Website Marketing Resource

Reality Check: A Straightforward Guide to Keywords and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
 by: Michael Murray, VP of Fathom SEO

Web site owners need to have realistic expectations when it comes to the world of keyword selection.

It’s essential to understand your audience, as well as to aim appropriately at powerful, concise keywords that are not vague or generic—those broad, expansive keywords that rarely attract the audience you are seeking–and lead to disappointing rankings and wasteful expenditures of cash resources.

If you want a healthy return on investment (ROI) with search engine optimization (SEO), your success - or failure - hinges on the keywords you select when combined with other factors like link popularity and web site design.

If your web site has content and design barriers, lacks saturation (a term used to describe how well a site is indexed by search engines) and isn’t found on many other relevant web sites, you’re odds of ranking well are pretty low.

Be careful with keyword research so that you don’t miss excellent opportunities or aim so broadly that you target phrases that will never rank well. Get your act together. Here are 5 tips to guide you along the way in your research. They may help you make good choices, achieve high rankings and bring more traffic (and leads) to your web site.

Google now checks the year your domain name was first registered.

This just makes sense. Those that care about their domain and their brand will register their domain for a long time. This demonstrates commitment. Of course it’s not very hard for a spammer to do the same but the upfront costs are just that little bit higher and might help act as a deterrent. If anything a short domain registration period will be yet another flag in the Google system that will keep certain sites away from top rankings. Hopefully it will be the spammers that trigger the penalty when combined with all the other spam flags they trigger.

If you are anything like me and you like to register domains for an “idea” you have for the future there is no way you will be investing in a 10 year registration for something you may never pursue. An idea is an idea and I know half of the domains I buy amount to nothing. However buying the domain also signifies *some* commitment to the project and on many occasions is the motivational spark I need to get the website built and a new project off the ground. A one or two year registration is not a significant cost. Securing a domain for 10 years is. The easy workaround is to initially register a domain for the minimum period, if things take off then renew the domain for a longer period. Simple.

I read over a lot of blogs each week, casually surfing one or two of the blog exchanges I belong.

I realized yesterday that I seldom read the whole entry unless it’s very short. Many are quite uncomfortable to read, some downright excruciating, in terms of their grammatical skills, spelling, and style. Because it is such an immediate and off-the-cuff personal expression, do the standard language rules apply?

The conversational nature of a blog leads naturally to an informal, casual approach that can be refreshing and innovative, indirectly echoing some of the great writers of the past who used dialect and local expressions to vitalize their work.

It is unfortunate that so many who write don’t understand basic language rules so cannot effectively break them. When it takes major time and effort to understand what on earth the writer is trying to say, rather than being able to appreciate the content and point of view being expressed, it becomes merely an exercise in frustration.

The beauty, and ultimate value of blogging, is that communication is direct, individual, and uncensored. No editor with an eye on public opinion or potential legal consequences is cutting out whole paragraphs in fear they will offend. There is no filter applied by conservative management or the need for committee consensus prior to publication.

Simple Steps To Plan Your Business For Success
 by: Tina Valiedi

Planning your business is the critical starting point. You need to map out your business. Where do you plan on going with your business? What steps are you going to take to get there? How are you going to market your business. All of these questions should be answered in your business plan.

Some people are excellent at planning. Others are not. The problem is, we were never taught how to plan in school. So how do you begin planning? It’s an acquired skill, it won’t appear over night.

The first step to becoming a successful planner in learning your personality type. Once you learn who you are, you can learn to plan according to you personality type.”Personality Plus: How to Understand your Personaltiy” by Florence Littauer, is an excellent book on learning about your personality type. It is easy to read and comes with a personality profile test.

Don’t worry if you feel like you’re not making any progress. Learning a new skill, especially planning, takes time to learn. Be patience and persistent. Start your in planning in baby steps.

Despite any failures or slow starts you may be experiencing or rebounding from right now, don’t focus too much on the people you listened to who may have contributed to your current state.

We all rely on “experts” to get ahead. Problem is you never know for SURE if the expert you just listened to is right until what she told you pans out in hard results.

Case studies are nice, but results in your bank account would be better. So there is always a leap of faith when deciding on a plan of action for your online business based upon the input from an “expert.”

Many times you fall flat on your face. Whether it is a marketing test, new sales copy, or a new product or service, you can do everything that was recommended to the best of your ability, and sometimes it still doesn’t work out.

I will tell you a secret that most experts won’t admit: everyone, even the “experts,” go through the same exact thing from time to time! We are all in the same boat when it comes to trying and failing. Or trying and succeeding.

A big-time dilemma is brewing online. In an understandable attempt to bypass all that annoying spam, e-mails that onliners want to receive are getting lost in the shuffle. Newsletter subscription requests are not being completed and important e-mails are not getting to their intended parties.

Your "Whitelist" is the list that contains the e-mail addresses of those you do in fact want to receive e-mail from. Some services require the accepted addresses be in one’s address book to be added to the whitelist. While other software/services call this list the approved or allowed senders list and require you manually add those you want to accept e-mail from to your list. Regardless of what this feature is called, it is clearly not being utilized correctly and in many cases, at all.

What can be done about this? A little user education and E-mail Whitelist Etiquette is in order!

=> When signing up for an online newsletter, mailing list or Web site service, immediately add their e-mail address or dot com to your approved or white list. This will ensure smooth communications with you and that e-mails will get through with the information you requested or confirmations necessary for you to acknowledge your request.

With so many internet and home business opportunities on the world wide web nowadays it is very confusing as to know which ones are scams and which are not.

However, even though I am sure that most of the money making schemes advertised have their merits, it would give the entrepreneur great peace of mind to know that he was building an internet business in conjunction with a credible and high profile corporate.

Credibility is a vital component of doing business on the Internet and I am sure that you would agree that credibility would give any "Internet Business Opportunity" the ability to convince you that it was all above board and a genuinely sound opportunity.

Well there are such opportunities and you do not even have to have a website to capitalize on them and to build a successful online business.

This is how it works?

Some of the top search engines have pay per click programs that essentially show small text advertisements to the right of their many search engine results (and in other places for that matter ? for instance Google shows them on websites whose publishers have signed up to display them).

Offline Promotion For Tourism Business
 by: Davdi Kan

This artilces has 6 part. Click here if you want to read all: http://www.tourism-internetmarketing.com/offline_promotion/tourism_offline_promotion_davidkan1.htm

Part 1

No business can survive the long run without some form of consistent advertising. As advertising result, most business owners will eventually consider using advertising to promote their business.

Online parties are hot right now. The internet is hot, getting hotter, and the same person that may no pick up the phone to call you for your services, can’t wait to check out your website and see what you are offering before they check in.

Although we focus on internet marketing for our tourism business, but remember that no matter how many prospects are online, they still spend the majority of their time offline, so how you can attract that target market where they spend most of their time offline? Therefore, a part of your online marketing strategy isoffline marketing, in order to find that offline traffic and getting them to our website.

In fact, on many occasions, advertising website marketing budget can be spent just as effectively using offline method as it can be using online methods. Offline marketing method provides a cost effective way to gain new customers, and website branding seems to be much more successful using offline method such as TV and Radio.

Here is a story of four traders who each started with a website built by us, retailing the same products Australia-wide from different cities. It’s hard to compare businesses with different products in different markets, but these four businesses had all those factors in common.

Start-up:

• Trader A started with a website and a spare room at home, and became so successful that he needed to open a shop.

• Trader B (in another city) liked Trader A’s website, so he also started with a website and a spare room at home, and became so successful that he also needed to open a shop.
• Trader C bought Trader A’s website, shop lease and business and employed someone to run it for him.
• Trader D (in a third city) liked Trader C’s website so started with a website and a spare room at home.

Current status:

• Trader A, after a break, started a new website and a shop with the same products (but a different part of the city). He now has two retail stores plus he is starting a wholesale division.

Today I would like to talk about an easy way to get high traffic links to your site for free. This method is really simple and only requires a little of your time to see results. I have personally used this method to generate 260+ links and 392+ unique visits to my site in under a month. It also produced top ten rankings in Google, yahoo and AltaVista without even submitting my site to them! Sound exciting? Let’s get started.

What you will need:

You will need the Google toolbar to find the page rank of any given page. You can download it for free from http://toolbar.google.com/