuffed metric-based content that would rank highly on Google? I agree this used to be the case. However, in the new post-Panda world Google tells us louder and more clear than ever: it wants to serve its searchers the kind of content the searchers want to read – unique, beneficial, and productive. When Google sends you organic search engine traffic, it wants to make sure that the search engine visitors are happy with what they find on your blog and don’t come back to Google searching for the same query. Thus, you do your job of delivering superb content right and satisfy the searchers looking for answers, and Google will happily send you even more traffic. Turns out that serving two masters in this particular case goes hand in hand. Killing two birds with one stone – how much more efficient can it get? So let’s take a look at what specifically we, the bloggers, need to pay attention to when writing that new killer post of ours. I am basing my conclusions on this SEOmoz report on search engine ranking factors . If it isn’t the holy grail of search engine rankings and how to draw the most traffic from it, then it’s as close as we can ever get to it. Uniqueness Of Content This might’ve not been as strong of a factor in pre-Panda times. (If you need more information on what on earth I refer to as “ Panda Update “, here’s the most coherent resource on the subject: Finding more high-quality sites in search – and it’d better be since it comes from the official Google blog). According to the above-mentioned SEOmoz report, the collective opinion of 132 SEO experts polled assign the uniqueness of content across the whole site 89 points out of 100 . Unique content was the most original marketing tool back in the 1990s and it’s, once again, taking its well-deserved place as one of the most significant positive indicators of the quality of the entire site. While many bloggers continued to stand firm on the principle of consistently producing unique content, many took the easier way of jumping on the bandwagon of flavor-of-the-month promotion techniques, thus diluting the core principle that goes to the heart of blogging “ Thou shall not produce the kind of content thou wouldn’t want to read yourself “. What would one refer to as “ unique content “? What might be the characteristics both your readers and the search engines are looking to find on your site? In the broadest terms, it’s the kind of content not found on the multitude of other sites . If I see another post on “ 15 Ways to Get Facebook Fans ” or “ How to Guest Post “, I am going to scream. I am not saying you have to invent something new every time you write a post, but a new angle on the old tired topic is in order at the very least. Onsite Duplicate Content: When Google crawls your site and sees that two out of three pages are duplicates of the first one, they will drop those two pages from rankings and will assume your site has a lot less unique content to offer than it actually does. Read Duplicate Content Phantom: Don’t Be Duped, Be Informed for more information and fix whatever issues you might have on your blog. Advertising: Yes, the amount of advertising on your site does matter – both to Google and your readers. The larger your Adsense and other advertisement blocks are, the less space you devote to your content = the less unique content you’ll appear to have. That’s precisely why some sites suffered in Panda update – not because they didn’t have unique content, but because their content to advertising ratio was too low. Freshness Of Content Freshness of content on the site got 75 points out of 100 – the second most significant signal among non-keyword related on-page factors. This signal also happens to have a direct affect on how much traffic your website gets. Want to see your blog traffic double? Double the number of your posts . ( Disclosure: don’t hold me to the exact number. ) That’s exactly what I did at my Traffic Generation Cafe blog back in October and I saw for myself what wonders it did for my traffic generation. I, since then, decided to take a little summer break and cut down to posting only three – four times a week and watched my traffic take a hit. It makes sense, right? The more fresh posts you have, the more reason your readers will have to come back on a regular, even daily basis – provided that you are meeting the threshold of unique content on your site. So if you are currently posting two times per week, try to post at least four times; if you are posting four times, try to publish everyday. It might sound like a lot, but remember: your brain is a muscle and, with due practice, it’ll be spitting out the needed amount of posts in no time. Length Of Content Aha – here comes a surprising factor. It appears that the majority of the 132 SEO experts think that the longer your posts are , the better chance they have to rank higher , thus bringing you more search engine traffic. Length of content on the page got 57 out of 100 . Once again, it makes perfect sense. The longer the post is, the more potential value it will deliver to the readers. So what to do if your primary methods of communication with your readers include videos, audios, cartoons, infographs, etc.? Try to beef it up by including scripts, captions, and explanations. And no, it’s not a concession to Google and other search engines – you’ll be providing a valuable alternative to those readers who still prefer to… well, read. I know, I am one of them, and I always appreciate it when a video is followed by a script. Marketing Takeaway I hate cliches, and I am sure I am not alone on this one, but in this particular case I have to resort to the old and true “ Content is (still) king ” motto. Yes, we all know it, but now we also have reasons to actually do it. And in the end, wouldn’t it be a win-win situation for everybody? Stay tuned for my future posts where we will be discussing why your content is the cornerstone of social media sharing and link building, and how to improve it to get more of both. Ana Hoffman Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: book, business, content, internet, online, reader, search engines, search-engine, seo, small-business, traffic

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3 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting Your Business

by Paul Joseph June 9, 2011 Featured

A common mistake that young entrepreneurs make is unwittingly starting highly cyclical and highly risky businesses, when it hasn’t been all that long since the Great Recession in the U.S. was declared over by the National Bureau of Economic Research in June 2009. These cyclical, risky businesses operate on the premise that we are going to experience an economic boom or that we are in the midst of one. Instead, the younger entrepreneur must be more traditional with his or her start-up plans . This means that they can’t hope to base a business on marketing cool, cutting-edge products, or towards the consumer market rather than the B2B (business-to-business) market . Or, just as bad, the prospective buyer can live without the product or service comfortably for a prolonged period of time. Sometimes, selling something that is not absolutely necessary is riskier than it was 20 years ago. When the economy turns, buyers may remember and still be scared by the economic hardship we saw in the past several years. I would venture to guess that the Great Recession has forever changed at least this generation of consumer mentality on frivolous spending. Will our buying psyches remain unscathed or will we always be doubtful of the stock market and the volcano that is the U.S. economic system? John Steinbeck would argue the latter: “The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” From The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The story, as many an AP English student can tell you, focuses on economic and familial hardship during the Great Depression told through a poor, victim-of-circumstance farming family from Oklahoma. If the prior years of economic hardship have prolonged perverse effects on the buyer’s mentality, how does this affect the younger aspiring (or any age for that matter) entrepreneur choosing which business to start? An entrepreneur searching for the “next huge thing,” or just looking for a business to start, must ask these three questions to help determine the right path. 1) How Much Do Companies Feel That They Need My Service Right Now? You may feel as if everybody needs your product and you’re probably correct, however it makes the sale a lot easier when your target market feels that they can put you off for 60+ days and still not feel pressed to buy. When choosing which business to start, remember that the more urgent your target market’s needs are (their perception), the higher your success probability will prove . Through KAS Write I sell marketing outsourcing to small business to help them put off hiring a full-time employee, who is just as expensive and half as effective. Even though I think that in many situations this could help lower sales force costs, I wouldn’t swap the entire kaswrite.com businesses for the sales staffing aspect of KAS , because finding a new employee usually can’t wait, but the website and its marketing can hold off another day. 2) If You’re Selling Consumer Services Through The Web, How Set Is That Consumer On The “Big Guys”? B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing is done via repetition, repetition and more repetition. You have to have your product or service right in front of the buyers’ faces all day long, or you’re not going to succeed in gaining their respect as a business and their trust in your ability to deliver. For instance, if you open an online travel company or a stock trading platform, you must now compete directly with Expedia and E-Trade . I would have gotten crushed years ago if I had to rely on stealing the clients of Heidrick and Struggles . I don’t think a consumer services web-based start-up is the best idea for the aspiring entrepreneur for two reasons: When Internet businesses can no longer afford PPC Google Advertising , that industry has become ironically crowded, and you’re going to find yourself drowned in expenses with no branding traction. Also, Internet competitors never really go away, and they all have tremendously well programmed websites. Most Internet companies that have SEO real estate are not going anywhere. SEO real estate is forever, nobody just walks away from it, and you can only take up 10% – 20% of the front page of various Google results. 3) Are You Starting This Business For Right Now Or For Years From Now? A start-up is not like buying a U.S. Treasury bond. If you sit around waiting for certain economic conditions to happen before your idea can be really viable, you will go broke staring at your stopwatch. Businesses have to be set up with a sense of urgency. You need to focus on businesses that you can somehow monetize right now. It’s too risky to base your company’s success on external economic conditions. If you want, have a suite of products just like a hedge fund manager would have a portfolio of stocks, etc. World leaders have teams of the brightest, most educated economic advisors and still these individuals can’t predict what is going to happen. After the economic hardship our country (and the majority of the world) has been through, it’s even more naive and egotistical to think that you have a particular market pinpointed at a future date in time. Diversify and offer some services that may be low-hanging fruit until your economic prediction comes true. If you’re an entrepreneur, you can think of something. Looking back ten years from now, will young entrepreneurs heed the above advice regarding sticking only to the necessities that can be monetized ASAP? Or will they see mirages of success in starting high-risk, high-reward cyclical business after the Great Recession? After all, it was less than a year and a half ago when CNN Money’s Chris Isidore came out with the special report : “The Great Recession: Economists generally agree this is the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, but they say despite pain, another depression isn’t likely.” To learn more about start-ups, take a look at the “Two Mistakes That Young Entrepreneurs Make When Opening A Business” video. Ken Sundheim Get your bonus copy of my book “How To Start An Internet Business & Make Your First $1,000 Online” Download Here

Tagged as: business, clients, companies, consumer, internet, online, seo, young

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Web Marketing Workshop for Startups Bangalore. SEO, PPC, Content Generation, Social Media

by Paul Joseph May 23, 2011 Featured

OME Community Monthly Meetup Workshop series in Christ University, Bangalore. Web Marketing for Start Ups. OME Meetup Workshops series on SEO, Content Generation, Social media, Internet Ads for Start ups. What should Startups and Entrepreneurs focus on today. Online marketing business strategy. Learn how your Internet Marketing, Social Media strategies influence and affect your business strategy. (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: business, entrepreneurs, internet marketing, marketing, other-content, seo, your-business

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1M/1M Strategy Roundtable For Entrepreneurs: Guerilla P.R. & SEO Most Profitable Customer Acquisition Strategies

by Paul Joseph April 29, 2011 Featured

Recap of the 28 April 2011 roundtable by Sramana Mitra At this week’s roundtable, we had five entrepreneurs pitching. One recurring theme that kept coming up is that entrepreneurs are finding guerilla p.r. and SEO as two of the most effective and affordable customer acquisition strategies. At yesterday’s private roundtable we also had this discussion, so I thought I would mention it in today’s… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: content, frontpage, other-content, seo, sramana, sramana-mitra, week, yourstory-in

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Warning: Traffic Generation is not One-Size-Fits-All

by Paul Joseph April 14, 2011 Featured

I can’t begin to tell you how many countless times I’ve heard someone ask the question, “how do you get more traffic to your website?” And I don’t mean to me per say, but in general. This really is the ultimate challenge for many site owners isn’t it? At the end of the day, No traffic means no prospects, which means no revenue! Yikes! I’m here to debunk the notion that there is any one particular technique, tactic, whatever you want to call it, that’s going to bring in loads of traffic. I’m also going to tackle the notion that it’s a one-size-fits-all concept. That is, to get tons of traffic you need to follow a particular color by numbers plan. Nothing can be further from the truth… I’ve tried countless traffic generation tactics for multiple sites, from blogs to ecommerce, and I can tell you that traffic generation is all about implementing various tactics, seeing what works for YOU, and doing more of that! What works for one business may not work for another. This is not to say that you can’t follow a blueprint, where you plan your traffic generating strategies and work your plan.  This is very different than saying what works for me will work for you. Let me give you a few examples. I recently visited a site called Social Mouths , where the blog owner “confessed” that for the longest time he was only posting one article a week on his blog. Yet his traffic numbers and stats have continued to increase over the course of time. Hmmmm…. I also visited another site called Biz Chicks Blogs where the site owner, Tia Peterson, noted that her traffic increased substantially by posting content frequently. Who’s right and who’s wrong? That’s just it – neither one of them is wrong. They are both benefiting from the fruits of their labor and reaping the rewards of high traffic numbers, even though they have had different modus operandi. Or do they? What you don’t know is everything else they may or may not be doing behind the scenes, which may be contributing to their traffic generating efforts, such as: Blog commenting Interviews Webinars Social Networking/ Social Media Optimization Private Groups RT Clubs SEO Guest Posting Holding contest and encouraging social sharing Joint Ventures Facebook and Google Adwords Advertising Integrating forums on their site etc. … all things that may be contributing factors to their success. Want a plan? Here’s one for you: Test different specific traffic generating tactics on your site and measure their effectiveness over a designated period of time. Create a spreadsheet. In the first column type in Traffic Generating Tactics and type in the specific technique you want to measure. In the second column type in Start Date. In the third column type in Google Analytics Status (if applicable). Enter any statistics that you may have in this column. In the fourth column type in End Date. Enter the date in which you’ve stopped testing. In the fifth column type in Results. Make notes of any progress (or lack of) that you’ve noted using this technique. In the sixth and final column type in Additional Notes. Here you can type in relevant notes as you go along or enter any results from other statistical analysis. Here are some examples: If you are currently only adding new content to your site once a week, try adding 2-3 and measure the results over a three month period using Google Analytics to see if it makes a difference. If you are only utilizing social media for five minutes a day, try increasing it to 10-15 minutes and see if the increase in engagement equals higher traffic volumes. If you are not currently taking advantage of guest posting, seek out relatively active sites you can request to post on and see if over a course of time, your traffic increases using this method. If you’ve never paid attention to SEO before, think about optimizing some of your pages/posts and track their performance to see if ranking better with them correlates to more traffic. On the flip side, if you are an SEO fanatic, lighten up a bit and see if you can write content that connects to people more on the emotional level and see if this in turn promotes social sharing, thus more traffic! If you’ve used email marketing sporadically or inconsistently, try stepping it up a notch by emailing your subscribers on a weekly basis. I think you get the idea… The Big Takeaway: Traffic generation is all about trial and error.  You can only evaluate what works and what doesn’t work by trying different tactics. Stop comparing yourself to other websites in your industry; you are your own unique business. Focus on your unique selling proposition and capitalize on these assets. In a nutshell, traffic generation is like trying on shoes, they may look fantastic on someone else, but not so much on you. They key is to finding shoes that fit perfectly for YOU. Have you had success with traffic? What are your traffic generating secrets? Michele Welch is a Personal Coach and Online Business Advisor . She shares online business tips with those looking to start their own online business ventures, through her blog.  Read more about Michele here .

Tagged as: entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, internet marketing, online, seo, social, traffic, unique

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7 of the Biggest SEO Mistakes Most People don’t Know they’re Making

by Paul Joseph March 21, 2011 Featured

It’s been said that the first page of search engine results is the most highly coveted real estate on the Internet. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of websites exist for the same keywords, but only around 10 can appear on page one for a given search. Perhaps even more infuriating is that there is no way to pay for a front page listing, and no definitive guide for getting there every time — you just have to figure out how to rank well on your own, which can be pretty scary for a new business without much SEO experience. Thankfully, you don’t need to pay an expensive consultant, or trust the mystified “secrets” of SEO charlatans promising to reveal “Google’s top-secret algorithm” at an exorbitant price. The following tips for avoiding big SEO mistakes can put your website on the path to the top. Furthermore, so few website owners take the time to address all of these issues that simply correcting them all will put you lightyears ahead of the competition. Not Writing Content for the Human Reader High keyword density (the number of times a keyword appears in your content) is no longer a deciding factor in search ranking. In the past, it was common to stuff your website content with the keyword you wanted to rank for, and begin to see results. Today, this misguided strategy not only doesn’t work, but could begin to hurt your ranking. Why? Because search engines have gotten smarter. Search engines, especially Google, now use Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to analyze the text on a website and determine if it sounds the way a person would naturally write. In other words, Google can tell if you purposely filling your content with awkwardly placed keywords in an attempt to game the system and rank high. Don’t focus on having your main keywords appear as many times as possible, strive instead to create quality content written for a human reader, and you will be rewarded by the search bots. Ignoring HTML Errors It’s a fact — Google’s ranking algorithm hates HTML errors. Having errors on your page will count against you and could cause your rank to fall significantly, even if many other of your on-page factors are good. Unfortunately, website owners may not even know if their site contains errors, because web browsers don’t always show problems when you view a page. A great way to find and correct HTML problems is to make use of the free W3C HTML compliance checking tool . Simply input your website address and the tool will scan your page for errors and report back how many problems there are, and where in the code they exist. This makes it easy to find and fix any issues you may have before beginning your full-forced SEO push. Not Checking URL Canonicalization Have you ever noticed that there are two ways you can type in a website address? You could type “www . YourWebsite . com,” or you could simply type “YourWebsite . com.” While both of these URLs may resolve to the same website, they are actually different website addresses in the eyes of the search engines. As you build out your website, publish content and seek inbound links, your link total will actually get split in half, as some bloggers will type your URL with the “www” prefix, and others will leave it off. The solution is to tell the search engines to group both URLs together using a 301 redirect from one to the other. This is called URL canonicalization, and it can double your search engine power when done properly. It does not matter which URL — “www . YourWebsite . com” or “YourWebsite . com” you choose to redirect to the other, all that matters is that the redirect is a 301 (or permanent redirect). Any other redirect type will not work. Reciprocal Linking You have probably wondered how you will go about getting links from other bloggers and thought about offering an exchange — “You link to me and I’ll link to you, and we will both benefit.” Logical as this may seem, it won’t help your search ranking one bit. This strategy is known as reciprocal linking (two sites that link to each other), and is ignored by Google. When you link to a site that is linking to you, the links cancel each other out, and neither site gets the SEO benefit. Putting Important Content in AJAX AJAX is a great tool for making your website very pretty and user-friendly, and is a common staple of today’s Internet. If you put the wrong content in AJAX, however, it can negatively effect your SEO efforts. AJAX works by reaching into a server and pulling content out to display on demand, without having to refresh the web page. This means that this content is not readily available for search engine bots to scan, and will be skipped entirely when the they index your website. Imagine if 70% of your homepage was done in AJAX (not uncommon these days), and most of your important, descriptive content was containing within this framework. That would mean that almost all of your website would go unseen by the search engines, making you look irrelevant to all of your keywords. Avoid this problem by making sure you have your most important content in actual, on-page text. AJAX is great for some jobs, but don’t over-use it or your site will be invisible to Google’s ranking system. Using Keywords in the Wrong Context Google now looks as much at the text surrounding the keyword as they do the keyword itself. This is an attempt to determine the overall theme of a website — essentially asking “what is this site mostly about?” Therefore, if you’re trying to rank for a keyword such as “health insurance policy,” but your website publishes a lot of content about movie reviews to get traffic flowing in, Google will take notice that your target keyword appears in an irrelevant place. In the above example, the search engine will scan all of the content on your website in an attempt to theme it, and will deduce that it’s a “movie review” website. Therefore, if every movie review ends with a quick blurb about getting your “free health insurance quote,” it will devalue that keyword placement as irrelevant to the rest of the website. Additionally, inbound links from totally irrelevant sources are valued less than those from relevant websites. Make sure that your website is themed around the keywords you’re aiming to rank for to make the most of your written content. Focusing too Much on On-Page Factors While on-page factors — the elements of your website that you can control — such as HTML errors and keyword context are important to SEO, they are only a small part of a much bigger picture. Think about it — if there was a recipe you could follow to make your site rank on the first page, the search engine results would be a joke. They would be dominated not by the best, most relevant and helpful websites, but by whatever businesses cracked the mystery code and slid their site onto page one. Needless to say, this is antithetical to the search engine philosophy. To solve this problem, search engines now rank a site largely based on the number of other sites that link to it. The idea here is that if other people find your website helpful or entertaining enough to recommend that their visitors check it out, it must be worthwhile. Therefore, it must be stressed that the majority of your SEO efforts should be spent seeking inbound links, not endlessly tweaking your own website. On-page optimization should be thought of a quick prerequisite to getting links, and quickly taken care of early on. About the Author: Jerrimie Allen is a freelance writer for Invesp. Invesp helps businesses improve their online revenue, reduce customer acquisition cost, and provide their visitors with a better user experience through landing page optimization .

Tagged as: code, entrepreneur, internet, real-estate, search, search engines, seo, time, words

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SEO, PPC, Social Media Summer Boot Camp Bangalore

by Paul Joseph March 5, 2011 Featured

Web Marketing Academy a Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Social Media Marketing Training Academy in Bangalore, India is all set to start a series of boot camps this summer from March 15th – June 30th on SEO Training, PPC Training, and Social Media Marketing Training in and around Bangalore. The boot camps are focused on providing hands-on training, mentoring and coaching on… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: content, india, marketing, seo, social, social-media, training

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Social Media minus the myths : The Art of Social Media

by Paul Joseph March 2, 2011 Featured

The biggest mistake today’s businesses make about social media is compare it with Search engine Ads. So before jumping into this article, I will clarify this for every one. Social media and SEO / SEM are two different worlds. They target two different set of people who have completely different mindset and needs. Let’s take an example, I want to buy a shoulder bag and am ok with not going to… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: article, frontpage, other-content, search, seo, yourstory-in

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