What is the need of a SEO Consultant?

If you are not getting enough traffic from all your online marketing
expenses, then don't get too much worried with that. You are not alone in
this category. Most of the online businesses fail to generate sufficient
amount of quality web traffic even they spend quite aggressively on the
online marketing campaigns. One of the main reasons for this is the lack of
knowledge of various online marketing practices and activities. To overcome
this limitation, you should consult an SEO Consultant who has got a great
amount of expertise and knowledge in the field of online marketing and
business in your business domain or in related domains.

Normally people think of SEO Consultants as web content writers who can
write keyword rich articles or content.
Even though this is quite correct up to an extent, the truth is that the
content writing is only one of the most important jobs of an SEO Consultant
but it is not the only job. A good SEO Consultant can do a variety of things
to increase quality web traffic to your site. This includes generating
incoming links from relevant website to increase the Page Rank of your
website.

Conversion enhancement is one of the major things that any SEO Consultant
will do to increase your traffic. He will use techniques like copywriting
strategies, site usability, call to action tactics and advanced conversion
reporting to enhance the conversion rate on your website. The main focal
point for any of the websites should be the content. If the content is not
useful to your target visitors, you just can't run a profitable website.

Professional SEO consultants continuously strive to keep updated with the
latest evolving techniques in the field of SEO. Hence they will take less
time to produce perfect results which you are looking for. But, if you
decide to do it on your own, then there comes some great disadvantages to
your business. This is mainly due to the lack of your knowledge and
experience in the field.

You are definitely not going to spend enough amount of quality time
consistently to learn new strategies as it is not your bread and butter.
This results in the usage of age old techniques in your business. As you
know, internet space is the space that keeps changing literally everyday.
So, you will be certainly behind your competition. You will also waste a lot
of money on several online marketing campaigns and generate a very poor
traffic.

To avoid these problems, it is better to hire a professional SEO Consultant
who has got a proven track record in his field. This not only provides your
online business with good web traffic but also saves your valuable money and
time. You can concentrate better on your competent skill, building your
business, leaving SEO activities to a professional SEO Consultant.

----------------------------------------------------
Darren Dunner is the author of this article. Find more information on the
subject at http://www.the-content-writers.com/

Surefire SEO For New Websites

Have you ever wonder why some websites are more successful than the others?
Have you purchased a ready-made website, fire it onto the web and realize
that there is no traffic to the website? Are the gurus having secrets that
you don't know? Is there a missing software that you need to purchase?

The truth is, the problem doesn't lie on the website being created. The
problem lies in you. Websites don't promote itself, you have to put in the
effort to promote is. Two persons can purchase the same set of ready-made
website but one person is much more successful than the other because the
successful one spends time promoting it whereas the other one simply upload
the website and hope miracles to happen.

It doesn't cost a lot of money to promote a website, but it does require
some time and some consistent effort. In this article, I'm going to share
with you a simple and surefire way to promote your website - through article
marketing.

What do I mean by promoting your website? When I say promoting your website,
I'm talking about getting more websites linking to your website. That's
promotion and that's the most important thing you need to do after you have
launched your website. That is the main difference between a successful
website and a failed website.

Forget about link exchange. In most cases, if you have a new website,
chances are, other webmasters are not interested in linking to you! Also, it
takes a lot of time to search for link partners and convince them! I would
rather spend that time to create one more website. Think link exchange only
when you have a PR of 3. Use what I'm going to share with you to build your
website to PR3.

1. Submit articles to hundreds of article directories.

Create articles about your web site, add your own resource box/byline to the
articles and submit them to article directories. Remember to link to your
website through your keywords, not your url address. This will increase your
search engine ranking for the keywords.

Some of the article directories you can submit include:

www.ezinearticles.com
www.goarticles.com
www.articlecity.com
www.knowhowtips.org

2. Bookmarking

There are more than 50 bookmarking website your can bookmark your website.
Bookmarking websites have high PR and they are frequently visited by search
engine spider. This is another excellent way to gain one way traffic to your
website and even get your website listed!

Below are some of the bookmarking website you can use:

http://del.icio.us
http://www.furl.net
http://jots.com
http://linkroll.com

3. Blogging

Blog is another type of website frequently visited by search engine spider.
Do a search on the blog related to your website and post some useful
comments to the blog. This is how you can get some good links to your
website.

Commit yourself to spend 1 hour a week to do these three promotions. After 1
month, you will realize that you are automatically getting good ranking in
some non competitive keywords. By then, if you are monetizing through
adsense, you should be to earn 1-2 dollars a day. This should give you
enough motivation to continue promoting your website and add more pages to
your website.

About The Author: Kenneth Koh is the webmaster for many websites, including
http://www.knowhowtips.org.

Company Blogs

Of the top 500 companies in the USA only 40 have a company blog. The reasons
for this are not yet clear, however some speculate that marketing agencies
do not have enough domain specific knowledge to truly comprehend the value
of a company blog from a PR, branding and direct sales perspective.

According to Bill Gates a company blog provides opportunities for companies
to establish opinion and thought, whilst creating a "human face" to an
organization.

Speaking with a blog consultant may help to explain the true ROI that can be
gained through effective blog management and implementation; a company blog
is an effective SEM (search engine marketing) tool that establishes
authority and provides direct sales conversions.

With the rise in social blogging, the commercial sector is set to follow,
with companies such as Microsoft already realizing and experiencing the
benefits of a company blog. They are able to respond to news as and when it
happens, they are able to attain feedback on products, and they have also
created a sales platform that speaks with millions of highly targeted
customers.

With blog consulting services from search marketing agencies and SEO
copywriting firms, the future of commercial blogging will be less about
public relations and far more about link building and SEO (search engine
marketing). Many companies are finding that a company blog is another sales
channel that enters markets that their sales domain cannot enter.

Let's think about a man who is getting started online - he approaches a
website design company and commissions a website design. After two months
online, he is disappointed to discover that he attains zero visitors, let
alone conversions, through his website.

He starts to look towards marketing, and wants to find out how he can rank
his website higher in the search engines. Is this man specifically looking
for an SEO company? No. Despite this an SEO company may have a company blog,
and they could provide the basic information that is needed to convert this
man into a sales lead through taking an authoritative stance.

Through speaking with a blog consultant it is possible to establish an idea
of the results that you will attain, and the blog management services that
are available to you. A competent blog consulting service should penetrate
far less competitive markets than search engines, with blog specific
directories and engines providing a format by which leads are less targeted,
yet less competitive.

With the recent upsurge of company blogging amongst small and medium size
businesses, many are opting for more than one blog on the back of the
results that they have attained. Through spreading a message across multiple
blogs they are able to represent different angles and keyword phrases in a
manner that would be impractical on a sales page.

As link building becomes a more exhaustive and costly task, blogging is an
area of the web, where savvy webmasters show a more kind-hearted approach to
providing links. A blog can be positioned within or out with a company's
primary domain name, meaning that any residual page rank can be distributed
to the sales page from highly content-relevant material.

About The Author: NameCritic's Blogging Services are reasonably priced. We
manage your blog for you. We update it daily with content written with SEO
for your keywords and phrases. Email NameCritic@blogs.pn to learn more.
http://www.blogs.pn

SEO or PPC - Which Marketing Campaign Is Best For Your Online Business?

Before you get started with the Search Engines you should decide which of
the two major Search Engine marketing strategies will work best for your
site. This will help you to stay on track and not waste a lot of time
needlessly.

The 2 major Search Engine marketing strategies that exist today are SEO
(search engine optimization) and PPC (pay-per-click).
You should know and understand that these two methods are very different
from one another. This will help you to be better enabled to decide which
one is right for you and your web site.
Of course, part of this decision will depend upon what your web site is
like.

One of the main reasons why it is difficult to decide which of these 2
strategies is best for your site lies in understanding why you cannot use
both of these methods. In reality, there really is no reason why you cannot
use both of these methods.
In fact, it is encouraged to use both strategies because PPC can work well
with any SEO plan.

By using PPC you can help users become more familiar with your web site.
Once these users become use to seeing your web site they will stick around.
Plus, the more often that visitors come to your site, the better the Search
Engines will like your site.
This is one of the many reasons why it is so important to try to get as many
people as possible to visit your site.

If you take some time to read about the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC
then you can decide for yourself which strategy will work best for your web
site. Since Search Engine traffic is still the best way to get targeted
traffic to your web site, a lot of marketers are still going to do battle
with Search Engine optimization.

You should understand that PPC is a form of text-based advertising on a
Search Engine. Whenever you use PPC you will be charged per click whenever a
visitor clicks on your ad to enter your web site. You will have to bid money
in order to be listed first. In actuality, this is the same as sponsored
listings.

On the other hand, SEO is an attempt to alter how you rank in the Search
Engines by looking at factors such as link popularity and Page Rank. The
rankings that you achieve through SEO will appear on the Search Engines'
main results pages, not in the box where the PPC links appear. A lot of
people like this method because it is free, yet you will have to invest your
time here.

Now that you know what is involved in each method, you are probably
wondering how you can tell which method is better.
Unfortunately, you really cannot say that one method is better than the
other because each of these methods serves a different purpose. Usually you
will be able to see that one method will be a better fit for your web site
though. Here are some pointers to help you make an educated decision for
your site.

If you are in search of stability and predictability then you will find this
with PPC. You may think that this is going to cost you a fortune, but this
really is not true. The stability and low cost are what makes this method so
popular. In fact, most web site owners will try PPC before working with SEO
because your site can rank high without doing all of the tedious work that
is involved in SEO (i.e. finding link partners, posting links, etc.). As
long as you have some money that you can invest in your web site then you
can rank wherever you want with PPC. Another advantage to PPC is that your
site will be listed when you add it, not whenever a Search Engine gets
around to finding it. Unfortunately this is a very competitive market and
CPCs (costs per click) are constantly increasing. This is because it works
like an auction wherein the more people there the higher the price will be.

On the other hand, SEO can be done for free. Unfortunately the traffic will
be unpredictable since you constantly have to guess, adapt and change your
strategies. This is important to understand because you could rank in the
top 10 one month and then fall out of the top 10 the next month, thus
loosing some important income. You also need to realize that SEO is slower
than PPC because Search Engines only update about once a month.

If you are still finding this a difficult decision to make you should think
about whether or not you have money to spend. If you do have some money then
go for PPC because it will have faster results. If your budget is tight then
go for SEO because all you will need to invest here is your time. The best
thing would be to use both SEO and PPC at the same time aiming for different
keywords with PPC than you are using in SEO.

Needless to say, while people are constantly looking for new, unique ways in
which they can bring more traffic to their web site, the SEO industry will
continue to grow. Nevertheless, it is still important to understand what PPC
advertising is. Once you have a thorough understanding of both SEO and PPC
you will be able to decide upon the best Search Engine strategy for your
site.

About The Author: For fast, higher rankings of your website visit
http://www.high-rank-directories-plus.com or
http://www.high-rank-directories-plus.com/ultimate-seo-plan-research-package
.html
today. Chris Taylor - author, internet marketer and SEO specialist -
http://Catdynamics.com

Tips For People Who Hate Writing In Providing Articles On Their Web Sites

Internet is all about providing information to people. Nowadays the amount
of people who are using this medium is increasing rapidly. Many internet
marketers know that people want information from their websites and not just
SEO enriched pages of advertising. As a website owner you can give any
information on the internet by providing articles on your site. By creating
an article and optimizing each page for a separate keyword you can get
search engines to include you in the results when users search for specific
word or phrase.

In addition marketing by articles have become increasingly popular in the
last few years. A lot of products related to article marketing such as
article submitter and article rewriter have been created to support it.

Unfortunately, although providing articles are crucial to keep ahead in
internet business, there is one dilemma. Not many people like writing
articles or have time to write them, and hiring people to write for you is
not cheap. The good news is there are some options available to provide
articles on your website.

You can use free articles which has the same subject or topic as you want
from article directory. But it is not wise to only provide such contents on
your website since they would have resource boxes that could link or direct
your visitors to other site.

Another option is public domain contents. They are freely given to the
public for public use and you can do whatever you want with it, including
put your name as the author. Just choose public domain contents that are
very relevant with the theme of your website.

But there is a disadvantage of using public domain articles.
Because they are free, many people may also use the same contents with
yours. It could be predicament since your website needs to be unique.
Duplicated contents are not good both for search engines and visitors.

Another resource to get free articles which are free to edit is sites that
provide articles and ebooks with private label rights. Because the contents
are not free there will not be many people that use the exact same articles
with yours. It can even be better if you create an article from some parts
of a PLR ebook since not many people do it. But you should also edit them a
bit so that there is no possibility that search engines and visitors will
see the same contents they have seen on a multitude of other sites.

If you don't have time to rework public domain or PLR contents but still
want to make them look original you can hire someone to do it for you. There
are people who do part time that charge only minimal fees for this job.
Unique and useful articles are important tools you should utilize to improve
and explode your online business.

About The Author: Heris Yunora http://www.soft-promotion.com - Private Label
Web Content and Tools

How To Get More Traffic For Your Articles

Besides submitting your articles to article directories, in order to get
even more traffic, you should also optimize your submitted article to get
traffic from search engines.

This is particular so for new websites. Most of the more popular article
directories are pretty well search engine optimized. By submitting a article
with a keyword phrase that has low competition related to your website, the
chances of the article showing up in search engines is greater.

You might be thinking I can also do it with my own website, why put my
article that is well optimized on someone's else website?
The reason for that is because larger and more popular article directories
has been around for a while and the same article has more 'weight' in the
search engines if it is placed on their site than yours.

I have tested this and some articles I've have written for article
directories can rank in #1 or #2 position out of 10,000 competing webpages
whereas the same article on my own site is not even on the lst page of
search engine results. I'm not sure why but Google, Yahoo and MSN seems to
like certain article directories more than others.

Of course, your keyword phrase that you use in your articles must have some
search traffic and have low competition count.
As a general rule, look for keywords in your niche that have at least a few
hundred searches and less than 5000 competing webpages.

Here are a few tips on how to optimize your article

1) Put the keyword phrase in the title

Number one rule in SEO is to fit your keyword phrase into your title of the
article.

2) Insert keyword phrase in the body content

Usually for a 400 word article, I only insert the keyword phrase twice, once
in the beginning of the first paragraph and at the last line of the last
paragraph. It's important not to overdo it to the point the article doesn't
make sense since you want the reader to read your article and then click
through to your website in the author's bio box.

That's it, simple onpage seo anyone can do to attract more traffic to your
submitted articles. It may take more time to optimize your article, find the
keyword phrase to use etc but it can proof more worthwhile since you only
need to do it once correctly and get unlimited traffic from that article for
years.

About The Author: Discover the best keyword research tool recommended by
Ricky Lim at http://epromote.info/1/nb.htm that allows you to mine keyword
discovery, wordtracker and overture databases plus 13 other keyword tools.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Part 05

With an affiliate program, you will be recruiting affiliates to advertise
your product or link. Every time one of your affiliates makes a sale for
your site, they get a percentage of the profits. Affiliate programs are a
great ways to get hundreds of people promoting your site for you. ClickBank
is probably one of the most widely used affiliate sites out there, so if you
want to start an affiliate program for your site, that would be a good
starting point. There is a fee to use ClickBank, however.
If you want to try out an affiliate program without paying, there are sites
like PayDotCom. They are free, but you probably won't get as many affiliates
as you would with ClickBank.

Now let's take a look at another way to bring visitors to your site -- by
providing them a valuable resource:

Starting a Newsletter. Starting a newsletter, ezine, or community can be a
fantastic way to bring repeat traffic to your site. So by all means, if you
can provide a newsletter once a week, then do so. A newsletter, ezine or
even a discussion community builds a loyal subscriber base and brings more
traffic from referrals to your site. You can put a subscription box on your
website with some information about your newsletter. Then, all subscribers
have to do is enter their email address, which will be sent to your
database. There are a variety of programs out there that can help you start
a newsletter, some of them
for free. To get started with a basic newsletter, check
out the free software at the ideamarketers web site. This is a good
starting point, although there are many other free newsletter software
programs you can find as well.
When your newsletter gets bigger with more subscribers, you can always move
to a more advanced newsletter program that costs.

Offering Something for Free. Offering your visitors something for free can
also be a great way to bring traffic to your site. You could offer a free
ebook, for example.
If people can obtain something free, they're more likely to visit your site.
Not only that, but then you can submit your site to the freebie and free
stuff directories out there. People seeking freebies will then come across
your site and visit. Not only that, but your link in the free directories
counts as a backlink! If you do end up using this tactic, be sure that your
site offers lots of quality content. Your visitors may come for the
freebie, but they stay, and return, for the content!

In Closing, bringing traffic to your website is an ongoing process. Let's
take a look at the steps we've discussed:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Quality Content Dynamic Content Lots of
Backlinks Buying Ad Space Starting a Newsletter Giving Something Away All of
these steps can be used together to bring the most traffic possible to your
site. Building a great site certainly doesn't happen overnight, so be
patient and keep at it. With diligence and attention, you can take your
website to the top!

----------------------------------------------------
Steve Renner, Author, Marketing Expert, Marketing Director, The Affiliate
Community http://www.affiliatecommunity.com

The SEO Guide Part 1

It helps you to get your web site to appear in search engine result pages
(SERPs) for keywords that that are relevant to your business.

Google, MSN, and Yahoo all use their own formulas to calculate the relevance
of your pages, but here are a few common factors to guarantee you will rank
above those not using them. Of course, one of the most important factors you
want to check out is the company's track record of results. There are a
couple of factors that have effect on your search engine positioning, here
is one important one, the on-page optimization factors.

If you want a healthy return on investment (ROI) with search engine
optimization (SEO), your success - or failure - hinges on the keywords you
select when combined with other factors like link popularity and web site
design. This would include such tasks like modifications to your keywords,
description, title tags, comment tags, alt descriptions, and title
descriptions of anchors and the actual text of your web page.
The TITLE tag first is the most important part, the "< TITLE >"
tag. Words people are most likely to search on put first in the title
(called "keyword prominence"). Optimizing Your Title Tag.
This is because most engines & directories place a high level of importance
on keywords that are found in your title tag. Your page title is one long
uninterrupted road sign instead of several small ones.

If it was possible to master seo techniques, and be sure that we can get
high rankings by editing just the Meta tags that would be very easy, but
this is only one part of search engine optimization, but that's just not
going to happen. These factors all relate to your own site and include your
domain name, page names, meta tags, keyword density, titles, headings and
last but not least the content. Optimizing your meta tags and dropping a few
keywords into your web site won't pay the rent. Things like the page title,
Meta tags, heading tags, comment tags, and anchor text were the only things
that mattered. Back couple of years ago you could just tweak, title, headers
and description on each page and by doing this you could create fantastic
seo results.

By including local information in your tags and web pages, you help
prospective customers find specific information on the area and business
they are searching for. Localized search engine optimization is the addition
of local search terms to your tags and web pages. Keywords / Description /
Alt Tags / Title Tags / Page Content.

Make sure that all your tags properly closed and that there are no tags
missing, when search engines spider your site and your pages are not
complete the search engines might ignore the page. The science is formatting
the pages with the right meta tags and submitting them in the right way to
the search engines.

Search Engines are also interested in the text of the site.
Anchor text is the text the web visitor sees on the web page, which is
hyperlinked to your domain name or URL. When submitting to other sites use
your keyword phrase for your anchor text when ever possible. You can just
take it that plain text is the food for search engine spiders.earch engines.

About The Author: http://www.linknetics.com is software that helps
http://www.linknetics.com/reciprocal-link-exchange.html

The 3 Types Of Keyword Database

If you have been marketing on the internet for a while now, you should have
realize the importance of keyword research. It doesn't matter how or which
way you earn money online, most likely or not, you still must have the
proper keyword research skills to analyze what these keywords means.

Keyword research is the first foundation step for any website, seo strategy
and even article marketing. Without doing keyword research, you are only
assuming keywords you think people are searching in the search engines which
may not be true.

Most people uses overture keyword inventory database to find out what people
are searching for online because it's free. The other two keyword database
are wordtracker and keyword discovery which are paid subscription.

Comparing the 3 keyword database

Let's take a look at how all 3 keyword database gather their database of
keywords.

For overture, it is the collective keywords gathered by the yahoo and
overture search engine and it tracks keywords up to 30 days.

One disadvantage of overture is the keyword search volume may not be always
accurate as it can be skewed by automated bots hitting their search engines.

For wordtracker, it uses meta search engines such dogpile and metacrawler to
gather its keyword database. It tracks keywords up to 90 days and it's
keyword database has approximately 330 million keywords.

Wordtracker database is more accurate than overture as the chances of
automated bots hitting meta search engines are pretty remote.

The disadvantage of wordtracker is that it does not accurate represent the
internet's search volume keywords since meta search engines only takes up
less than 1% of total keyword search volume.

For keyword discovery, it gathers data from more than 180 search engines
with the majority from google. It tracks up to
365 days and has approximately 32 billion keywords in its database.

The major advantage of keyword discovery is in its massive keyword database
which can allow you to dig up keywords that may not show up on overture and
wordtracker.

Now you might think keyword discovery is the best keyword research tool
since it has the largest keyword database.
However it may not be necessary depending on what you want to do. For
example, if you are just trying to come up with new ideas for a product or a
website, then overture and wordtracker will be sufficient.

If you are trying to gather a large keyword list for your niche, then use
keyword discovery. If you are doing ppc with adwords or yahoo search
marketing, then developing a huge list of keywords is important and keyword
discovery can do that better than wordtracker or overture.

About The Author: Discover the keyword research tool recommended by Ricky
Lim at http://epromote.info/1/nb.htm that allows you to mine keyword
discovery, wordtracker and overture databases plus 13 other keyword tools.

SEO - Google's Sandbox Is A Myth

The "Google Sandbox" argument has been around for a very long time; it is
much loved and loathed by many people trying to do Search Engine
Optimisation.

The truth of the matter is Google's Sandbox does not exist.

People doing SEO who refer back to the "sandbox" as a reason for websites
not performing as they should are either naive or are dishonest.

I have recently tested the alleged "sandbox" theory on a number of sites and
at every hurdle the sandbox theory failed.

In one particular test I registered a car insurance domain and slapped up a
bunch of content. Now, anyone who has been in SEO circles for any amount of
time will tell you that car insurance is a highly competitive industry and
Google would have most certainly "sandboxed" the site.

However, four months later, the site is on the first page of Google's search
results for a highly competitive search term.

The site is also moving very quickly on an ultra competitive search term
that should appear on the first page within a month or two.

Search Engine Optimisers who believe in the sandbox theory all too often
blame their own poor performance for why the website is not ranking highly
on Google.

Getting a site's on-page optimisation right as well as building a sufficient
quantity of relevant backlinks will get any site to rank well.

Google's search algorithm can detect if a site has been selling links, this
obviously will nullify the effect of the link.

Therefore, if you buy a whole lot of links, there is a chance that the
majority of the links will not be passing page rank to your site and the
links will probably be wasted.

Google's also algorithm detects a number of other techniques that search
engine spammers use to manipulate the results.

If you want to create a website that performs well in Google's search engine
results, create a site with lots of quality content and get relevant sites
with a high page rank to back link to your site. It's that easy.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a freelance writer and journalist. He is
available for hire and website promotion.http://www.illustratemyname.com
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

The Link Popularity Every Website Needs

One of the important ways of getting traffic is to post to forums, search
engines pick up and index forum posts very frequently, when posting be sure
to add many keyword rich content and topics to each post. This will help
provide popular keywords for your site. Good link popularity is important
because it can increase the visitor traffic to your web page.
Getting good quality incoming links back to your website is an excellent way
of getting visitors that are targeted to your website. If you are selling
niche products, you will need to get links from other sites that are related
to the products or services you are selling.

Building links to your website is not as difficult as everyone believes, you
will need many hours dedicating your time to get the job done properly.
Since Search Engine's are placing more and more emphasis on "link
popularity" as part of their search engine ranking algorithms, webmasters
should definitely invest some time building quality back links to their
site. Spend the time building one way and reciprocal links, it is time
consuming and it will take a long time but in the end it is worth it.

Finding the right partner to exchange links with is equally as important. To
increase link popularity it is necessary to conduct the link exchanges with
other webmasters. To increase your traffic and ultimately your revenue, it
is certainly worth your while to put some serious effort into reciprocal
link exchanging.

Everyday more and more webmasters enter into the world of search engine
optimization, after doing some research and reading a few SEO news articles
or forum posts everyone move ahead and starts optimizing their sites. First
of all, you'll need 3 things to be taken care of: on-site optimization,
search engine submission and some major work on link popularity building.
There's plenty of information about internal web page optimization on the
internet, and it's not a secret how to submit all your web pages to Google
or Yahoo. Nowadays link popularity is being considered to be the most
important step of the search engine optimization process. Building links is
one of the most import function a webmaster has, many webmasters do not
spend the correct amount of time to marketing their website, this is
critical for search engine optimization .

Google's Page Rank is a measuring tool that helps Internet surfers know how
popular a website is compared to other websites. Google uses link popularity
as its most important factor in ranking sites. If you are have link on
website with high Page Rank 4 or more, Google will count this as a link back
to your site. As we all know Google uses their Page Rank technology to
calculate the number of links that point to your web pages, it is uses many
different factors to determine your page ranking. It is well known that a
listing in the Yahoo and DMOZ directory will give you a good boost in Page
Rank.

About The Author: http://www.linknetics.com is software that helps
http://www.linknetics.com/reciprocal-link-exchange.html

Anatomy Of A Web-Advertising Campaign

In The Beginning There Was Marketing

Anyone in business who has any interest in using the Web to further his or
her business is well aware of "search engine optimization." Not a day goes
by that my email in-box isn't loaded with information on how to get the best
search engine results, and not a week goes by that a client or potential
client doesn't request that their website be not just search friendly but
search engine fanatical.

For some time we have been preaching the importance of delivering the
marketing message and that your message should not be corrupted or distorted
by techniques aimed at attracting search engine robots well driving away
real people who may actually be potential customers.

Now I realize that in many circles this attitude is considered outright
heresy, but hopefully there are a few marketing types around that understand
websites have to deliver more than miscellaneous random eyeballs; websites
have to deliver a message that is memorable, understandable, useable, and if
you're really good at your job, information that can be incorporated into
your audiences' belief system.

With that in mind we were pleasantly surprised when Google the primary
target of this SEO obsessive compulsive frenzy of technical slight-of-hand
announced that they were instituting Google Video Ads and to add a little
icing on the cake, they purchased YouTube adding to their already
considerable investment in Google Video. Somebody at the big "G" thinks
video is a viable Web-medium even if the purveyors of search engine fool's
gold would have you believe otherwise.

The list of companies, including Forbes, Amazon, Wyeth, and Ford, delivering
Web-audio and Web-video grows daily and we are not just talking about major
corporations. Small companies are using multimedia to get the edge on their
larger competitors who still have their heads buried in the search engine
optimization sand.

Acknowledging All The Issues

In developing our campaign to promote the use of Web-audio and Web-video as
an effective method of delivering marketing messages over the Web, we
identified four key issues that would have to be addressed:

(a) We had to demonstrate that website design was about delivering the
marketing message and not just search engine optimization.

(b) We had to demonstrate that even small and medium-sized companies could
afford professional Web-audio and Web-video and that it wasn't cost
prohibitive.


(c) We had to demonstrate that professional Web-audio and Web-video required
more than just the ability to use a video camera and that professional
multimedia story-telling required a unique set of creative skills and
technical ability not often found in-house in most businesses.

(d) We had to demonstrate that the development and production of creative
multimedia marketing and professional webmedia content had to do with talent
and experience, not size.

These were the challenges that informed all our subsequent decisions.

The Concept

In order to make people pay attention to what we had to say we needed a
concept that was both familiar and edgy. Sure we were sticking a finger in
the eye of all the search engine optimizers but you can't be afraid to make
a strong statement if you want people to sit-up and take notice, especially
if you are fighting a tidal wave of misconception.

The fact that we were telling people that delivering your marketing message
on the Web using multimedia was more important than search engine
optimization was enough to make what we were doing controversial, but we
also needed a vehicle that allowed us to present the opposing point of view.
What we needed was a recognizable style that demonstrated our ability to
deliver a memorable, comprehensible, useable, belief-altering message in the
medium we were promoting.

Since we primarily use Macintosh computers for all our work and only use PCs
to check for compatibility, we thought we would pay homage to the brilliant
Mac commercials running on television.
The format worked for us because it allowed us to create two characters of
our own that would present opposing points of view over a series of videos
that would comprise the campaign.
We knew that some people would react unfavorably to our using such a
familiar format but we figured it would demonstrate how even small but
talented production companies can deliver high quality multimedia Web-based
marketing on tight budgets.

A Market Primed and Ready

Our efforts in advocating the power of using the human voice and image to
deliver marketing stories over the Web was finally getting through to
companies who were fed-up with the cost and ineffectiveness of continually
chasing the holy grail of search engine optimization. Company presidents and
marketing managers were starting to listen, starting to realize there was
another way. This campaign was aimed at pushing these business executives to
act on what they already knew: good marketing is about delivering the
message, not keyword density.

Preproduction, Production, and Post Production

We wanted to make sure we had a distinctive sound by composing our own
signature theme music and creating our own cast of characters with a
distinctive message promoting the concept of multimedia. In fact these
planned web-commercials really don't sell anything, all they do is make
people aware that search engine optimization is not the only thing they
should be thinking about when they are developing a website or webmedia
campaign. In short, the medium was the message.

The use of Web-audio and Web-video is the best way to implement this kind of
marketing presentation. We sat down and started to write and before we know
it we had eighteen scripts each featuring a different issue in the search
engine optimization versus multimedia controversy.

The next step was finding the right actors to play the part.
Whereas Web-audio allows us to draw upon a vast number of voice talents
across North American, video is much more limiting, especially if were
wanted to keep the cost down to a reasonable amount. Even if we were
prepared to blow the budget on actors, we knew our clients wouldn't, so it
was important to demonstrate that we could get the job cast at a sensible
cost.
The casting proved to be an interesting exercise of frustration and humor.
We had all types of applicants ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous to
the outright bizarre, but ultimately we were able to find two fine young
actors who understood exactly what we were doing and who took to the parts
as if they were written specifically for them.

One of our greatest assets as a firm is that we do everything from concept
to implementation, including writing, videoing, editing, graphic, motion,
and website design; but if you want to produce a campaign at a sensible
price you still have to be careful you don't write overly elaborate scripts
that require multiple sets, locations or hard to acquire props. That said we
still had to find a cute dog we could trust on set, links of various kinds
of sausages, a hard to put together toy, and best of all a real
straightjacket from an interesting website that specialized in rather
strange items of clothing.

The shoot itself went extremely smoothly and we ended up shooting all
eighteen videos in less than two days. We assumed some of the videos that
looked good on paper just wouldn't translate to the screen, but to our
surprise every one of the scripts worked. We knew what we wanted to say and
weren't afraid to say it, even though we were flying in the face of
conventional wisdom.

While Josh Bader our Director of Photography was digitizing, color
correcting and editing the raw footage, Simon Bader our Director of Audio
composed a number of theme music compositions to choose from for our
signature sound. Once all the pieces were put together into a series of
finished videos, we were ready to implement the campaign.

Implementation

The first set of six videos were uploaded to Google Video and YouTube as
well as onto a webpage
(http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads/) that was created to house the full
campaign of eventually eighteen videos, each presenting a different issue in
the search engine optimization versus multimedia controversy. Versions of
the videos were also used to create a Google Video Ad campaign.

Credits

Produced by MRPwebmedia
Executive Producer: Jerry Bader
Written By: Jerry and Josh Bader
Director of Photography and Visual Design: Josh Bader Director of Audio and
Music Composer: Simon Bader SEO Guy: Sean Kaufmann Multimedia Guy: Erez
Bowers

About The Author: Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website
design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit
http://www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, http://www.136words.com
http://www.sonicpersonality.com.
Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Part 02

A Look at META Tags

Another important aspect of your site that can make a difference in your
site are meta tags. There are various types of meta tags, but the ones that
are most important
are the meta description and meta keywords tags. Let's
take a look at the meta description tag, which will look like this:

Meta Name="Description" Content="here you will put a short keyword rich
description of your site"

On most search engines, the words you enter will be what gets displayed on
the results page as a description of the site. Whether or not you have a
good meta description can make a big difference not only in your search
engine ranking, but whether or not seekers decide to visit your site. Your
meta description should be descriptive, alluring, and to the point.

Now let's take a look at the meta keywords tag. This tag looks like this:

Meta Name="Keywords" Content="your various keywords will go here"

There are some important things you should know before creating your meta
keywords tag. For one, your keywords should never exceed 500 characters.
More than 500 characters can lower your ranking or even get you in hot water
for spam. You also do not want to repeat the same keywords. Keywords
should be separated with commas, and be relevant to the content of your
site.

All About Content

Now let's talk a bit about site content. It's crucial that your site
contains quality content that's not duplicated elsewhere. Search engines
are becoming wise to duplicate content, and sites that contain it do not
receive good rankings. There are several reasons why duplicate content can
occur, and one of them has to do with PLR articles, or Private Label Rights
articles. PLR articles are articles that are normally sold in packages,
sometimes through a subscription service. The problem with these articles
is that so many different webmasters have access to them. If you find
yourself using PLR articles to create your site's content, it's crucial that
you rewrite the articles to make them unique.

You might have seen those sites that offer free articles for use on your
site. This may sound appealing, but it usually does more harm than good,
because of the duplicate content issue. Most of the time, you are not
allowed to change the content of these articles, making it impossible to
avoid having duplicate content. These free article sites do have some
benefits, however, which we'll discuss later.

On the topic of content, it cannot be stressed enough that quality content
is key to good traffic. Search engines look for sites whose content is
unique, of high quality, and added on a regular basis. If you're unable to
add pages of content to your site each day, consider hiring a professional
writer to do it for you. Good content is truly one of the most important
aspects of optimizing your site for search engines and getting the traffic
you desire.
Plus, visitors are more likely to bookmark your site and return to it
regularly if they know that the content is updated often.

You'll want to check your site thoroughly before submitting it to search
engines to ensure that you have no broken links, one of the most detrimental
factors to a site's ranking and popularity. You'll see on some sites that
webmasters have a link where visitors can report broken links if they come
across them.

Another important aspect of SEO is having a sitemap. Your sitemap page
should be linked from every page of your site.
In this sitemap, it should be easy to access the pages of your site. Sites
that contain detailed sitemaps are normally seen as more favorable by search
engines than those that do not.

Now that you've learned a bit about search engine optimization, let's look
at some of the other aspects of bringing traffic to your site.

----------------------------------------------------
Steve Renner
Author, Marketing Expert
Marketing Director
The Affiliate Community
http://www.affiliatecommunity.com

SEO - It's Easy To Be Effective

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so easy a child could so it well, the
main problem is that it is incredibly time consuming.
If you don't have the time to do SEO then you may be better off hiring an
SEO company.

Search Engine Optimisation is governed by two basic but powerful guidelines
and they are:

- Have keyword rich text.
- Have links back to your website.

1)Having keyword rich text is absolutely critical to your websites success
as your chosen keyword phrases will be the words that "trigger"
your site to appear at the top of the search results. I would suggest having
four or five keyword phrases on your home page.
Also, repeat them four or five times each throughout your copy.

2)Getting links back to your website is also vital to having a website that
ranks highly in the search engines, even better is having your keywords in
your links back to your website.
These words within the links are called "Anchor Text".

Getting links back to a website is always the hardest part of any SEO
campaign. However, it does account for around 80% of a websites performance.
The latest buzzword in SEO at the moment is "Link Baiting", this involves
creating a page that has a feature or content that is "Link Worthy"
Having a website that has a page that people want to link to is incredibly
powerful as the more people will see it, the more people will link to it.
This will create hundreds if not thousands of links back to the website that
has the "interesting" content on it. A good link baiting campaign will give
the same amount of links in two weeks than traditional forms of SEO will
create in an entire year!

If you don't want to do down the link baiting route you can always gather
links in a variety of different ways. These include, Article writing, link
exchanges and registering with Internet directories.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a SEO and Expert Link Baiter.
He is also a White Hat SEO. He can be contacted at sales (at)
brilliantseo.com http://www.illustratemyname.com
http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

Real Estate Website Design

If i were going to build a real estate website today starting from scratch.
These are a few things I would focus on.
Understanding what I know now about webdesign, SEO and Real Estate Websites.

1. Domain name - This is tricky because if your only marketing will be
Organic Search/ PPC you may want a keyword spam type domain name. ie
www.YOURCITY_State_REAL_ESTATE.com or whatever.
If you are going to advertise your website in your print advertising,
business cards ect. You want something someone can see and remember. You can
rank any site with time and effort but as far as I know keywords in the
domain name are still a factor in all the engines so its just a little
harder. The best solution to this problem is to just simply have 2 domain
names.
One for print and one for ranking. Have your print domain redirected to
the keyword rich domain name and you get the best of both worlds.

2. Website - I would focus on building (or having built) a SEO friendly site
that was easy to add content/new pages to as well as having a blog
installed. I would make sure the site looked professional of course, I
believe that having quality photography and a clean design are the two best
ways to get a professional site. I would have a very limited amount of
outgoing links on my main page and NO BANNERS from directories.

3. Lead Generation - I would build my site so it entices people to contact
me. I would have a contact me page, a Auto Email from MLS page, free CMA
page, and of course I would have my IDX search accessable and I wouldn't
make people sign up prior to using it.(This is debated but I find forced
contacts to be a waste of time others disagree and I see there point as
well) The reason behind this is a site that doesnt convert might as well not
be ranked. If you have 1 million visitors and only 1 person contacts you
would probally be better off building a site that 20 people visit you but 10
contact you. You want a site that does both, you want to both a rankable
site and one that converts those visitors to leads.

4. Off Site SEO - if I had the money I would hire Off Site SEO out. If i
didn't have the money (which I dont) I would focus on building
[U]relevant[/U] links to my site. I would roated between 10 or so different
anchor texts but I would be heavy on my main 1 or 2 terms. These are the
different types of links I would focus on getting. 1 Ways links, Recips, 3
Ways, Article, Directory (free and a [U]select[/U] few paid), Forum Sigs,
Offsite Blogs, Blog Comments, and Press Releases.

I believe if you do (or hire someone to do) just these 4 easy steps you will
rank well in the search engines. MSN will be almost instant, Yahoo 3-6
months, Google 8-12 months. During this time I would use PPC and print
marketing to suppliment my poor rankings and help drive people to my
website.

One more point, people need to realize that web leads are different then
your normal office leads. Usually web leads are just starting there search.
They need to be cultivated, you will need a good lead management system to
keep track of these leads. I have found personally that my leads are usually
6-10 months out when they first contact me. I have obviously also recieved
the I need a home NOW leads as well but they are very few and far between.

Drip Email, Newsleters and PERSONAL PHONE calls are the best way I have
found to keep in constant contact with my leads. I like to mix it up and
contact my clients at least 1 time a week with one of these methods.

About The Author: Sam Dodd is a professional real estate agent in Southern
Utah. If you are looking for http://www.cedarcityonline.com contact Sam for
more information.

Tips For Successful Internet Marketing

If you own a business, and have expanded onto the World Wide Web, you
undoubtedly understand the growing importance of successful Internet
marketing. In the world of Ecommerce, it is becoming increasingly
competitive because of the vast number of people the Internet can reach
world-wide. Another factor is the convenience of doing business online. You
see the product you want, click add to cart, fill out your information in a
few simple steps, and it can be shipped to you the same day, and reach you
very quickly. That is why marketing your business on the Internet has become
so crucial in this fast-paced, ever-evolving medium.

While the strategies for Internet marketing are different from those used
when doing so face-to-face, the concepts are much the same. You still offer
a product that you would like to sell, and you have to convince the masses
that they should buy your product instead of the many other similar products
from the vast number of competing companies. Below are a few tips that will
help you when planning your Internet marketing strategy.

Develop a web site that is effective. If the information on your site is
easy for people to read and navigate, and can be easily found, they will
probably not leave your site to find another one that is similar to yours.
Take the time to research effective site development, and make sure the end
product accurately depicts who your company is, and what you have to offer.
If you also run your business off-line, be sure your site reflects the
values of your company.

Find out what services are available to you that might help you get the word
out to potential customers. Online advertising is a good idea, and knowing
what to look for when doing so is essential. It isn't necessary to spend a
ton of money to let others know of your existence on the Internet, but keep
in mind that you will have to make some investments.

Link to as many web sites as possible. Find other web sites that are
relevant to the products and services you have to offer, and encourage their
web masters to link your site to theirs. This is a good way to advertise
your site. It can also help increase your customer base by leading others to
you. You can also add to this by linking other relevant sites to you own.

About The Author:
http://www.searchengineoptimizationtoronto.com/ Search Engine Optimization
Toronto offers Search Engine Marketing Services in Toronto

Established Websites For Sale: 3 Reasons Why Buying An Existing Website Can Be Good For Your New Business

Buying an established website can be a great way to jump start your new
internet business for three reasons.

It is important to note the difference between an established, developed
website and a cookie-cutter site that is simply a copy (in design and
content) of the original domain.
Established, developed websites that are good to buy will be at least one
year old and offer a good selection of content.
Cookie-cutters that are not worth your time or money are often very new and
their content and design are duplicated all over the web.

One of the top reasons to consider buying an established website is that it
already has traffic flowing in from various sources. As an internet
entrepreneur you know that traffic is vital to the success of your new
business. If you buy an existing site with an existing flow of traffic then
you do not have to start from the bottom and build up from there. You can
use that existing traffic to grow your fledgling business faster and bigger
than you could starting from scratch with a brand new domain name and site.

Hand-in-hand with the existing traffic flow, you will benefit from the
previous owners search engine marketing efforts. An established website will
possess back links and listings in various search engines and directories.
These will not only add to your traffic but will also make it easier for
your improvements and marketing efforts to reap greater rewards. A new site
can take weeks or months to get listed in many directories and search
engines. It can take months before a new site is given any type of
recognition or ranking. However an established website has already paid its
dues (so to speak) and so you will not have to wait. Not only is the domain
name itself listed, but usually a good many subpages have also been indexed
by various search engines.

Finally, an important and often overlooked benefit of buying an existing
domain is that many of the good website names have long been taken. However,
once you start searching the marketplace you can often find not only a
domain name that reflects your target audience and keywords but also an
established website that has been search engine optimized for those keywords
as well.

If you are just starting out and looking to establish your own internet
presence then you should look into buying an established website to give
your new web business a jump start in terms of traffic and search engine
marketing.

About The Author: Deanna Mascle has been developing websites since 1999 and
is currently offering a small selection of her personally developed
established websites for sale at
http://renaissancewomanonline.com/domainsforsale.php

SEO - Use Digg To Make Your Website An Overnight Success

Internet marketers are going crazy over this new social network called Digg
and for good reason too. Using Digg correctly can send tens of thousands to
your website virtually overnight.

This is how Digg works: People register with the site, and thus join the
Digg community. These registered users then submit newsworthy or rather
"Digg" worthy content. A short summary of the news item is written about the
content. You can submit nearly anything to Digg; this includes videos,
stories, blog entries, funny pictures - Anything!

What then happens is "Registered Users" then "Digg" the story or whatever
has been submitted. The "Digg" is actually a vote for the content that was
submitted to Digg.

The stories with the highest number of "Diggs" make it onto the front page
of Digg. Stories can also be "Buried" which will send them shooting down to
rankings at Digg.

Digg stories are then kept in the up and coming section for around 12 - 24
hours.

If the story does not receive enough "Diggs" it is then sent to the Digg
homepage. If the story starts to get "buried" it will automatically
disappear.

Writing a good story that gets a number of Diggs, and by number I mean a few
hundred can produce tens of thousands of page views which will mean
thousands of visitors and potential customers to your websites.

To produce a popular story you need to write about something that will help
people, actually, writing about Digg itself is a very popular subject and
frequently makes it onto the top spot.

This is a form of viral marketing, get it right and your site will do
incredibly well, get it wrong and nothing will happen.
Site promotion like this is a far, far more powerful way of gaining
popularity and backlinks to your site than traditional Search Engine
Optimisation (SEO) Techniques.

About The Author: Chris Angus Is a website promoter and SEO. He is available
for hire. Please contact him at Chris (at) brilliantseo.com.
http://www.mobility-direct.co.uk http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

How to Drive Traffic to Your Website Part 01

No matter what kind of website you may have, your ultimate goal is to bring
traffic to it. Luckily, there are lots of different ways you can achieve
this. In this report, you'll learn some of the most effective ways to bring
eager visitors to your site. Let's take a look at the first method of
driving traffic to a website, called SEO or search engine optimization.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO, is a cornerstone to
healthy website traffic. As the name suggests, this technique involves
optimizing the pages of your site to garner the best search engine
placement.
There are many different ways you can do this. But first, it's important to
understand how search engines work.

Search engines use programs that are called spiders or bots to perform a
function known as crawling. After your pages have been crawled, the next
step is indexing. A search engine's index is a massive database that stores
all the information. When someone enters a query into a search engine, that
engine then finds all the related pages that are in its index. The order,
or ranking, in which the sites and pages are displayed depends on several
factors.

One is relevance. The search engine will find pages that are most relevant
to the terms that have been entered.
This is why it's important to center your web pages around the most
effective keywords, which we'll discuss shortly.
The other part of the equation is popularity. How popular your site is will
depend on how many backlinks you have pointing to your site. The more links
you have with other quality sites, the higher your site's popularity will be
to
a search engine. Now that you know a little about how a
search engine works, you are ready to learn how to make your pages as
attractive to these engines as possible. One way to do this is through HTML
tags. Each page of your site should be centered around a particular keyword
so the search engines will be able to determine if your site is relevant.
There are various ways to achieve this. First, you need to determine the
keyword or keywords that you want
to center your pages around. One way to do this is by
researching the most popular search terms with a helpful tool like the
Overture Keyword Selector Tool. With a tool like this, you can enter a
search term and find out how many searches there have been for that term in
a month.
This tool also lists related keywords and their search results as well.

Once you've figured out your keywords, it's time to insert them into your
pages. When naming your individual site pages, always use the keywords
you've chosen as the page title or at least as part of it. The title tag,
which looks like <title>Your Title Goes Here</title> is one of the most
important tags on your entire site. Also, if you can find a domain name
that includes your main keyword or words, all the better. Other places to
insert your keywords include links on your page, image tags, meta tags and
also in the content of your site.

However, it's important not to overload a page with a particular keyword or
phrase. This can cause the search engines to designate your site as one
that uses keyword spam, which can get your site shut down. To maintain a
healthy keyword balance, aim for 1.5 to 3 percent keyword density.

----------------------------------------------------
Steve Renner, Author, Marketing Expert, Marketing Director, The Affiliate
Community http://www.affiliatecommunity.net

How To Charge A Bomb By Marketing Your Internet Business Skills Online!

Some time ago I was savagely attacked by a bee while innocently enjoying a
tipple of sherry in the living room. In the process of battling it (flailing
my arms about frantically and screaming like a lunatic) the front door
SLAMMED shut so hard that the lock broke instantly.

I had to call a locksmith to fix it and do you know how much he charged?
£90! (That's about $160 if you're across the atlantic by the way). He didn't
change it. He didn't even change any of the parts. As far as I could tell he
simply twiddled at it with some metal thingy (i think they call it a
screwdriver) and then stuck me with a ridiculous bill. I had no option but
to pay it.

The thing is I checked, and that's the going rate for a locksmith in London.
And do you know WHY they get away with charging such high rates? Because
it's a SPECIAL SKILL. Most people can't do it.

What does this have to do with you? Absolutely everything. You see, YOUR
specialist knowledge is absolutely priceless online.
If you happen to be an internet business entrepreneur (like me) you can make
an absolute BOMB simply by knowing more than most, and having more skills
than most. Because people will pay (sometimes exorbidant sums of) cash for
your specialist skills & knowledge. And the potential is even more potent in
the internet arena where new techniques, systems, methods & technologies are
born almost daily.

Think about that the next time you're struggling with trying something new
online. Because once you sort it out, you can probably write your own ticket
by having that skill or knowledge. Here are just a few examples of the type
of online specialist skills & knowledge I'm talking about:

* Creating simple websites.
* Understanding & penetrating new niche markets.
* Installing scripts.
* Creating information products & software.
* Creating graphics.
* Pulling in traffic.
* Building Opt In Lists.
* Setting up membership sites.
* Creating Audio/Video.
* Creating podcasts & RSS feeds.
* Creating high-ticket courses.

You see, just this small list of topics require SPECIALIST KNOWLEDGE too.
This means that like the locksmith, once you start to master them, and know
where to find customers who are looking for them, you can start charging
those high market rates for them yourself.

A lot of people want to earn a massive amount of money online.
They want $5,000 or $10,000 online. There's nothing wrong with that at all
but if you're starting out from scratch then it takes some time and
application to develop your skills & knowledge online.

Perhaps you already have a SPECIALIST SKILL? If so, start to think about how
you can market that skill online. The next section of this article looks at
how and where to freelance your skills for immediate gains.

Freelancing - The Opportunities For YOU Are Endless. Here's What To Sell,
Where To Find Work & How To Set-Up A Freelancing Business Selling Your
Skills Online!

It's almost startling the way that the entire world is rushing online to
conduct business. Did you know that there are an estimated 8 billion
websites floating around on the world wide web? That number is going up as
we speak.

It's good news. Because as more and more people and businesses come online
it creates one thing - opportunity. As the internet evolves, so does your
scope for marketing your skills and services online.

So what type of skills can you market online? The answer is just about
ANYTHING that you can do for someone else. I'm going to be focusing largely
on online business skills today but it could just as easily be something
completely different (for example making hand made crafts or speciality
cards).

Here are just a sample of your skills and services that you could offer to
the exploding internet business market:

- Content creation.
- Website creation & maintenance.
- Graphics creation.
- Copywriting.
- Information product creation.
- Software creation.
- Search engine optimisation.
- Pay per click campaign management.
- Affiliate program management.
- Joint venture marketing.
- Market research.
- Opt in list/leads services.
- Audio/Video production.
- Accounts/Excel/Word skills.
- Access database skills.

I could just as easily keep going for AGES with additional services & skills
that you could charge for (and that are in great demand). For now, lets talk
a little about the sort of prices that you could charge for your skills.
Here are some averages I found for you:

For WRITING Services (copywriting, transcriptions, reports) - Average price
of $376 per project.

For DESIGN Services (book/cd covers/photo editing) - Average price of $264
per project.

For PROGRAMMING Services (C++ and other geeky type languages) - Average
price of $1,030 per project.

For OTHER services (including lead generation, video editing, word
processing, excel skills) - Average price of $780 per project.

Do YOU have any skills that could be used by the billions of businesses
seeking them? Why not find out (pop in to elance and have a poke about).

You'll find out exactly what skills are sought after - and if you happen to
have them you could start bidding on projects and start creating an
additional stream of income by offering your services.

To your immediate success,

About The Author: I'm so convinced that you're going to find my free
internet business newsletter so very valuable that I'm giving away ALL my
resell rights ebooks & software worth hundreds of dollars if you just TRY
it:
http://www.digital-resale-rights.com/ibelifepass.htm

Blogging Wars - Wordpress Vs Blogger Part 1

There's a war going on in the blogosphere, and it has nothing to do with
bloggers dissing each other on their respective websites. The war is about
control of the blogosphere by several great, many good, and tons of terrible
blogging platforms. The average newbie now has "too many" options to choose
from, and the battle for blogging supremacy is hotter than ever.

At my website and blogs, I'm always asked the question "Is Wordpress better
than Blogger?". The answer, of course, is "Yes". But to really understand
why, it's important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see
which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress,
the earliest now termed as "Wordpress" at Wordpress.org, and the hosted
version similar to Blogger now termed "Wordpress.com" which is of course
available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a
sub-domain account. We'll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of
Wordpress. Here's the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it's much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own
Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you're set-up you
can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer's touch to your
blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don't know what
you're doing. Since you're going to host it on your own account, you'll need
to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a
database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with
Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade
and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn't allow categories. You can't sort your articles into
different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress,
not only can you add categories, you can also display each category
differently on your main page.
In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a
magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to
post articles, especially if you're making changes to the entire website.
With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system
with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like "Shout Boxes"
that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and
nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However,
that's as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound,
not only can you get themes, additional "plugins" and advanced tools, you
can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content
Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke,
B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability
of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community
makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system,
classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won't say that it's bad. But after a while I
started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here's
why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they
don't like what you're blogging about. You don't have absolute control over
your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is
hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you're free
to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want.
Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own
the database that holds your content! Don't forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There's this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor
Blogger accounts. I won't say that this is illogical, but from my
experience, there's no such favoritism.

I've heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in
search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users.
As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only "ping" a limited amount of sites,
whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog
directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms
of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There's no doubt that it's easier to get started with Google Adsense if you
have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a
Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are
owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough.
You'll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize
the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there's
even "Adsense revenue sharing" plugins around that allow you to share ad
revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you'll soon
discover what I mean. It's something you need to experience for yourself. I
can tell you one thing though - when you go Wordpress, you don't go back.

About The Author: Gobala Krishnan is a micro-niche specialist that coaches
Internet marketers to cash in on profitable markets using Wordpress and
secret blogging tactics. Get started now by reading a copy of his report
"Wordpress Adsense System" at http://adsense.easywordpress.com

Do It Yourself SEO: Ten Search Engine Optimization Tips (Part 2)

In the first article of this series I outlined five important steps in the
optimization of any web page or website. Here are five more tips for those
who want to make sure that their web pages are both user and search engine
friendly.

6. Write copy that includes your keyword and search phrases at the
beginning, middle and end.

If you want to write website copy that is search engine optimized, then you
just have to follow good writing and presentation procedure. State clearly
what you want to say in the opening paragraph, elaborate on your basic ideas
in the middle section of your text and at the end summarize what you have
said, reminding your readers with text that is similar to the opening
paragraph. Be natural; don't try to stuff your page with the keywords. If
you read the page out loud and it sounds funny, then you have overdone the
repetition of your search phrases and keywords. A density of 2% is
considered to be OK.
Thus in a 400 word page of text your keyword might be repeated eight times.

7. Place your keywords and phrases in the link text of your web pages

So far we have placed the keywords in the strategic places of the web page:
the title, the description, the headlines and the body text. Now we have to
see that the keywords are included in clickable link text on the page.
Whenever you are linking to sub pages or other pages of your site, make sure
that your keywords are included in the clickable portions of the links.
Thus, instead of making a link that says "click here" for more information
about bicycle accessories, it would be better to
write: click here for more information about "bicycle accessories," with the
keywords "bicycle accessories" being the anchor (clickable) text.

8. Install a navigation system that can be easily followed by search engines

One of the most important steps in getting more traffic to your site is to
ensure that all of the site's web pages are included in the search engine
indices. Normally a search engine robot will visit the main page of a site
and follow links to the other pages. If your navigation system is based on
java script, or on images, there is a possibility that some search engine
robots will not be able to follow the links and thus they will not pick up
the interior pages of your site. One simple remedy for this problem is to
build an additional text-link navigation bar and place it at the bottom of
the page. This additional navigation bar will serve multiple purposes:

a. Helping the search engines to reach the interior pages b. Putting your
keywords in link "anchor text"
c. Reminding the user to go deeper into the site by repeating the navigation
options again

9. Build a site map page or use the Google sitemap option

Getting all of your pages indexed is so important, that it is also prudent
to take another step that will ensure that all of your pages are visited by
search engine robots. A site map is a page that has text links to all of the
pages of your site. As with a text link navigation bar, a site map serves
multiple
purposes:

1. It helps users to find what they are looking for on the site by providing
an outline summary of all of your pages 2. It helps search engine robots to
land on the interior pages

After your build your site map page, be sure to make a link to it from your
home page and the other important pages of your website.

In addition to a normal site map page, you can also make an XML site map,
upload it to the server and then register it with the Google site map tool.
You can use a free online utility to create your XML site map at:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and visit www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
for more information.
This process is easy to accomplish, and it will supply you with important
statistical information from Google as well as help get all of your pages
indexed.

10. Once your website is up and running concentrate on off-site optimization

So far all the steps that I have outlined are concerned with on-page
factors, the parts of your website that are under your control. But your
ranking in Google and other search engines will also be heavily dependent on
off-page factors such as how many high quality sites link to your site.
Unless you obtain a good amount of high quality links to your site you will
not be able to compete in highly competitive search categories.

By far the best way to get links to your site is to first build a site that
has valuable content. You should endeavor to build a site that is so "cool"
or so unique, that other people will link to you without even asking you. Of
course this is easier said than done, but it should be what you are striving
for.

The next best way to get high quality back links to a website is to write
informative articles and get them published on other websites with a link
back to your site. This process is known as article marketing and it not
only helps to build incoming links, but it also builds your online
reputation as an expert in your field.

Other common methods of increasing incoming links include submissions to
important directories, participation in forums and careful trading of links
with high quality websites.

If you follow the ten "do-it-yourself" search engine optimization tips that
I have described in the two articles of this series then you will have taken
a big step towards guaranteeing the success of your online enterprise.

About The Author: Donald Nelson is a search engine optimization specialist.
His company, http://www.a1-optimization.com offers affordable search engine
optimization, website copywriting, article writing and link building
services.

SEO copywriting for spiders - Nourishing the logical needs of search engine spiders

Search Engines send these programs, also known as robots, to
'crawl' and 'index' websites to help determine their
relevancy and ranking.

If your copywriting is not spider friendly, you're missing out
on one of the most powerful, cost-effective ways to achieve
online presence: search engine optimization (SEO).

Consider these facts:

* More than 500 million web searches are made daily (source:
Google)

* Search engines account for more than 85 per cent of all new
visitors to a website (source: GvU)

* Studies indicate only seven per cent of Internet users surf
beyond the first 20 listings of a search engine

* The Internet is home to more than 100 million registered
domains (source: Netcraft)

How to achieve SEO

While online marketing strategies such as inbound links score
points, many industry experts are of the same opinion: content is
king! This is reinforced by the search engines themselves. For
instance, Google advises webmasters one of the keys to a high
ranking is to "create a useful, information-rich site."

Essential ingredients to effective SEO copywriting:

1) Determine the best keywords for your business and target
market

Choosing and using the right keywords within your web pages can
make the difference between a top 10 and top 500 search engine
ranking. To maximize targeted traffic to your website, you need
to establish:

* What your potential customers are likely to enter into a
search engine

* How often that search term is used

* How many websites and pages you are competing against

* What keywords your direct competitors are using, and with what
success

Depending on the nature of your business, your SEO copywriting
might need to be 'regionalized' to reach your target market.
For instance, a bicycle repair shop in Seattle, Washington might
use the keywords: "Bill's Bikes bicycle repairs Seattle" as web
traffic from another city would have little or no benefit.

2) Assign one to three keywords per page

Increase your chances of appearing on search engine results by
using one to three keywords or keyphrases per page. For example,
a Toronto-based web developer might have the following keywords
on his home page: web design Toronto, web development Toronto,
websites Toronto.

3) Create keyword-rich copy

Once your keywords are established, you need to incorporate them
into content-rich SEO copywriting. Search engine spiders look for
pages that are relative to a search phrase, so they like to see
phrases repeated. As a result, your SEO copywriting should
ideally comprise a keyword density ratio of three to seven per
cent. This is calculated by dividing the keywords by the total
number of words on the page.

If your keyword density is too low, search engines may overlook
your website. Meanwhile, overly aggressive SEO copywriting can
get you flagged as a "spammer" and result in ranking
penalties.

Test your SEO copywriting

Test your SEO copywriting today with one of several keyword
density tools available on the Web.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Rick Sloboda is a Senior Web Copywriter at

http://www.webcopyplus.com Test your web
copy with a free keyword density tool

http://www.webcopyplus.com/tools

Get more SEO copywriting tips

http://www.webcopyplus.com/faqs

Importance of Search Engine Marketing Firms

Literally speaking, there is no business in today's world of World Wide Web,
which doesn't have online business. To reach ever growing population of
internet all across the world it is mandatory to have a good online presence
for any business. Moreover, meeting customers online is the cheapest
possible way.

According to all prominent researches on online businesses, it is through
search engines that businesses are getting more than seventy five percent of
their web traffic. So, there is quite obvious that every website wants to
have good search engine traffic so that it gets free and quality traffic
from these search engines. However, it is not an easy task to get good
search engine ranking for your business, unless you are a website with more
than 5 million page views a day, already.

Some people say that if you have quality content and if it is updated quite
consistently, then your website is going to be ranked at the top of the
list. However, the life is not as simple as that. You need to have a lot of
knowledge on search engine optimization techniques and you need to spend a
lot of time in optimizing your website in several ways to get a very good
search engine ranking. Normally, business owners or webmasters lack either
knowledge or time or both. This is the time where search engine marketing
firms help you in a big way.

People belonging to so many varieties, surf the internet everyday in search
of information that is related to different things. If your website has got
that information then it is mandatory for you to make your website easily
accessible to those surfers and make them as the visitors of your website. A
professional and good search engine marketing firm sees helps you in this
case. It makes sure that you are able in a perfect way to announce your
website presence to all interested parties in the best possible and in a
cost effective way. However, announcing your presence is not the end point
of your success. Creating page links, forum posting, blog posting, article
writing and many different aspects of the internet business are very
necessary to be done for successful marketing of your website by the
professional search engine marketing firms.

Search engine marketing firms are quite perfect for you, if you are looking
to launch your website and to make real good business out of it.

----------------------------------------------------
Darren Dunner is the author of this article. Find more information on the
subject at http://www.the-content-writers.com/
Also feel free to check on their website http://www.buildpr.com

Seo - Use Dmoz For Excellent Results

There have been many discussions about how registering with DMOZ affects
your sites ranking. However, the majority of Search Engine Optimisers (SEO)
will agree that registering with the DMOZ directory will help your site
significantly improve in the search engine results. It's not always going to
make the biggest difference to your site but on the whole it should help
your site jump up quite a few places. Even if it does nothing for your site,
it is still a link back to your site.

There are two common ways to get your site listed in the DMOZ directory. The
first is to try and find your relative category; this is by far the hardest
way to go about registering your site with DMOZ. Speaking from experience, I
would not suggest this way as people almost always get their DMOZ entry in
the wrong category. This will delay your insertion into DMOZ by months and
months.

The second way in which you can apply to get your site listed in DMOZ is by
going through your regions until you find your specific town or city. I
would certainly suggest going about registering your site with DMOZ in this
manner.

When registering your site with DMOZ, you will be asked to fill out a little
bit of information about your website. Make it matter of fact as if it was
another person describing what your site offers. Avoid words that promote
your site, like best, leader, brilliant etc. DMOZ does not want sales
pitches in their descriptions they simply want to know what your website has
to offer. Since I am an editor as DMOZ, I can confirm that having to rewrite
website descriptions does not motivate me to registering a particular site.
I usually do all the websites that don't need much work and then get around
to registering the ones that do.

As of writing this article DMOZ has been out of action for almost two
months, this has stopped any new websites being registered. It is assumed
that DMOZ will be back online and accepting new website submissions by the
beginning of 2007.

About The Author: Chris Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He is available
for hire and can be contacted at sales(at)brilliantseo.com Personalised
Christening Gift http://www.mdhsasbestosconsultants.com
http://www.everest-oxfordshire.co.uk

Capture Your Prospects Now!

After six months of hard work you finally completed your apprenticeship on
Website Development, Site Promotions, Traffic Building, and Internet
Marketing. Your SEO campaign was programmed to all the Internet marketing
Guru's knowledge and advice. Your website looks and appears like it was
developed by the leading web design company in the industry.

Page Rank and back links are now pointing to your website like a three foot
laser beam coming from the heavens above.

You have successfully prepared your website to rank supreme and establish
your presence as a successful money making Internet Home Business. Your
website offers excellent products with good values.

As the sun goes down and the day comes to an end, you back-out of your day
by surveying your daily sales records. The bottom line of your ledger
reveals that traffic is respectable, but your daily sales are weak when
compared to your traffic volume.
Your prospects click on your sales link but fail to complete the
transaction. What is the problem you ask?

To evaluate the strength and power of one's website ability to actively
generate significant revenue, you first must understand what forces your
prospect to reach for their wallet.

When a prospect visits your website, they will skim over titles and phrases
seeking pertinent information that may have relevant interest to them.
Possible solutions and desires for solving their problems remain their main
objective.

Remember one thing here that is paramount, we all have the American Dream of
winning the Lottery, and or, successfully making money on the Internet
working from home.

Have you ever seen a lottery jack pot rise to $200 million dollars? Camera
crews from network Television stations sometimes camp-out at lottery ticket
stations to interview wanna-be winners. They regularly ask the ticket
holders what they initially intend to do with their winnings if their
numbers are selected. These ticket holders are excited emotional with the
anticipation with acquiring massive amounts of money and the personal
rewards that come with it.

What these wanna-be lottery winners perceive in their minds are the primary
solutions to their unresolved problems or desires.
Just by purchasing a lottery ticket and winning all your present problems
and desires will be solved.

Smart Internet marketing Guru's apply the same tactics while trying to lure
their prospects into purchasing their products.

Power words, power marketing phrases, and trigger words now all come into
play to entice the prospect to purchase now.

Words and phrases that tug on your heart strings and won't let go ultimately
heighten your curiosity. These words and phrases emotionally place your mind
in a state of seeking a practical resolution that may solve your problems
and actively accomplish your dreams.

It's all about the WORDS, folks! Trying to convince a prospect about how
outstanding your product might be has never played an important role for any
successful business.

Convincing a prospect that your product will resolve, aid, enhance, develop,
cleverly save precious time, save money, etc.
will overwhelmingly increase your sales.

Painting a picture of unexpected success by using power words, power
phrases, and triggers into a prospects mind will increase your odds
dramatically. Some of the worst products that were ever developed became a
sales success due to their marketing campaign. The advertiser had placed a
perceived value of their product into the prospect mind using the power of
words.

Using the proper selection of power words and phrases to display on your
website will become your ultimate sales force and should be considered as
Golden Nuggets in a desolate field of rocks.

Stand back sometime you have a moment and evaluate yourself.
Ask yourself the question: What makes you willingly purchase a product that
you never heard of before? Exclude all meaningful name brands or recognition
by your friends. What really captures your attention and peaks your
curiosity? Is the advertiser bragging about their product? Is there product
new with people standing in line to eagerly purchase it? Or just maybe
because it's just cutting-edge technology and a must have?

What if the advertiser of the website proclaimed:

... Take your business to a new and exciting level ... Achieve success
instantly ... Boost your online commissions ... Claim all FREE bonuses Today
... Don't spend another dime until you read this ... Exciting ways to make
money ... Explosive information ... Financial Freedom ... Get thousands of
visitors to your site using this simple Secret Method ... Make massive money
... Maximize your profit potential ... Outsell your competition ... Save
hundreds of hours of time ... Seriously increase your profits ... Simple
technique ... The fastest way to your success of making money online is ...
You can generate more sales ... Yours FREE

These types power phrases motivate your prospects thinking regarding a
relationship between their problems and your solutions.

Don't just take my word regarding power words and phrases, simply reread the
above phrases and see where your thoughts go.

About The Author: Roy King, is the editor for Ecom Newspaper which is
dedicated to provide Ecommerce news, information, and articles of interest
for home-based Internet businesses. Tips, Tricks, Techniques, and Secrets
are revealed by the Guru's of the Ecommerce world within our online
newspaper. Stop by and visit us at: http://www.ecomnewspaper.com Have a
Great E-Commerce Day.... Roy King