Spam tactics may be deliberate and unintentional in internet marketing. What’s certain is that they are a regrettable and unavoidable reality for all those organizations with an online business. Perpetrators of spam, spamdexing, or black hat techniques will tempt using sales patter – guaranteed search engine rankings, campaigns measured in weeks not several weeks, and a quick shot of immediate search engine visibility. Sooner or later , most website owners will have been pitched these empty guarantees . Most will have considered, even if only for a moment, the appealing prospect of circumnavigating a drawn out and potentially pricey optimization or paid search campaign.

The tough facts are that these shortcuts can cause damage to existing search engine rankings and harm long-term listings if search engines like Google or Bing decide that the site has used spam or non-ethical tactics to unnaturally inflate search positions. Sometimes though despite the best motives of all concerned, sites do stray into spam territory. This happens simply through not being aware of what does and does not constitute questionable methods. Spam can happen accidently, particularly when search engine optimization work continues to be performed by novice campaign managers. Being on guard for the following stumbling blocks can help limit mistakes and penalties.

Keyword stuffing: This is the most common of black hat SEO or spam techniques, and can become a problem on a site by simply too placing too much attention on certain key phrases in the dash to enhance search engine ratings. An oversight small site owners frequently make is to believe that they have to place primary key phrases just about everywhere on the page – in titles, headers, alt tags, meta descriptions, body text, and anchor text- and as often as possible. While a certain degree of keyword density is imperative, unneccessary use of key phrases with little or no synonym consideration is usually categorised as spam.

As a standard, anywhere from 5% – 8% key phrase density is satisfactory, but anything over that is considered SPAM. If unpracticed optimizers have been given free control on your site, check that you’ll be not displaying identical anchor text throughout, that titles are restricted to five or six descriptive phrases, that meta tags provide significant, unique details about that web page, that H1 and H2 headers are not simply vehicles for having key phrases in bigger, bold print which the body text utilizes both long and short tail keyword variations.

Cloaking: As the name suggests, cloaking is a means of hiding information on your website. It is commonly used to send one lot of information to the various search engines while presenting a completely different view to the user. Proponents of black hat search engine optimization use cloaking as a way to present a highly optimized page of code for the spiders, often filled with keywords along with other factors which are known to aid favorable rankings. Because these pages in many cases are keyword stuffed, they are of little help or sense to a real user so an alternative version of the page is designed for a human reader. Which page is presented is determined by the IP address or User-Agent HTTP of the requesting user.

Look through your CMS system or FTP files to evaluate that you recognize each listed page. Actually it could be necessary to have a different version for the search engine, for instance image descriptions in the code. If you suspect that cloaking has been performed on your own website, it’s a good idea to consult with an SEO agency or consultancy to go over helpful resolutions.

URL Redirects: Redirection methods have many useful and ethical applications, such as redirecting a user with a bookmarked page to the correct new page when the URL is renamed or moved. However, there are also some non-ethical applications used in black hat SEO and spam which the various search engines will take a dim view of. One example of this is directing a search engine to at least one version of a page full of popular search terms while siphoning the user off to a very different page. Temporary redirects have also been utilized to attempt to steal the PageRank of a well established page and pass on to a new page. These techniques are both identified as spam by the various search engines and can lead to the website being given lower rankings or dropped from the search engine results entirely.

Doorway Pages: Sometimes called bridge or portal pages, a doorway page is quite similar to cloaking in that it is a page that is used to make the search engines think one thing while showing entirely different data to the end user. A doorway page will redirect the user off to another page either via a Meta refresh command, JavaScript, or a link.

It is rather simple to detect a doorway page on your own server as they are clearly constructed for search engine purposes so will contain plenty of keywords, perhaps make little sense to the reader and have very simple navigation structures or links.

The existence of any of these tactics on your site can jeopardize your ranking and may even lead to blacklisting by search engines. Make sure that your SEO program avoids this pitfalls to preserve your good name online!

Developing a Website That Generates Traffic and Increases Sales

When you own a business, your website is one of your most important tools that can be used to reach new customers and generate higher sales.

Whether you have an established website that is not currently working for you, or you are a complete newbie to the online marketing world, improving your website so that it generates traffic and increases sales is the right thing for your business.

Without a high quality website that attracts visitors and provides you with a way to capture information, you are not using the Internet’s power to its full potential. The information below can provide you with an idea of why a good website is so important for your businesses’ bottom line.

Why is a Quality Business Website so Important?

A high-quality business website provides you with a way to capture the enormous amount of traffic that is on the Internet. It also makes your business more accessible to your customers.

It does this, by giving website users a way to contact you or find out valuable information about your products or services without having to get on the phone, and during non-business hours.

There are literally millions of people searching the Internet for various reasons on any given day. If you are not trying to capture some of those visitors, then you are losing out on many potential sales each month. Just as your store gives you a physical presence a high-quality website provides you with an online Internet presence.

Benefits of Having a Good Website

As a business owner, there are many benefits to having a quality website that is able to not only generate traffic but also increase sales for your company. The first benefit that a business website can provide you with is it enables you to have access to customers that you otherwise might not have contact with.

Without a website, you are only able to reach your potential market through traditional means, and not those potential customers that primarily use the internet for their purchase research.

By enlisting the help of an internet marketing service company, you can create a highly effective direct response website that enables you to reach out to Internet traffic.

By adding an opt-in form to a quality website, you can increase your earning potential each year by at least 20%. An opt-in form provides a means of capturing visitors’ contact information. This is very valuable as it will allow you to send current and potential customers information about promotions, important updates, and special sales events throughout the year.

The visitors on your list will be people that you know are already interested in the services that you are offering, and by sending out a sales message to them your rate of return will be much higher than with an untargeted ad in the newspaper.

One of the most important benefits that a business website provides is that it allows you to remain a step above your competition. If other related local businesses do not currently have websites, you are already reaching far more people than they are.

By creating a high-quality website that can generate massive traffic and drive sales, you are ensuring that your site will be listed before the competitions’ in the search engine rankings.

How to Develop a High Quality Business Website

Unless you are professional, the best way to develop a high-quality business website is to seek out an Internet marketing company or web designer that can create a customized plan for your business.

These companies have experience marketing to those online, and they can help your website by marketing it for targeted driven traffic, and ensuring that it gets ranked well within the search engine listings.

Off-line business owners can increase their revenue by creating a business website or revamping their old one. Without a high-quality site that is able to generate traffic and increase your sales, your online presence will do you no good. Enlist the help of a professional Internet marketing company to develop a website that will help your business thrive.

About the Author: Aaron Howard – For more information on website development and online marketing, contact Aaron Howard, Business Development Manager with CU Innovative Marketing at http://CUInMarketing.com.

Guided navigation means more sales.

When designing an e-commerce site, retailers must consider how to get a shopper to the product she wants quickly. Site search is an important tool to accomplish this but can actually be slower because if they don’t put in the correct phrase it can show to many products.

A faster method that allows shoppers to drill down from category to features with great speed is a guided navigation tool. It can become an important element of the site experience because it gets shoppers to the products they want quicker that trying to spell Mississippi!

One strategy for improving guided navigation is to make the feature the mandatory starting point for any onsite product search. Site design and development firm Americaneagle.com Inc. has developed such a guided navigation system for Weathertech.com, a retailer of auto parts and accessories.

After navigating to the retail site, shoppers are required to enter the make, model and year of the vehicle for which they are buying accessories, or they can enter the product type. In both cases, shoppers select the required information from a pull-down menu. Shoppers that enter the make, model and year of the vehicle are shown product categories specific to that vehicle and can drill down further from that point by clicking on a category. Shoppers selecting a product are shown that product.

The change to guided navigation from open-ended site search boosted the retailer’s conversion rate from less than 6% to 10%, Americaneagle.com reports.

“The retailer wanted to improve the way shoppers search for products specific to a vehicle, as well as specific types of products, and decided that steering shoppers into guided navigation was the best way to eliminate the risk of having site search return unsatisfactory results,” says Americaneagle.com chief operating officer Mike Svanascini. “In the current economy, guiding shoppers to the products they are looking for in as few steps as possible is going to create a more satisfying shopping experience and boost conversion rates.”

based on an article from Internetretailer.com

After putting a lot of thought into how to best use RSS feeds on your website and then creating them on your website, the next step is to promote them. As with any kind of marketing, where and how you advertise your website can determine the amount of visitors. The same applies to RSS feeds.

As you create your RSS feeds, keep in mind that the title should contain optimal search keywords. The more keywords contained, the more likely you are to have your feed come up when a particular search string is entered. This is not to say you should cram every possible keyword into the title of the RSS feed. Instead, keep in mind that you can have up to 15 different titles listed for the same link, article, content, etc. when creating the original RSS file.

Use descriptors to attract visitors to your site by tempting them to click on your feed. Think of text that will enhance your content, but not make it appear irrelevant. People are less likely to click on a RSS feed if it doesn’t fit their needs and wants. By keeping the descriptors concise, but also tempting, you will drive people to click on your link over someone else’s.

In keeping with the keyword search, don’t forget that you can now search by theme. Use this to your advantage and group your RSS feeds into themes. When submitting them to search engines, group the feeds into specific themes. This can help bring your feeds up more often when similar themes are searched.

When you add RSS feeds from other companies, you can tell your website how to react when the feed is clicked on. Rather than have visitors transported to the new site, have it come up as a new window. This will help lessen the chance your site visitors will leave your website completely.

People don’t use the back button as often, so it increases your chances of the person to continue to peruse your site if the RSS feeds pop up as new browsers.

As you design your RSS feeds, include your company’s contact information. This entails your website, any relevant contact information, and if possible, your logo. The more experience a person has with your website, the more frequently he or she will recall it when thinking of your products or services.

Consequently, it also goes to say you need to make sure the experience is a positive one because it goes the same way with a negative experience, except it deters visitors from returning.

Use your feed within your own site. By promoting it within your own website, you can improve its standing on external search engines. Search engines often return results by the most frequently clicked first. If you don’t have enough faith in your own RSS feed to include it in your website, why would anyone else want to subscribe to it? At the same time, RSS feed search engines often return results alphabetically.

Typically an English teacher would not count the word ‘A’ in a title when cataloguing it, but in RSS search engines, it is viewed as the first word of a title. Try to word your titles to begin with ‘A’ to improve their standing. As they are clicked on more and more, it will increase the feeds’ standings in other search engines.

In order to utilize your well written and constructed RSS feeds, remember to subscribe to them yourself. Nothing gives others’ faith in their content like seeing it on the originators’ website. Use keywords appropriately in titles because you can write multiple titles to fit the same content. You can also use themes to help capture the essence of your RSS feeds. Keep site visitors at your website by ‘instructing’ external RSS feeds to open in new browser windows.

Lastly, don’t forget to include your company’s contact information with the website in your feeds. The more often these are put out to the general population, the more exposure you will get.

Technorati Tags: article content, search engine optimization

For the past few years we have been hearing the idea that you will be able to walk up to a pop machine, put in a code on you phone and have credit your account and out comes a pop. Also you have heard about walking past a store like The GAP and have a coupon pop up on you phone from that store. Well 2009 is not going to be the year where this becomes a reality. But we are getting closer! You should start preparing your ad campaigns now.

Why now?

The more than sluggish evolution of mobile devices and mobile internet penetration have kept location-based advertising only a twinkle  in most online advertisers eyes.  But we have seen a few major vendors promise to a

• Verizon signed Microsoft to provide location-based services and advertising for mobile customers. Under the five-year agreement, Microsoft will manage search and display advertising for the mobile web, creating a one-stop shop for advertisers and ad agencies. Announcing the deal, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer promised to help advertisers reach consumers who are on-the-go more effectively.
• Google followed up last year’s provision of opt-in location awareness with Google Latitude, a feature that lets you see where your friends are. The search company has refused to comment on the prospects for advertising, but experts see Google as ideally placed to add a location layer to its ad algorithms; think Gmail ads on steroids.
• NAVTEQ released LocationPoint, an advertising platform that can deliver both display and interactive ads to mobile phones, personal navigation devices, and in-vehicle navigation systems. It’s working with Interpublic Group’s Emerging Media Lab to demonstrate location-based ad targeting. By the way, in 2007, Nokia bought NAVTEQ, one of the top providers of location info, for $8.1 billion, saying that the deal made sense because of the swift growth of location services.
• Ford Motor Co. announced Sync, technology that will connect cars to the mobile internet in order to receive traffic, directions, business search and other information. Ford expects to have 1 million SYNC-equipped vehicles on the road by the third quarter of 2009. Microsoft is its partner, so Ballmer’s boast likely covers the service: If you can search for an Italian restaurant, you can bet Microsoft will try to sell paid listings.

Technorati Tags: advertisements

In previous posts I have discussed the choice between using a shotgun and a rifle, and how depending upon your business either could work. For those that don’t know the difference a rifle shoots a single bullet in a single path, a shotgun shoots many pellets in an ever widening path to the target. A rifle is exact, but there is a larger chance that you might miss. While a shotgun increases the chances that you’ll hit the target, the penetration of the pellets isn’t as deep. How about using many rifles at once? The only marketplace where this makes sense is on the internet, any other advertising medium would cost too much.

In Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail, he explains how the internet caters to niche markets and communities. He also discusses the fact that big online businesses have taken advantage of the niche markets that were “too small” and these niches have become a major portion of their businesses. Think about it, online, people can find the most random stuff—sure the popular stuff is still there, but so is a whole bunch of stuff that you can’t find in any store. Read more of Chris Anderson’s stuff at www.thelongtail.com .

If I am not selling a product or service that has mass appeal, but I can aggregate enough niches together, I’ll still be able to sell in high volumes.

So how do I do this?

Well, it takes quite a bit of work. I look at the possibilities, narrow it down to those niches that are most likely to enjoy my product or service, and then examine what modifications I need to make to make my product or service attractive to that particular niche. Then I pick a couple of niches that are prime targets and don’t require a lot of modification to my business to facilitate that new business. I’ll find the right mixes that work, and then I’ll start with modifications once I know it is worth doing. I’ll look at the marketing materials and campaigns, the look and feel of the website/landing page, the pricing strategy, and what modifications to the product or service will make it more palatable.

It can be a lot of work, but many companies have proven that the business model is effective in the online world. The result will be exact campaigns with an increased number of sales.

Technorati Tags: campaigns, chris anderson, niche markets, Online Advertising, prime targets, targeting

In the Directory of Ezines is where you will locate these publishers. within a day of signing up I was receiving offers for ads and Jv’s. By use of the Directory you will have thousands of email list owners just waiting to promote your ad and offer.

Even though you have a ton of advertisers at your fingertips in the directory doesn’t mean that they are trustworthy. Some will say they have thousands of subscribers and really have hundreds. You have to beware of the fact that people will lie to you to make money! Protect yourself by using the following steps and tools so you can weed out the liars from the true advertisers.
Step 1. Locate your potential advertiser in the Directory of eZines. Write down their list size and how often it gets published. Look for publishers with a large list and a quarterly circulation.

Next follow the link in the directory to the eZine sign up page put in your info. Use a gmail email address or from yahoo so that the address can be dropped if the box becomes a spam target. As time goes by read the publications and note the date and frequency they are published.

You should also read their archives if they have them available to see what kind of content they publish and what ads they allow to be run through their eZine. If you see a prominent ad, then you know that that advertiser trusts that ezine publisher.

Step 2. Evaluate the traffic of the publisher’s site. You will need to figure out if the traffic justifies the claimed size of the publishers list. For example; if the list is said to be 10k subscribers but the site only gets 2k visitors a month, it is unlikely that the list can be that size. Notice I said unlikely. They may have undergone other list building methods or build subscribers from multiple websites.

The best evaluation tools are Google Page Rank, Alexa. Use sites like dnscoop.com to evaluate the total value of the client. Use compete.com for a sample of their monthly traffic. Look for a high Page Rank and a low Alexa ranking. Dnscoop.com can see how long a website has been online, and that will give you another good indication.

While you are going through this process be sure to be submitting your ad to the ezines that will allow a free ad. Don’t send an ad selling your wares; instead send an ad that is giving away a freebee that will require their readers to subscribe to your list. This will increase your subscribers from theirs and in turn can make you more money that an advert for your products or services.

In closing, use your best judgment. Be sure to budget your advertising expense and from your research, pick the best eZine to advertise with. If you get a good response from that ad run another. Mix the ads up so they look fresh and new.

Good luck in your efforts. This is a tedious process but it can pay off in the long run.

Technorati Tags: Ezine Article Submission