Saturday, May 24, 2008

List Building and Why You Need To Do It!

I'm sure you have heard the saying 'the money is in the list'. This is quite true with Internet Marketing and list building really is a necessity to make a good income online.

So just how do you build a good, targeted list that will take your online business to the next level? Here are some points that may help you in your list building efforts.

1. Sell your offer so that your visitors just can't say 'no' to signing up to your list. You need to make your visitors think that opting in to your list is the best decision that they can make at this point in time.

So if your niche is on dog training then offer a free report on 'Tips for Training Your Dog' or something similar.

2. Whatever it is that you offer your visitors make sure that it is targeted to your niche. You don't want to offer a free report on horse riding if your niche is about dog training. You need to offer your visitors something that they would really value and in return you will get a good list.

3. Once you have subscribers signed up to your list it is important to build a good relationship with them. You can set up your autoresponder to send out a sequence of emails to your customers at intervals set by you.

4. Make sure that your emails are also targeted to the niche that your subscribers subscribed to. If your emails are not related to the niche then your subscribers will not be interested in reading them.

Also make sure that any products that you promote through your emails also relate to the niche otherwise you are just wasting your time and are not likely to make any sales.

To learn more about how you can master niche affiliate marketing, please visit his website today to start right away http://www.makemoneyonlinehow.com/

Franck Silvestre specializes in providing a successful niche marketing plan right from the start.

How Many Articles Should I Submit Every Month To Make Sales?

Do you want to make more money with article marketing? Let me show you some of the common mistakes made by newbies just starting with this form of advertising, then I will show your the exact steps to quickly becoming more profitable.

Deadly Article Marketing Mistakes

1. Submitting one article per week.

Actually, it's not really a sin, but you will not make a lot of profits except if nobody else write and submit articles in your niche.

One article will not make you a lot of profits.

2. Submitting to only one directory

If you only submit to a single directory, you will not get the exposure you deserve. Profit from leverage in every single thing you do.

3. Mass submission

I see that many newbies try to submit with articlemarketer or articlepostrobots.com. There is no need to do this.

Will this hurt your article marketing plan because of the threat of duplicate content?

No, I've submitted with those services as well and my articles still bring me traffic. Duplicate content is another issue that I will discuss with you later because it needs a more in depth analyze.

What are the exact steps for success?

You need to do the following:

* Write several articles a day. I suggest a minimum of two per day to start. If you can't or don't have the time, this tedious work can be outsourced.

* Submit to the top twenty directories. For obvious reasons, you need to outsource this part as well.

If you are on a budget, you need to do this yourself. I know it's not easy but it's how I started.

To learn more, download my Free Guide: "How To Earn $100K Per Year With Article Marketing"

Franck Silvestre makes thousands of dollars a year from affiliate and article marketing. Wonder what the secret to his success is? Discover how he does it at: http://www.mynetmarketingland.com/article-marketing/

High Ranking In The Search Engine - Your Step By Step Guide

A high ranking in the search engine is very important to any webmaster on the net. It is without doubt the best place to have a searcher on the internet find your website. If you wish to have swarms of free traffic coming to your website on an ongoing basis, then you need to make sure that your keywords are placed in the top 1-5 positions when a search uses the keywords you use to optimize your web pages. So how do we get high rankings in the search engines?

First off, you need to make sure that you have your web pages fully optimized for the search engines so that they understand exactly what your website is all about! The search engines need to know what your site is about in order to display your pages to the searchers. How do they do this? They can identify what your web pages are about when they look at the title tag, the header tags, bold tags and the keyword density within the text content. Basically, if you are targeting a keyword like "Salmon fishing" then you will want to include it in the title tag, header tags and throughout the content both at the top and at the bottom.

You then need to acquire back links for your web pages. In case you are unfamiliar with the term back links. A back link is when a website/web page has a link in the form of an anchor text of your url pointing to your web page. This in the eyes of the search engines is classed as a vote to your web page. The more votes you get from other web pages, the higher you will climb in the search engines. However, it is advised that you try and get web pages that have a high page rank with a your link pointing back to your web page or site.

Not every website can give you a quality vote. If you get a vote from a website that has a high page rank it will be more beneficial to you. Just be careful of websites that can actually damage your ability to rank high. Most of the time, these sites are spammy and linking to them will harm your rankings!

Following these guidelines you should be well able to boast your keyword optimized pages in the search engines. It important to make sure you are on top of the game and your competitors.

I use a piece of software that really helps me with my SEO on my websites. It saves me a lot of time and money and boasts traffic to my sites. I have had web pages that rank in the top 5 position for very competitive keywords thanks to this software. What to know what it is? Then please visit the link below

If you would like to learn more about this tool, please read the SEO Elite review, or visit http://its-about-internet-marketing.blogspot.com/

Key Marketing Strategies To Gain Traffic To Your Website

You did it! You finally took that leap of faith and started your own business. You have a website, and you are ready for your first client. The only problem is no one is visiting your site. With so many websites online, how do you make your company stand out? How do you get people to even know your business is alive? Marketing is not just for the major fortune 500 companies. Every business needs a marketing plan. No matter if your company has one or two employees, or one to two thousand employees. In this article we will look at a couple of different ways to market your site.

The first thing you want to do is submit your website to all of the major search engines. This will include Google, MSN, and yahoo. By doing this, it will allow the search engines to crawl your site and index it accordingly in the natural listing. The natural listing is the list of websites that appear on the left hand of the page. Another method would be sign up for sponsored ads, or pay per click ads. This can be done with one or all of the major search engines. You will create an account, and set up a monthly budget. You will then create ads and list of keywords appropriate for your website. When consumers are online searching for a particular product and enter your keyword, your ad will show up in the sponsored ad section. This can be found at the very top, the very bottom, and the right hand side of the page. You pay a set amount every time someone clicks on your ad, which is really a small price to pay for a potential customer.

Email marketing is another great way to gain customers. Make sure you have a sign up box on your website to capture email address of your visitors on your site. There are several companies available to help you with this, and many of them come with a free trial period. Constant contact and I contact are a few good companies to take a look at. It is important that you have the consumer's permission before sending them an email. You do not want to be accused of spam. Not only does spam turn a customer off, it is a quick way to get a bad reputation for your business.

Make sure you get professional business cards with all of your contact information listed. You want to include your business name, address, phone number, fax number, email address, and of course your website. Hand them out as often as possible; during business functions and even at the grocery store. You never know where a potential customer may be. Flyers are another great marketing idea. You can have them printed professionally or if your budget is tight, print a few yourselves. All you need is a color printer, glossy paper, and a software like adobe PageMaker, or Microsoft word. Post your flyers wherever possible; grocery stores may have bulletins, your local library, and your local community center. Once you start to gain customers, it's important to keep in contact with them. It is much more expensive to attract a new customer then it is to have a repeat customer. Send out postcards to keep them abreast of what's new with your company. Let them know when you will have sales and promotions or if you have a new product available. You can even send them a birthday card or a Christmas card.. This will keep you on your clients mind.

If you put all of these methods into action, you will start to see traffic to your website. And of course, the more traffic to your website, the greater chance you have of making that sale!

http://www.dreacustomdesigns.com

List Building - It's ALL About List Building

So, what are the two options in Internet Marketing?

List building or failure.

It's just that simple.

Many, many people come online looking to make quick cash. That would be nice, but the old idea about if anything seems to be too good, it probably isn't applies online more than anywhere else in the world! You can spend months, chasing the buck, running from program to program, hoping that THIS will be the one, or you can do something fundamentally simple and make money very quickly.

List building isn't rocket science:

  • You build a squeeze page.
  • You get it up onto a server.
  • You send traffic to it.
  • People sign up for your list
Bang!

There are plenty of ways to send traffic to your list building page, too. You can:

  • Write articles about your niche
  • Write a blog regarding your niche
  • Use Pay-per-Click
  • Write press releases
  • Learn Search Engine Optimization
and there are 12 other ways that you can get traffic to that list building page and build an enormous list.

Before you start driving traffic, though, you set up an autoresponder and load it up with messages. You offer news, information, or tips about your niche, and you introduce the folks on your list to a product you can stand behind because you've tried it and love it. Then, you will make money.

Joining every free program out there won't make you rich or you may not get ANY money at all. You must be willing to invest in your business, to get serious about creating a business of your own, to start list building. It' just that simple.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of OvercomeEverything, Inc. and a master of list building. Learn the 9 Laws of List Building at MyFirstList.com

Article Marketing - How to Use Article Marketing to Get Prospects to Come to You

The way I do it is with article marketing combined with list building. Now, the beautiful thing about article marketing, is that I don't have to go where they hang out. All I have to do is write articles that make sense to them. Upload them to the article directories, and then the article directories because of their own high search engine ranking ability, their high pay rank, the article directories themselves will get my articles where people hang out.

Not necessarily where people hang out but where people look. So for example if somebody's looking for information about natural health, let's say somebody's looking for information about natural health, I'm into natural health. Well, I can go about this 2 different ways, number 1 I can go hang out on all the natural health forums and the natural health blogs, and all of that. I can kind of hope I can pick up some visitors. Or I can write natural health articles, I can submit them to the online article directories.

The online article directories have the page rank to get me ranked high in the search engines, and then what happens is when somebody goes in and they search for a term like natural health or alternative health or natural health for my knee, or whatever they're thinking about, natural health, for example, then my article is going to come up really really high. So I'm not going to necessarily get them where they hang out, but I'm going to get them when they're looking for information.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Sean Mize is a full time internet marketer who has written over 1200 articles in print and 9 published ebooks.

Link Building Campaign

Link building is not an easy task if you depend purely on manual efforts to go out and request for links in the link building campaign. There are two types of links: one way and reciprocal.

Certain link building tips are

Submit to directories

Do slow and continuous submissions for your website. This is a team work and solution for any site. Start doing directory submission from the very first date your site is up.

Reciprocal link building

Contact webmasters of relevant sites and requesting to have a link exchange. Write emails for the request for link exchange. Mention them the benefits of link building. Remember to give the URL, title as well as description of the link.

To search for a link partner search goggle and other search engines for terms like "keyword reciprocal links", keyword links"," keyword link exchange" etc

Article Submissions:

Write quality articles that have interesting and useful information and submit these to free article directories.

Put link back to your site. Articles provide double benefit, link back and bring traffic. Make keyword anchor link to your site. You can expect good results when you place article to high page rank and high traffic sites. Sometimes you submit articles like submission to directories while in other case you request webmaster via email.

Submit Press Releases:

Write press release about your website and submit to press release distribution sites or services.

Submit to social networking sites

Social networking sites are very useful resource these days for getting back links as well as huge traffic. The other benefit is that you get thousands of friends to make there and convert them into your prospective customers. Participating in such type of sites is considered as boom these days. There are many types of such sites available online. Thus it is a great way to have links and traffic.

Get link from .org and .edu sites

Education and organization sites are considered as more valuable sites and links form such sites are valuable links. Search such type of sites. Find out the forums and blogs of the organizations that have content relevant to your website. Make comments in blog and put links in it. Remember that the comment is genuine and not as a spam. In a similar way put your link in forum signature. You can also put blog comment and forum sign at non edu sites.

Participation in link farms

There are certain good link programs where you help others to get them link and others too help you. This is good for link building but too much of it should be avoided.

Rajeev Guglani writes Articles for SEO. He has vast exposure in Writing for Web Promotions .He is working for NDDW. For Link Building Campaign, Reciprocal and one way link building and Link Building Services India visit http://www.nddw.com

How To Find Profitable Products To Promote - Identifying And Modeling Super Affiliates

As affiliate marketers, should we be leaving our product selection decisions to gossip and intuition. Brad Callen apparently does not believe that we should. He developed Affiliate Elite to provide current data to help us make those marketing decisions. Inside Affiliate Elite, Project #1 is titled: How to find profitable products to promote. Do you think that the identity and campaign details of the super affiliates would help us select products form marketing strategies?

Just in case you did not answer yes to that question, the reason we would want to know the identities of the super affiliates and their marketing strategies for a specific product is that we could then pattern our activities after theirs. Do what successful people are doing, improving upon it if possible. That is a solid success strategy. Affiliate Elite identifies the super affiliates. AE tracks and identifies their strategies all in later projects. Project #1 also reveals important information. The lower tab referred provides a time line for the percentage of sales which are completed by affiliates. The remainder are completed by the merchant. If the referred percentage is very high and almost 100%, then you will need to use later projects to identify the super affiliates. If the referred percentage is significantly less than 100%, say 70%, then that means that 30% of all net sales are completed by the merchant. 30% of all sales for a product is awesome. Then the merchant is the super affiliate.

If the merchant is completing a disproportionate percentage of the sales volume, then is this not an opportunity for an affiliate to operate against less competition? Later projects will tell us the keywords, the ad copy, the web pages, the marketing strategy of any super affiliate, but if the merchant is the super affiliate, it is even easier. Just copy the strategy of the merchant and improve it slightly where possible. If you highlight a product and then click the bottom link for referred, then you will see the time trends of affiliate sales volume. If this value is increasing, then affiliates are becoming more active. If this value is decreasing over time, then the merchant is becoming more active. Remember all other values must be assumed constant when making this type of analysis. In this example, I am assuming you have already established that the product has an increasing popularity using the gravity tab as described previously. So if product sales are rising and referred is falling, then the merchant is likely running promotions or some successful marketing activity. Use the other projects to identify the activities and jump on board.

Again, much less gossip and intuition. Much more data and time trends. Brad Callen and Affiliate Elite will change affiliate marketing forever.

Click here for demonstration videos

The videos show you how to use some of the features of Affiliate Elite.

Click here to find out more about Affiliate Elite

Updates will be posted and forwarded as available as we lead
up to the launch date. If you read the copy carefully you will
find directions to 14 training videos and and the pdf training
manual for Affiliate Elite. Do you want a head start?
Mapping out your success with Mike Anderson, Roswell, Georgia 30075
mikesbizzz@yahoo.com
http://rbm3.com/wma/home.php

How Links Can Boost Your Search Engine Page Ranking

It is well known that one of the best search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is to create incoming links to your website. As general rule, the more links there are to your website, the more popular it will be with the search engines.

However, much depends on where the links are coming from as some links can even be damaging to your website's popularity with the search engines. Any SEO professional should be able to help you create the right links for your website. However, if you do not have the budget for this, there are a few steps you can take yourself.

The first thing to remember is that the value of any link to your site will depend on the popularity of the site where the link appears. For example, a link from a site like usatoday.com will be much more beneficial than a link from an obscure website.

When setting up a new website, many companies embark on a link building campaign. This usually involves contacting other website owners requesting that you each place reciprocal links on your sites. There is software available to automate this process for you.

While this can certainly drive traffic to your website, it can also have some disadvantages. Using reciprocal links means that you are encouraging visitors to navigate away from your website. Also, the links to your websites should appear on websites that at least have some popularity.

Another option is to have your website listed in directories. However, links to your site on these directories usually expire after a few days so this is an ongoing process.

You can also market your website while increasing the number of links to it by submitting articles to article directories. Basically, you write articles on certain topics and submit them to article submission sites, or use an article submission service. These articles are available free to whoever wants to use them on the condition that the page where it is published contains your details and a link back to your site.

Ideally, you should write articles on subjects that are relevant to your website and encourage people to use your products or services, without sounding like advertising.

The above methods can all be useful tools in increasing the number of links to your website. However, there is nothing more effective for creating links than a good website with quality content that people want to read. If people like your website, they will link to it of their own accord.

For more information about how to get started as a freelancer, visit FreelanceSprout.com.

Concealed Strategies Internet Marketing

"What am I doing wrong?" Sometimes you wonder how come competing websites get so many daily visitors and you only have a few people dropping in now and then. Here are some things you can do to change that and have thousands of visitors.

You may not have original content on your site. Giving visitors original information that they cannot find any where else is critical. Make sure your website is the authority on what you offer and individuals will continuously visit. Not only should the information be up to date it should also be factual and not science fiction unless your site is a SCI-FI site. New Stories, Articles, and Press releases that relate to your website will also make persons interested in checking it out. Giving away free e-books is a great idea; potential customers would appreciate receiving free information being sent to them about things that interest them.

Do you offer freeware (software)? Not doing this could do your site a lot of damage. Every body loves to find great offers on useful software for their personal computers and because it is free, this makes it even better. Having an article directory will encourage lots of people to your website, If you don't own a directory you should get one right away. A Directory to consider is an Article Directory for visitors to submit article, this will not only increase visitors but it also increase the information on your site, the search engines like fresh new material. A SEO link Directory is also a great idea where other sites can promote themselves, this gives more value to your customers. People will visit because they can locate what ever they're are searching for all on one website.

Offering samples of your goods or service will make people more likely to visit your website, if you are not giving away free samples this will cause you to receive fewer visitors than you should. Visitors would trust you and be more interested in buying once you show theme that your confidence in your service or product is so strong that you are willing to give away free samples.

Is there consistency on your website? If not you should look into maintaining the theme of your site. You don't want unrelated content that does not go with the whole theme of your site. You should also make your website public ready. People are not trusting to Internet businesses so to build trust you must have a place on your site that has details about the owner- your name, phone number, address and money back guarantee.

Do you offer a payment Option for your services? You should keep pricing flexible, if you try offering a fixed price you could loose customers who can't afford one payment, but if you have an easy payment plan you could get interested visitors who would not normally be able to, to purchase your product. Most business both offline and online offer Options plans because of this you should too. If your' guilty of any these things you should take the action. You would see incredible results. If you would like to know more about self employment opportunities check out the attached link.

Andy The Home Biz Wiz recommends for more information subscribe to my FREE Internet Home Business tips newsletter and get hundreds of money making tips and tricks along with FREE Software delivered to your inbox. A $147 value, yours FREE Signup at:

http://www.MakingMoneyFromHomeOnTheInternet.com

SEO - Keyword Selection

Key words are the magic players who let search engines to recognize your website and take your website to higher rankings. Key words are the single or multiple words that describe the content of your website most appropriately and relevantly. When you select keywords, you must do it very carefully and intelligently following the guidelines that I provide in this post.

There are few tools in the internet where you can find keywords. Two of them are keyworddiscovery and free tools in seobook dot com. The keyworddiscovery dot com asks for purchasing their service but also provides a free trial where you can register with an email. The free trial only allows limited number of keyword searches per day. But if you can create few email accounts and register in keyworddiscovery dot com, you can easily avoid this limitation. SEO tools in seobook dot com are absolutely free and they were designed by the father in SEO, one of my favorite, AARON MATTHEW WALL. These tools are highly used and trusted by many SEO guys around the world. If you have money to spend, there are hundreds of sophisticated and automated SEO software to be sold. But I personally feel that the free tools I provided are quite enough to SEO your website. All you have to do is thinking of a keyword or few keywords which describes the content of your website or webpage best. Then search them with an above mentioned tool and check the number of searches. You have to find your keyword or number of keywords in a way that they have the highest number of searches.

It is a better approach if you can have a keyword phrase than a single keyword. Because it is proved that the keyword phrases are more productive compared to a single keyword. For an example, let's assume that your website is about webhosting and the keywords you found are "web hosting", "cheap hosting" and reliable hosting", you can make a phrase as "cheap reliable web hosting". Never use a single key word or phrase for multiple pages. Always try to use a different keyword phrase for each webpage. Otherwise you will lose the quality and productivity of the SEO. Never use more than two primary and few secondary keyword phrases. I will let you how to and where to put these primary and secondary keywords in the coming posts.

If your website has more than hundred pages, make sure that all your pages convey the main theme and niche of your website. Each page must have a unique content and it should be informative and useful for your visitors and customers. As I mentioned earlier, you must have separate keyword phrases for each page. Always make sure that you select the best keyword phrase for each page.

If there are dynamically generated web pages in your website, you should find a technique to add the keyword phrase suitable for each page. For an example, if you provide a customized search option in your website, the result page will differ according to the search parameters. Then you have to define keywords for each criterion and add it in the programming level of the website. The most important thing you must understand is, the best keyword phrase you found for a page might not be the best after few months. You must do keyword research few times per year if you maintain a high productivity in your SEO effort. In the next post I will explain you about the webpage optimization and homepage optimization.

Sampath Wijeratne is the administrator and main contributor of http://www.best-internet-guide.com which provides information on various topics related to the internet with free of charge. It also provide RSS subscription through a RSS link and by email. You will find more related articles in his website.

Article Marketing - The Cold, Ultimate Truth About Article Marketing

The myth of autopilot income from articles is truly a myth. I know I'm going to receive a ton of flak for this, but there's no such thing as truly automated income from article marketing. The reason for that is this: articles lose some of their traffic generation power after some time, you'll have to keep pumping them out to keep your profits coming in. Information is growing exponentially online; if you don't continuously release new content, your traffic will drop.

It's also not good enough to submit five to ten articles a month. Many article marketers simply submit a number of articles similar to that and stop. Totally. They don't see results and they give up! Five to ten articles will never create hundreds of visitors to your websites, you have to be pumping them out in the hundreds to see any "real" traffic.

Go to sites like Ezine Articles. The top writers churn out hundreds and thousands of articles and they are doing it for a reason. Because it works. It works in generating traffic, and it's also a great branding tool. Having hundreds of articles out there is a great credibility weapon.

I don't care if you are marketing affiliate products, an ecommerce store, an eBay store, or selling your own digital products. Article marketing works, but only if you work it. Most people give it a try and declare that it doesn't work. Maybe they are too lazy to write the articles. Well, if you have a bundle of extra cash, you can certainly outsource the articles. But if you don't, you'll just have to keep churning them out. The rewards will be totally amazing.

Fabian Tan is the author of the free 51-Page Report:

"Murder Your Job: How To Build Cash Sucking Autopilot Businesses In 30 Days Or Less!"

Head over to http://www.MurderYourJob.com to get your free copy now before it's gone!

5 Incredible SEO Tips That Never Fail

The term SEO is very familiar to anyone who knows what online business is and what it is all about. There are many people and many institutions that have unbelievable achievements to their name. But all these achievements will come to a naught if there is no authority to officially recognize this amazing feat. So is the case in online business and marketing. Any feat achieved by an online site on the web must be recognized by search engines to be taken seriously in the internet. SEO tips are the sources through which you can make search engines sit up and take notice of your site.

SEO tips are the methods by implementing which you are sure to attract the attention of major search engines. Yes, you may have the best looking website with amazing text and content, but what is the use if no one has any knowledge about your site. If you have a site running on the web and major search engines do not have inkling about your site, then what is the use of having such a site? I have found out and compiled a list of 5 incredible SEO tips that are guaranteed to help you in making search engines notice your site on the web.

First and foremost you must make sure that you know what SEO also known as search engine optimization is all about. How can you ever go about doing something about which you have no knowledge? So first of all equip yourself with all things that you can about optimization on the web. There are different ways that you can use for making major search engines take notice of your online site.

Blog building is one method that has been very successful for optimizing a site on the web. For this first you will have to create a database of websites with which you can exchange links and build up a chain, so that your site is visible everywhere on the web. While building up the database make sure that you search and find out those sites that are relevant to your site and product which you are selling on the web.

Do proper keyword research. One good way of finding out proper keyword for a site is by thinking what words are most likely to be used by visitors for searching information about the product and service that you are offering to them for sale. There are also some keyword selection tools that you can use for finding out relevant keywords. Wordtracker, overture, digital point forum are some of the major keyword tracking tools.

Writing title for each page of you site is also a good way of going about attracting search engine bots. The title of a webpage contains the relevant keyword and keyword phrases. The title is also important from the visitor point of view. So if you visit a site and want to know what the site is all about and also its relevance by viewing the title of the page through the source code.

Writing articles using the keyword of your site is also a good way for optimizing your site on the web. You can write articles and publish these articles in different article sites. This is also a great source for you help in spreading the link of your site on the World Wide Web. Articles are also a great source of information to online visitors.

Read all the above mentioned SEO tips very carefully. Implement them in your site and I am sure you will very easily be able to optimize your site in major search engines on the web. And once you have optimized your site on the web, your business can grow by leaps and bounds.

Steve Waganer has specialization in Web Marketing. He is expert in search engine optimization, Affiliated Marketing,search engine marketing and Website Marketing.To get his expert advice for your website to get high rank and top position in major search engines visit http://www.cometsearchenginemarketing.com

Part I - Linking Practices That Will Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings

Quality linking practices are encouraged by the major search engines as an acceptable way of improving site popularity, website traffic and help contribute to higher search engine rankings. As a webmaster you must be wary of engaging in poor linking practices that have the potential to strip your website of its ranking status on the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN.

In this two part Article Series we will firstly discuss those linking practices that will find your website penalized by the major search engines, with the most current controversy over 'paid links'. Google has recently penalized several sites with ranking drops for violating its quality webmaster guidelines by selling paid links. This penalty can also be applied to those sites displaying 'paid links' that are considered spam or of low quality by the search engines and provide users with a poor browsing experience.

Not all paid linking will be penalized, the current focus tends to be on those links that are primarily being used to manipulate search engine rankings. Purchasing paid links may also affect your rankings if the originating site selling the links is considered to be a 'bad neighborhood' site by the major search engines, your site's rankings can be affected by association. As a general rule, avoid companies selling links who are promoting paid links that are 'hard to detect by a search engine' and with the recent increase in the reporting of paid links to Google, their ranking algorithms are being adjusted to detect such paid links.

The advice from Google on paid links is that it's okay to promote paid links that are aimed at increasing website traffic but are not being used to manipulate search engine rankings. If you are using paid links:-

Add a 'no follow attribute' to the linking info, for more information on how to do this see Google Webmaster Tools

You can also redirect the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from the search engines with robots.txt file.

Clearly define paid advertising links on your site to the search engines ie. with a 'sponsored link' title heading.

Another linking practice that is discouraged by the major search engines is using Link Farms to artificially increase a site's link popularity. Link farms are usually classified as a website or web page that displays a series of links to other unrelated sites and displays no content of real value or interest to site visitors. These types of links pages are usually created by automated software programs and services. To avoid being caught linking to a 'link farm' vigorously check all link exchange requests and the reciprocal URL location of your link on their site. Link farms will be obvious in nature as no actual web content will be present for site visitors except links and often the link exchange will be represented as a '3 way link' exchange.

3 Way Linking' has been an emerging trend over the past 12 months and is designed to quickly boost the search engine rankings and online presence of the requesting link partners site by anonymously building link pages that have no direct link to them so that they can't be penalized by the search engines for deceptive SEO practices. 3 Way Links are of little or no benefit to your site or your linking campaign as typically the third party site that your link is located on has no content relevance to your own site or worse still it is just a 'link farm'. Once again your site's search engine rankings can be penalized by association.

Check link exchange requests carefully as often 3 way linking practices are hidden in the link request, in some cases you may agree to a link exchange with a site whose content is similar to yours only to find that when the link exchange is completed that your link has been placed on a third party site. Often the site requesting the link exchange does not even have a links page set up on their site. 3 Way Links can also be represented as 'triangular link exchanges'.

The final linking practice we will look at is 'Cross Linking'. Excessively cross-linking sites of unrelated content can and will violate the quality webmaster guidelines of Google, Yahoo and MSN. This linking practice is generally used to artificially increase the number of links to a site and link popularity with the main aim of manipulating the search engine rankings. Even if you are the owner of multiple sites it is unwise to cross link them if the content of the sites is unrelated.

I came across a prime example of cross-linking recently when analyzing a potential new client's site for SEO & website marketing recommendations. What I discovered was that their existing SEO provider had excessively cross-linked their site to all their other clients sites under the disguise of 'site map' pages which were not only numerous in quantity but also keyword stuffed. This practice has somehow gotten past the ranking algorithms of Google and Yahoo most likely because the pages were being represented as 'site map' pages however the site had been penalized by MSN with no rankings showing whatsoever.

The only way of bringing up the site on MSN was to type in the site's direct URL address. The site owner was completely unaware of this breach which was explained away by this SEO company as the search engine results for MSN being inconclusive on the day they were searched for reporting purposes. To a novice, this explanation probably seems viable - so website owners be wary and don't be afraid to ask questions as to why your site is not receiving rankings in at least the top 10 pages of the search engine results for Google, Yahoo & MSN especially if you are paying for professional SEO services. Avoid automated software being added to your site primarily for SEO purposes, organic search engine results are certainly achievable without the application of automated software which usually displays web pages of lower quality than your main web pages and certainly be wary of site maps being developed for your site in the format I have described above. These are generally placed in the footer of your home page with the words site map preceding them, followed by an A - Z listing of site map web pages. This doesn't apply to software added to your site to record site statistics for performance analysis.

Positive linking practices will be discussed in Part 2 of this Article Series.

Rosemary Donald, Rank1 Website Marketing 5th November, 2007
www.rank1websitemarketing.com

Rosemary Donald is an SEO Consultant with Rank1 Website Marketing
( http://www.rank1websitemarketing.com ) and author of the SEO ebook 'Insider Secrets of Rank1 Websites' available for $29.95 AU. Rosemary is a regular contributor to online article sites on the topics of SEO, website marketing, ecommerce, search engine marketing and small business development.

Rosemary is also a successful online trader and owner of http://www.sabujewellery.com a top ranking on site on Google, Yahoo and MSN with experience in online marketing, export sales, importing, growing customer bases, ecommerce customer service, online sales generation and Rank 1 search engine marketing.

How To Use Search Engine Optimization to Destroy Your Competition in 3 Easy Steps

Search Engine Optimization - Secrets Revealed.

Let's begin: What is 'competition'? Competition is described as "one that competes", "a rival", "selling or buying goods or sevices in the same market as another", and even down to the biological level - "an organism that lives in competition with another".

SEO & Web - Competitive Landscape.
Increasingly, web surfers are using search engines to find companies, services and goods. Big and smaller companies, are using search engine optimization and search engine marketing techniques to beat their competitors. On the Internet, we are dealing with virtual entities - and we all compete in increasingly tougher and user-aware market places. Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing focuses on building traffic and allowing you to leverage your websites, services and products. Through competitive research, optimal keyword strategies, quality content, link-back neighborhoods and educating yourself on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM), you should be well positioned to beat the competition -- over time.

What options exist for creating revenue online?
A) Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are two fantastic ways in which you can get visibility on the Internet. Additionally, you can and should include email marketing strategies, with a complete CRM and backoffice process. You can increase visibility and competitive edge hundred-fold. Great content with an intelligent link strategy is vital.

B) Affiliate Marketing Programs. Join and promote these (Mr. Jeff Bezos at Amazon is famous for this). Create one for your company - with potentially exciting and lucrative results. (The merchants, or you - offer affiliates commissions for sales activity generated by the affiliate's web sites).

C) Adsense. A sophisticated affiliate online advertising program from Google. Complimentary Adsense Training Videos are worth a look. However, without search engine marketing and search engine optimization, you are missing out on other huge opportunities for smashing the competition and making large sums online.

D) Adwords. A break-through ad ('sponsored advertising') system from Google that can bring traffic (quality) to your site within 1/2 hour! The complimentary adwords email courses show ways to beat the system, and lessen the frustration on your part. It can get expensive fast.

Create edge and stay competitive with SEO and SEM.
You must have a service or product niche - to create success on the Internet using these 'silent money making engines'. You need to understand that niche marketplaces is how you get there, along with sound search engine optimization and search engine marketing principles, quality content, backlinks and CRM sales backend processes.

Optimization Tip #1: On and off page optimization, what is that, and why is it important?

First of all you need to create a web site that is a related to a niche marketplace. (You already know who your customer is, right!?) It is very important that you do your keyword research first. In fact, competitive research as an action step is missed by over 98% of the online marketplace. There are many great keyword tools and many are free. Keep in mind that Google 'owns' over 50% of the search marketplace. (Yahoo receives about 30% and MSN about 20%). Google is a very important search engine for you to focus on, and I suggest you start with it (even though MSN and Yahoo are great resources - especially the newly launched MSN Adcenter).

Competitive SEO Research:
Try the following on yahoo and google (make sure syntax is correct): site: www.competitor.com. (replace 'competitor' with real name). It will show you how many pages that each search engine has indexed from the competitors site. Depending on the site, many results could be returned. Look to see if each page has a title and description associated with them. You will then be able to determine whether each page within your competitor site has been individually optimized.

When you start researching keywords do not start with the most common keyword. For example, if you are selling Canon products, do no start researching or optimizing for the word 'Canon'. You need to break it down - for example - to 'Canon power shot'. Even better -'Canon power shot SD400 memory sticks'. This way, you have created a niche keyword structure (many permutations from these keywords) within a larger category, and you will able to better optimize keywords for this area. With this in mind, go to Google and start typing in specific keywords and phrases to see where the competition is. As you are doing this, you should understand the page rank algorithm. It is Google's way of giving specific value to how popular are popular your web site is. It's essentially based on the number of votes of other web sites that have cast votes up for your web site. Votes are generated when another web site places a link on their web site that is pointing to your web site. The more votes you get, the better your chances are for good ranking. Try our free SEO tools and give yourself a kick-start.

To view the page rank, install the Google toolbar (toolbar.google.com). As you look at the competition, recognize that we talk about on-page and off- page optimization. On-page optimization are things like proper use of H1 header tags, using main keywords in the title tags, keywords and phrases are bolded underlined or italicized, using image tags and placing correct keywords within that tag. Many place keywords at the very beginning of the text, and once at the very end of the copy, with other sprinkled throughout the company. It's an "hour glass" type of a concept. Keywords at the top, less in the middle and again repeated at the end. Do the things that the competition is doing just do it a little bit better - this is one way to get one step ahead of them. The "least imperfect" site wins.

Optimization Tip #2: How does Tagging really work, and why does it matter?

In our example, when we open the Canon landing page you need to start with the page title for your web site. The page title should only include the main keywords. (Do not ever say welcome to our web site!) Try to combine the keywords in your title. Make sure you use the H1 header tag early in your body text. Also, when Google reads the web page it uses the text from the top left-hand side of the page to the bottom right hand side of the page.

Next, you would need to create H2 header tags. You can think of that as the sub heading for a web page. This is a very common used tag, so it's best to place the primary keyword in your H1 tags and your secondary keywords into your H2 tags.

Now you need to actually create the content for the page. When you try to write the contents, sprinkle your main keywords throughout the copy. But don't overdo it, just make it a natural effort. Once you have written the copy you should then go back and bold underline or italicize some of the keywords. Only one time each, maximum. There are many HTML site building tools out there that use the Bold (B) tag for bolding keywords, and has been overused. Google doesn't penalize you for it, but in fact, by using the tag STRONG it provides higher quality content for search engines. You can also add some images for your users, and when you do this you need to properly include the keyworded image tags. So for example, if we have an image on our web page called 'oneshot.jpg' you would include code that adds that ALT tag and text about that specific memory stick (from our Sony example).

Also, Google views your web page from top left to bottom right. Well, in general they do. However, you want to make sure that you code your HTML to compliment or support this, specially if you have non-related navigational elements to the left of page. There are techniques to do this, which is explained in a great series, try the Free SEO 3-day Email Course.

Optimization Tip #3: Off page search engine optimization - competition to the ground!

You have come up with your niche marketplace and associated keywords and phrases into your page. You will have completed proper approach to tagging from titles through the body content, including H1's, H2's and ALT tags. You are then ready to get your site indexed. Your first rule, is to never use the Google submission form. There are better and faster ways.

The first approach
You need to know how a search engine finds you in the first place. They will visit one web site that is already in their index and if they follow the link to that new site, it could be yours. For example, if you have a new site and you have a partner in this 'Canon' business space, and he puts a link to your page and he's already visible on the Internet at Google, they'll crawl to that site and find your link and get you into the index. Now what if you don't have a partner in this space in your are brand new, you still can get into the index. There are article directories that you can submit to, places like PRWeb.com. Others are - goarticles.com, buzz article.com, article fever.com and many more. These are excellent sites for you to write something about your services or products. The engines will pick you out, and Google will find you.

The second approach (and to quickly get listed in the Google index)
Go see your competition. Type in the search terms you are competing with and find web sites that have a page rank of five or six or higher that you will notice in the green bar from the Google toolbar (above). Find six or 10 of these sites and locate their contact information. We have found that e-mail works - of course - but picking up the phone and commenting on their site and how discussing how a link partnership could benefit each others, rates higher. Top ranking sites may ignore you, and it's certainly tougher persuade somebody to add your link to their web sites. You must give them a good reason to do this. Contact sites that are related to you and are complimentary - those are the best. Find good and great link neighborhoods within your topics. And always think of a way that you can give them something that they would benefit from. Think of this as an emotional bank account. You make deposits, and you (later) may make withdrawals. If you can manage to get at least one PR 6 web site to link your web site, you'll be off and running. You should be indexed in under three days. If you get a PR 7 web site link to you - in most cases you'll be there in 24 hours.

The third approach (and why you must be careful here)
Purchase links from high Page Rank websites. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to visit one of the many link purchasing websites. Here are a few of the better ones: a) http://www.linkadage.com, b) c) http://www.textlinkbrokers.com, d) http://www.text-link-ads.com. (NOTE: Only buy one/month, or you may get seriously penalized). Many times you can purchase 1 PR7 link for a 1 month time period for, say, $150. After the month is up, there is no need to renew because you are already in Google's index. Paying $150, and you can be indexed by Google quickly and with little to no work on your part.

Tip #1:
Add a Google sitemap (XML). You can easily do this with free tools or directly via a Google account. You should also check the competitor sites for http://URLname/sitemap.xml. It's the default for Google, and if the competition has it (it will load in your browser or reader) - you can be assured they are pretty agressive and informed about Search Engine Optimization techniques.

Tip #2:
Discover how many pages the competition has online. You can use free tools again, and the Xenu's Link Sleuth is free - and fast - a good tool to keep close. The 'Stats for Managers' at the bottom of page is the important data for statistics.

Tip #3:
Use the 'link: sitename.com' syntax in Google to locate number of backlinks within a competitor site. Google and Yahoo have different estimates here, but it's vital information from both. (Yahoo use 'linkdomain: sitename.com').

Much is written on the blogs' approach to SEO rankings. We believe it has its place, but in moderation and always pertinent to your business. Blog spamming can get you penalized as well. The Microsaw Web 2.0 blogs are here, and recently a new service was launched at PayPerPost, written up in Business Week.

Continue the search engine optimization and search engine marketing work, and expand your strategy to include email marketing, affiliate, on / off-page optimization, along with traditional means for online marketing (keyword) dominance (print/media). Always provide great content, but that alone will not do it. Off-page strategies are very important, but may work too well. For example, check out the top result on Google for the search term miserable failure. It is not in position one because that web page had been optimized for that search term. The web site is in position one because huge amounts of web sites link to it with the text miserable failure in the link text. Can you guess which site it is?

Enjoyed this article? More on our website www.microsaw.com
Contact author directly at jrognerud@microsaw.com

CLICK FOR MORE ON OUR WEBSITE: Microsaw Search Engine Optimization

About Us: http://www.microsaw.com/microsaw-about.htm

4 Tips On Creating Fresh Article Content

Producing articles to create back links and generate traffic has been a long time favorite of most internet marketers. Continuing to generate fresh article content is one of the burdens faced when using this form of marketing. How can you look this problem in the eye and continue to produce what you need? Read on...

The first method in locating fresh topic ideas is by reading articles related to your business to find if anything has been left unanswered. Surf some of the larger article directories like Technorati or Amazines read some of the more recent articles to spot a lack of information. While you are scanning through these articles be sure to write down any pertinent ideas you generate. You may find helpful tips and tricks while you are searching which is just an added bonus.

The second method revolves around answering your own questions to create articles. If you have come across topics of interest that you have questions on then research to find your answer. Once your research is complete, you can create an article sharing what you found. If you can not think of any questions, you may find when you are reading through articles in the first method presented, that questions will arise any how. You will be benefiting yourself from the additional knowledge and chances are you will be answering a question for your readers too.

The third method is to read through your previously written articles. The more you the sharpen your writing skills will become and the more defined your topics will be. If you pull out some of your earliest work you will probably notice that many of the topics are very broad. Generate new articles by narrowing your subjects and answering them more specifically. Readers tend to gravitate toward highly focused content as nine times out of ten they are seeking an answer to a question or concern they have.

The fourth method is based on surveying readers and forums to locate hot topics. If your business has been around for sometime and you have a large email list then send out a note to your readers to see what it is they would like to have answered. If you want to boost your response rate, offer them an incentive to reply such as a discount on your product or service. If your firm is new and does not have this type of list then head to the forums to find ideas.

Forums are generally set up as a form of question and answer sessions for their readers. Review several forums and make a note of themes that your see. Are you finding that readers continue to ask the same questions only to be given vague answers if any? Research the answer and create your article. Later on, you can revisit these forums and write a message letting them know that you have written an article to address the topic. Many forums will not allow you to blatantly place the link in the subject area so put it in your signature. Reread this article any time you bump into writers block and run through each step to continue your article series.

Sarah Paine Seeking to become a master marketer? Discover the guaranteed educational resources to make this a reality at http://legitimatetelecommutejobs.blogspot.com

Search Engine Optimization and Affiliate Marketing Success

Why does search engine optimization helps you in achieving affiliate marketing success? Before we discuss this topic, let me explain briefly to you what is search engine optimization.

Search engine optimization is a process of choosing appropriate and targeted keyword phrases that are related to your website, and ensuring that these keyword phrases achieve high organic listings in search engines. High ranking in organic listings of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN will bring a lot of targeted traffic to your website when people search for the keywords that you have optimized. This will in turn drives more targeted and eager traffic to your affiliate product sales page.

As you are in the affiliate marketing business, it is always a good practice to develop your own landing page to promote an affiliate product. Some people call it "squeeze page", whereby you will capture their email address and name for future promotion. Be it a landing page or squeeze page, you will need to apply search engine optimization on it. This is to ensure that it appears at the top of search listings when someone searches keywords that are related to the product that you promote.

One very important thing you must note is that people searching for the affiliate product that you promote want information. Therefore, it is always a good idea to entice them with some free information on your landing page, either through your own website or blog, articles, or squidoo lens. If you have a landing page with information, do make sure that you update the content regularly. Sites which provide content that are interesting, well-written and regularly updated create highly engaged visitors who are more likely to return to the website in the coming days. Moreover, with fresh content, you will score well with search engines and able to be rewarded with good organic rankings for your webpages.

To successfully ensure that your webpage ranks well for the keyword that you wish to optimize, you need to include keyword phrases within your content. One thing to note is not to overdo it. By "stuffing" lots of keywords within your content, you may get penalized by search engines and lose your chance to achieve good organic ranking.

One technique I love to use is to write articles to promote affiliate products. For each article that I write, I will make sure it is keyword optimized, and stand a chance to rank high for a particular niche keyword in search engines. Then through my article, it will drive traffic to my landing pages, and in turn bring visitors to the sales page of the affiliate products that I promote. This is a combination of search engine optimization and article marketing to achieve affiliate marketing success.

You can now get more updated affiliate marketing tips from my blog below...

Click here: Affiliate Marketing Tips at http://www.SingaporeAffiliateMarketing.com

Please feel free to republish this article on your website, or distribute it to your friends or clients, as long as you leave the resource box intact.

Discover How To Use Article Marketing To Promote Your Business

Article marketing is one of the easiest forms of website promotion. Simply by writing articles that focus on aspects of your website's theme and submitting them to top article directories, you will begin to see an increase in website traffic. If you are not a confident writer, then you can easily and affordably outsource writing projects.

Well written articles can bring you free website traffic from a huge increase in back links. The key to your success with article marketing is twofold. Firstly, your articles need to be well written, informative and relevant to your website. Secondly, you need to write and submit articles to high traffic websites regularly. Article marketing won't work as a website promotion strategy if you are simply doing it occasionally, you have to work to a regular writing and submission routine so that the number of back links increase over time.

These back links are important for website promotion in two different ways. They are a link from the article to your site that interested readers of your article can follow and thus, they are a means for highly targeted traffic to reach your site. Additionally, they serve an important SEO (search engine optimization) service because the search engine algorithms use the number of relevant, one way back links to your website as an important factor in assigning your position on free search results pages.

Article marketing works as a website promotion technique because other websites and ezines can locate your articles in article directories and publish your articles with a link to your website in the resource bio. Most websites do not allow you to include embedded links in your article but do allow you to place links and marketing style information in your resource box that appears beneath the article.

Your resource bio info can attract free website traffic by highlighting your expertise and anything you are particularly marketing with a link to relevant pages. People who wish to use your article on their website or in their ezine must agree to keep your resource information intact.

You can choose to write an informative article about some aspect of your business that a reader may be interested in, alternatively you can write a product review designed to encourage your reader to take the next step and buy (or at least consider buying) the product. Many internet entrepreneurs use article marketing to direct people to their website to offer them a free ebook or subscription to a newsletter so that they can build an opt-in email list for ongoing marketing purposes. Article marketing is one of the best ways to pre-sell a product because it allows you to gain enough credibility with your reader that they are more inclined to click on your resource box link to discover more.

Article marketing is a very effective strategy to attract free traffic to your website. You may have an excellent product and a great sales-pitch, but without targeted website traffic your business will be dead in the water. However, if you are committed to writing at least one article a day and submit those articles to high traffic article directories as well as directories that have high search engine ranks, you will soon find that more than enough visitors are knocking on your online door.

Learn how to promote any product, service or business opportunity using the most powerful Free Web Site Traffic method-Article Marketing