Devour The Web

As an authorative hub a link from a DMOZ directory category to your website will give your site a boost in PageRank? and may assist in getting search engine spiders to crawl your site faster and more often. Google also uses DMOZ data for its Google directory.

What does this mean? It is well known in seo circles that by having a site listing in DMOZ you will also get a listing in the Google directory, effectively creating two high PageRank? backlinks. Hundreds if not thousands of smaller sites also use Dmoz directory data. Check my search engine relationship table for who DMOZ supplies directory data to. So from a single listing in DMOZ the potential for hundreds of backlinks can stack up quite substantially.

Unlike Yahoo! with it’s paid inclusion via Yahoo! Express, you may submit your site freely to DMOZ for inclusion into their database. This can be a harrowing and traumatic experience for some as the DMOZ directory submission requirements are very tight and strict.

DMOZ prides itself on listing websites with high quality content, culling bad and garbage sites. Hopefully I can lay to rest some of your DMOZ submission fears.

Sponsored Links

In case you haven’t heard, the net is buzzing with talk of blogging and RSS. Once the province strictly of people who got a kick out of publishing online diaries, and later of political and social commentarists, blogs and RSS are being adopted by the internet marketing community.

This is the hot new trend for 2005. The word “blog” was actually selected as the word of the year for 2004, and 2005 promises to be the year of the blog.

So what is all the fuss about? Well, especially with the increasing restrictions on email marketing, including ISP blocking of mail amounting to estimates of 40% of all email never getting delivered, marketers began to look for new avenues to get their message out. Enter blogs and RSS.

Delivered straight to a user’s desktop, the content of an RSS feed is unfiltered by anyone. Users can subscribe and unsubscribe anonymously, with the click of a mouse, and have no fear that their personal information will be shared. RSS is “pull” technology, meaning that the user asks for it, in contrast to email, which is often unasked for, and thus is often “push” technology.

SEO is all about “Individualism”

According to me SEO is not only getting rank for keywords (Of course that is the primary objective) but apart from ranking your objective should be “Conversion” getting “Sales” (No matter if its personal site or clients site)

SEO Steps:

1. Understanding Business.

# What is your business all about

# How is it going to Operate.

# Target audience (Global/Local)

# Opportunity

# Competitor study operating in same business.

# “Core competence”

2. Target Keywords.

# Getting a good list of keywords. (More keywords maximum number of ppl can be targeted)

# This is something that will directly reflect your efforts (targeting wrong keyword will get all your efforts in vain)

3. WEB Designing.

# Navigation

# Page size

# looks n feel

# inter linking

# HTML Code validation*

4. Meta tags & Content

# Title

# Description

# Keywords

# Content

*This is something all seo do in their style, some do not emphasis more on 1st point (according to me which is very important) & shoot up with 3rd step then 2nd & 4th.

People often come to me in a state of crisis and say their website isn’t working. Usually they’re in a cold sweat:

“Michael, give me some practical things I can do to get more sales from my website!”

You want practical advice? Stop treating your website like an object in your business and start treating it like an employee. Most businesses treat their website like a physical item in their business - such as a filing cabinet for example. Just take Mr. Smith from ABC Ltd.:

“Everyone else has got a filing cabinet so I thought we’d better get one. I’m not very interested in cabinets myself but people seem to think they get you more customers. It looks quite neat though - I made sure my face is on the front of it.”

Very good. How much business do you get from it?

“Business? Oh I don’t know - I haven’t even looked at it for a year or so. It’s been a waste of money. We paid a company to build it and it doesn’t work.”

Right, I see. Have you updated it regularly and promoted it extensively?

Are you happy with your website? (Does your business even have one?)

Does it ‘perform’ as well as you’d like?

I’m a professional web designer and I always try to influence the design of a client site with the following three so-called super-tips. If I apply these tips to a new (or existing) site, I always feel that the site will ‘deliver’ much more.

So here are three super-tips, to help anyone get the most from their website:

In the old days of the internet, links were the primary communication path between web sites. Search engines were not as sophisticated as today, and search results rather crude. Actually, even today links are reported to be more used than search engine results; but the latter are increasing their share. In a way, this began to change when Google entered the scene. In an effort to make search results more relevant, Google implemented an algoritm that judged the quality of a web site by the number of other sites linking to it. It seemed rather obvious that a popular, much linked-to, site should be of higher relevance than a site with few links pointing to it.

Unfortunately, as webmasters realized this a frantic stampede began. Everybody did whatever they could to secure as many incoming links as possible. One example: In my own field, web hosting reviews, there is a site that has (according to Yahoo) 4,000,000 incoming links pointing to it! Yes, FOUR MILLION links! By comparison, Microsoft.com has only about 3,000,000 incoming links!

Many of our customers (http://www.internet-marketing-australia.com) find search engine optimisation (SEO) services quite expensive. From the client’s point of view the results are intangible and the process is lengthy. Therefore, the clients are often reluctant to commit to the additional expense.

Typically, a call for SEO comes after the website is already up and running. The quoted price depends on the client’s needs, industry, positioning, etc. The price varies a lot, yet the cost of optimisation is comparable to the cost of Web design.

Is it expensive? - You bet!

During the negotiations with the Web designers the client gets an expectation of having a beautiful and functional site developed for an X amount of dollars. The client is also getting a free hosting, free search engines submissions and other freebies. That is why the price looks reasonable.

Only at some later stage the client realises that there is not enough traffic (and potential buyers) coming through the website. Consultations with the Internet marketing gurus reveal that in addition to the extra cost there is a need to restructure the content - copy. Why was it not done during the Web design phase?

This year, 2005, will see the demise of some well known Network Marketing businesses. Spam laws, spam-traps, filtering and useless leads, will all be a contributing factor. The age of mailing prospects is all but dead and buried.

Now a marketer can’t even translate his own description of a business opening without disguising the words with spaces or characters that have no relevance to the English language.

As an e-mail to a colleague read;

“I could not see my way forward in choosing you as a sponsor, due to the fact that your communication by e-mail to me was full of misquotes, spelling errors and strange characters.”

Of course, this was done on purpose, to avoid the spam traps. However, it does point a heavy finger at what ISP’s are doing and what a marketer has to do in response, to avoid their nonsensical filtering. Perhaps we ought to develop a new language?

The big question here, is what can we do about it?

The answer lies in how you wish to attract people to your business. In my experience, there are many ways but only two main options.

1). You chase or contact them.

1. Use reward programs to keep people revisiting your web site and buying your products. You could reward gifts or discounts for revisiting or buying.

2. Publish ezines for other web sites to increase your traffic. You could do it at no charge and in return just ask for a sponsor ad in each issue.

3. Trade endorsement ads with other ezines. They pull more hits and sales than just trading classified ads because it gives your ad instant credibility.

4. Test your ad copy before you start taking orders. Tell your visitors to email you if they want to be notified when you launch a new product.

5. Get your visitors excited about your product by letting them know how excited you are about it. Tell them why you’re excited and use exclamation points.

6. Use incentives to gain referrals if you don’t have an affiliate program. Tell people when they refer customers you will award them with free products.

7. Tell your visitors the reason why you’re having a sale so they don’t think your products are cheap. It could be a holiday/seasonal sale or clearance sale.

Email is a wonderful thing. It costs next to nothing and can be sent almost anywhere in the world in a few minutes. When email is used properly, it can help move your business forward. When it is not used properly, it can hurt your business.

Here are a couple of ways that email can hurt your business

The first way that email can hurt your business is by sending unsolicited emails to every email address you can find. This is now commonly referred to as spam and it is an epidemic of major proportions. In fact, there has been talk that spam has made email almost useless as a form of communication. The average person gets so much junk email in their boxes every day that many people simply select all and delete without bothering to go through each message.

There is a second way that an email may be hurting you online. If you are conducting business online and your principal email account is from a free email service like hotmail.com or yahoo.com, you are practically shouting to people that you don’t take your business seriously. Asking someone to fork over money on the internet is already difficult without giving off signals that people shouldn’t trust you or your business. Getting an email account with your own domain at the end of it does not have to be expensive.