Unless you've been living on a desert island with no Internet access, you've probably seen the recent blog fallout from Google's latest crack down on alleged link brokers.
This week it seems that Google made some type of manual Toolbar PageRank reduction on a handful of major blogs and portal sites like the Washington Post, ProBlogger, CopyBlogger and Forbes.com. Some of these sites had PageRank scores of 7 which have now dropped to 5, scores of 6 which have now dropped to 4 and so on. The blog buzz is that the sites have been singled out by Google as using their high PageRank scores to sell links and have been punished by the world's most popular search engine as a result. There is currently no proof of this and no public statement by Google acknowledging or denying the situation.
A lot of bloggers have weighed in with commentary, observations and opinions. Every time I read a new post about the so called smack-down I imagine some Googlers at Mountain View laughing hysterically and high-fiving each other for turning the tables on the SEO industry yet again.
The situation has even got the SEOs turning on each other. One of the world's best known SEOs, Jill Whalen, made a post in response to the situation that included a comment about one of the affected sites, Search Engine Guide. Jill's post has been interpreted in some circles as a type of attack. Here's the comment Jill made in her post:
"Even my very good friends at Search Engine Guide were smacked down. I hadn't been to their home page in ages since I usually visit through direct article links, but when I looked at their home page today and scrolled down to the bottom, I was taken aback to see what looks more like a link farm than anything else!"
I've known Jill a long time and I read her remark about Search Engine Guide as a quick off the cuff comment, not a deliberate attack. Without putting words in her mouth, I think it sounded more shocking than she meant it, probably because she was typing as a response to first impressions of Search Engine Guide after not seeing it for so long and because (being ridiculously busy) she was probably in a hurry. So the comment itself didn't raise an eyebrow for me. But I WAS concerned about how the general webmaster community would interpret the comment.
Yes, she has every right to her opinion. But being who she is and the industry reputation she's built up, Jill has incredible influence over a large number of webmasters and SEOs who absorb her material. Persons reading her article that are unfamiliar with Search Engine Guide may permanently associate the site with the term "link farm" and all the negative connotations that brings. No matter her intent, her remark definitely has the power to hurt Search Engine Guide and their reputation. The site's publisher Robert Clough obviously thought so, as he was prompted to make an uncharacteristic post in response.
Personally, I think Jill should have considered the possible backlash from her casual comment and worded her post much more carefully. After all, with industry influence comes responsibility. Which brings me to the main point of this article. Google now has extreme influence and power over the Internet. When they make changes to their algorithm or the way they cache and filter web sites, it has a dramatic impact on not just web site owners, but business and life in general. Millíons of people rely on Google to survive, literally. In that respect, this attempt at link bait humor is a little too close to reality to be funny.
With such powerful social influence, I think it's about time Google started taking more responsibility by being more transparent with their activities. If too many webmasters are doing the wrong thing with regard to linking, or an algorithm change has occurred, why not launch a media release to set the facts straight? Not everyone knows about Google's Webmaster Guidelines, or has a Webmaster Tools account. But a lot of people read the newspaper. If they want webmasters to co-operate, Google has to recognize it's a two way street.
By slapping on this latest penalty, (if it is indeed a penalty), Google seems to be claiming to *know* the intent of these sites. But what if they're wrong? What if, as Jennifer Laycock claims, they are merely selling advertising space without Google being a consideration? There's nothing in Search Engine Guide's advertising material relating to PageRank OR Google. To assume they are trying to use their site's high PageRank as a selling point is pretty arrogant and irresponsible of Google, in my opinion.
Without some type of public acknowledgement from them, we can only assume Google's latest move is an attempt to control how webmasters use their own web site space. That's a huge line in the sand they've crossed and I don't know about you, but it makes me nervous.
About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
4 Steps to Combat Website Plagiarism
Publishing your website can be one of the most exciting times for a business owner. After all of your hard work and persistence, the whole world now has access to your products or services. You have either paid hundreds of dollars to have someone write your site content for you, or you have put your heart and soul (not to mention hour upon hour of hard work) into creating content of which you can be proud. In either case, you've invested time and/or money into your website copy. Now that it is out there for the whole world to see, it may be a target for all kinds of unscrupulous individuals.
Copyright infringement is a very common occurrence on the World Wide Web. How do you protect yourself? And, what can you do if someone steals your content?
It's important for you to know that anything you have written is copyrighted. You can register a copyright, but you don't need to in order for it to be illegal for someone to copy or reproduce your work without your permission. Any written text, painting, drawing, musical composition, photograph or computer program, be they published or not is protected by copyright law. Unfortunately, just because your work is copyrighted doesn't mean it is safe. Some individuals don't know that copyright laws apply to the internet, and others simply don't care.
With millions of websites out there, it's difficult to know if your website has been targeted by thieves. A great tool to use in the protection of your website content is www.copyscape.com. Simply enter your website URL and it will scan the web for you. This is a free service, but if you have been a frequent victim of copyright infringement, you might want to consider their paid service, which automatically scans the web regularly for any duplicates of your content.
What do you do if you are one of the unfortunate victims of copyright infringement? How can you deal with the offender and avoid the high cost of litigation? The following are some simple steps that you can take to ensure that the infringer removes your material from their website.
1. Contact the offender. You can usually visit the "contact" page of the offender's website to obtain their contact information. If for some reason you can't find their coordinates that way, you can perform a search for "who is" to find many sites that can provide information about the website owner by simply entering their URL. The website owner's contact information should be posted here, but if not, their website host will be and you should contact them. Keep your first contact civil. Calling or emailing the responsible individual with a stern, yet professional demeanor will be much more effective than yelling or name calling. Remember that the owner of the site isn't necessarily the writer, and if they are, then being nasty may not have the desired effect and in fact may create more problems for you in the long run.
2. Send a cease and desist order. If your initial contact didn't get the desired results, your next step should be to send a cease and desist order. You do not need to hire a lawyer to create one for you. A simple search for "cease and desist order templates" should give you an order that can be altered to meet your needs. Send one copy by email and one copy by registered mail and make it look as official as possible. Include a date by which the material should be removed. You want the offender to know that you mean business.
3. If action is still not taken, send a cease and desist order to the offending party's web host. Again, the host information is available by performing a search for "who is". The majority of hosts will take action by temporarily removing the offender's site until the copied material is removed.
4. The situation should be resolved at step 3, but one more step that can be taken is to notify search engines of the infringement. Performing a search for the "DMCA" or "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" policies for each search engine will provide the information you need to contact each of them in order to request that the offender's website be removed.
Finally, it's always advisable to protect yourself by keeping records of the dates your content was placed on your site. This ensures that the other party can be proven wrong it they claim to have posted their content first.
Placing your website and it's content on the internet for the world to see is a proud moment. It's nearly impossible for you to be able to prevent the theft of its content, but the next best thing is knowing what to do if it does happen.
About the Author: Kelly Sims is a Virtual Assistant and Owner of Virtually There VA Services. To find out more about virtual assistance and how using a Virtual Assistant can simplify your life and increase your profitability, visit her website at => http://www.virtuallythereva.com. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for her free monthly newsletter providing useful information that enhances and simplifies the lives of busy entrepreneurs.
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Advertising's Most Important Word
If you had to guess the single most important word in advertising what would it be: free, special, discount, sale, new, improved, bígger, better?
So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to actually describe what's inside a package.
What advertisers have done is create a hyper cynical marketplace, where the audience for whatever you sell has lost faith in what is being said. The Web with its emphasis on content gives advertisers a chance to redeem themselves and to deliver meaningful information to its audience.
All Content Is Advertising, All Advertising Isn't
Some may cringe at the thought, but in the final analysis all content is a form of advertising. Content is rarely if ever neutral, even if it doesn't overtly promote a product or service; content always has a point to make, or an idea, concept, or position to advance. If content doesn't provide some perspective, some meaningful knowledge, then does it really qualify as content? The same can be said for advertising, if it doesn't explain, enlighten or engage, it is just noise.
What Is Advertising's Most Important Word?
My vote goes to the simple innocuous word "like": a nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand personality, and to position your product or service in the mind of your audience. A previous article of mine "A Website Without Video Is Like..." uses the power of metaphor to illustrate how this little four-letter word can crystallize an idea in the mind of an audience.
Metaphor + Analogy + Stories: The Adman's Best Friends
A metaphor explains complex concepts and hard to comprehend processes by comparing them to common everyday knowledge. We use metaphors everyday without even realizing we're doing it. We 'race' to the office. We work like 'dogs." And we all know, it's a 'jungle' out there. Metaphors are critical to the way we communicate with each other and to the success of our marketing communication and advertising.
Metaphors can be extended into analogies, and analogies into stories, and stories into campaigns; and campaigns developed in this manner have a higher probability of achieving the elusive status of meaningful content that embeds your message in your audience's collective consciousness. There is no better way to overcome a client's objection than to put that objection into perspective with an appropriate allegorical story.
Overcoming Objections: How Long Is Too Long?
We've all heard the constant bellyaching from impatient Web users about how long they have to wait for everything on the Web. Every time I hear this from somebody, I am reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of the early introduction of the Polaroid Land camera.
Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography, and immediate video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the era of ínstant gratification had begun.
So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When they came across a tribe who hadn't seen outsiders before, they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since they hadn't seen anything like this before, but they did have one complaint, 'why did it take so long for the pictures to develop?'
The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception. Like the natives who perceived the sixty second developing of photographs to be slow, so to do many Web-users perceive the Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible technological achievement where anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access information from all over the world in seconds or, heaven forbid, minutes.
If you had to guess the single most important word in advertising what would it be: free, special, discount, sale, new, improved, bígger, better?
So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to actually describe what's inside a package.
What advertisers have done is create a hyper cynical marketplace, where the audience for whatever you sell has lost faith in what is being said. The Web with its emphasis on content gives advertisers a chance to redeem themselves and to deliver meaningful information to its audience.
All Content Is Advertising, All Advertising Isn't
Some may cringe at the thought, but in the final analysis all content is a form of advertising. Content is rarely if ever neutral, even if it doesn't overtly promote a product or service; content always has a point to make, or an idea, concept, or position to advance. If content doesn't provide some perspective, some meaningful knowledge, then does it really qualify as content? The same can be said for advertising, if it doesn't explain, enlighten or engage, it is just noise.
What Is Advertising's Most Important Word?
My vote goes to the simple innocuous word "like": a nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand personality, and to position your product or service in the mind of your audience. A previous article of mine "A Website Without Video Is Like..." uses the power of metaphor to illustrate how this little four-letter word can crystallize an idea in the mind of an audience.
Metaphor + Analogy + Stories: The Adman's Best Friends
A metaphor explains complex concepts and hard to comprehend processes by comparing them to common everyday knowledge. We use metaphors everyday without even realizing we're doing it. We 'race' to the office. We work like 'dogs." And we all know, it's a 'jungle' out there. Metaphors are critical to the way we communicate with each other and to the success of our marketing communication and advertising.
Metaphors can be extended into analogies, and analogies into stories, and stories into campaigns; and campaigns developed in this manner have a higher probability of achieving the elusive status of meaningful content that embeds your message in your audience's collective consciousness. There is no better way to overcome a client's objection than to put that objection into perspective with an appropriate allegorical story.
Overcoming Objections: How Long Is Too Long?
We've all heard the constant bellyaching from impatient Web users about how long they have to wait for everything on the Web. Every time I hear this from somebody, I am reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of the early introduction of the Polaroid Land camera.
Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography, and immediate video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the era of ínstant gratification had begun.
So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When they came across a tribe who hadn't seen outsiders before, they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since they hadn't seen anything like this before, but they did have one complaint, 'why did it take so long for the pictures to develop?'
The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception. Like the natives who perceived the sixty second developing of photographs to be slow, so to do many Web-users perceive the Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible technological achievement where anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access information from all over the world in seconds or, heaven forbid, minutes.
The Better The Story, The Better The Communication
The solution to the problem is better communication, making yourself and your message instantly understood. People who are truly interested in what you have to say will wait for your Web page or video to load. What gets them frustrated is when they wait, and instead of getting a meaningful message, they get a bunch of nonsense that is irrelevant, self-congratulatory or completely incomprehensible.
A video or audio message on your website is more easily grasped than a page full of densely written text or cryptic bulleted points. But you will loose your audience quickly no matter what the form of your message if it's confusing, muddled, overly complex, or buried in b-school platitudes and industry jargon.
You need your message to be understandable, engaging, and memorable and one of the best ways to convey that message is to compare it to something your audience can relate to. It's like teaching your kids a life lesson by reading them one of Aesop's Fables.
Finding Your Metaphor
Some people have a knack for expressing things in a way that an audience will instantly grasp and more importantly remember. For those of us in the communication, marketing, advertising, and creative development businesses it is a necessary skill learned over the years. But for those in the day-to-day grind of business's nitty-gritty it is rarely an ability that ever gets developed.
Creating a Web video campaign that your audience is going to watch, remember, and pass on to colleagues requires a commitment of time and funds, and you want to make sure it communicates your message effectively. Rather than using your traditional approach concentrating on features and facts, try something different; try developing a campaign based on a metaphor that delivers your brand's personality and emotional value-add.
Where to begin? You need to set yourself free from the concrete, and concentrate on the conceptual. If this seems like a difficult thing to wrap your head around, then start with baby steps.
Concentrate On The Conceptual
Any effective marketing campaign whether it's a series of Web videos, direct emails, magazine display ads, banner ads, outdoor billboards, television and radio spots, or any combination there of, will only work if it focuses on a single message.
At the heart of all advertising is the promise you commit to delivering to your clients. No matter how clever or memorable your marketing, if you fail to deliver on that promise, you will fail.
Learn a lesson from the politicians. The general publics' opinion of politicians is about on a par with having a prostate exam. Politicians can't help themselves, they promise the electorate what the electorate wants to hear, and then fail to deliver on promises that can't be kept. Consequently, people become cynical and distrust everything politicians say.
Failure to deliver on your promise to be the cheapest, the best, or the guy with the most features, is like a politician promising no new taxes. Read my lips! Those kinds of promises are a prescription for marketing disaster.
Taking the conceptual approach requires a certain degree of confidence and an understanding that you are going to have to give something up to get something in return. If you present your identity as the Timex of widgets, inexpensive and ubiquitous; then you are giving up the audience looking for the Rolex of widgets, expensive and exclusive.
Audience Resonance: It's All About Striking A Nerve
One of the most memorable commercials ever to appear on television was the 1985 introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer. The anti-big brother message said nothing of bits or bytes, or anything else computer related, but it did establish Apple's character and personality with its allegorical message, a message that is still valid today.
If your marketing message lacks this kind of power and personality; if your advertising is getting lost, or drowned-out by the competition, try finding a metaphor that instantly tells your audience who you are and why they should care.
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to actually describe what's inside a package.
What advertisers have done is create a hyper cynical marketplace, where the audience for whatever you sell has lost faith in what is being said. The Web with its emphasis on content gives advertisers a chance to redeem themselves and to deliver meaningful information to its audience.
All Content Is Advertising, All Advertising Isn't
Some may cringe at the thought, but in the final analysis all content is a form of advertising. Content is rarely if ever neutral, even if it doesn't overtly promote a product or service; content always has a point to make, or an idea, concept, or position to advance. If content doesn't provide some perspective, some meaningful knowledge, then does it really qualify as content? The same can be said for advertising, if it doesn't explain, enlighten or engage, it is just noise.
What Is Advertising's Most Important Word?
My vote goes to the simple innocuous word "like": a nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand personality, and to position your product or service in the mind of your audience. A previous article of mine "A Website Without Video Is Like..." uses the power of metaphor to illustrate how this little four-letter word can crystallize an idea in the mind of an audience.
Metaphor + Analogy + Stories: The Adman's Best Friends
A metaphor explains complex concepts and hard to comprehend processes by comparing them to common everyday knowledge. We use metaphors everyday without even realizing we're doing it. We 'race' to the office. We work like 'dogs." And we all know, it's a 'jungle' out there. Metaphors are critical to the way we communicate with each other and to the success of our marketing communication and advertising.
Metaphors can be extended into analogies, and analogies into stories, and stories into campaigns; and campaigns developed in this manner have a higher probability of achieving the elusive status of meaningful content that embeds your message in your audience's collective consciousness. There is no better way to overcome a client's objection than to put that objection into perspective with an appropriate allegorical story.
Overcoming Objections: How Long Is Too Long?
We've all heard the constant bellyaching from impatient Web users about how long they have to wait for everything on the Web. Every time I hear this from somebody, I am reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of the early introduction of the Polaroid Land camera.
Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography, and immediate video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the era of ínstant gratification had begun.
So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When they came across a tribe who hadn't seen outsiders before, they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since they hadn't seen anything like this before, but they did have one complaint, 'why did it take so long for the pictures to develop?'
The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception. Like the natives who perceived the sixty second developing of photographs to be slow, so to do many Web-users perceive the Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible technological achievement where anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access information from all over the world in seconds or, heaven forbid, minutes.
If you had to guess the single most important word in advertising what would it be: free, special, discount, sale, new, improved, bígger, better?
So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to actually describe what's inside a package.
What advertisers have done is create a hyper cynical marketplace, where the audience for whatever you sell has lost faith in what is being said. The Web with its emphasis on content gives advertisers a chance to redeem themselves and to deliver meaningful information to its audience.
All Content Is Advertising, All Advertising Isn't
Some may cringe at the thought, but in the final analysis all content is a form of advertising. Content is rarely if ever neutral, even if it doesn't overtly promote a product or service; content always has a point to make, or an idea, concept, or position to advance. If content doesn't provide some perspective, some meaningful knowledge, then does it really qualify as content? The same can be said for advertising, if it doesn't explain, enlighten or engage, it is just noise.
What Is Advertising's Most Important Word?
My vote goes to the simple innocuous word "like": a nondescript word that carries with it all the conceptualization power you need to create a business identity, to form a brand personality, and to position your product or service in the mind of your audience. A previous article of mine "A Website Without Video Is Like..." uses the power of metaphor to illustrate how this little four-letter word can crystallize an idea in the mind of an audience.
Metaphor + Analogy + Stories: The Adman's Best Friends
A metaphor explains complex concepts and hard to comprehend processes by comparing them to common everyday knowledge. We use metaphors everyday without even realizing we're doing it. We 'race' to the office. We work like 'dogs." And we all know, it's a 'jungle' out there. Metaphors are critical to the way we communicate with each other and to the success of our marketing communication and advertising.
Metaphors can be extended into analogies, and analogies into stories, and stories into campaigns; and campaigns developed in this manner have a higher probability of achieving the elusive status of meaningful content that embeds your message in your audience's collective consciousness. There is no better way to overcome a client's objection than to put that objection into perspective with an appropriate allegorical story.
Overcoming Objections: How Long Is Too Long?
We've all heard the constant bellyaching from impatient Web users about how long they have to wait for everything on the Web. Every time I hear this from somebody, I am reminded of the story (perhaps apocryphal) of the early introduction of the Polaroid Land camera.
Before the days of one-hour photo shops, digital photography, and immediate video feedback, people had to wait up to a week for their pictures to be developed by the local pharmacy or camera shop. When Polaroid came out with a camera that delivered a finished photograph in sixty seconds, people were amazed; the era of ínstant gratification had begun.
So the story goes, a group of adventurers traveled deep into the Brazilian Rainforest to learn about the indigenous people. When they came across a tribe who hadn't seen outsiders before, they befriended them and took pictures of them with the Polaroid cameras they brought along. The natives loved the pictures since they hadn't seen anything like this before, but they did have one complaint, 'why did it take so long for the pictures to develop?'
The problem is not technology; the problem is one of perception. Like the natives who perceived the sixty second developing of photographs to be slow, so to do many Web-users perceive the Internet to be slow when in fact it is an incredible technological achievement where anyone with a computer and Internet connection can access information from all over the world in seconds or, heaven forbid, minutes.
The Better The Story, The Better The Communication
The solution to the problem is better communication, making yourself and your message instantly understood. People who are truly interested in what you have to say will wait for your Web page or video to load. What gets them frustrated is when they wait, and instead of getting a meaningful message, they get a bunch of nonsense that is irrelevant, self-congratulatory or completely incomprehensible.
A video or audio message on your website is more easily grasped than a page full of densely written text or cryptic bulleted points. But you will loose your audience quickly no matter what the form of your message if it's confusing, muddled, overly complex, or buried in b-school platitudes and industry jargon.
You need your message to be understandable, engaging, and memorable and one of the best ways to convey that message is to compare it to something your audience can relate to. It's like teaching your kids a life lesson by reading them one of Aesop's Fables.
Finding Your Metaphor
Some people have a knack for expressing things in a way that an audience will instantly grasp and more importantly remember. For those of us in the communication, marketing, advertising, and creative development businesses it is a necessary skill learned over the years. But for those in the day-to-day grind of business's nitty-gritty it is rarely an ability that ever gets developed.
Creating a Web video campaign that your audience is going to watch, remember, and pass on to colleagues requires a commitment of time and funds, and you want to make sure it communicates your message effectively. Rather than using your traditional approach concentrating on features and facts, try something different; try developing a campaign based on a metaphor that delivers your brand's personality and emotional value-add.
Where to begin? You need to set yourself free from the concrete, and concentrate on the conceptual. If this seems like a difficult thing to wrap your head around, then start with baby steps.
Concentrate On The Conceptual
Any effective marketing campaign whether it's a series of Web videos, direct emails, magazine display ads, banner ads, outdoor billboards, television and radio spots, or any combination there of, will only work if it focuses on a single message.
At the heart of all advertising is the promise you commit to delivering to your clients. No matter how clever or memorable your marketing, if you fail to deliver on that promise, you will fail.
Learn a lesson from the politicians. The general publics' opinion of politicians is about on a par with having a prostate exam. Politicians can't help themselves, they promise the electorate what the electorate wants to hear, and then fail to deliver on promises that can't be kept. Consequently, people become cynical and distrust everything politicians say.
Failure to deliver on your promise to be the cheapest, the best, or the guy with the most features, is like a politician promising no new taxes. Read my lips! Those kinds of promises are a prescription for marketing disaster.
Taking the conceptual approach requires a certain degree of confidence and an understanding that you are going to have to give something up to get something in return. If you present your identity as the Timex of widgets, inexpensive and ubiquitous; then you are giving up the audience looking for the Rolex of widgets, expensive and exclusive.
Audience Resonance: It's All About Striking A Nerve
One of the most memorable commercials ever to appear on television was the 1985 introduction of the Apple Macintosh computer. The anti-big brother message said nothing of bits or bytes, or anything else computer related, but it did establish Apple's character and personality with its allegorical message, a message that is still valid today.
If your marketing message lacks this kind of power and personality; if your advertising is getting lost, or drowned-out by the competition, try finding a metaphor that instantly tells your audience who you are and why they should care.
About The Author
Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia, a website design firm that specializes in Web-audio and Web-video. Visit www.mrpwebmedia.com/ads, www.136words.com and www.sonicpersonality.com. Contact at info@mrpwebmedia.com or telephone (905) 764-1246.
Monday, October 22, 2007
20 MORE Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools
My recent article 20 Must-Have Search Engine Marketing Tools listed 20 of the most popular time-saving tools you can use to help you with your search engine marketing efforts.
The article proved quite popular with both search engine marketers and webmasters, some of whom decided to send me their favorites that weren't included in the list. I also discovered a few more of my own since I wrote the original article, so I decided to add to the list by reviewing another 20 tools.
NetBooks - Integrated Business Management!
So here are 20 MORE must-have search engine marketing tools:
1. SEO Toolbox
The SEO Toolbox is a collection of 11 free SEO tools developed by the team at SEOmoz, including a backlink checker, URL inclusion checker, an outbound link checker, domain age detection and a PageRank checker.
Price: $0
2. EditPlus
EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmers' editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.
Price: Shareware (Registration fee encouraged)
3. WordPress
Like Blogger, WordPress offers hosted blogging and blog templates. Unlike Blogger, WordPress also offers a stand-alone publishing platform to enable you to host and fully manage your own blogs.
Price: $0
4. Marketing Experiments
MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory engaged in research publishing and education. Their mission is to test and document every conceivable marketing method on the Internet.
Price: $0
5. Web Page Analyzer
Web Page Analyzer is a free web page analysis tool and web page speed tester to help you improve your web site's performance. Enter a URL and the tool will calculate page size, composition, and download time.
Price: $0
Discover a Better Ad Solution with Fair Ads Network!
6. Web Accessibility Toolbar
The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed by the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It's particularly helpful for site usability testing and there are versions for both Opera and Internet Explorer users.
Price: $0
7. Search Engine Friendly Layouts
SearchEngineFriendlyLayouts offers CSS-based layouts that are known to be search engine friendly (easier for search engine robots to index). All of the XHTML, CSS and Javascrípt code used in the layouts are provided for use free of charge.
Price: $0
8. The Interactive HTML Tutorial
Dave's Interactive HTML Tutorial is a tutorial for anyone who is serious about learning HTML code or who just wants to brush up on some of the basics. It includes code descriptions and integration examples.
Price: $0
9. Indextools
Indextools is another popular web site analytics program that also offers built-in PPC bid management tools.
Price: From USD 49.95 per month
10. WordTracker
WordTracker was one of the very first keyword research tools available on the Internet. It helps you pinpoint the most popular keywords for your product and services, generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns, research your online markets and find niche opportunities to exploit.
Price: From USD 30.00 per week
Forget Expensive PPC Advertising!
11. CSS Layout Techniques
CSS Layout Techniques catalogs search engine friendly web site templates based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All code is made freely available for download. The site also includes links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran.
Price: $0
12. RSS Feeds Submit
RSS Feeds Submit is automatic RSS and blog submission software that submits your feed to over 80 search engines and directories automatically. The creators claim it's the quickest way to submit your feeds to the most popular RSS directories and blog search engines. You can also choose to submit your site manually to directories that require more detailed information about your feed.
Price: USD 29.95
13. iBusinessPromoter (IBP)
iBusiness Promoter (IBP) is a suite of professional web promotion tools created by Axandra.com that helps you with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimization. It includes tools for optimizing your pages and links, researching keywords, submitting your site to search engines and directories and search position querying to determine how your site pages are ranking for particular keywords.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 249.95
14. Bid Rank
BidRank is a desktop application that you run on your PC to help you manage your PPC campaigns and automate the keyword bidding process. There are two versions of the product available: BidRank for Yahoo! which is a Yahoo! approved third party bid management tool to help you manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. Then there's BidRank Plus which works with multiple pay-per-click search engines, including Google AdWords, to help you manage multiple PPC keyword accounts.
Price: From USD 14.90 per month
15. Hot Banana Web CMS
Hot Banana is an easy-to-use Web Content Management System (Web CMS) that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance. Content Management Systems are notorious for being SEO unfriendly but this one is purposely built to avoid such problems.
Price: From USD 329.00 per month
16. WebPosition
WebPosition is a powerful suite of tools aimed at improving your web site's search engine positioning and monitoring performance. WebPosition allows you to review your search engine rankings, target your keywords, optimize pages using built-in expertise, submit URLs to search engines and analyze conversions using WebTrends site metrics.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 149.00
17. Competitive Intelligence
Trellian's Competitive Intelligence provides the means to monitor your competitors' web sites to identify their major traffíc sources. You can find out which sites are responsible for sending traffíc to their pages, including search engines and the search keywords used.
Price: From USD 99.95 per month
18. HTML Toolbox
The HTML Toolbox from NetMechanic is an online tool that helps you discover HTML errors and syntax that prevents browsers from processing your HTML and prevents visitors (both humans and spiders) from reading your site. HTML Toolbox automatically fixes html problems upon request with one quick clíck. The Toolbox includes several tools in one, including a HTML Checker and Repairer, a Spell Checker, HTML Validator, a Browser Compatibility Checker and a Load Time Checker.
Price: Free for up to 5 pages
19. Web CEO
Web CEO claims to be the most complete SEO software package on the planet. The latest version of this SEO/SEM software provides the ability to research keywords and keyphrases that will bring most targeted visitors to your site; optimize your Web pages for better search engine visibility; submit your site to search engines; research, analyze and build links; manage pay-per-click campaigns; track your positions in search engines; review site traffíc statistics; get rid of errors on your sites; find bad links before your visitors do; edit your Web pages; upload any file or folder to your site and monitor the availability of your web site.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 199
20. AdWatcher
AdWatcher is a suite of tools designed to help you receive the maximum ROI for every advertising dollar you spend from online marketing campaigns, be it Google AdWords, banners, text links, or email marketing. It detects and combats clíck fraud and allows you to manage all of your ad campaigns from one easy-to-use interface. Essentially, it provides clíck fraud monitoring and ad tracking.
Price: From USD 29.95 per month
So there you have ANOTHER 20 time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts. Now there's no excuse for avoiding SEM. Happy site marketing!
About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
The article proved quite popular with both search engine marketers and webmasters, some of whom decided to send me their favorites that weren't included in the list. I also discovered a few more of my own since I wrote the original article, so I decided to add to the list by reviewing another 20 tools.
NetBooks - Integrated Business Management!
So here are 20 MORE must-have search engine marketing tools:
1. SEO Toolbox
The SEO Toolbox is a collection of 11 free SEO tools developed by the team at SEOmoz, including a backlink checker, URL inclusion checker, an outbound link checker, domain age detection and a PageRank checker.
Price: $0
2. EditPlus
EditPlus is a 32-bit text editor, HTML editor and programmers' editor for Windows. While it can serve as a good replacement for Notepad, it also offers many powerful features for Web page authors and programmers.
Price: Shareware (Registration fee encouraged)
3. WordPress
Like Blogger, WordPress offers hosted blogging and blog templates. Unlike Blogger, WordPress also offers a stand-alone publishing platform to enable you to host and fully manage your own blogs.
Price: $0
4. Marketing Experiments
MarketingExperiments is an online laboratory engaged in research publishing and education. Their mission is to test and document every conceivable marketing method on the Internet.
Price: $0
5. Web Page Analyzer
Web Page Analyzer is a free web page analysis tool and web page speed tester to help you improve your web site's performance. Enter a URL and the tool will calculate page size, composition, and download time.
Price: $0
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6. Web Accessibility Toolbar
The Web Accessibility Toolbar has been developed by the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium to aid manual examination of web pages for a variety of aspects of accessibility. It's particularly helpful for site usability testing and there are versions for both Opera and Internet Explorer users.
Price: $0
7. Search Engine Friendly Layouts
SearchEngineFriendlyLayouts offers CSS-based layouts that are known to be search engine friendly (easier for search engine robots to index). All of the XHTML, CSS and Javascrípt code used in the layouts are provided for use free of charge.
Price: $0
8. The Interactive HTML Tutorial
Dave's Interactive HTML Tutorial is a tutorial for anyone who is serious about learning HTML code or who just wants to brush up on some of the basics. It includes code descriptions and integration examples.
Price: $0
9. Indextools
Indextools is another popular web site analytics program that also offers built-in PPC bid management tools.
Price: From USD 49.95 per month
10. WordTracker
WordTracker was one of the very first keyword research tools available on the Internet. It helps you pinpoint the most popular keywords for your product and services, generate thousands of relevant keywords to improve your organic and PPC search campaigns, research your online markets and find niche opportunities to exploit.
Price: From USD 30.00 per week
Forget Expensive PPC Advertising!
11. CSS Layout Techniques
CSS Layout Techniques catalogs search engine friendly web site templates based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). All code is made freely available for download. The site also includes links to various online CSS resources and tutorials, appropriate for both the novice and the seasoned CSS veteran.
Price: $0
12. RSS Feeds Submit
RSS Feeds Submit is automatic RSS and blog submission software that submits your feed to over 80 search engines and directories automatically. The creators claim it's the quickest way to submit your feeds to the most popular RSS directories and blog search engines. You can also choose to submit your site manually to directories that require more detailed information about your feed.
Price: USD 29.95
13. iBusinessPromoter (IBP)
iBusiness Promoter (IBP) is a suite of professional web promotion tools created by Axandra.com that helps you with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimization. It includes tools for optimizing your pages and links, researching keywords, submitting your site to search engines and directories and search position querying to determine how your site pages are ranking for particular keywords.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 249.95
14. Bid Rank
BidRank is a desktop application that you run on your PC to help you manage your PPC campaigns and automate the keyword bidding process. There are two versions of the product available: BidRank for Yahoo! which is a Yahoo! approved third party bid management tool to help you manage Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns. Then there's BidRank Plus which works with multiple pay-per-click search engines, including Google AdWords, to help you manage multiple PPC keyword accounts.
Price: From USD 14.90 per month
15. Hot Banana Web CMS
Hot Banana is an easy-to-use Web Content Management System (Web CMS) that helps marketers build and manage SEO-friendly Web sites that can be automated and optimized for maximum lead generation and conversion performance. Content Management Systems are notorious for being SEO unfriendly but this one is purposely built to avoid such problems.
Price: From USD 329.00 per month
16. WebPosition
WebPosition is a powerful suite of tools aimed at improving your web site's search engine positioning and monitoring performance. WebPosition allows you to review your search engine rankings, target your keywords, optimize pages using built-in expertise, submit URLs to search engines and analyze conversions using WebTrends site metrics.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 149.00
17. Competitive Intelligence
Trellian's Competitive Intelligence provides the means to monitor your competitors' web sites to identify their major traffíc sources. You can find out which sites are responsible for sending traffíc to their pages, including search engines and the search keywords used.
Price: From USD 99.95 per month
18. HTML Toolbox
The HTML Toolbox from NetMechanic is an online tool that helps you discover HTML errors and syntax that prevents browsers from processing your HTML and prevents visitors (both humans and spiders) from reading your site. HTML Toolbox automatically fixes html problems upon request with one quick clíck. The Toolbox includes several tools in one, including a HTML Checker and Repairer, a Spell Checker, HTML Validator, a Browser Compatibility Checker and a Load Time Checker.
Price: Free for up to 5 pages
19. Web CEO
Web CEO claims to be the most complete SEO software package on the planet. The latest version of this SEO/SEM software provides the ability to research keywords and keyphrases that will bring most targeted visitors to your site; optimize your Web pages for better search engine visibility; submit your site to search engines; research, analyze and build links; manage pay-per-click campaigns; track your positions in search engines; review site traffíc statistics; get rid of errors on your sites; find bad links before your visitors do; edit your Web pages; upload any file or folder to your site and monitor the availability of your web site.
Disclaimer: Some of the functions performed by this tool (e.g. automatic submissions and search rank querying) are discouraged by Google in their Webmaster Guidelines.
Price: From USD 199
20. AdWatcher
AdWatcher is a suite of tools designed to help you receive the maximum ROI for every advertising dollar you spend from online marketing campaigns, be it Google AdWords, banners, text links, or email marketing. It detects and combats clíck fraud and allows you to manage all of your ad campaigns from one easy-to-use interface. Essentially, it provides clíck fraud monitoring and ad tracking.
Price: From USD 29.95 per month
So there you have ANOTHER 20 time-saving tools to help you with your search engine marketing efforts. Now there's no excuse for avoiding SEM. Happy site marketing!
About The Author
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running her own SEO business, Kalena is Director of Studies at Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
XQuery: The Search Language For A Multi-Platform Future
The advent of wireless internet access has made web design a very complicated matter. Previously, all web browsers were created equal. HTML was the only language used to create web sites, and it was only possible to go online with a desktop PC.
Since the turn of the century, cyberspace has changed. It is now possible to surf the world wide web using a wide variety of wireless gadgets, such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, computer screens in automobiles, etc. As a result, new programming languages and specifications that are more versatile than HTML have evolved to create websites that can be displayed on the new web browsers utilized by these various devices.
Languages such as XML, XHTML, XSL, and a host of other programming innovations were developed because web sites coded in basic HTML were not being displayed properly on the browsers installed on all these neat gadgets. XML is a language that enables data to be displayed across all platforms because XML is a simple text file that merely defines data, it does not tell the web browser how to display the data. XSL and XHTML were created so that XML could be transformed into a web page.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how and why programming has changed, you are ready for a brief introduction to the main topic of this article, XQuery. XQuery was invented so that there was a way to query data stored in an XML document, much the same way SQL is used to query a database.
XQuery uses simple functions to query a document. An XQuery function looks a little like a javascript function in that it uses parentheses containing an element that is to be the object of the function. With XQuery, the element in parentheses is typically the name of the document or file to be queried.
To find what it is looking for within that file, XQuery narrows its search by using path expressions that look a lot like the path for an ordinary file stored on your computer, with the various subsets of data within the XML file separated by backslashes. The predicate is the final component of an XQuery function. The predicate tells the function exactly what information, data, or range of data within a particular subset is to be extracted and returned to the user.
For example, an XML file for a dating website would contain a list of men and women who have posted their profiles on the website. Some of the people in the XML file might be classified as single, while others might classified as divorced. The XML file would also contain the age of each man and woman.
If a woman were to visit that dating website and perform a search for profiles of only single men who are over the age of 30, that search request would be converted into an XQuery function that would contain a path that would tell the function to search through the list of men who are classified as single, and the predicate would instruct the function to return only the profiles of the single men who are older than 30.
Learning how to use XML, XHTML, and XQuery is of critical importance to every web designer or programmer. There are now so many ways to connect to the internet using computers that run on different platforms that are no longer compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. Web designers need to be conscious of this and start designing web sites that utilize XML and XQuery.
About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.
Since the turn of the century, cyberspace has changed. It is now possible to surf the world wide web using a wide variety of wireless gadgets, such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, computer screens in automobiles, etc. As a result, new programming languages and specifications that are more versatile than HTML have evolved to create websites that can be displayed on the new web browsers utilized by these various devices.
Languages such as XML, XHTML, XSL, and a host of other programming innovations were developed because web sites coded in basic HTML were not being displayed properly on the browsers installed on all these neat gadgets. XML is a language that enables data to be displayed across all platforms because XML is a simple text file that merely defines data, it does not tell the web browser how to display the data. XSL and XHTML were created so that XML could be transformed into a web page.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how and why programming has changed, you are ready for a brief introduction to the main topic of this article, XQuery. XQuery was invented so that there was a way to query data stored in an XML document, much the same way SQL is used to query a database.
XQuery uses simple functions to query a document. An XQuery function looks a little like a javascript function in that it uses parentheses containing an element that is to be the object of the function. With XQuery, the element in parentheses is typically the name of the document or file to be queried.
To find what it is looking for within that file, XQuery narrows its search by using path expressions that look a lot like the path for an ordinary file stored on your computer, with the various subsets of data within the XML file separated by backslashes. The predicate is the final component of an XQuery function. The predicate tells the function exactly what information, data, or range of data within a particular subset is to be extracted and returned to the user.
For example, an XML file for a dating website would contain a list of men and women who have posted their profiles on the website. Some of the people in the XML file might be classified as single, while others might classified as divorced. The XML file would also contain the age of each man and woman.
If a woman were to visit that dating website and perform a search for profiles of only single men who are over the age of 30, that search request would be converted into an XQuery function that would contain a path that would tell the function to search through the list of men who are classified as single, and the predicate would instruct the function to return only the profiles of the single men who are older than 30.
Learning how to use XML, XHTML, and XQuery is of critical importance to every web designer or programmer. There are now so many ways to connect to the internet using computers that run on different platforms that are no longer compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. Web designers need to be conscious of this and start designing web sites that utilize XML and XQuery.
About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.
Thursday, October 18, 2007
The Case Against Outsourced SEO
About a week ago I got a telephone call from a college buddy of mine named Paul who runs a soon-to-launch online business. Here's how the conversation went:
Paul: "We want to hire your company to do the SEO for us. Whatever the price is, we can afford it."
Me: "Tell me a little more about your company and exactly what you expect to achieve from search."
Paul: "We want to rank Number 1 in Google for EVERYTHING in our industry, and I know you can do it for us."
Me: "I'd be happy to consult with your team to make sure you understand the principles of SEO and get off on the right foot, but I think you're better off doing the work yourself."
He was perplexed. Why wouldn't we want to take on his SEO work? It has nothing to do with him or his company. It has everything to do with the misunderstood nature of what it takes to consistently rank high in natural search. The absolute best companies I've worked with make every decision with SEO in mind. Everyone in their organization – from management to programmers to marketing – is thinking about the search impact of their decisions. For that reason it makes sense to hire a consultant or to learn it yourself, but not to hire an outside firm to outsource your entire SEO campaign to.
Most of the time when companies outsource SEO they do it with the mentality of "here you go, you handle it, we expect results." They view it as an entirely separate entity and not as a core value that needs to be instilled in their organization to be successful. That's why outsourced SEO just doesn't work: your organization still makes decisions the old way.
How will this programming change impact our search results? Can we build link-building into our marketing campaign? What adjustments can we make so that both are working in harmony to achieve our objectives as a company and rank as high as we can? There is no incentive to learn about search if someone else is handling it for you, and consequently you probably won't be asking these important questíons when making a critical business decision.
Paul was still a bit confused with that answer. So let's take a closer look at some of the key components necessary for SEO success and what needs to take place for them to be accomplished:
Keyword Research – this entails researching how frequently phrases relevant to your site are searched. I like to use the SEO-Book tool or the free version of Wordtracker. Keyword research is important because it will impact your site structure, title tags (widely regarded as the most influential factor in how high you rank), and will help identify opportunities in your industry (if a term is searched a lot but there aren't a lot of good results, you may have just identified a great expansion opportuníty for your company). This is best done by either a consultant or the internal head of your SEO campaign, which should be someone in upper-management.
On-Site Optimization and Site Structure – this is what most people think of when they think of SEO. What changes should be made to your site so that search engine spiders have the best chance of crawling it, understanding the content, and ranking you accordingly. Most often, this involves changes to Title/META tags, cleaning up source code so that it's proper HTML, moving CSS and Javascrípt to external files, adding sitemaps, modifying internal linking structure and anchor text, and several other standard changes that eliminate all potential crawling and indexing issues. This is best done by your programmer(s) so that they understand the importance of the changes and make them part of their routine in the future. These changes can be suggested by a consultant, but will only really be successful if programmers are on board.
Link building – this is probably the second most common task associated with SEO. By now you already know that you need one-way incoming links from relevant sites with applicable anchor text to rank high. Many outsourced SEO firms will either engage in elaborate link exchanges or purchase paid links for you: both of which are obsolete in terms of having any positive impact in your rankings, and now can potentially penalize you. The best one-way link building techniques – press releases, content syndication, blogging, product syndication, viral videos, etc – all require a LOT of input from you to be successful. Most of the time they should be integrated into your existing marketing plan to have the highest chance to thrive. For example, most companies already issue press releases when they have newsworthy announcements so it's a natural extension to email the release to online news sites and blogs, and to use an online distribution service. I think successful link building is best done by your marketing department as part of your overall marketing strategy. It's fine to have a consultant help put the plan together, but the actual implementation of the plan should be done by you.
Analytics – this involves the measurement and tracking of your sites' SEO and marketing campaign. Previously, this could be tedious for small sites and I might have recommended outsourcing. But with the new version of Google Analytics, a properly configured account will tell you everything you need to know about where every single sale on your site came from. Your programmer or consultant should be able to set it up for you and configure the reports to track only the most important metrics for your organization. I also like to track incoming links and search engine rankings for a site (two things that Analytics does not track), but those can easily be tracked with the Marketleap Link Checker and Digital Point Keyword Tracker .
In the end, whether you decide to hire a consultant or tackle SEO internally with the vast information available online, you still need to make SEO part of your organizations objectives for it to be a success: something that outsourcing usually doesn't do.
About The Author
Adam McFarland is the co-founder of Faceup-Sites and the author of the Faceup Web Marketing Book: The Perfect Combination of SEO, SEM, and other tactics to maximize results without breaking the bank. Faceup-Sites specializes in helping businesses develop highly customizable sites that are easy to update, visually pleasing, and search engine friendly at a fraction of the cost of what most developers charge.
Paul: "We want to hire your company to do the SEO for us. Whatever the price is, we can afford it."
Me: "Tell me a little more about your company and exactly what you expect to achieve from search."
Paul: "We want to rank Number 1 in Google for EVERYTHING in our industry, and I know you can do it for us."
Me: "I'd be happy to consult with your team to make sure you understand the principles of SEO and get off on the right foot, but I think you're better off doing the work yourself."
He was perplexed. Why wouldn't we want to take on his SEO work? It has nothing to do with him or his company. It has everything to do with the misunderstood nature of what it takes to consistently rank high in natural search. The absolute best companies I've worked with make every decision with SEO in mind. Everyone in their organization – from management to programmers to marketing – is thinking about the search impact of their decisions. For that reason it makes sense to hire a consultant or to learn it yourself, but not to hire an outside firm to outsource your entire SEO campaign to.
Most of the time when companies outsource SEO they do it with the mentality of "here you go, you handle it, we expect results." They view it as an entirely separate entity and not as a core value that needs to be instilled in their organization to be successful. That's why outsourced SEO just doesn't work: your organization still makes decisions the old way.
How will this programming change impact our search results? Can we build link-building into our marketing campaign? What adjustments can we make so that both are working in harmony to achieve our objectives as a company and rank as high as we can? There is no incentive to learn about search if someone else is handling it for you, and consequently you probably won't be asking these important questíons when making a critical business decision.
Paul was still a bit confused with that answer. So let's take a closer look at some of the key components necessary for SEO success and what needs to take place for them to be accomplished:
Keyword Research – this entails researching how frequently phrases relevant to your site are searched. I like to use the SEO-Book tool or the free version of Wordtracker. Keyword research is important because it will impact your site structure, title tags (widely regarded as the most influential factor in how high you rank), and will help identify opportunities in your industry (if a term is searched a lot but there aren't a lot of good results, you may have just identified a great expansion opportuníty for your company). This is best done by either a consultant or the internal head of your SEO campaign, which should be someone in upper-management.
On-Site Optimization and Site Structure – this is what most people think of when they think of SEO. What changes should be made to your site so that search engine spiders have the best chance of crawling it, understanding the content, and ranking you accordingly. Most often, this involves changes to Title/META tags, cleaning up source code so that it's proper HTML, moving CSS and Javascrípt to external files, adding sitemaps, modifying internal linking structure and anchor text, and several other standard changes that eliminate all potential crawling and indexing issues. This is best done by your programmer(s) so that they understand the importance of the changes and make them part of their routine in the future. These changes can be suggested by a consultant, but will only really be successful if programmers are on board.
Link building – this is probably the second most common task associated with SEO. By now you already know that you need one-way incoming links from relevant sites with applicable anchor text to rank high. Many outsourced SEO firms will either engage in elaborate link exchanges or purchase paid links for you: both of which are obsolete in terms of having any positive impact in your rankings, and now can potentially penalize you. The best one-way link building techniques – press releases, content syndication, blogging, product syndication, viral videos, etc – all require a LOT of input from you to be successful. Most of the time they should be integrated into your existing marketing plan to have the highest chance to thrive. For example, most companies already issue press releases when they have newsworthy announcements so it's a natural extension to email the release to online news sites and blogs, and to use an online distribution service. I think successful link building is best done by your marketing department as part of your overall marketing strategy. It's fine to have a consultant help put the plan together, but the actual implementation of the plan should be done by you.
Analytics – this involves the measurement and tracking of your sites' SEO and marketing campaign. Previously, this could be tedious for small sites and I might have recommended outsourcing. But with the new version of Google Analytics, a properly configured account will tell you everything you need to know about where every single sale on your site came from. Your programmer or consultant should be able to set it up for you and configure the reports to track only the most important metrics for your organization. I also like to track incoming links and search engine rankings for a site (two things that Analytics does not track), but those can easily be tracked with the Marketleap Link Checker and Digital Point Keyword Tracker .
In the end, whether you decide to hire a consultant or tackle SEO internally with the vast information available online, you still need to make SEO part of your organizations objectives for it to be a success: something that outsourcing usually doesn't do.
About The Author
Adam McFarland is the co-founder of Faceup-Sites and the author of the Faceup Web Marketing Book: The Perfect Combination of SEO, SEM, and other tactics to maximize results without breaking the bank. Faceup-Sites specializes in helping businesses develop highly customizable sites that are easy to update, visually pleasing, and search engine friendly at a fraction of the cost of what most developers charge.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
New Website? It's Time To Think Links
Link building has long been the staple dietary topic for SEO and Internet marketing experts, but with good reason. This is hardly ground breaking news but having a powerful link profile will help you to rank well in the search engines. Having an especially powerful link profile will also drive traffic directly to your website.
As the webmaster of a new site, there are several things you must do. First, you need to create a genuinely useful website filled with equally useful and informative content. You need to ready yourself to add fresh content on a frequent basis, in order to retain existing site visitors and to attract the search engine spiders. You also need to start building links – a good link profile takes time to develop so it is essential that you start as soon as possible. Below are some of the more and less effective methods of building quality inbound links to your new website.
Create Quality Content
OK, we've already mentioned this in passing, but it's important. Linkable content will get linked to (eventually). You may not have the traffic base to command links organically in this way yet, but you will do soon. Unique, informative, and even controversial content will ultimately see other sites willing to link to your own.
Video marketing has become especially popular because of its viral nature. You can create a good video clip, embed it into a page of your site and include "email to a friend" links. Also ensure that it is well branded so that everybody knows where the video first came from.
Free Directory Submissions
You should submit your site to a lot of web directories over time. If your domain is brand new then you should attempt to limit the amount of submissions you make in the first month. Google is believed to penalize sites that build too many links too quickly in this way. However, free directories can take days, weeks, or even months before they get round to accepting your submission so do start early.
As well as general category directories for your search engine link profile, you should research industry specific directories. These will also help your search engine ranking, but they can drive excellent levels of targeted traffíc to your site. Consider paying some of the bigger and more influential directories for an annual submission.
Paid Directory Submissions
Free directories typically only allow you to link to the main page of your website, but most also allow you to choose the title of your link. This gives you the opportunity to build your links according to your keywords, which is an essential component of link building for search engine rankings. Paid directories, on the other hand, also usually allow deep linking to individual pages of your website.
Consider paying for one or two annual subscriptions to the better directories. Yahoo is perhaps the most expensive at $299 per annum but it commands a lot of respect and a lot of traffic. Business.com isn't much cheaper ($199) but is almost on an equal footing. Less expensive directories include Best Of The Web and Uncover The Net.
Join Forums And Post Relevant Comments
Forums are, in reality, becoming less popular. The advent of the oft discussed web 2.0 means that the forum is seen as something of a dying trend. However, a lot of people do still use them and they do offer the opportunity to garner your website with some traffic and provide you with signature links.
Join forums that are relevant to your industry, create a signature link using your more important keywords and then browse. Find topics that genuinely interest you, or areas where you can offer assistance. Post comments, without linking to your site, and rely on your signature link to do the rest. If you provide genuine, helpful information then you may find that you pick up some very interested leads along the way.
Request Links
You don't get anything if you don't ask. Find relevant websites, though not in direct competition to your own site, and request a link. Point out a particularly useful section of your website content that is easily linkable and offer the HTML code to provide a link.
This isn't, in all honesty, the best way to spend your linking time. It can take many attempts with various websites before you get an acceptance and a link to your site. Webmasters will usually link to sites they have genuinely found themselves, or else sell their advertising spaces. Alternatively, they may only link to other sites within their own network.
Tagging And Social Bookmarking
So, you've read all about social bookmarking and tagging, but don't know how it can help your site? Well, the principle is fairly simple – join the social bookmarking sites, create a list of useful sites including one or two of your own, and then publish them. Some search engines are known to be particularly fond of using links found in this way. Also, if your list is genuinely useful then you should find some traffic diverts to your own site as a result.
Blog Commenting
Find blogs that are relevant to your industry and your site and sign up. Most blogs provide the opportunity to link to your site via your name so pick a name that includes relevant keywords. Like forums, only post relevant content and comments. Answers like "me too" do not count. If you don't have something valuable to add, then don't add anything, and move on to the next link building venture, please!
Article Syndication
Write articles, or have them written for you, and submit them to syndication websites. GoArticles and EzineArticles are among the more popular syndication sites and the article pages typically rank well. You have the opportunity to include two biographical links with most article directories, and these should point to the relevant pages on your site and include keywords as the anchor text.
Article syndication is a very good method of building links, but only if you can create article content that is appealing to visitors and to webmasters. However, one good article could generate many links and hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your website.
Offer Content To Other Sites
This is similar, although more specific, than article syndication. Contact webmasters of websites that operate in the same industry as you. Offer unique content in exchange for a link or links to your website. Again, if you can write well, then you shouldn't find it too difficult to find an avenue for publication of your work.
A lot of sites actively look for submissions in this way, so keep an eye out when you are next browsing the web.
Press Release Submissions
Press releases have been around a long time, and are still going fairly strong online. Again, press releases offer the opportunity to drive interested traffic to your website and some PR wires allow authors to include links to their website. PRLeap and PRWeb are among two of the more popular and beneficial sites to submit your PR to.
Reciprocal Links
I find myself sitting on the fence when it comes to reciprocal links. Once upon a time, a reciprocal link campaign was the most popular way of building links. You exchange links with another website and you both benefit. They do still have their place, if you can negotiate a well placed link on a relevant website with a lot of traffic. However, in terms of SEO, reciprocal links are known to have been devalued by the search engines. Consider every reciprocal link opportunity based on its own merit and, in most cases, ignoring the search engine optimization possibilities.
Don't Spam Blogs And Forums
Above, we have detailed a couple of link building methods that include posting on forums and blogs. Please, don't spam. Spam is the scourge of the online world and something that every site owner could do without. Spamming will make you unpopular, may get your site delisted, and it sure won't make you any friends.
Don't Use FFA Link Farms
A FFA (Free For All) website enables any website owner to place their link on a web page. Don't do it. Search engines despise this practice and you will not gain any benefit in any way from the use of this kind of site.
Avoid Any Dubious Link Building Practice
If you see a link building opportunity that looks dodgy, ignore it. At best you will waste your time, but at worst your site could be penalized and you may never be able to recover. If it looks too good to be true... you know the rest.
About The Author
WebWiseWords offers an article writing and submission service as well as various other forms of website content writing and creation. Visit us today for help in creating compelling content and marketing your website.
As the webmaster of a new site, there are several things you must do. First, you need to create a genuinely useful website filled with equally useful and informative content. You need to ready yourself to add fresh content on a frequent basis, in order to retain existing site visitors and to attract the search engine spiders. You also need to start building links – a good link profile takes time to develop so it is essential that you start as soon as possible. Below are some of the more and less effective methods of building quality inbound links to your new website.
Create Quality Content
OK, we've already mentioned this in passing, but it's important. Linkable content will get linked to (eventually). You may not have the traffic base to command links organically in this way yet, but you will do soon. Unique, informative, and even controversial content will ultimately see other sites willing to link to your own.
Video marketing has become especially popular because of its viral nature. You can create a good video clip, embed it into a page of your site and include "email to a friend" links. Also ensure that it is well branded so that everybody knows where the video first came from.
Free Directory Submissions
You should submit your site to a lot of web directories over time. If your domain is brand new then you should attempt to limit the amount of submissions you make in the first month. Google is believed to penalize sites that build too many links too quickly in this way. However, free directories can take days, weeks, or even months before they get round to accepting your submission so do start early.
As well as general category directories for your search engine link profile, you should research industry specific directories. These will also help your search engine ranking, but they can drive excellent levels of targeted traffíc to your site. Consider paying some of the bigger and more influential directories for an annual submission.
Paid Directory Submissions
Free directories typically only allow you to link to the main page of your website, but most also allow you to choose the title of your link. This gives you the opportunity to build your links according to your keywords, which is an essential component of link building for search engine rankings. Paid directories, on the other hand, also usually allow deep linking to individual pages of your website.
Consider paying for one or two annual subscriptions to the better directories. Yahoo is perhaps the most expensive at $299 per annum but it commands a lot of respect and a lot of traffic. Business.com isn't much cheaper ($199) but is almost on an equal footing. Less expensive directories include Best Of The Web and Uncover The Net.
Join Forums And Post Relevant Comments
Forums are, in reality, becoming less popular. The advent of the oft discussed web 2.0 means that the forum is seen as something of a dying trend. However, a lot of people do still use them and they do offer the opportunity to garner your website with some traffic and provide you with signature links.
Join forums that are relevant to your industry, create a signature link using your more important keywords and then browse. Find topics that genuinely interest you, or areas where you can offer assistance. Post comments, without linking to your site, and rely on your signature link to do the rest. If you provide genuine, helpful information then you may find that you pick up some very interested leads along the way.
Request Links
You don't get anything if you don't ask. Find relevant websites, though not in direct competition to your own site, and request a link. Point out a particularly useful section of your website content that is easily linkable and offer the HTML code to provide a link.
This isn't, in all honesty, the best way to spend your linking time. It can take many attempts with various websites before you get an acceptance and a link to your site. Webmasters will usually link to sites they have genuinely found themselves, or else sell their advertising spaces. Alternatively, they may only link to other sites within their own network.
Tagging And Social Bookmarking
So, you've read all about social bookmarking and tagging, but don't know how it can help your site? Well, the principle is fairly simple – join the social bookmarking sites, create a list of useful sites including one or two of your own, and then publish them. Some search engines are known to be particularly fond of using links found in this way. Also, if your list is genuinely useful then you should find some traffic diverts to your own site as a result.
Blog Commenting
Find blogs that are relevant to your industry and your site and sign up. Most blogs provide the opportunity to link to your site via your name so pick a name that includes relevant keywords. Like forums, only post relevant content and comments. Answers like "me too" do not count. If you don't have something valuable to add, then don't add anything, and move on to the next link building venture, please!
Article Syndication
Write articles, or have them written for you, and submit them to syndication websites. GoArticles and EzineArticles are among the more popular syndication sites and the article pages typically rank well. You have the opportunity to include two biographical links with most article directories, and these should point to the relevant pages on your site and include keywords as the anchor text.
Article syndication is a very good method of building links, but only if you can create article content that is appealing to visitors and to webmasters. However, one good article could generate many links and hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your website.
Offer Content To Other Sites
This is similar, although more specific, than article syndication. Contact webmasters of websites that operate in the same industry as you. Offer unique content in exchange for a link or links to your website. Again, if you can write well, then you shouldn't find it too difficult to find an avenue for publication of your work.
A lot of sites actively look for submissions in this way, so keep an eye out when you are next browsing the web.
Press Release Submissions
Press releases have been around a long time, and are still going fairly strong online. Again, press releases offer the opportunity to drive interested traffic to your website and some PR wires allow authors to include links to their website. PRLeap and PRWeb are among two of the more popular and beneficial sites to submit your PR to.
Reciprocal Links
I find myself sitting on the fence when it comes to reciprocal links. Once upon a time, a reciprocal link campaign was the most popular way of building links. You exchange links with another website and you both benefit. They do still have their place, if you can negotiate a well placed link on a relevant website with a lot of traffic. However, in terms of SEO, reciprocal links are known to have been devalued by the search engines. Consider every reciprocal link opportunity based on its own merit and, in most cases, ignoring the search engine optimization possibilities.
Don't Spam Blogs And Forums
Above, we have detailed a couple of link building methods that include posting on forums and blogs. Please, don't spam. Spam is the scourge of the online world and something that every site owner could do without. Spamming will make you unpopular, may get your site delisted, and it sure won't make you any friends.
Don't Use FFA Link Farms
A FFA (Free For All) website enables any website owner to place their link on a web page. Don't do it. Search engines despise this practice and you will not gain any benefit in any way from the use of this kind of site.
Avoid Any Dubious Link Building Practice
If you see a link building opportunity that looks dodgy, ignore it. At best you will waste your time, but at worst your site could be penalized and you may never be able to recover. If it looks too good to be true... you know the rest.
About The Author
WebWiseWords offers an article writing and submission service as well as various other forms of website content writing and creation. Visit us today for help in creating compelling content and marketing your website.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
47 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website or Blog
If your website does not create a sense of trust in your visitors, all your efforts will be in vain. Your online business will not succeed. That's the bad news. The good news is that it is very easy to create and build trust in your online visitors. Below, I have listed all the techniques used by the hundreds of websites I have helped launch. If you have additional techniques, please add them to the líst.
As the old saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. Building trust cannot be achieved by one single action. Trust is achieved by hundreds of little things you do throughout your website that, when taken together, give readers a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability.
DropJack - A New Social Content Site Powered by Users Like You!
The other bit of good news is that few website owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. If you do it well, it can become a real and sustainable competitive advantage.
Here are 47 simple actions you can take to get started.
1. Trust is built by lots of small actions on every page of your website.
2. Your website design is the first impression. Make sure it is professional and relevant to the subject matter.
3. Navigation must be intuitive. If visitors can't find what they are looking for easily, they will question your competence in providing what they want.
4. Make the website personal by giving it its own tone and voice. People buy people.
5. Follow the HEART rule of creating online content. (Reminder: HEART stands for Honest, Exclusive, Accurate, Relevant and Timely.)
6. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.
7. Regularly add new content to your site. It shows that the business is alive and kicking.
8. Review all links. Doubts will quickly form in your visitors' minds if links don't work or, worse still, take them to error pages.
9. Good grammar and spelling matter. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.
10. Don't make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like "Read this blog and you'll be a millionaire by the end of the week." People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs.
11. Publish REAL testimonials and third-party endorsements. Try to always use real names and link to websites where possible. Some sites show images of letters sent by happy customers.
12. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.
13. Don't put down, curse or insult competitors. It's unprofessional. It is better to offer an objective comparison of competitive services or products.
14. Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making quick sales.
15. Write articles for humans, not search engines.
16. Make your 'About Us' page personal and comprehensive. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that real people are behind the site.
17. Publish your photo or the photos of the key people involved with the site. Again, this reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the screenshots.
18. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a site that tries to hide the identity of its publishers.
19. On the 'Contact Us' page, provide an email form, telephone number, fax and address of the company. In Europe, it is a legal requirement for sites taking funds, but even sites driven by advertising will benefit from openness.
20. Provide a telephone number that people can call and talk to a person.
21. Provide Web addresses linked to the website domain, not addresses from free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.
22. Don't lie to make money. The most common way is to write a glowing report about a product or service to earn affilíate revenues. It is very short-sighted to lie to visitors to sell them rubbish. They'll won't come back or, worse still, they'll actively condemn your site on forums and blogs.
23. Think carefully about reciprocal links. If your site is about organic food and you have links to Party Poker, people are going to question your integrity.
24. Think carefully about the adverts you display on your site. Ensure that they are relevant to your subject and audience.
25. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent. Paid-to-post is corrupting the Web and will experience a user backlash. I don't read websites that accept payment for posting.
26. Write and publish your privacy policy. Be clear about what you will and will not do with any personal data you collect. State that you adhere to all data protection laws. Make it easy to read and don't use legal gobbledygook.
27. Write and publish a security policy. State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.
28. Ensure that you have a security and privacy policy which is linked from the footer on every page. Make the link more prominent on all the order pages.
29. Clearly publish your guarantëe. I would recommend making it a 100% money-back guarantëe if possible.
30. Clearly state your refund and returns policy.
31. Piggyback off reputable brands. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant services account with a major bank like Citibank or HSBC, put its logo on your site.
32. Use Google search on your site for two reasons. First, it is a great search solution which will help your visitors find what they are looking for. Second, having the Google name on your site instills trust.
33. If there are well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site.
34. Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questíons. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, 'Givers always gain.'
35. Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
36. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don't delete them, but respond with your point of view.
37. Put photos on the website of the owners, publishers and/or team. Let visitors know there are real people behind the business.
38. Put images of the credít cards you accept on every page of the order process.
39. Use the words 'secure website' whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.
40. On every page, state, "We take your privacy and security very seriously." Link the statement to the security and privacy policy.
41. Remember, reputations take years to build and seconds to destroy.
42. If you are selling a subscription, offer a low-cost, entry-level option. This could be a one-day taster, 'a week before billing starts' or a monthly tríal.
43. Use a high level of security when processing credít cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.
44. Don't send credít card information or personal details over the Internet unencrypted. Tell your customers that their data will be encrypted.
45. Only ask for information from customers that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, the only information you REALLY need is an email address, so that is all you should ask for.
46. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent. I recently went to buy a book which was advertised for $10. When I checked out, they added tax, post and packaging, and the final bill was $19.50. I didn't buy it as I felt they had deliberately tried to mislead me.
47. Keep your SSL certificate up to date. Let people know you are using SSL encryption and who the provider is.
You can't do too much to build trust. Most of it comes down to common sense and good business practice. To ensure that you are continually improving your trustworthiness, every time you go to a website, ask yourself whether you trust it or not. Then ask yourself why you have formed the opinion you have. Continually try to learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.
If people trust you, the revenue will follow!
About The Author
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com SubHub Articles Feed
As the old saying goes, you have only one chance to make a first impression. Building trust cannot be achieved by one single action. Trust is achieved by hundreds of little things you do throughout your website that, when taken together, give readers a sense of honesty, legitimacy and stability.
DropJack - A New Social Content Site Powered by Users Like You!
The other bit of good news is that few website owners focus on building trust in the minds of their visitors. If you do it well, it can become a real and sustainable competitive advantage.
Here are 47 simple actions you can take to get started.
1. Trust is built by lots of small actions on every page of your website.
2. Your website design is the first impression. Make sure it is professional and relevant to the subject matter.
3. Navigation must be intuitive. If visitors can't find what they are looking for easily, they will question your competence in providing what they want.
4. Make the website personal by giving it its own tone and voice. People buy people.
5. Follow the HEART rule of creating online content. (Reminder: HEART stands for Honest, Exclusive, Accurate, Relevant and Timely.)
6. Use language that is appropriate to the audience. It will build empathy.
7. Regularly add new content to your site. It shows that the business is alive and kicking.
8. Review all links. Doubts will quickly form in your visitors' minds if links don't work or, worse still, take them to error pages.
9. Good grammar and spelling matter. Errors give the impression of sloppiness and carelessness.
10. Don't make outrageous and unbelievable claims, like "Read this blog and you'll be a millionaire by the end of the week." People are used to scams, get-rich-quick schemes and rip-offs.
11. Publish REAL testimonials and third-party endorsements. Try to always use real names and link to websites where possible. Some sites show images of letters sent by happy customers.
12. Publish case studies about customers you have helped, who use your product, etc.
13. Don't put down, curse or insult competitors. It's unprofessional. It is better to offer an objective comparison of competitive services or products.
14. Focus on building your long-term reputation, not on making quick sales.
15. Write articles for humans, not search engines.
16. Make your 'About Us' page personal and comprehensive. It plays an important part in making visitors feel comfortable that real people are behind the site.
17. Publish your photo or the photos of the key people involved with the site. Again, this reinforces the fact that there are real people behind the screenshots.
18. Clearly identify who is behind the site. Nothing creates more suspicion than a site that tries to hide the identity of its publishers.
19. On the 'Contact Us' page, provide an email form, telephone number, fax and address of the company. In Europe, it is a legal requirement for sites taking funds, but even sites driven by advertising will benefit from openness.
20. Provide a telephone number that people can call and talk to a person.
21. Provide Web addresses linked to the website domain, not addresses from free webmail services such as Hotmail and Gmail.
22. Don't lie to make money. The most common way is to write a glowing report about a product or service to earn affilíate revenues. It is very short-sighted to lie to visitors to sell them rubbish. They'll won't come back or, worse still, they'll actively condemn your site on forums and blogs.
23. Think carefully about reciprocal links. If your site is about organic food and you have links to Party Poker, people are going to question your integrity.
24. Think carefully about the adverts you display on your site. Ensure that they are relevant to your subject and audience.
25. Be explicit when you are being paid to endorse a product or service. An advertorial is fine as long as it is transparent. Paid-to-post is corrupting the Web and will experience a user backlash. I don't read websites that accept payment for posting.
26. Write and publish your privacy policy. Be clear about what you will and will not do with any personal data you collect. State that you adhere to all data protection laws. Make it easy to read and don't use legal gobbledygook.
27. Write and publish a security policy. State what measures you take to ensure that all transactions are secure.
28. Ensure that you have a security and privacy policy which is linked from the footer on every page. Make the link more prominent on all the order pages.
29. Clearly publish your guarantëe. I would recommend making it a 100% money-back guarantëe if possible.
30. Clearly state your refund and returns policy.
31. Piggyback off reputable brands. If you use PayPal, put the PayPal logo on your site. If you have a merchant services account with a major bank like Citibank or HSBC, put its logo on your site.
32. Use Google search on your site for two reasons. First, it is a great search solution which will help your visitors find what they are looking for. Second, having the Google name on your site instills trust.
33. If there are well-known industry associations for your subject, join up and put their logos on your site.
34. Have a forum on your site and respond quickly to questíons. Have the attitude that you are happy to help others without receiving immediate reward. As the old saying goes, 'Givers always gain.'
35. Allow people to comment on articles. Interactivity and an exchange of views build community and a sense of involvement.
36. If people provide constructive criticism or comments in the forum, don't delete them, but respond with your point of view.
37. Put photos on the website of the owners, publishers and/or team. Let visitors know there are real people behind the business.
38. Put images of the credít cards you accept on every page of the order process.
39. Use the words 'secure website' whenever you try to get any information from visitors, including newsletter sign-ups, forum input and payment.
40. On every page, state, "We take your privacy and security very seriously." Link the statement to the security and privacy policy.
41. Remember, reputations take years to build and seconds to destroy.
42. If you are selling a subscription, offer a low-cost, entry-level option. This could be a one-day taster, 'a week before billing starts' or a monthly tríal.
43. Use a high level of security when processing credít cards. Make sure you make your clients aware of all the steps you are taking.
44. Don't send credít card information or personal details over the Internet unencrypted. Tell your customers that their data will be encrypted.
45. Only ask for information from customers that you really need. For example, for an email newsletter sign-up, the only information you REALLY need is an email address, so that is all you should ask for.
46. If you have pricing on your website, make it transparent. I recently went to buy a book which was advertised for $10. When I checked out, they added tax, post and packaging, and the final bill was $19.50. I didn't buy it as I felt they had deliberately tried to mislead me.
47. Keep your SSL certificate up to date. Let people know you are using SSL encryption and who the provider is.
You can't do too much to build trust. Most of it comes down to common sense and good business practice. To ensure that you are continually improving your trustworthiness, every time you go to a website, ask yourself whether you trust it or not. Then ask yourself why you have formed the opinion you have. Continually try to learn what makes a site trustworthy or untrustworthy and implement the relevant changes to your site.
If people trust you, the revenue will follow!
About The Author
SubHub provides an all-in-one solution to enable you to rapidly design, build and run your own content website. Publish for profít on the web. Website: SubHub.com SubHub Articles Feed
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