Marketing Spot gets a new look and now uses Word Press. The new website will have more updates and easier search tools.

We hope you like it!

Our spam crazy forum gets a new look and hopefully in the near future a new sheriff to get it back on track.

Webmaster Forum

To help troubleshoot firewalls and give the ability for users to protect themselves we now have a free full service proxy for public access.

Free Web Proxy

If you have any questions about it, please let us know.

This is particularly useful in seeing if your ip is blocked from a firewall. By accessing the blocked web page through the proxy you can see if it’s your local ip or if the website is just not working.

We found a clean free web stats service at EZ Web Stats. No catch just great free web stats with no ads.

We found a nice internet marketing forum at DWHS, All you need to do is to get a free profile and you can chat and get some great tools for free.

It is virtually impossible to build a site in which each page brings good search engine position. The home page, for example, will likely change frequently. Thus spiders will not find it the same when they return, which they do, roughly once each month.
Pages devoted to selling product do not often rank well. The same is true of a page where visitors can subscribe to your newsletter. Or the one you pop up to say thanks when they do subscribe. So how does one go about getting good search engine positions?

Great Content Is The Answer

So what is great content? Any information surfers may need. However, it must also be a topic that enhances your site purpose. That is, there is no room on a site devoted to baseball for a piece describing the inner workings of steam engines.

Assuming you have a clear read on who your visitors are, then it’s only a matter of selecting a topic likely to be of interest to at least some of them. Given this, write the page for your visitors, not the search engines. Then do what you can to make the spiders happy.

Happy Spiders?

Not likely. It is impossible to please them all. Some see “Market,” “MARKET,” and “market” as separate words; others see only one repeated three times. Some see “market” as “marketing;” most require a specific match. “Markets” may be seen as “Market,” but in other cases both forms may be required.

Okay, we’ll include all cases in our keyword tag: Market, MARKET, market, Markets, MARKETS, markets, Marketing, MARKETING, marketing.

That’s got it covered fine, but how do we make this work with a spider that considers more than three repetitions as spam? One that might even consider all of the above as 9 repetitions of one word?

You Can’t Get There From Here

Search engines are competing in a multi-billion dollar race. The winner will be the one that can most consistently present the most relevant information available in response to a query.

Be assured that with the stakes this high, the competition is fierce. They are not about to reveal their latest wrinkle to improve their listings. Which leaves us with empirical evidence and educated guesses.

Try to sort this all out for each search engine, and you’ll go crazy. Not to mention constant changes which mean one or more of the carefully defined “rules” no longer holds.

Even supposing you had an accurate listing of the rules for each engine. Would you seriously consider creating a separate page for each? Not me. I have much more profitable ways in which to use my time.

Take the longer view. Spiders are getting smarter every day. And they are becoming smarter at a rapidly increasing rate. Some are now reading a page as if with a thesaurus in hand, thus being able to see house and home as having similar meanings.

Grammar checkers exist; I expect to see these and related tools implemented in spider logic. In the not-to-distant future, those keyword-rich doorway pages are going to be discarded.

Meanwhile we need to create some great content pages and try to make the spiders as happy as possible. Here’s my approach.

Finding Keywords

Given a topic and a mental draft of what needs to be written, I identify 1 to 3 keyword phases (I don’t think individual words work well now). I work at this, trying to put myself in the shoes of one who will search for this information. If I am building a major page, or one of a set of related topics, I may take the time to visit Overture to find phrases actually entered. ( For details, keywordlot@sitetipsandtricks.com )

Meta Tags

I build a rough draft of the title and description tags before beginning to write. They must serve two purposes. First, the title is the headline of an ad which draws the reader into the ad copy (description). And the description must compel a click to my site. Second, to please the spiders, keywords need to be included, and the closer to the beginning of the statements the better (I try not to think about the fact that some spiders will ignore both tags).

Since Excite limits a title to 70 characters, I try to hold under this. If I go over, I try to work things out so that truncation does little harm. I try to hold the description under 150 characters, the limit at AltaVista. I use these limits because together, AltaVista and Excite dominate among search engines.

These two tags are so vitally important, that I review them as often as I write.

The keyword tag, on the other hand, gets little attention. This tag has been so abused, I simply can’t get a handle on what works best. Some meta tag checkers still claim you ought to use all 1000 characters allowed. This seems unwise.

I include only my keyword phrases, all in lower case. But I do add the plural case and “ing” when appropriate.

The Content

When I begin to write, I think only of communicating as effectively as possible with my visitor. I keep the keywords in mind and seek to build in a theme based upon them. After editing a first draft, I will often lay it aside for a day or two before continuing. My visitors are my target here, not the spiders.

The Spider’s Turn

If I can build some header tags with keywords, I will. I don’t bother with ALT assignments or comments in the source, although this reportedly gives a boost with some search engines.

I work at including keywords as close to the top of the page as possible, in the first 100-200 words. For this is the part of the page in which one expects to find the subject defined, followed by further explanation and expansion. Even now, spiders also expect this.

I also work at rephrasing things to add more repetitions of keywords and to bring them as close to the beginning of paragraphs as possible.

And I make a point of repeating the keywords in the close of the page, a sort of “theme” wrap up, if you will.

One further thing I do is look for words I used so frequently they may dilute the weight of the keywords. For example, if I have used “buildings” too often, I may replace some instances with “structures” or a specific name for a type.

But throughout, I absolutely refuse to sacrifice readability. To me, my visitor is far more important than any search engine.

Other Guidelines

Keyword density is the percentage of words that the keywords are to the total number of words. It is considered quite differently by different spiders. Some suggest as much as 15% of a page be keywords. To me this is nonsense, for it makes the page unintelligible to a visitor. I have never been able to get above 2% without decreasing readability, even when using three keywords.

Page length expected also differs drastically. Many claim short pages are better. 300-600 words is often suggested. But Excite doesn’t care how long a page is. I say what needs saying as briefly as possible and call it good.

Never Look Back

When the page is polished, I submit it to the major search engines. Then I do something you really ought to try.

I never look back. The page is up and that’s that. I’ve got more important things to do than worry about what position it has today. Or where it may be tomorrow. If I’ve done the job properly, my visitors will enjoy the page. And that’s the end of it.

File Structure

She also discussed her definition of site architecture:

• A site’s navigation scheme (referring to image maps, text links, and dynamic content);

• Layout of individual pages;

• How directories are set up on your Web server.

In order for you to sell your products and services, your target audience needs to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible.

Thurow closed with the following reminder. “Make sure your pages have visible text. Give the spiders a suitable link architecture to help them find visible text. Use external files whenever possible. Use the Robots Exclusion Protocol to exclude information that is not important to the search engines. And, keep the most important pages in the top-level directory on your server.”

As with many other things which are unseen, there is a lot of unnecessary mystery surrounding the use of meta-tags on web pages. The meta tags are information slots in the “head” portion of a web page.
Though there are several possible meta tags that may be included in the head of a web page, the ones which are most important for search engine optimization are the Title Tag, the Description tag and the Keywords tag.

TITLE TAG

The title tag is really one of the most important single things you can work on for improving your website’s search engine results. Go to Google and make a search for any particular keyword. If you look at the top ten entries in that search you will see that all of them have this key word in the title, sometimes more than once. So when writing your title tag, it is helpful to have your keywords included in the title tag, and not only in the tag, near the beginning of the title.

Suppose that your company is the Acme Manufacturing Company and you are selling electric widgets and you are located in California. What should your title tag be? Most people would opt for the name of their company as the first word of the title. It makes sense, in that it looks good in the blue strip at the top of the browser, but it doesn’t necessarily help you to get a good ranking in search results for your keywords “electric widgets, California”.

The first few words of your title tag are very important. People may not be searching for Acme Manufacturing, unless it is a very important brand, but they are searching for electric widgets, and they may not want to purchase it from someone in New York, especially if it is not a mail-order type item.

In addition, if there are tons of widget companies, it will be difficult to get to the top of the heap in a search simply for the term “widgets”. But if it is “widgets, California”, then you will have a good chance of getting a high ranking if you put the keyword California prominently in the title. So, if you are in a very competitive category and your customers don’t already know about you, then you might consider a title tag like this “Electric widgets from Acme Manufacturing of California” or even better “Electric Widgets in California produced by Acme Manufacturing.”

Some guidelines for the title tag suggest that this tag be limited to 70-80 characters including spaces. (I confess to have used more on several occasions.)

META DESCRIPTION TAG

The next tag that has to be done is the Description tag. Many search engines use the description tag as a way to tell the searchers what the page is about. On MSN, for example, the description of the site shown underneath the title is the description that has been placed in the description tag.

The description tag is thus important in two respects: the search engine robot searches it for keywords to “get an idea” of what the page is about, and this tag will be seen by the surfers as they scroll down through the search results. If it is an interesting and well-written description then they may click through to visit the site. So this tag should be well written but also contain the important keywords that you wish to highlight.

Going back to our example of Acme Manufacturing. We could make a description tag that reads as follows: “Acme Manufacturing is the largest producer of electric widgets in California, providing round the clock service and warranties on all products.” This description contains the keywords again and also says something about the company.

Some guidelines for description length recommend a maximum length of 250 characters. Once again there is no precision about this, but it is good to be cautious until you are already entered into a search engine’s index.

META KEYWORDS TAG

The last of the important meta tags relevant to search engine optimization is the keywords tag. In this tag you have a chance to list your important keywords, but this time they do not have to be in a coherent phrase as in the Title and Description. Put your important keywords near the beginning. Make sure that all the keywords used in the title and the description tags are again listed. On top of that, add prominent keywords, especially those that appear in the actual text of the page you are optimizing. For the Acme Manufacturing company we could have these keywords: “widgets, widget, electric widgets, California, widgets in California, Acme Manufacturing, service, warranty, warranties.”

Many pundits advise against excessive repetition of any single keyword even if they appear in different phrases separated by commas. Once again the guidelines vary and are not precise but it would be better to be conservative at first. How big should the keywords section be? 800-1000 characters is the estimate provided by some search engines and commentators alike.

The thing to remember about meta tags is that they are just one part of search engine optimization. If your text is keyword rich and your page structure allows the search engines to get to this text easily and if, on top of this, you have crafted your meta tags well, then you have an excellent chance of getting the search engine positioning results that you are aiming for.

You’ve spent the last few months optimizing your web site. You did your homework and learned all about optimizing techniques for your web page. Your relevant keywords are prominently placed in all the right places on your pages. Yet your site still isn’t ranking the way you want. What do you do?

It’s time to improve you link popularity!
Why bother with link building? Link popularity and link quality are very important because every major search engine now considers them as a part of their ranking algorithms. If you don’t have links, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords.

If your page includes all the important on-the-page criteria and scores well with Page Primer, it’s time to focus on your links. Good inbound links can move your page up the ranking ladder and act as new entry points to your site. But how does your site get those coveted inbound links we hear so much about?

First off, let’s make sure we understand the basics. Link popularity is the measure of inbound links to your web site. Link analysis evaluates which sites are linking to you and the link text itself.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to improve your link quality and popularity, which will give you a boost in the rankings. Here are some guidelines to help you set up your own linking campaign:

1. Prepare your site first
Before you start your link building campaign, take time to get your site in shape. Make sure your site looks professional, has good content and is easy to navigate. Validate your HTML code and check your links with a tool like HTML Toolbox. If a potential linker goes to your site and finds broken pages, they are not going to want to link to you.

In addition, directories have gone on record saying they may exclude sites with broken links and page errors. Directories want only professional looking sites in their databases, so do your homework on your site before you start promoting it and your linking campaign will be more effective.

2. Budget time for link building
Don’t expect to grow your link popularity overnight. Budget time every week to work on link building. If you force yourself to spend a couple hours a week on link building, it will become part of your routine. Pick one day a week and set aside time as your “link building time.” If you don’t make it a priority, it won’t get done.

Link building is an incremental activity. Over time these one or two new links start adding up until they are hundreds or even thousands of links.

3. Establish realistic link goals
Don’t expect to see instant results. Link building is difficult, frustrating and time intensive. Convincing another web site to link to you can be exasperating. If you get one good quality link a month you’re doing better than the majority of sites out there.

Patience and creativity are key to link building. Track your progress so you know who you’ve asked already. It could be embarrassing to ask a site for a link if they’ve already given you one.

If a company initially declines your link request, wait a while and then ask again. Their company focus may change over time. A “no” today may change into a “yes” 6 - 9 months later.

4. Develop internal management support
If you’re link building in-house, build support from your company’s internal management for your link building. This usually means educating management about the benefits of link building.

Link popularity is unique to the search engine industry - it’s not taught in graduate schools (not yet, anyway). Sit down with your management and explain the concept behind link building - don’t assume they understand it or have even heard of the term. In fact, most won’t have a clue what you’re talking about.

Explain link building in terms they will understand and in ways that will get their attention, such as describing the relationship of link building and increased revenue. Talking about making more money usually gets management’s attention.

Why worry about management support? You will need it to provide the time and money you need to get into search engines or directories.

5. Link popularity is all about quality
Be selective about the sites from which you request links. Search engines use sophisticated rules when judging the importance of a link, and the popularity of the site linking to you is a key criteria. One link from CNet is worth far more than a link from a personal web site.

And don’t even think of using a link farm! Link farms are sites that exist solely to link to other web sites. Link farms are a blatant attempt to inflate your link popularity, and search engines take a dim view of them. Google in particular has been known to ban sites found using a link farm.

Try to identify non-competitive sites in the same field as your site. Links from sites that are related to your area carry more weight than sites from Aunt Sue’s favorite horse site. That doesn’t mean you should refuse a link from Aunt Sue, just be aware it won’t help you much in link quality terms. On the other hand, links from sites within your industry are strong endorsements for your site.

6. Develop a relationship with a site
Before you ask for the link, get to know the web site. Establish yourself as a real human first. That way, when you ask for a link, it’s harder for them to say no.

Impersonal broadcast emails asking for links are spam. Sure, it’s easier, but it will only result in making another company mad at you. Spam link requests do not work and waste everyone’s time. Don’t do it!

7. Provide the linking code
Make it easy for other sites to link to you. Send the prospective linker the exact HTML code you want in the link and suggest which page you want the link from. This ensures the right words are used in the link and reduces the burden in setting up the link. Everybody on the Internet is pressed for time and if you don’t make it “drop-in simple” by giving them the exact HTML, you’ve made their job too hard. Make it easy and your success rate will go up.

8. Get directory listings
Jumpstart your link campaign by getting directory links first. This is especially important if you have a new site or a site with no inbound links. A shortage of inbound links puts your site at a severe disadvantage because link analysis is an important part of every search engine’s ranking algorithm.

The way to overcome this disadvantage is to get a few quality links. A good way to start is to get listed in as many directories as you can. There are many directories out there, and the more you can get into the better.

A few to target include:

Open Directory
Yahoo
LookSmart
Zeal.com
Joeant.com
Business.com
Be aware that most of these directories require you to pay for a listing. It’s worth the expense.

9. Consider bartering for links
It’s a good idea to have something to offer in return for a link. Many sites won’t link to you unless you link back to them or otherwise make it worth their while. Create a Resources or Partner page that allows you to have a place from which you can easily link to them.

You might also offer to work a barter arrangement with them. If you have a popular site with their target market, they might consider free advertisements in exchange for a link. If the link is of great value to you, be prepared to give something back.

10. Link building alternatives
If time constraints keep you from link building, consider outsourcing your link popularity work. Link building is undoubtedly the most time consuming part of search engine optimization. You may find it is not cost effective to do it in house. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, it just means you hire someone else to do it for you.

Many top SEO firms have turned to outsourcing this function. For example: Jill Whalen of highrankings.com uses Debra O’Neil-Mastaler’s link building firm.

Outsourcing to a reputable link building firm ensures good links and could be a more efficient model for you if you are already time limited.

One word of caution if you do chose to hire a company specializing in link building: make sure any firm you hire follows good link building practices. Ask them to describe the process they use to request links Make sure they follow a personalized approach, and don’t simply spam sites with requests for links.

If they refuse to discuss their link building methods you can assume they use impersonal widespread email drops or link farms - that’s spam. They may call it a fancy name, but if the process involves sending out large numbers of form emails, it’s still spam and will only set your campaign backwards and injure your company’s professional reputation. Go find a different company or develop your links in house.

Just do it!
Link popularity is important and the link building process needs to be given high priority. Link analysis is only going to get more important to search engines, not less. Search engines have found it highly resistant to manipulation and a legitimate way to measure the importance of a site. Since link building takes time, the sooner you start the better.

So think of link building as a long-term investment in your site. Put in a little time now to improve your linking today to insure a good search engine ranking in the future.

Whether you are selling other peoples products or your own, if you approach the Net without a Marketing Strategy you will be fighting an uphill battle to get people to buy your product or service.

Sustaining a steady, increasing flow of income from the products and services you are offering on the Net cannot be achieved by a shot gun approach to Marketing.

If you are planning to build an online business, then your time and money will be well spent taking the time to design the strategy you are going to use to build a “customer-for-life” database. If done right the majority of your customers will buy your first product, and most likely the ones that you sell in the future.

Here’s 3 Basic, Effective Strategies you can put in place now….

1. PUSH STRATEGY… Newsletter, Ezine, Daily Email Broadcasts.

If you are a serious Internet Marketer and plan to earn any substantial money online, then you must get the word out about you and your product, and build traffic to your website using this essential strategy.

The basic idea is to Email out something of *VALUE* to your target audience who have requested information from you (Opt-in), on a regular basis. Providing you continue to send valuable information to this audience on a regular schedule, then you can expect your subscriber base to grow into a solid opt-in list to which you can promote your products and services.

The mailing can be in the form of a Newsletter, Ezine, or Email Tips Broadcast. The topics and themes you choose for your publication will be something of interest to your target audience. Some ideas you can use; your views on subjects relating to your field of expertise or hobby, suggestions on issues/problems that relate to your field of expertise or hobby, or a perhaps a collection of “How To Tips”.

If your publication is consistent in holding the interest of your target audience, then over time your subscriber base will build. Your subscribers will begin to notice your name and look forward to hearing from you. They will come to trust you to deliver something of value and familiarity will begin to grow.

When your subscriber base reaches 1000+ you can expect to start earning income from each issue. Either your subscribers will buy what you are promoting in the publication, and/or other Marketers will seek you out to place paid advertisements in your publication to reach your valuable readers.

This strategy will not generate a great deal of income in the beginning, it will take time for your publication to gain creditability and a substantial subscriber base, however when you get there it will be your GOLDMINE!

2. PULL STRATEGY.. Building Traffic To Your Website

This topic would require volumes to do it justice. However, for the purpose of this article let’s touch on the essentials of building traffic to you website.

Contrary to what a good majority of people think, “If you build it they will come” is a great line from a great movie, and has nothing to do with the number of visitors who will visit your website uninvited.

It goes without saying that once you manage to get your *TARGET AUDIENCE* to visit your website you will not keep them there unless you have a well designed site.

FIRST, CREATE A GREAT WEBSITE:

- Design your website’s content to address your customers needs, have it speak only of the benefits to the buyer. Your product’s features can be addressed at the point in which your customer decides they are interested in buying what you have to sell.

- K.I.S.S Design, enough said.

- A clear pathway that keeps your customer moving through the sales message to the desired results that you want….An Order!

- A simple navigation design that will keep your customer on your website, and moving in the direction of the order page. Make sure they are not left stranded on a page in your site where they cannot return to your desired “sales pathway”.

- Fast Loading, keep graphics to a minimum. Fancy graphics will not Sell you product…. good sales copy loaded with benefit rich content WILL!

- Timely content that is updated frequently and keeps the customer coming back. You want your website to be one added to your customers bookmarked websites.

NOW CREATE THE TRAFFIC….

- Collect Email addresses on your site. BY REQUEST ONLY!

- Submit your website to the Major Search Engines. Although I recommend manually submitting your websites URL’s to the major search engines, here are some services that will do it for Free:
http://www.123submit.com/freesubmit.htm
http://accusubmit.com/submit.html
http://www.hileytech.com/freesub.html

- Submit your website to 1,000’s of smaller Search Engines.
Although advertising your site on the smaller engines will not produce a whole lot of traffic, they will produce some. It’s worthwhile. One free online submission service to 1,200 Search Engines and link pages is available at:
http://www.submitxtras.com

- Submit articles you have written to Ezines for publication. Be sure to include a resource box at the end of the article with your contact information and a small commercial for your product and services. Some free databases to use for submitting articles to Ezines are:
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm
http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.htm
http://www.ideamarketers.com/
http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm

- Place paid Ads in Ezines which are read by your target Audience.

- Submit Ads to Free classifieds. To get started here are two sites:
http://www.icclassifieds.com/
http://www.uran.net/imall/FREE_Sites_A-H.html

- Start your own newsletter, Ezine, Email broadcast. For tips on how to start your own Ezine look up the February 15 ,2000 issue of AS&W at: http://wealthinmind.com/archive.html

- Place bids for Keywords on “Pay for Clicks” Search Engines.
These are new Search Engines which allow webmasters to purchase any keyword they want by bidding on it. The higher the bid for the keyword, the higher the position in the Search Engine. The webmaster pays the bidded price for each visitor who clicks on their link from that Search Engine. Here are some:
http://www.searchenginedog.com
http://Goto.com
http://RocketLinks.com
http://www.sprinks.com
http://findwhat.com
http://SearchHound.com
http://win4win.com
http://www.SearchGalore.com
http://www.kanoodle.com

- Trade links with webmasters who have websites that compliment your products and services.

- Participate in some Online Discussion Groups and Forums where your target audience is likely to hang out. Be sure to offer solutions and good advice to posted questions you reply to. Keep away from selling yourself or your products in any post that you make, and add value in your participation. Anything less will work against you. Some good places to look for a forum or discussion group are:
http://forumone.com
http://www.friendsinbusiness.com/forum/
http://forums.list-universe.com/
http://homebusiness-websites.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi
http://talk.businessbug.com/

3. DANGLE STRATEGY…. Offer Free Valuable Intellectual Property

People are hungry to learn today, so if you know something why not share it? In this virtual world you will be giving people an opportunity to experience you. Some excellent vehicles to offer free information are:
- Email Broadcasts
- Newsletters & Ezines
- Teleclasses
- Courses offered via Email or Autoresponders
- Articles
- Ebooks
- “How To” manuals

Ideally all 3 strategies will become part of your Internet Marketing Strategy. They work for any business or practice, and for any product or service you are promoting on the Internet.

There are many excellent sources available that will give you step by step guidelines to follow to put any or all of the above strategies in place for your business. Contact me for my recommendations on which programs or courses might be best for you based on the level of Internet Marketing experience you have.

And as always, I must stress again, these strategies take time to work their magic. But they are proven strategies that will ensure you have an ongoing viable online business for your future.