PBAC Blog

Part 1

It is amazing how small businesses understand the need for seo training or the need to hire an accomplished seo as a part of their search marketing initiative but just can�??t seem to pull the trigger when it comes to committing to one or the other.

Stop me if you�??ve heard this one before. I am sitting in my dentist�??s chair in Toronto when our one sided conversation turns to web marketing. Dr. Bob utters those 7 famous words; �??Nobody can find me on the internet.�?�

Now, we�??ve all heard that statement too many times and we all know the routine that accompanies the website in question; all flash; no content. Well guess what Dr Bob; NO GOOGLE FOR YOU!

Dr. Bob is one of the best dentists in Toronto so I am usually able to grab 40 winks while he is restructuring my dental work, but now he has my attention. I gargle out my seo training spiel as to the usual problems inflicted upon websites by web developers, would-be search engine optimizers and of course, site owners themselves. I suggest that he send one of his employees to a search engine optimization (seo) training course in Toronto and then promise to review his website and get back to him before my next dental examination in 6 months.

�??Six Months!�?� screams Dr. Bob! I thought he might shatter a crown if I let him continue, so I agreed to look at his website when I got home and get back to him before the weekend.

My suspicions were realized when I looked at the site. Leading off with flash, every page has the same title and description tags and absolutely no connection to keyword phrases that his audience may actually be typing into the Google search box. Beginner seo training would have revealed a host of possibilities for the site.

The weekend arrives and I find myself in a dental office in Toronto hunched over a computer screen while desperately trying listen to NFL football on the radio. Not exactly where I want to be on the weekend but at least I am not in THE chair. We begin discussing seo strategies and web site changes that Dr Bob might want to make.

We email the requirements to the web site programmer in Toronto and guess what? Three weeks later Google, Yahoo! and MSN have FOUND Dr. Bob. He is now appearing on page one for his most important keyword phrase and pages 1 and 2 for the next most important. All without any seo training, it�??s a miracle!

Time, however, is money and anyone involved in seo or seo training will tell you that the effort you must undertake to maintain your listings is considerable. So, when several months later I get the alarming phone call that WE are now on page two, I explain to Dr. Bob that I don�??t take clients but I can refer him to a couple of accomplished seos or, as I previously suggested, he can send someone from his office for an seo training workshop in Toronto.

My dentist is great at his profession because he is both talented and brilliant. It doesn�??t take him long to do the math and figure out that the cost of hiring an seo firm is substantial. His return on investment would take the lifetime of a client approach rather than a yearly approach. That is, he would have to look at how much revenue a client would generate over the 7 year average lifetime of a dental client in Toronto as opposed to the revenue generated in the initial year. The seo training is starting to look good to him.

In fact, our illustrious Toronto dentist has decided to take the training himself through once a week private training sessions! We scheduled our first lesson next week but I wanted him to start thinking about keyword selection and adjusting his content to make it relevant to the new keywords phrases.

So I asked the good doctor to consider the following before his first training session; �??Think about the famous line in Field of Dreams but in reverse: If They Come, You Will Build it.�?�

In other words, your customers are already typing specific keyword phrases into search boxes in order to find your services. They are already coming to your site but you�??re not there! I left Dr Bob with several tools available to choose the best keywords for a Toronto dentist.

Google Suggest

Overture

Wordtracker

Keyword Discovery

Barry Byers and Greg Mate have a significant body of experience as Professional Search Engine Optimizers and Internet Marketers and they have owned and operated successful National Yellow Pages Advertising Agencies for the past 15 years. Together they have helped a number of businesses achieve top search engine rankings and increased web site traffic in both Canada and the U.S. Together, they have designed and programmed effective websites as well as consulted on SEO and marketing on existing sites. Offices located in Montreal and Toronto. Web addresses: http://www.serchengineacademy.ca and http://www.adperformancedirect.com

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Building your website with search engine appeal - or search engine optimization - is more art than science but experience has shown that there are some very useful guidelines. The question is, why bother? With effective optimization you’ll attract free website traffic that the search engines will send you. Free traffic goes a long way towards not only making your site income-generating but, hopefully, profit-generating as well.

With search engine optimization you might even receive a high traffic volume. Let�??s just say you have a conversion to successful sales with 5 to 10 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good number of sales already. If you get only twenty or so hits a day, you only get one or two sales if any at all. Higher traffic, especially if it’s free, means potentially higher revenue.

Search engine optimization involves a variety of methods for making your site appealing to the search engines, such as having relevant keywords, title and content. It also helps to have other similar sites linking to yours. The aim is to have your site listed in the search engine results and apearing in, preferably, the first two or three pages. The higher the better. This will ensure that your site is displayed in answer to public inquiries as being possibly relevant. In turn, this increases public awareness and directs more traffic to your site - traffic that could lead to potential sales, revenue and profit.

There are many locations on the internet that can help you improve search engine optimization, including those that help in tracking keyword phrases. For instance, the free Yahoo/Overture Suggestion Tool, as well as many commercial keyword analyzers. There are also some content writers and article directories that can provide suitable keyword-laden content for you.

However, most people performing a search examine only the ten top results, which are on the first page. Those entries further down the list languish, with little attention. So making it to the top three pages is a barometer of a site’s success in search engine optimization as you will get more people clicking through to your site when you have a higher ranking on these pages. And, as mentioned, more traffic means more business for you.

As you might have guessed, search engine optimization may require a fair bit of work to be fully realized. For instance, researching the keyword phrases that are popular for your niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your site’s contents so that you get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too awkward to read. There are useful guidelines that can be followed to assist with this.

Also consider collaborating with other web sites to obtain link exchanges and page transfers. Having inbound links definitely increases search engine appeal. Possibly the best way of gaining these is to write quality articles on the subject of your website and submit them to article directories for others to use. This generates desirable one-way links from those who post your articles on their websites, and they have usually selected your article because of its relevance!

When you need help just search the internet. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are abundant and easily found. There are also many articles freely available that can help you optimize your website. Just posing the question on Google or inquiring at your favorite article directory will quickly locate some of these. The more informed you are the better. But resist the temptation to buy ebooks when so much free information is available.

This all helps in getting those high rankings. It may require a little time and effort but the benefits can be astounding.

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the knowledge and tools needed to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites clamber for higher rankings and, if you get careless, you may just get trampled and be left in cyber dust.

In recent years, and in the foreseeable future, search engines have been the most widely used internet sources of information. Use them well and prosper.

However, even with effective optimization in place, don’t just rest on your laurels; it is a continuing process. Check your ranking from time to time and also have a good look at what the top sites for a keyword are doing. Why do they have a higher ranking? What do you have to do to secure the top spot? Each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites or, as Scarlet O’Hara said: “Tomorrow is another day!”

Ivan Kelly managed a Direct Mail business with extensive mailing lists for ten years and has designed and promoted many websites. He also provides a quality f’ree course on Search Engine Marketing. For details go to: List Of Topics

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Introduction

The Google Sandbox is a metaphorical term to explain why most new websites have very poor rankings in Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). Very few people know for sure if the ’sandbox’ actually exists, but it seems to be a filter added to the Google algorithms sometime around March 2004.

What is the function of the Google Sandbox?

The generally accepted principle behind the Google Sandbox is that it enables Google to filter out ‘Flash-in-the-Pan’ websites from those that offer good quality, up-to-date content. It is within Googles interest to ensure that the results it displays to its users within the SERPS lead to highly relevant, up-to-date, useful websites Relevancy is key to the search engines success so it will take all steps it can to ensure the relevancy of its search results. Filtering out new websites and monitoring them may allow them to provide more accurate results within the real SERPS.

Indentifying the Sandbox?

How do you know if your website in in the sandbox? Most new websites under newly registered domains will get relegated to the sandbox once Google knows about the site. Google will find the site by following an Inbound Link (IBL) from another site that the Googlebot crawls. You will then see the website in the normal Google SERPS if you search for the actual domain name, but the website is unlikely to be listed for any of its keywords. Google also won’t show signs of any other websites linking to your website, nor will it display pages related to yours. In addition Google won’t list any pages other than your Home (index) page.

If you track your websites visitor stats whilst it is in the Google Sandbox, you will see that the Googlebot comes crawling fairly regularly and that it does crawl, and therefore catalogue, all of your pages. Google does know that your pages exist and knows what they contain, but doesn’t list them in the main SERPS. In other words, because your website is new, it is under probation in the ’sandbox’.

How Long Will My website Stay in the Google Sandbox?

It is difficult to say how long a website will stay in the Google sandbox as this seems to depend on the types of keywords it will be completing for in the real SERPS It can be up to 6-8 months and the only way to get out of the sandbox is to wait.

The Google Sandbox isn’t all bad news. If your site contains good quality relevant material it will find its way out of the sandbox and will get the rankings it deserves in the Google SERPS. I even have some theories that may mean that your time in the sandbox can be used wisely to actually improve your final rankings.

You also shouldn’t forget that Google isn’t the only search engine out there. MSN is widely used and with the might of Microsoft behind it is likely to become a bigger player in the search engine world in the new future. At the time of writing, MSN or other search engines such as Yahoo! and Alta Vista don’t have a ’sandbox’ filter and your new websites will be listed in the quickly and should start driving traffic to your site.

Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd.

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When it comes to AdSense, it could be described as one of the most easiest ways to earn and make any money online without having to create a product, but then any advertising revenue stream can be easy to collect money from advertisers and sponsors, but it all comes down to getting a decent amount of traffic, for the earnings from contextual advertising to really build up, but that’s another article entirely.

For now I’d like to go through why you should be constantly optimizing and updating your ads in the following ways:

Change your colours and fonts

Target through use of channels

Position your ads above the fold - the fold being the top half of your web page or blog.

First AdSense is Googles own advertising service which complements the paying advertising service of Google adwords as all of the ads are from actual advertisers who are paying per click for their ads to bring them instant traffic and the AdSense is a way for others to earn who wish not to participate in the adwords program and you can earn every time your ads are clicked on.

So changing the colour of your AdSense ads, so that they blend right into your web sites design, this is perhaps one of the most important points and steps to do that and the positioning of your ad units.

Whilst thinking about changing things refer to the Google AdSense programme policies often to see if what you are doing is correct as some things are not allowed, so use this help resource to avoid confusion about how you can use AdSense advertising and what you may be limited to.

Working out what you can do to change the way ad space is seen on your website

Most people become blind to ads on sites, as they just want to read quality content which you provide, so the trick is to add your ads seamlessly into the content or around the content, blending the colours and making them not look like advertisements, while your task is not to decieve as thats not allowed, you have to work on some creative ideas that you can use together with AdSense formats to measure your results.

As I mentioned above, channels work well, this is were you can target specific domains or url’s or even keywords related to your website, I prefer to use the actual domains, so you know where your clicks are being generated from, then you can optimize in the form of adding separate keyword channels for the ad units.

Last of all it’s best to figure out what types of ad units you want to place on your site, AdSense for content is the ones I talked about above, but there are video units from youtube and referral content links that can be added individually, or if you are a tiny person you can use AdSense on a mobile phone to target any tiny coin size people.

Wayne Tully an artist, writer and affiliate marketer who does many online business ventures and earns a reasonable income online as a result.

http://www.earningprofitsonline.com/blogger.html

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