I’m co-leading a discussion session at Wordcamp about Monetizing Blogs, so I thought I’d also touch on it here with a post about 10 Ways to Monetize Your Blog.

First, I should preface this discussion by saying you first need to seriously evaluate whether you want to work at monetizing your blog. Steve Pavlina has a very thorough post that goes over what’s necessary to really do this well, and why the majority of people who try end up not generating significant income.

Second, you have to make sure that making money from your blog directly is your goal. For example, for this blog direct income isn’t my goal. I didn’t have ads at all untli recently, and the only reason I added them was to use the ad network management application I’ve been working on called RMX Direct. It’s quite possible that your blogging goals may just to network, write about something you’re interested in, or serve some business purpose that isn’t direct income generation.

With that out of the way, let’s get started:

1. Contextual Advertising

Surprise, surprise. Advertising is easily the most popular blog monetization tactic, mostly due to it being the easiest thing to implement. Advertising comes in many forms, and contextual advertising is the most popular due to Google Adsense and it’s general success with blogs and niche sites.

I’m going to assume everyone reading this is familiar with it, but I think it should be mentioned that too many bloggers assume that Adsense is the best solution for their blog. For some blogs and topics it works great, for others, not very well at all.

My advice is to not limit your blog to one ad network or just one form of advertising. Other contextual options include the Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika, Clicksor, AdSonar, and others. It’s not easy to manually test all these though if you’re shuffling ad tags around and randomly allocating your impressions to them, using a ad network management tool like RMX Direct can help you manage, evaluate, and control your various ad networks.

2. Display Advertising

As I mentioned above, contextual networks aren’t always the best solution for blogs. In some cases there aren’t enough advertisers in niche topics, and in others the users just isn’t likely to click. In this case, you want to be working with ad networks that provide CPM display advertising. This means you get paid something for every ad viewed, opposed to only getting paid per click.

Just like with contextual networks, it’s important to use multiple display ad networks to get more variety from your ads, to not let any one network control your inventory, and to make sure you’re earning the most amount of money possible.

3. Targeted Advertising

The most desirable form of advertising is having companies that wish to pay good rates to advertise on your blog directly whether it’s text or image ads. Many bloggers feel that this is a pipe dream, but I speak from experience from running a wakeboarding blog for many years that you can make solid income from targeted advertising without having insane amounts of traffic.

There are a number of key things you have to do though in order to get this type of advertising:

* Have a blog with leading content in your niche and a professional design
* Create a “media kit” which is essentially a page on your blog that explains that you take targeted advertising, what your rates are, demographics of your users, your traffic levels, examples of the types of ads people can run, testimonials from any companies that have advertised with you, and a phone number and email address they can use to get more information.
* Have obvious “Advertise On This Blog” links in key places on your blog.
* Give a company or two in your niche free or very low-cost advertising in order to get the ball rolling. When advertisers see their competitors or companies similar to them advertising, they get the idea that it’s available. If all they ever see is Adsense ads, they might not realize it’s an option.
* Be willing to be creative to help your advertisers achieve their goals, and lower your price to get the deals.
* Provide statistics and results to your advertisers. Use an ad server like RMX Direct, phpAdsNew, or something similar which has the ability to create reports per advertiser.

Once you’ve set your blog up properly, start approaching companies in your niche who will want to reach your traffic. You don’t need to go after the biggest companies, there are many small companies who are looking to get better results from the web, and they might not even know about your blog. You don’t need to be an ad sales professional, you just need to present your case well on why they’re missing out if they don’t advertise on your traffic. Make it easy on them to work with you, help them create ads, help them determine what sizes to use, and work with them to make sure they get the results they need. It seems like hard work at first, but after you get a solid base of advertisers going, it’s a great source of income and it starts to streamline.

4. Text Link Advertising

Another somewhat unobtrusive form of advertising is using services like Text Link Ads or Adbrite to sell text ads directly to companies. This is pretty low effort and often doesn’t take up too much space on a site, so it’s easy to implement and try out. It should be noted though that you need significant traffic for it to be a big source of income.

5. Affiliate Links

One of the older web monetization methods is still as good today as it’s always been. If you’ve got a blog in a specific area, there’s a very large chance that there are companies out there that sell products or services your users are interested in. You can earn some nice income recommending or linking to those products.

Amazon.com is probably the most common affiliate merchant used by bloggers, but I’d advise finding other unique merchants who may pay better and be more specific to your topic. Amazon is always there as an option, but you’re more likely to get more help from the merchant if you go with a smaller company.

Another nice thing about affiliate links is that they fit well with quality content. Reviewing products and services for your users is valuable content, and if you can make money off it as well it’s a great combination. A word of warning though that you shouldn’t change your reviews or be biased due to the fact you can make money off a referral.

While traffic also helps for affiliate links, it can sometimes be an easier way to generate income without high traffic levels like advertising requires. As an example I did a review of a web analytics application a couple of years ago, and this blog had very little traffic at that point. I referred two sales through that review though that still earn me $150 a month every month two years later.

6. Selling Your Content (Ebooks, Videos, DVDs)

If you’ve got great content, another option is to package it and sell it. There are numerous bloggers who have created ebooks and even real books based on their blog content and made great income selling them. You can also expand to infoproducts like videos, DVDs, audio CDs, and printed books on demand.

This can take some significant work and it requires great content to actually sell, but it can be a nice income stream that lasts a long time.

7. Consulting

Depending on your topic and your level of expertise, you can sell consulting services. If you’re a web analytics expert, you could offer web analytics consulting services on your blog for an hourly fee. This takes very little work to setup beyond creating a page outlining your services, getting a standard contract, and having a way to take payments from companies. Again though, it just takes a little bit of effort to let people know that consulting services are available.

8. Donations

Not quite as common as it once was, it used to be fairly common for bloggers to ask for donations on their blog through Paypal or some other service. This only works if you have a dedicated userbase, and a large enough number of users that their donations add up. I wouldn’t recommend this if you’re also putting a lot of advertising and other monetization methods on your blog. You’ll come off as a bit too greedy in that case.

9. Selling Products

Besides infoproducts, you can sell real products like t-shirts, bumper stickers, clothing, or whatever other kind of merchandise makes sense for your topic. Companies like Goodstorm, CafePress, Lulu, and others make it easy by creating the products based on your design and letting you set up a shop. There is no risk to bloggers, which makes it a great opportunity.

10. Selling Your Blog

Perhaps the most extreme of the blog monetization methods, but it can be lucrative! If you aren’t attached to your blog and are willing to part with it, you can usually find a buyer for it. Your blog must be pretty good, and have a level of traffic worth buying, and it really helps if you already have some income streams going for it. Blogs usually sell for 12-24 times monthly revenues, and there are numerous places you can sell them like eBay and the Sitepoint Marketplace.

Conclusion

It definitely takes some work to monetize your site well, and having good traffic really helps out. Work on building a blog with a solid userbase, and you should be on your way to generating income using any of the methods above. Good luck, and please share any blog monetization experiences you have in the comments.

Article Source: http://www.christiannotepad.com

Web Hosting Reviews

EasyCGI Review

For more info please visit us at – Search Engine Optimization India

If you are new to internet marketing, you are probably facing the horrifying task of trying to get your site listed on the first page of the search engines. You probably have no idea how to improve your ranking or where to begin. For the purposes of this discussion, we will outline the procedures you should follow to do better on the search engines, while still making sure that you attract qualified traffic that will actually be receptive to the products or services that your website offers.

The first thing you need to understand is that your search engine ranking will not improve overnight. Watch our for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants. They will charge you a hefty sum for their services, sometimes as much as $2,000 per month or more. They often make dubious claims that they can get you ranked on the first page of the search engines within a few months, and they will usually offer a money-back guarantee.

However, once you pay the initial deposit and the SEO company begins working on your website, they will rig your website so that you will be able to quickly rise to the top of the rankings for insignificant keywords that will not attract any visitors to your site.

For example, if your website provides auto insurance quotes, any SEO consultant knows that it will be extremely difficult to get your website ranked on the first page of Google for a highly sought after phrase such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES. So, instead, they will pick a less popular phrase, such as AUTO INSURANCE QUOTES FAST, for which there is no competition, and you will quickly rise to the top. The only problem is no one will ever actually use that exact phrase when searching for auto insurance quotes, so even though the SEO company delivered on its promise to improve your ranking, you will still not receive any traffic.

So, you need to use a different approach if you want to not only improve your ranking, but also attract qualified traffic to your website. The first thing you need to do is optimize your website for the keywords or phrases that people actually use when searching for products or services related to what you offer. For example, if you sell candy, you would want to improve your ranking for the phrases BUY CANDY or BUY CANDY ONLINE. To optimize your website for your chosen keywords, you should either hire a web designer that has experience optimizing websites, or you should purchase search engine optimization software that will show you how to optimize your HTML code so that your site is set up properly. You should also try to have a decent amount of free content on your website that relates to your subject matter.

The next step is to submit your site to the search engines, if you have not already done so. There are hundreds or even thousands of legitimate search engines and directories in cyberspace, and you should submit to all them. I recommend that you look for search engine submission companies on Google and pick one that charges a small monthly fee to submit your site to the search engines once every month.

The last and most crucial step to improving your ranking is increasing your link popularity. You can write articles and submit them to article submission directories. At the bottom of each article you write, you are allowed to include a link to your website. As the articles you write are put into circulation and are published on other websites, your link popularity will increase. Also, you should do some pay-per-click or other paid advertising in order to promote your business, and eventually you will acquire some links as the word spreads about your site.

If you employ each of the strategies we have discussed, you should be able to improve your search engine ranking. No website can improve upon its ranking overnight, but if you are persistent, eventually, your hard work will pay off.

Article Source - http://www.articlecircle.com/internet-marketing/search-engine-marketing/getting-ranked-higher-on-search-engines.html

For more info please visit us at – search engine optimization

Before letting you know on the changes made to the pagerank of ArticleSet.com’s pages during today’s update, I would like to give an answer to some basic questions in case you’re new to this stuff.

What is PageRank and why is it important?

Simply put, PageRank is a value from 0 to 10 that Google assigns to indexed webpages, according to the importance they give to that specific page. The importance is that a higher pagerank means a better position in search engine result pages.

Where can I view the PageRank of a website?

The Google Toolbar displays the PageRank of the page you are viewing in your browser in a small green bar.

to see the pagerank of pages you are surfing.

About the pagerank update

The reason I’m so happy is that today there was a new pagerank update and ArticleSet.com has received some good rank values. Generally updates happen once every three months. ArticleSet.com is only about two months old so this is the first pagerank update it has experienced. When a new website is added to the web, all it’s pages have a pagerank of 0 and of course this was the case for ArticleSet.com. After this update the homepage was given a pagerank of 4 and all of the secondary pages a rank of 3. I believe it’s a good start. We can now talk business at a different level.

Article Source - http://blog.articleset.com/pagerank-update/

For more info please visit us at – internet marketing solutions

If you haven’t heard of human powered search engine, Stumpedia, you might want to give it a whirl. It is essentially a human-powered search engine with a social aspect to it. In other words, Stumpedia allows content producers to submit and profit from their work and then allows the search community to determine relevancy of search results. While it is similar to human powered search engines Mahalo and Wikia Search, it differentiates itself because it is powered by the very people that use it.

How Is Stumpedia Different?

Stumpedia takes a different approach to human-powered search than competing sites Mahalo and Wikia Search. For example, the relevancy of search results at Mahalo is determined by their staff whose underlying motive is to profit from their own internally produced and hosted content. Wikia Search takes the wikipedia approach to creating and hosting collaborative content pages.

Where Stumpedia is unique is the fact that it enables registered users to submit sites along with matching keywords and phrases. The relevancy of search results are then ranked and rated by the volunteer community through the ability to vote listings up or down (much like Digg, Mixx and Sphinn). Unlike Mahalo and Wikia Search, Stumpedia is not a content producer or provider and as such does not host any content pages. Furthermore, unlike traditional search engines they do not use bots or crawlers.

How Does It Work?

Anyone can actually jump right on the Stumpedia Home Page and start searching. The real value is being able to add to the search results in case you do not find what you are looking for but are aware of sites that should be included in those results. To be able to add sites, you follow a simple registration process that asks you to provide an email address and your desired user name. Once you verify your email address by clicking on a link in an email they send to you, you are able to contribute to the search engine.

One word of caution - be careful what you add because you will have a unique address that shows what you have added. Therefore if you choose to add spammy sites or other inappropriate sites, it will be viewable via your public profile. While the public profiles keep track of what you have added, they do not record what you have searched for. So, there is some privacy built in to the experience with regards to what you are actually searching for.

Adding sites is so easy a caveman can do it. For example, I searched for “Arizona web design” which produced zero results (most likely due to the fact that this is still a relatively new service). It’s a good thing I know of a Arizona based web design company (our own) and so I added it. I type in the URL in the submit field and an AJAX function opens a box that reveals a title and description field. If a title tag and meta description tag are present on the site, it populates those fields with that data. However, keep in mind that you can edit those fields as well. After I am satisfied with the data, I hit “Submit Link” and the listing is added as a search result. Sound simple? It is! See screen shots below on how this works.

Initial search for “Arizona web design” produces zero results:

Additional features include most recent activity being shown on the home page. You can also display submitted search results (listings) by popularity (most votes) in the following time ranges - 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or 365 days.

What About Spam?

A service such as this is no doubt susceptible to spam. It would be easy enough for spammers to add listings for Viagra for example and then create multiple accounts to vote up their submissions. So, when I asked how Stumpedia planned to deal with such occurrences of spam, they replied with the following statement:

“Presently we’re leaving it up to the community to handle spam submissions by voting down irrelevant results. We’re also monitoring activity and are prepared to take action if spam becomes a problem. Banning people that spam, removing spammy results, etc, are all options we are open to.”

This leads me to wonder if a select number “thumbs down” votes will work to automatically remove spammy results or at the very least, flag those results so that Stumpedia staff can manually remove them or do they simply remain with negative votes. The latter is true for now - Stumpedia staff would have to manually remove them and in the meanwhile they remain although if several listings exist for a particular search query, they will be ranked lower.

Background and Future Plans

Stumpedia officially launched on February 22, 2008 so it is a relatively new service. This is why you will not find search results for many queries. However as time unfolds and as the community continues to contribute, the amount of listings will only grow. As of the writing of this post, there are just 2,160 links submitted and 341 members. So, while they have a long way to go with regards to catching similar services, they have a pretty good model in place.

The service is currently free of any paid advertising. When asked if we will see paid advertising in the future, the answer was yes but the good news is that they will incorporate a revenue sharing model that rewards users that are contributing to the service.

Some future stuff in the works include:

Users will have the ability to import and share their social bookmarks, making them easily searchable using the Stumpedia search feature. Imported bookmarks would be ranked using their Social Rank algorithm and their associated tags would become search engine friendly. For example, tags such as “search engines,” “search_engines,” “search-engines,” and “searchengines” would be considered one in the same and produce the same search results.

Social bookmarking features similar to del.icio.us will be added.

Additional social networking features such as adding/inviting friends and sharing link submissions are in the works.

They will add a feature that ranks and scores activity of members.

Future submission sections for news, videos, and images will be added.

Stumpedia sounds like an interesting service, one which I will use and contribute to as time allows. I like the democratic way that users can essentially build this human powered search. My only fear is that once Stumpedia becomes more popular, it will become laden with spam. However, if the community stays active, they should be able to combat that with relative ease.

For more info please visit us at – social media optimization & SEO services

In developing the link analysis tool I’ve been thinking a lot about the tools I would like to be able to use but haven’t found yet. Some tools offer great features but are full of bugs and are therefore hard to use.

This thread from 2005 discusses the ultimate link analysis tool but 3 years later we don’t seem to have one (as far as I know). There are some excellent ones but ideally they would be combined into one big tool that you can just set going on 10 domains and then come back in 12 hours and see a massive report of all the data.

Here are the features I would like in the idea link tool:

What would you like to see?

Article source - http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/features-you-would-like-in-the-ultimate-seo-tool/

Vanessa Fox:

Why Get Involved with Social Media?
Deeper engagement with customers
Get insights not available any there way
Your customers are online already
Happier Customer > Provide Feedback > Create Better Products > Evangelize > More Customers

Social Networking is Anywhere People are Talking Online
YouTube, Yahoo Answers, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Niche Forums
Verticals - social shopping, real estate, lawyers
No matter what you do - there’s likely a social media niche for you.

Social Media Submissions -
Mixx, Sphinn, Digg - this likely goes back to the keynote about social media being a fad.  These most people think about as a place for links. 

Rating & Reviews
Yelp, Epinions, Amazon - whether its negative or positive you want to know what’s going on

Twitter:
Technorati uses it to know about outages, Dell for it’s outlet promotions, NYTimes for Stories, Southwest Airlines for specials, Vanity searches on your name

Dell - Ideastorm
Helps with Dell’s customer research, the community decides what Dell should work on next

Facebook
Not a good place yet for advertising, but growing.  Mostly use it for brand awareness rather than paid advertising.

Evolve What You Do Already
Assess your customers
Who Are They
Where are they

Have a Plan
What are your goals
What are your guidelines
What will you measure

What Not To Do:
Flogs - Walmart RV Across America
Dell:  Told bloggers to take something down - only inflamed the situation

Social Media helps you improve your conversation audience

Per Jacobsson from Nimble.ie

Nimble is Ireland’s own social networking site
Re-launched in Sept. 07
109,00 members in Ireland
New , fun and exciting design and functionality
For Advertisers:  sponsor functions, corporate profiles, banner advertising
Nimble’s future:  several hundred thousand users in Ireland, adding more fun stuff to the website, looking for partners and advertisers

Social Networking in general
It’s local activity after all
Non-excluding
Future holds integration between sites - 3rd party developers are already doin this
Social networking websites are a new media
The m ore successful networks fully utilize the networks of friends

Search Marketing
Tested radio, college magazine some web pages
By far most effective:  viral networking; friends inviting friends
15% of users through search engines (Google) but search terms have not been interesting: “nimble” “nimble.ie” www.nimble.ie, etc.

Will McInnes from Nixon McInnes
5 facts
1.  We’re dealing in a networked world
2.  You are not in control
3.  If you are thinking about your website being a destination site, you’re dreaming  (think about the distributed world)
4.  Social Media isn’t just for kids anymore, 55% of users to YouTube is over 25 - it’s not about kids!
5.  Content is free, glitz and glamor (Craig’s lists) don’t matter

Opportunities
1.  idea storm from dell - the community promotes ideas.  from this dell has cut out focus group.  creates a buzz in the market before products even come to market
2.  ratings and reviews - huge opportunities.  own it and host it before someone else does  (negative reviews actually helps, people are cynical,  people set expectations and that helps with return rates dropping)
3.  start listening to the networks & conversations - use Google alerts.  know who the influencers are in your marketer
4.  widgets - helps to deliver your message out to a wider audience

Networked world, Not in control, Not big destinations, demographics are excitingly broad and dynamics.

Article source - http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/2008/04/search-market-2.html

For more info please visit us at – offshore software development & SEO

Pay-per-click marketing and web analytics – they go together like peas and carrots. Why you ask? Because the reports provided by the PPC search engines aren’t always enough! Services like Google Analytics provide advertisers with a wealth of knowledge for fine-tuning and perfecting their paid-search campaigns. This includes data like bounce rate, time on site or goal funnel visualizations. For advertisers who are using Analytics in tandem with their AdWords PPC account, the process for tracking data is a cinch. Google has an auto-tagging feature that will pull all of your PPC data into Analytics – including keyword level data. The question then becomes, “How do I track this data for my Yahoo! Search Marketing PPC campaigns?” Today I’m going to quickly explain how you can build custom tracking URLs to get the same comprehensive data for Yahoo!.

The first step is to head on over to the trusty Google Analytics URL Builder. This tool will let you input your landing page and variables including term (keyword), name (campaign), source (search engine), medium (cpc vs. email or organic) and content (ad version). After you manually input your data, the URL builder will provide you with a full tracking URL that you can copy/paste into your Yahoo! ads. Here’s a quick example:

This example would basically only work for a single keyword and a single ad text. If you have the time to create a separate URL for every keyword in your Yahoo! account, all I can say is go for it! If you’re like me, you need a much quicker process for capturing data. It just so happens that Yahoo! has an auto-tagging feature. In your account, go to the Administration tab and click on Tracking URLs. Select the option Tracking URLs On and save changes. This will tell Yahoo! to append your destination URLs with information ranging from the keyword you bid on, to the actual search query and account specific information like campaign and ad group IDs.

How do you pull this information into Analytics? It’s relatively easy. If you look at the custom tracking URL example above, you will need to make modifications to the term, content and campaign variables. You will need to insert Yahoo!’s identifiers into each of these variables to pull the auto-tagged information into Analytics. Some of the basics include {OVKEY} for the paid keyword, {OVRAW} for the actual search query, {OVADID} for the ad text ID number and {OVCAMPGID} for the campaign ID numer. Here’s another quick example:

Now you can use this customized destination URL for an entire campaign (if applicable) and you will still pull detailed information into Analytics. I should point out that using Yahoo!’s auto-tagging identifiers will only produce real data if you have turned auto-tagging ON in your account! Otherwise all of your Yahoo! PPC visitors will register keywords as {OVKEY}. And trust me when I say, that isn’t very helpful. Discovering this process and putting it to use in my Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts has proved to be an invaluable asset. I would recommend to everyone reading this blog to set this up for your accounts as soon as you get the chance! And check in next week – I’ll explain how to do this for your MSN adCenter PPC accounts, too!

Article source – http://www.ppchero.com/2008/04/03/the-secret-of-tracking-yahoo-keyword-data-in-google-analytics/

For more info please visit us at – offshore software development & SEO services

Here’s a collection of several strategic methods you can use to deal with competitors within your niche. Do note that they should be implemented within a framework which tracks and measures your performance in relation to specific competitors.

1.       Focus on Building a Reputation. While products can easily be replicated, a strong reputation or brand is nearly impossible to appropriate without much effort. Brand your website consistently and focus on satisfying your customers or site visitors by generously offering support and free information.

2.       Increase Your Product Value. This two step process involves either improving the quality of your product and selling it at the competitor’s price or reducing the price of your product while keeping it at the same quality level. This can be used to counter surges in popularity for specific competitor products.

3.       Develop Retention Equity. Retaining first-time and regular customers is very important for market-share growth. The best way to do this is to make it difficult for customers to switch to a competitor. This can be achieved by offering specific unique features or benefits that your competitors do not offer. Loyalty-programs with attractive advantages can be implemented alongside your product or service offerings.

4.       Target a Sub-Niche. When your niche is overrun by strong competitors, it might be easier to target a sub-niche exclusively to capture a larger share of a targeted market. By breaking your flagship site into several sub-niches, you are deepening your brand’s reach within the overall field.

5.       Establish a Community. One way to build customer loyalty is to encourage interaction between customers through an open community. This can take the form of a forum, blog or social network. Communities are a public front for your community and can address customer or visitor concerns. Communities help your business develop excellent visibility on search engines as well.

6.       Optimize Your Product Launches. Product or site launches are a great opportunity to distinguish your website or product from a competitor. Make your pricing cheaper or similar to your competitor and aim to secure first time customers with an attractive initial promotional package. You can also seek objective reviews to demonstrate how it is different or superior to a competitor’s product.

7.       Celebrate Your Competitors. Create an industry-specific ranking or awards list to attract attention to your own brand or product. Two specific examples come to mind: Scott And’s list of Top 150 Marketing blogs, which evolved from a personal list to one jointly hosted by Advertising Age, a respected marketing/advertising publication.

Another example is SEOMoz’s Web 2.0 Awards, which has brought a lot of publicity to their business brand. The awards also received over 100K in backlinks and continue to bring them a fair amount of targeted search traffic. While the companies listed aren’t competitors, this example demonstrates how an awards list can be used for branding purposes.

8.       Perform On-going Competitor Analysis. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitor helps you to measure your own performance and success. You can learn a lot from how competitors operate and apply these techniques to your businesses in other industries or niches as well.

On-going competitor analysis simply means keeping conceptual and metric-based tabs on your competitor’s business and website. What are they planning for next month? How did their new product perform in the market?

9.       Collaborate on Joint Projects. Competitors can become allies when you seek to dominate a specific industry. Large scale project collaborations can grow your business or website considerably because they allow you to combine marketing resources and brand power.

A loyal customer of your competitor isn’t likely to purchase your product but a collaboration of some sort will encourage support for joint projects that will pull in new customers for both businesses. A simpler form of collaboration between webmasters can take the form of a basic banner exchange.

It is always important to note that your most powerful competitor might be the limitations posed by your own product, website or brand. Be sure to keep an eye on your target market’s needs/interests and focus on effectively communicating the value of your business.

The customer trust and reputation you’ve acquired is a necessary foundation you need to successfully compete in any niche.

Article source - http://www.doshdosh.com/how-to-deal-with-your-niche-competitors-guide-for-businesses-and-webmasters/

For more info please visit us at – SEO services & website Design Company

Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers.

Creating a website that conveys trust can be tricky. There are rarely any answers that are always “right” for every visitor. There are, however, several factors that have universal appeal to the weary shopper.

Company info

Provide your visitors information about your company and its primary owners and operators. Treat your shoppers with a company history and links to frequently asked questions, policies and physical location. The more information you provide the better satisfied any concerned shopper will tend to be.

Prompt responses

Shoppers want to know that they can rely on a company to meet their needs and concerns quickly once contacted. Be sure to respond promptly and professionally to all customer inquiries. Don’t let email or phone messages go unanswered for more than a couple of hours, especially if requests are urgent.

Feedback options

Create ways for visitors to provide user feedback regarding your products or services and encourage them to do so. Be sure to follow up with feedback and use it to better your services.

Transaction security

Emphasize that online transactions will be handled securely and that privacy is a top priority. Using secure logos and links to privacy policies page is a must.

Offer discounts

Sometimes discounts can be a negative, making you appear desperate. However when implemented properly and professionally, percent-off discounts and coupons can be effective and giving visitors an added desire to move forward.

Delivery options

Be sure to provide low cost and/or varied delivery options. Having more options available allow visitors to select the delivery method they prefer and trust the most, which will then lend additional trust to you.

Brand and product quality

If you sell brand-name products, be sure to emphasis this as your customers will be more likely to purchase a product brand they recognize. If you don’t have brand name products, create a brand and emphasize that. An unknown brand name product is still better than a no-name brand product.

Off-line retailer comparison

Provide your visitors compelling reasons why they should purchase products from you rather than an offline competitor. Highlight free shipping, lower prices, easy access customer support, etc.

Return policy

Adding a no-hassle return policy can clinch a sale. Be sure to have return policy information easily available and spell out exactly what is required to return a product and/or get a refund.

Minimal / clearly distinguishable ads

Don’t clutter up your space with ads. Keep your visitors focused on purchasing your products. If you have ads in informational areas of the site keep them to a minimum and make sure they don’t overpower your own information.
In an anonymous world where customers cannot examine a product or meet with company reps face to face, trust is much harder to come by. Online businesses have many more hurdles than offline businesses when it comes to establishing trust with their customer base. This means that as an online business, you have to do more than just create a compelling reason to convince people “why you” rather than a competitor.

Establishing trust is the key. Your shoppers need to believe without a doubt that, as a business, you’re not just in it for yourself, but that you care and will take care of the customer. Without having established any sort of trust there really is no sale.

Article source - http://www.searchengineguide.com/stoney-degeyter/10-ways-to-help-your-visitors-trust-you.php

For more info please visit us at –Software Outsourcing & SEO services

Yahoo is still fighting off Microsoft’s marriage proposal. But it’s open to making more friends.

On March 25, Yahoo, the largest online destination, teamed up with two other Web titans—search goliath Google and leading social network MySpace—to form the OpenSocial Foundation. The not-for-profit, which is scheduled to launch within the next 90 days, is dedicated to preserving open source programming codes that allow Web developers to build applications that work across all major Web sites. “We believe common sets of specifications are beneficial to the developer community at large and enrich the experience of the Web both on and off Yahoo,” said Wade Chambers, Yahoo’s VP of Platforms, in a media conference call.

Google launched the OpenSocial platform in October in hopes of solving two problems created by the increasingly social Web. The first issue concerned developers. Facebook’s May decision to open up its popular real estate to applications from third parties spurred thousands of developers to create programs for the social networking site. The enthusiastic response of Facebook users to the new programs encouraged other social networks to follow suit. Soon most sites were allowing outsiders to create programs for them.

All the opening up, however, presented developers with a dilemma: who to program for? Most social networks had unique codes that demanded developers build programs specifically to work on their site. Most development teams, however, had staffs composed of only a handful of programmers capable of creating just a few such specific applications at a time.

If developers didn’t make their programs work across sites, they risked losing out on valuable audiences who might use their program only if they could get it to work on their favorite Web destination. Worse, developers risked their program failing to get virally distribution because a user’s friends were not all on the same site.

The developers’ dilemma presented a problem for Web site owners as well. If developers had to choose one or two sites to program for, and your site wasn’t on the short list, you could miss out on the hot new program. Web surfers wanting to use a particular widget—such as Slide’s popular photo sharing widget or iLike’s music sharing and discovery service—would potentially ignore your site if that particular application wasn’t available.

Many sites, including Google, found themselves quickly faced with the flipside of the developers’ dilemma. Facebook was already on most developers’ short lists, thanks to the early release of its APIs and its global audience, which now reaches more than 70 million people. Without common codes, MySpace, Yahoo, Google’s Orkut social network, AOL, and myriad other sites would find themselves competing for the remaining slots on individual developers’ lists.

It’s no wonder then that Google, whose own Orkut social network lagged behind MySpace and Facebook in the US, chose to create a common set of codes for developers. It’s also no wonder why MySpace, which opened up comparatively late, quickly signed on.

Despite already being the most popular site on the Web, Yahoo has a lot to gain by joining. The company suffers from a lack of innovation. Several of its social properties, such as Yahoo 360, have failed to take off. Moreover, it has lost some mindshare among young people—those most likely to pass around many developers’ applications — to hotter social networking properties. By joining OpenSocial Yahoo ensures it doesn’t miss out on some developers’ next great creation. It also gets an opportunity to increase adoption of its own properties such as photo-sharing site Flickr by enabling developers to more easily create programs that spread Yahoo’s offerings onto other popular sites.

Getting on the OpenSocial bandwagon now is particularly important because of where the Web is going. Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, sees a future where social applications will live on nearly every site and audiences will take their favorite programs and content wherever they wish. In that world, making sure your content is easily distributable and that your site can support a variety of different programs is key.

Moreover, cute little widgets are quickly evolving into full-fledged programs. It may not seem so bad if your site doesn’t support an application allowing people to turn each other into vampires. But it could be terrible, say, if everyone began using a widget notifying them of important business emails and they couldn’t see alerts when on your site. “In the future we see applications for OpenSocial and the MySpace developer platform moving beyond toys and widgets and becoming real features,” said Steve Pearman, MySpace’s SVP of Product Strategy.

OpenSocial is far from perfect. Developers often still have a lot of work to do to customize their applications so they truly work across all the sites that have signed up. Also, like any open source standard, there is some worry that competing developers will be able to easily copy existing applications built upon the APIs.
The other problem with OpenSocial is that it is still far from comprehensive. Microsoft has, notably, not signed on. But, even Yahoo says it would welcome the tech giant’s friendship in this respect. “I think any large platform should be able to participate and we would welcome anyone to participate,” said Chambers.

Article Source - http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2008/03/yahoo_myspace_a.html

For more info please visit us at – offshore software development & Web Development Company

This post is an ode to Matt McGee’s post How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes. I found myself using this as a quick reference from time to time when first published. It was a great write-up that was very useful to many people. I always wanted to expand on this a bit and have the search community community add to it so here’s my new and updated checklist for your review. If there’s anything I missed please add it in the comments below.

Contents
SEO Checklist
A: Homepage
B: Site
C: External

SEO Checklist
A1: Homepage - www.domain.com
1. Check for redirects and canonicalization issues
2. Choose http://domain.com or http://www.domain.com
3. Redirect domain.com/(index|main).(html|htm|php|cfm|asp) to domain.com

Apache redirects and editing .htaccess files:
domain.com to www.domain.com
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^domain.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.html [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

www.domain.com/index.php to www.domain.com
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[^/]*/index\.php [NC]
RewriteRule . / [R=301,L]

A2: Homepage – Navigation
1. Check for image, drop downs, javascript, image maps vs text navigation. Text is the best option.

A3: Homepage – Content
1. How much text is present? The more the better.
2. Check for keyword density in homepage content
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html
3. Check for use of H2 tags and bold fonts (light/appropriate use is good on keywords)
4. There should be a sitemap present
5. Do a select all (ctrl + A) to find potentially hidden text
6. Check to see how search engines will view your site with SEO Browser. Make sure everything is crawlable.

B1: Site – Meta Tags
1. Check Title tags. Are they using keywords and are formatted correctly?

Brand authority formatting:
Brand Name or Domain | Keyword, Keyword & Keyword

Non brand authority formatting
Keyword, Keyword & Keyword | Brand Name or Domain

2. Check Descriptions for keywords and composition. Make sure the description gets to the point and speaks to the purpose/content on its respective page in the first couple sentences.

3. Make sure the keyword tag contains around 5 – 10 keywords. No more or less is really necessary.

4. Make sure there are no duplicate meta tags anywhere, site wide.

B2: Site – URL Formatting
1. Check url formatting. Dynamic URLs are bad. URLs that are too long will be truncated in Google SERPs.
2. URLs should contain keywords separated by hyphens.
3. Hyphens are more preferable than underscores
4. Keywords in URLs should match the content contained within the page they are leading to.

B3: Analytics
1. Make sure you have some sort of analytics installed. It doesn’t have to be Google analytics but do remember that every page within the site should contain the analytic tracking code.

B4: Site – Links
1. Links should contain keywords
2. Links should contain titles utilizing keywords
3. Anchor text, link keywords, link title, and page being linked to should be relevant to one another.
4. Site linking structure should be cyclical. There should be no dangling pages.
5. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links

B5: Site – nofollows (advanced)
1. nofollow TOS, Privacy Policy, or other pages that don’t contribute to your site’s ranking.
2. If you know how to link funnel correctly this should be done. I haven’t written anything on this yet but you can consult Slightly Shady SEO or Andy Beard

B6: Site – Robots.txt
1. Check for robots.txt file. Does one exist?
2. See what’s being blocked and what’s not.
3. Make sure it’s written correctly (consult Sebastian’s Pamphlets for best advice)

B7: Site – Duplicate Content
1. Make sure there is no duplicate content within your site
2. Make sure there is no duplicate content on other domains. You can use CopyScape to check for dupe content.

B8: Site – PDF files
1. Does this site contain PDF files? If so these can be optimized with new titles, keywords, and comments. Use Adobe Acrobat Professional to edit PDFs.

B9: Site – Images
1. Images can have ALT tags. Make sure to utilize these appropriately with keywords. When implemented, your site may gain traffic from image search engines like Google Image Search.

C1: External – Indexation
1. Perform a site:domain.com search on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Compare what’s being indexed and what isn’t.
*Install FireFox Extension Search Status by Craig Raw
You’ll be able to easily perform this operative plus many other functions with the Search Status plugin.

C2: External – Backlinks
1. Perform a backlink count with the Search Status plugin.
2. You may also want to install Joost de Valk’s backlink checker plugin for FireFox to check the anchor text of your Backlinks within Yahoo Site Explorer or Google’s Webmaster tools.

So that’s about all I can think of for the time being. If I forgot anything please submit your additions to this checklist in the comments below.

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For more info please visit us at: Offshore software Development Company & SEO services

Posted by Lisa Barone

One of the first things we do when a potential client approaches us with their tales of search engine ranking woe is to see how many pages they have indexed in the search engine. Let’s face it; if the search engines aren’t even indexing your site, rankings are the least of your concerns.

Typically, when we say “search engine”, we’re most concerned with Google, and a really easy way to see how big Google thinks you are is to do a quick site: query. This will give you a list of all the pages Google has indexed on your site and will clue you in to your indexing ratio (the number of pages Google has indexed in relation to the number of pages you actually have). Often when we do this test with new clients we’ll find that Google isn’t indexing their site at all due to some common search engine optimization mistakes.

Here are some of our favorites:

1.       You’ve disallowed the spiders in your robots.txt: This will always be my most favorite reason for why sites are not indexed simply because it’s a classic search engine optimization mistake. If you’ve set your robots.txt to disallow the search engines from entering your site, you can’t complain when they follow your command. Go check out your robots.txt file and make sure you’re allowing the spiders into your site. If you’re finding that your site has 0 pages indexed, do yourself a favor and go check out that robots.txt file. If it looks like the one below, you have a problem:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

2.       Your server is too slow: Google’s not going to directly penalize you for running on the slowest server ever, but it may occur indirectly. If Googlebot notices that your site is having a hard time keeping up with their request for information, they’re going to hand it a cookie (the chocolate chip kind) and some juice and let it rest while they go spend time with someone else. This means they’re not going to get through your entire site before they stop crawling pages, which in turn means fewer pages for you in the index. You can’t fault Google. They don’t want to be responsible for crashing your site. So instead, they’ll just go on their merry Google way, leaving your site still standing but not fully spidered. They’ll pick up the rest of your subject’s information over at your competitors.

3.       They think you’re a spammer: If Google has decided that you’re engaging in some bad behavior and are trying to deceive them or their users, they’re not going to index your Web site. And if you’re spamming and spending your days getting some color on that white hat of yours, you’re probably aware of what you’re doing. So stop it. Fix up your site and submit a reinclusion request to Google. They’ll take a look and if they decide you’ve pulled a Todd Friesen they’ll let you back into the index and start indexing your site again.

There’s another side to this. If you’re having trouble getting the domain you just bought 3 months ago to rank, it could be that you’re feeling the wrath of someone else’s penalty. Take a spin through the Wayback Machine and discover what your site looked like before you took control over it. If it was touting the non-friendly variety of PPC, you may be in for a hard time.

4.       Bad Navigation: Is your navigation designed in all Flash? Does it consist of 90 percent broken links? Yeah? Well, then the spiders probably aren’t going to be able to access it, let alone index it. Way to go, genius.

5.       Spider Traps Galore: Spider traps come in many different flavors and varieties. It could be that your JavaScript is taking up the first 2,000 lines of code, that you require cookies or some other user dependant action for entrance, that you’re sporting some seriously crazy dynamic URLs, that your home page is redirecting 7 times before finally hitting something, etc. All of these things are huge roadblocks for a hungry spider trying to get to your content. Remove them and give the search engines easy access. Otherwise, start putting your dollars back into advertising in your Sunday circular again because that Web site isn’t going to do you a hell of a lot of good.

6.       Site’s down/Too many 500 errors: If the search engines keep trying to visit your site to no avail, eventually they may stop trying. They don’t want to index a site that isn’t going to load when users trying to access it. Returning these sites makes Google look like Yahoo’s confused cousin. Make sure your Web site is free of hosting issues and sits on a fast server. If you want to run a quick diagnostic on your site, I’d recommend the Check Server tool located on our free SEO tools page. We have lots of great stuff on that page, but the Check Server will help you identify most of the indexing obstacles your site may be facing.

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For more info please visit us at: SEO Services & Software outsourcing company  

By Peter Nisbet (c) 2008  

If you know how to use Squidoo to achieve improved search engine rank of your web pages, then you have a tool at your disposal that can be just as powerful as using traditional search engine optimization, if not more so.

One important facet of your Squidoo lens is that it could be listed on Google, or any of the other search engines, for your major keywords, and you should not lose sight of any promotional techniques that provide you with free exposure on search engines. If you Blink your Squidoo lens, you can win every way. Not just with Blinklist, but you can have it listed on just about every social networking site you can think of, Technorati and Deli.cio.us included. Also Furl, Craigslist, Stumbleupon and any of the many others out there.

For those not totally aware of what Squidoo is, I don’t intend to go into the ethos of the site right here, other than to state that it can be used as a promotional tool as well as a being a virtual website. Your lens can also be given a Google PageRank. You can use your Squidoo lens in place of a minisite in order to promote yourself and your product, and improve your search engine listing. You can use it as a showcase for your products, your blogs or even your websites, and draw traffic to it and hence to those other online ventures you are involved in.

In order to use Squidoo as a promotional tool for your main website you have to know a lot about the topic of your site. It is not a tool to use to sell an affiliate product, for example, unless you are an authority on that product. However, if you have written a book on a certain aspect of SEO, and want to advertise it, then Squidoo is ideal for that. The reason is that you can give in order to earn. Hence, Squidoo is great for me, because I can provide visitors to my lens with useful information on SEO, while at the same time advertising my SEO site that offers my product. I then get visitors and a link from Squidoo, both of which are great for my search engine rank, and also listing position.

It might be possible just to advertise the product directly, but I prefer to provide information. That allows your visitors to become confident that know what you are talking about, and are not just a ‘fly by night’ that is trying to sell a product that you know nothing about. The objective of Squidoo is to provide useful information on topics to others interested in that topic. If they go to Squidoo and click on a category, they should be able to find all the info they are looking for.

They don’t want outright adverts, but if they find that you are providing good information, then they might want to visit your website. You give them the link to do so, and then they get more information. Part of that might be the offer to purchase your product that will possibly solve their problem. However, neither you nor they know that it will, so you provide them with a guarantee that if it doesn’t work for them, they get their money back. You have used Squidoo to persuade them that you know what you are talking about, that led them to your site and more information, and then to your product. They buy it, try it, and if it works fine. If not, they get refunded. In my book that is the proper way to conduct business, and you can use Squidoo to help you with that.

You can also optimize your lens for maximum search engine listing position, since your Squidoo lens should be based upon a single keyword or keyphrase to enable you to get a good listing. You can SEO a lens just as you can do a web page, and with the same effect. Free organic traffic from your listing position.

To achieve all that, sign up for Squidoo, follow their instructions and get your first lens up and running, and then use it to promote your regular website and improve its ranking. You must also make sure that your customers have an out if it doesn’t work for them. Squidoo provide lots of help in designing your first lens, but if you already have website then you should find it easy. Optimize your lens for the search engines and you are all set.

By combining your web page, lens and blog optimization, and cross-promoting each in an intelligent way, it is difficult to see how you could fail to get high search engine listings and improved search engine rank using Squidoo and SEO.

About The Author
If you need more information on how to use Squidoo for improved search engine rank, here is a lens that does what I am suggesting you do. Check it out, and then sign up for Squidoo yourself from the same page. Copy what I do and you can hardly fail. The free info on the page is important, especially Improved Search Engine Rank dot com and might be all that you are looking for.

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For more info please visit us at: SEO services & Software Outsourcing Company

By Esteban Panzera on the 05-02-2008

If you are looking to become a pro social media marketer or you are already one wanting to know more about it, I have compiled a list of 23 blogs that talk about social media marketing and are great places to learn. Of course mine is a must read too! (:P)

1.       ViperChill

2.       CopyBlogger

3