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After designing your website and creating your web portal you will hopefully begin receiving visitors to your site. You would think that after creating your website people would just be flying to your site. But that isn’t how it happens. Therefore, it is important to understand that there page rankings and link strategies that can aide you in guaranteeing your link popularity amongst the virtual world. As with the society in the real world, there is popularity in cyber space too. The better you are at selling the more popular your site will be!

Those websites that are most visited often contain all or most of the words the searcher is seeking. For example. You as the searchers will go to a search engine and type in camera cell phones. The websites that offer the most results will be those that use camera, cell, and phones in their description a variety of times. The key to your link popularity is the description of your site, not your site name.

When creating your link description write down the words that will grab the customer’s attention. Using the camera cell phone, a suggestion would be to write down camera cell phone, the types of camera cell phones, i.e. Motorola, Samsung, etc., latest technology camera cell phone, phone camera cell, yes, changing the wording around helps too. List the characteristic, best quality picture, email capability, voicemail all these will aid in providing the broadest rang of visitors. Although it has been said that simple is best, in this case, using same words over and over in various patterns and forms can aid you in ways that you never thought was possible before.

Sentence structure here is not important, key words are! Therefore, when consumers perform a search they simply type the subject they are seeking information on. This can be a few words or an entire sentence. To obtain their presence on your site you need to provide an extremely broad description of what you site has to offer. This, guaranteed, will provide you the advantage of experiencing the feeling of link popularity and guide you to the top of the page ranks in the internet website cyber space world. After you understand the importance of description and wording you will reap the rewards of link popularity and soar on that internet highway to generate traffic to your site.

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

Download it free here: Secrets of Article Promotion

Do you want to learn how to build a massive list fast? Click here: Email List Building

Tags: SEO, Generating Traffic, PageRank, Link Popularity, Webmaster Articles

Labels: Generating Traffic, PageRank, SEO

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Whether you call it website promotion or search engine optimization or even internet marketing, it's still important to 'court the what, don't marry the how'.

What do I mean by that?

Basically, that expression means to be concerned about *what* you are trying to achieve -- more visitors to your website, say -- rather than *how* you want to achieve it -- a high ranking on Google.

For example, here are three websites that *can* help you promote your website and thus help you promote your business, online:

1) YouTube
2) Digg.com
3) Del.icio.us

The above sites are known as social networking sites or social bookmarking sites or even social media sites. Whatever they are known as, the most important thing about these types of sites (and these three sites in particular) is that they are some of the most visited websites in the world.

Notice I haven't mentioned Google, until now that is:
4) Google Video.

I could also include:
MySpace, Technorati, Bloglines etc.

With the arrival of these social media sites, the website promotion game has changed.

Yes, website promotion -- getting visitors to your website -- is now much more than about ranking well on search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN these days. It's taking advantage of so-called social networking or bookmarking sites, and the high levels of visitors these sites receive.

Or, to use a fancy term: it's about social media optimization.

What are the rules of this new game?

How does social media optimization work?

Well, with any new technology (and these sites are also known as examples of Web 2.0 sites) the rules are still being made up, and no one has all the answers.

But here are a few clues:
-http://digg.com/design/Top_7_ways_to_get_a_useless_article_dugg -http://digg.com/tech_news/10_Tips_for_Promoting_Your_Blog_or_Business_on_MySpace_com (all 1 word)

And here are further reasons why you should take these social media sites seriously:
-http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Social_Media_Numbers_are_Out

Some think that Web 2.0 websites or social media sites will not be around for long. Others think that social media optimization will become as important as search engine Optimization. The important thing, right now, is to understand how you can best utilise these high traffic websites in promoting your website.

So, the time to embrace social networking sites is now.

Don't ignore search engine optimization, but do find out how your business or website can use social media Optimization, before it's too late.

Tags: SMO, SEO, Social Networking, Generating Traffic, Search Engines, Webmaster Articles

Labels: Generating Traffic, Search Engines, SEO, SMO, Social Networking

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Probably one of the hottest things to hit the Internet Scene in the past couple of years is the social networking sites. Sites like MySpace have grown to astronomical proportions indeed. It appears to be a logical outgrowth and evolution from blogs and now kids, teens, and even adults are posting videos and media clips on their websites.

There have been a few problems with this such as video clips have been taken from other websites and actual mass media outlets, some stolen outright and this has caused a stir in places all over the planet and with the movie industry, as kids use their video, digital camera cellphones and such to take pictures of things they shouldn’t that are copyrighted and then placing them on their websites. Whoops?

What do they say about the theory of the law of unintended consequences? Of course now there are millions of these social networking sites and policing it is rather tough. Worse off now some companies are suing other companies that host these sites for not policing the content. But how can they? This whole issue is causing a media firestorm. MySpace is trying to cleanse its video postings;

http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsid=8017

There is another problem on the horizon that has to do with video and bandwidth especially as many people also switch to VoIP systems. These issues will eventually be worked out, but there is a temporary bit of chaos that we will have to deal with in the mean time. I certainly hope this article is of interest and that is has propelled thought. The goal is simple; to help you in your quest to be the best in 2007. I thank you for reading my many articles on diverse subjects, which interest you.

Tags: Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Generating Traffic, Webmaster Articles, Myspace

Labels: Generating Traffic, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking

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The phrase Social Media Optimization, (SMO), has quickly become an industry buzzword in search marketing circles. The term refers to the practice of crafting, altering or augmenting profiles, images, movies and other files to be easily found and well shared in social media applications such as 43Things.com, MySpace, Tribe.net or Flickr, and by interested parties throughout the blogosphere.


The ultimate goal of any marketing campaign is to put products or services in front of as many interested eyeballs as possible. Where the public leads, marketers, by necessity, must follow and if those eyeballs begin to congregate over there as well as over here, many marketers feel the need to move. Tens of millions of registered members populate dozens of social networks. People appear to enjoy the ability to form communities and inform each other. Online marketers looking for another winning venue are therefore turning to social media spaces as social marketing tools.

For the past five years, the number of high-traffic venues for search marketers remained fairly constant, consisting primarily of Google. More recently, the space has been supplemented by Yahoo, Ask and MSN. For the most part, five years of consistency has benefited the search engines, their users, online merchants and the SEO/webmaster communities. Nothing stays static very long on the Internet though. The online marketing metaverse has expanded yet again.

People like applications that make life easier. That's why search is somehow part of practically every application people use online. One of the major appeals of social media networks is that by nature, they are about sharing information, usually from a highly personalized point of view. As the theory goes nobody knows everything but everyone knows something. Collectively, we must know a great deal. Where search tools are about users pulling information and Web2.0 applications are about pushing information to users, social media steps into the middle ground by pushing information to subscribers and inviting others to pull information via shared files.

In a social network, large groups of people who would otherwise likely be strangers associate with each other based on spider-web networks of contacts, friends, images, interests, and occupations, creating ever expanding communities. These communities, built around shared ideas and interests, draw users by giving them the ability to educate, inform and share with others.

Both Google and Yahoo have embraced social networking in their membership based services for years, starting with Yahoo Groups and Google's Orkut. More recent products include Flickr (Yahoo), Picasa (Google), Yahoo Publisher Network, and Blogger (Google). The major search engines have learned from the lesson suffered by the music and movie industries over the past decade.

About eight years ago the true power distributive power of the Internet was demonstrated by peer-to-peer file sharing networks. When Napster appeared on the scene, the music files of millions of people became illicitly traded public property, virtually overnight. A similar thing happened to the movie industry two years ago with broadband and bit-torrent. As soon as a large enough number of Internet users catch on to a technology that delivers access to the information or entertainment they want, that technology becomes a trend. Sometimes, trends have a way of becoming habit.

Social media applications have transited from trend to mainstream usage. Thousands of new users sign up for Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Linked-In, Tribes and other community-active networks every day. As a result, blogging, image sharing and new-media content creation have moved well beyond creative geekery and corporate PR departments to become a trans-global pastime. Now that the various social network tools have acquired mass-market popularity they represent a pirate's treasure to corporate PR departments and the online marketers ready to serve them.

As far as treasure troves go, the world of social media is fairly easy to find; access and start working in. Creating a MySpace membership or a Flickr account is as easy as filling in a simple form. While building a MySpace profile is slightly more difficult than outfitting a Flickr portfolio, both are easy enough for new users to begin immediately. Partially because social media is so easy to use and partially because sharing information, recommendations and the latest outrageousness with friends and strangers alike is so cool, tens of millions of people have populated the social environments with hundreds of millions of files, ranging from music, images, documents and movies.

Social media is a cool, barely controlled environment in which individual users can form instant communities, finding friendships based on shared interest, passion and ideas. So how long do such environments remain cool after the invasion of barbarians cleverly disguised as marketing experts? That all depends on how we (the barbarians), make use of the virtual villages we're migrating into.

The problem with breaking in any new marketing medium is the instant gold-rush mentality of the advertisers who are early adopters. As recently as six or seven years ago, for instance, the majority of SEOs chased placements without a great deal of regard for the integrity of the search results. Claiming every possible Top10 placement under any given keyword phrase for a single site on AltaVista, InfoSeek and Lycos was entirely possible, and it was done with mercenary zeal. Ask any long-term SEO about the earliest days of the industry and most, if not all will show a slow, sly, satisfied smile. Back then, everything was blackhat. Before PPC paved the way to profitability, the search engines naturally considered SEOs as dangerous enemies.

Similarly, social networkers are not terribly happy about hitting the search marketing radar screen. By introducing corporate clients to what is assumed to be an open and non-commercial atmosphere, the online marketing sector is blatantly degrading the experience shared amongst the people making up the social network. As the months move on, more and more marketers are finding their way into places like MySpace. Communicating with custom created personalities shilling brand name sneakers is not what most social network users signed up for.

On the other side of the coin, the people populating social networks are already being subjected to advertising. Banner ads have been a part of MySpace for over a year and in a deal recently signed between MySpace and Google, AdWords ads could begin appearing alongside the personal profiles of MySpace members who've registered with the AdSense program. Movie studios, bands and other performers have also used social media, primarily MySpace, as an effective marketing venue to reach youthful consumers. Flickr sometimes displays paid ads from Yahoo Search Marketing. Advertising is nothing new to web users though its inclusion in areas or formats that would normally be considered non-commercial content is often frowned upon.

The social media environment is increasingly going to be used as a marketing tool regardless of how the various social networks and their millions of members feel about it. For a good search marketer, it is nearly impossible to avoid affecting whatever file one is working on in order to get good placement. In the realm of social media, adding tags, links and trackbacks is easier than altering the title, meta-tags, content text and link patterns. As Internet users gravitate towards the social media and thus, towards each other, online advertising is likely to take a community and interest based focus.

Tags: Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Generating Traffic, Search Engines, SEO, Webmaster Articles, Myspace

Labels: Generating Traffic, Search Engines, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking

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Firstly let’s all get up to speed and cover social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of storing you bookmarks or (websites added to your favorites) on a publicly accessible website. This allows people to essentially store their favorites on a website which will be available wherever they are and whatever PC they are accessing the internet from.

Social Bookmarking sites are predicted to make huge gains in popularity in the near future as the boom around user generated content increases and the internet increases in size making finding quality sites harder. Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and they have experienced a 300% increase in their user base since then which shows the growth of these sites.


So now to the main point, can social bookmarking sites be used for website promotion?

In an attempt to stop marketing and promotion SPAM most social tagging sites have implemented the now famous nofollow attribute tags (like Wikipedia) meaning no link popularity can be passed on from these sites.

However despite the attempts to prevent any link popularity and SEO benefit being gained, there are still some great benefits to be had by submitting websites to the social plethora of social bookmarking sites. Most enjoy good search engine ranking and appear high up on a huge amount of search terms, this can provide some excellent search engine visibility by population for listings with your sites links.

This provided with searches from the bookmarking sites can provide some good traffic. This can work especially well if used in conjunction with link bait or viral marketing, as a sites exposure increases exponentially as it gets more “bookmarks”.

The increased traffic and search engine listings can increase brand awareness and can be especially useful when launching a new site. So despite the nofollow’s social tagging sites can yield some very impressive results especially when used in conjunction other SEO and link generation methods.

Look out for the next article which will explain how best to go about submitting to social bookmarking sites and what content to use for maximum benefit.

Tags: Social Bookmarking, Site Promotion, Webmaster Articles

Labels: Generating Traffic, Social Bookmarking

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What are web site keywords and how do I go about finding keywords that will work for me?

You may have the dandiest web site with eye popping text and graphics, but if you have missing keywords then you are going to be out of business quick.

Web sites revolve around traffic. No traffic = no sales. It’s a simple equation but one that many web site owners are unable to resolve. The good news is that it’s reasonably easy to select your web site keywords and deploy them, and I’m going to show you how.

Web site keywords are the words that people will use to search for your product or service. These are the words that people actually type into a search engine to find your site – so you can see how important they are.

So how do you go about selecting your keywords?

Selecting and finding keywords and phrases most likely to drive targeted traffic is THE single most important exercise that you can undertake when planning your web site deployment. Omitting this step will result in a marketing failure. Choosing good keywords is the basis on which all of your future traffic will flow.

You may have your own ideas about the specific keywords that people will use to find your site, however I can tell you from experience that if you are the business owner or proprietor then you are probably well wide of the mark.

Don’t believe me! Write down the top five keywords or keyword phrases that you think people will use to find your site now! Go and grab a paper and pen and scribble them down. Then compare them to what you are going to end up with at the end of this article.

Firstly ask your customers how they would search for your product!

This is important because these are the real human beings that will search for your product, service or information. Draw up a list of ten of the most popular keywords and keyword phrases that your customers tell you they would use to discover your web site and then put them into a spreadsheet.

2. Expand Your Keywords into a List of Key Phrases

Starting with the obvious keyword build your spreadsheet like this:

search

search engine

search engine optimization

search engine optimization Birmingham

search engine optimization Birmingham UK

3. Got to word tracker.

Sign up for the free trial and enter your one word keyword. In this case “search”. When you press the search button you are returned a list of related terms. The first term is the same as the keyword followed by a list of related terms – search, search engine, etc. Choose your main term “search” and in the right hand pane you will see the associated terms for your keyword.

4. Organise your workload

You can now see that you are beginning to build up a sizeable list of keywords, keyword phrases and search terms. Compare the results of your word tracker research with the results from your customer polling.

The Word tracker results are fact. These are the terms that are actually used in Real searches. Hopefully these should closely match. But they are probably different to the terms that you initially wrote down yourself!

Five keywords is a good workload to start with. If you are a beginner and you attempt more you will likely end up confusing yourself. Five keywords and keyword phrases is a good start.

Take the first keyword and then make a keyword phrase so that it looks like this:

search

search engine

search engine optimization

search engine optimization Birmingham

search engine optimization Birmingham UK

5. Prioritise your terms

There is a huge amount of competition for your primary keyword “search” but much less for the fifth ranked. Your word tracker results will tell you how popular each term is and how many searches are carried out for each keyword phrase.

It’s unreasonable to expect to get top search position for “motorcycle” as the competition is just too intense. However it’s perfectly possible for the last term and if you are serious about search engine traffic then you should be able to achieve good results for all of your other keyword phrases.

List your terms in REVERSE order and go to work. The reason I suggest doing them in reverse is that you should get good results from the less searched for terms and this will give you the encouragement to be more adventurous when you repeat the process for another keyword set.

Another keyword set!

Ah yes, I omitted to tell you that building traffic is a tedious and time consuming pastime, but hey! Someone’s got to do it!

6. Putting your keyword phrases to work

OK, so now you have your keyword phrases you can put them into action. Allocate each keyword phrase to a specific page and build the content around them.

What do I mean by this?

There are “hotspots” on your pages that search engines look for when they are indexing your pages.

These hotspots are the page title, the page description and the page heading. By incorporating your keyword phrase into these hotspots you are telling the search engine what your page is all about. Sprinkle in some eye-popping copy with your keyword phrase repeated once or twice and you are well on your way to receiving copious amounts of search engine traffic.

7. Repeat the dose

As I mentioned above, you need to build on your basic five keyword phrases and build up a stack of “keyword sets” Once you get to five or more keyword sets then you should be well on your way to a successful web site By allocating each keyword phrase to a page you will know that you need five pages for each keyword set. So five keyword sets will give you twenty five pages of search engine content. That’s a good target for a small web site

Summary

Finding keywords is a process that you simply can not afford to leave out of your marketing mix. It’s important that you target the correct keywords and build your content around them to induce good search engine traffic.

If you miss this vital step then all of your marketing efforts will crumble around you.

Start with five keywords and keyword phrases to make a keyword set. Use word tracker to sanitise your own research findings. Allocate each keyword phrase to a page and fill the hotspots. Sprinkle liberally with good, quality content and repeat your keyword phrases within the main body text.

Now go and service that traffic!

Labels: Generating Traffic

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Ok so the first way to get traffic is not particularly unique. But the fact is that you will get lots of traffic by writing articles. The traffic won't come immediately but it will come. Articles will also bring link popularity. I wouldn't be doing my job if I wrote about free traffic and neglected to mention articles.

If you write one article a week for the next year at the end of that year you will have an unstoppable flow of traffic and where there is traffic money follows.

So traffic source

#1 - Write articles

#2 - Post ads on other peoples sites. Now you're probably thinking 'tell me something I don't know' but think about this for a moment. If there is a site that has a lot of traffic, gets spidered frequently and has excellent page rank. Do you think pages on that site get good search engine rankings. You betcha!

Here in the UK there is a site called UK Free Ads. It has an Alexa rank of about 20,000 and, you guessed it, you can place ads on it for free. All you have to do is find your equivalent of UK Free Ads then find a keyword phrase without too much competition and write an ad optimised for the keyword phrase. I'm not guaranteeing a top ten listing but a percentage of the ads you write will place well in Google and other search engines. You might even get a number one position.

The best of these sites allow your url to be included in the listing. But better than that some of them allow you to upgrade your listing and have that listing redirect to the url you supply. Top Tip: Wait until the page has been spidered and ranks well then upgrade and have the listing redirect to your web page.

#3 - Get your site mentioned in mailings from complimentary sites in return for you mentioning theirs. You're going to need a list for this. But assuming you have one why not contact other site owners with a list and ask them to mention your site in their next mailing. In return you mention their site in your next mail. This doesn't have to be a heavy sell, just a mention of a friends site.

At worst this strategy will put your site url in front of a lot of people who may not have heard of you. At best you will get a lot of free visitors. This strategy should work out just fine if you partner with a site that isn't in direct competition with you.

#4 - Instead of just trading links why not trade home page links or ads. Next time you visit a site and they have a space for an ad and are inviting you to buy that space, why not contact them and offer to exchange the ad space for a similar position on your site. Or why not barter an ad for a mention to your mailing list. A lot of smaller sites have trouble selling their ad space, but these same sites still have respectable traffic flows.

#5 - The last free traffic tip is probably the hardest to pull off but also the most regarding. The strategy is to offer something of real value for free. If you use Adwords you no doubt know about Mikes Marketing Tools where you will find a 'keyword wrapper'. Or if you are into natural search engine traffic then you probably visit Market Leap to find out how many pages you have ranked. People need these tools and everybody recommends these sites. They offer a valuable resource for free. Once you do that, word spreads quickly . Mikes Tools has an Alexa rank of 5,000. Market Leap has a rank of 900. Yes it's in the top 900 websites online. Do you think you could make some money with that sort of traffic?

To pull this off you need a tool that is useful to your target audience. Maybe some sort of calculator or a data manipulator or converter. Although a software tool is an excellent choice it doesn't have to be software. Think what tool do I use that I could make available to others.

If your goal is to build free traffic to your sites then you need to be thinking about this all the time. As you surf keep this need in the back of your mind. Every site you visit think 'how could I get free traffic from this site' or 'what is this site doing to get traffic that I could copy'.

If you want to learn more about free traffic sources & other free resources then visit www.ireviewguru.com/freeresources.html

Labels: Generating Traffic

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