Website Marketing Resource

Do the Search Engines Know Your Website?
 by: Chet Childers

Are you considering a search engine promotion campaign to improve your website’s search engine visibility? To aid in your decision, have you checked your website to determine its search engine awareness?

Perhaps you may be thinking why do I need to check my website? Do you remember going to the doctor for an illness? Hopefully, your doctor performed some tests to diagnose your illness before prescribing your medication. If not, you may have gotten some very undesirable results.

In the case of your website, you need to diagnose the patient and determine the extent of your website’s search engine visibility. Based on your findings, you can decide to focus on standard search results or paid search results.

Your checks should be done in the Google and Yahoo search engines since they are the major search engines in today’s marketplace. As an option, you should consider MSN since they have recently released their search engine. It is only a matter of time before they are considered a player, if not already.

How To Get Lots Of Home Page Links
 by: Rick Rouse

Most webmasters are reluctant to link out from their home pages, so getting home page links pointing to your own website can be difficult. But there is a simple and effective way to get tons of home page links.

All you have to do is find websites that are relatively new and offer the webmasters a good link from two or three internal, well-established pages on your site in exchange for a home page link on theirs.

This is a true win-win situation because your linking partner gets two or three high quality inbound links to help establish his/her new site while you get a home page link on a site that will become established in its own right in a relatively short period of time.

Some of your linking partners will move your home page link to an internal page after their site becomes established, in which case you can drop all but one of your links to the other site. It’s still win-win because:

1 - You still have a quality inbound link in exchange for yours.

Tons of Top 10 Rankings Guaranteed
 by: John Gergye

Okay I admit it. I was kidding. I can’t guarantee top 10 search engine rankings any more than the next guy.

But hold on. Before you click away in disgust I believe I’ve got the next best thing. That all but guarantees you’ll get top 10 rankings. Lots of them. For next to nothing. So you might want to stick around and find out what this is all about.

You see to hear some tell it a top 10 ranking is a shoo in. A gimme. A piece of cake.

Must be since Google Adwords are crammed with all sorts of beckoning, come hither ads that suggest as much.

Now admittedly in any food chain even the bottom feeders play a role in the big scheme of things. But I don’t know. Such pitches may be hard for the typical traffic starved newbie to resist. I mean these ads suggest for a mere $49, $69 or $99 you’ll be rolling in top 10 rankings in no time.

Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website!
 by: Dom Vonarburg

*** What is ROR?

ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an exciting new website content description tool and format created by AddMe.com. It makes it very easy to describe the content, objects, and structure of your website so search engines and other web applications can better find and understand your information.

For example if you are selling products, ROR enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affiliate programs, etc. Or if your site or blog provides information on a given topic, it allows you to describe how this information is organized (sitemap, topics, categories, new information, archive, blogroll, etc). ROR also provides terms for documenting objects such as contacts, articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio, links, reviews, privacy policy, copyrights, and more.

ROR information can be easily added to your website by adding a ROR File called ror.xml. To create the file ROR provides templates and examples. It also provide a ROR File Editor, which will extract information from your website and allow you to describe it further. Larger websites can also generate ROR files from their databases.

How To Create A Blog
 by: Christos Varsamis

Blogs are more permanent than posts to an online discussion list, more dynamic than older-style home pages. They are more personal than traditional journalism, and definitely more public than diaries. A blog is often a mixture of what is happening in a person’s life and what is happening on the Web, a kind of hybrid diary site. So, there are as many unique types of blogs as there are people.

Blogs enable interaction and invite others to reward a person’s creative effort with feedback. They weave new social networks, introducing people with common passions. Another reason why one should start blogging is dissemination of “micro-opinions” important to a small audience - opinions that would never make it in newspapers.

Weblogs, definitely, are the mavericks of the online world. Two of its greatest strengths are their ability to filter and disseminate information to a widely dispersed audience, and their position outside the mainstream of mass media.

The XHTML family can accommodate extensions through XHTML modules and techniques to develop new XHTML-conforming modules. These modules permit the combination of existing and new feature sets when developing content and when designing new user agents.

Link Building for Hilltop
 by: Andy Hagans

Hilltop is one of the major concepts underpinning Google’s search algorithm, yet its workings and implications are often misunderstood. After the infamous Florida Update, many webmasters were aghast as their rankings plummeted; and again, when the mysterious “sandbox” was implemented, some webmasters could not get a Web site to rank well, period. Part of the reason that some Web sites get shuffled out of the SERPs when new algorithmic features are implemented is that those sites never gained authority in the eyes of the search engines–that is, they were not sufficiently meshed into their local topical communities.

This concept of authority was one pioneered in a paper titled “Hilltop: A Search Engine based on Expert Documents,” written by Krishna Bharat and George A. Mihaila. The full text is available online at http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/.

(Note: Google has obviously not implemented Hilltop in its pure form, but rather uses the principles of topical communities and authority in its algorithm. Likewise, other search engines such as MSN and Yahoo! are not using Hilltop per se, but rather similar algorithmic features. Thus when I mention ‘Hilltop’ I am referring to not just the specific paper published by Bharat and Mihaila, but also to the fundamental theory upon which any authority-based link popularity algorithm is based. This theory applies to Topic-Sensitive PageRank, etc.)

The Click Fraud Problem
 by: Christos Varsamis

Click fraud has become a major problem for online marketers. If you participate on Google adwords campaigns or Overture, you must already pay a lot for your campaigns.

What is click fraud?

Click fraud is the deliberate clicks to PPC search engine ads for completely other reasons than expressing interest for buying the related products or services.

Overture defines click fraud as clicks arising for reasons other than the good-faith intention of an Internet user to visit a web site to purchase goods or services or to obtain information.

Google defines click fraud, or invalid clicks, as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions.

In simple words, Click fraud means that someone is cheating you and that you pay too much for your pay per click campaigns.

Who is doing that?

Three main groups click on pay per click ads, without real interest in the offered goods:

People who joined Google AdSense or other per click affiliate programs click on the ads on their own web site to make a little income. Often, these people cooperate with other webmasters to click on each other’s ads.

Google PageRank Explained
 by: Tony Zhu

Google PageRank has always been a controvertial issue among us webmasters. There seems to be many questions floating around with suggests that many people are not familier with how PageRank works. Here, I will attempt to answer some of the common questions and discard the rumors.

1. What is PageRank?

Here is what Google says:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

Click here for more…

In other words, PageRank is simply a mechanical algorithm by Google that attempts to evaluate the importance of your website larged based on the amount and quality of backlinks your website have. For the more intellectual crowds out there, check out The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web .

Do It Yourself SEO
 by: Matt Colyer

Internet surfers use search engines more than any other tool to find things online. Search engines rank their results using a complex formula that considers web page content, link popularity and other details. This is why you should Search Engine Optimization (SEO) your web site.

First before you start you need to identify your keywords. It is critical that you know and understand the search terms surfers will use to find your web site with. If your not sure yet try thinking of search terms you would use to find your site. After you find your keywords make a list of about 50 (If you can find that many) keywords and target them.

Next you need to identify your competition. Start searching with your site’s targeted keywords and research the top ranked competing sites. Create a list of the top 10 to 15 sites and review each one of these web sites. While reviewing each of the competing sites look at the SEO methods that they use.

Free Or Not Free — It’s Your Choice
 by: Randy Justason

The internet is one of the world’s top sources of information, products and just about anything else you could possibly want. And, if you have spent any amount of time online, you must have noticed that much of it is free.

Many home business entrepreneurs get their start online using some of these free resources. In fact, some of them use freebees almost exclusively.

So, just what are these valuable assets that attract so many home business newbies? Here are just a few:

1. Email - one can get free email accounts just about anywhere (MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google GMail, Lycos) plus tons of others. Actually, free email accounts can be very useful, but that’s another article.
2. Autoresponders - there are many free autoresponders (getresponse, and freeautobot, just to name a few). Some are better than others but they are a useful tool.
3. EBooks - You can get free ebooks just about anywhere. These can prove very valuable as giveaways to get people to do some sort of action, like join your mailing list.
4. Web Space - Free web space abounds throughout the internet. Most likely, the ISP you signed up with offers web space for free for you to put up your own personal web site. You can also get free space at places like Yahoo Geocities, Tripod, Bravenet, plus tons of others.

And the list goes on. However, today I would like to talk about Web Space. Free Or Not Free, It’s Your Choice.