Monday, October 15, 2007

The Basic Rules of Search Engine Optimization

- A guarantee for Successful Internet Marketing


Source:

Search engine optimization is a process that generates traffic for your website. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) includes principles and algorithms, mainly related to the website design, capable of generating actions to improve the search engine ranking for your webpages. Increasing the value of your page’s rank, the quality and quantity of visitors will be increased too. For example, the main search engines, Google and Yahoo will index your website and will rank pages according to some complex algorithms.

In order to obtain higher page ranks, you should have in mind some basic rules that will assure your SEO success. There are two types of SEO: on page SEO and off page optimization. In both cases, you should check if your site design matches the SEO main conditions:

1. Optimization of URLs – It is recommended to use short URLs titles having static character (for example .html pages), clearly named and if is possible to contain relevant keywords for your page’s content. The ideal case is when the relevant keywords are even in the domain name. When choosing the keywords for meta tags you should think what keywords or key phrases you would type to search for a certain page or content on a given search engine.

2. Optimization of the page title tag – The search engine spider will look also in your page title tag for relevant keywords that describe the content of your webpages. As a consequence, the title tag should contain from one two three keywords or key phrases related or present in the page’s content. You should also limit the length of your page title to 50 characters or less. And of course, every page should have a distinctive page title, easy to understand for crawlers. The abusive use of keywords will induce a decrease of page rank.

3. Optimization of the website content – The website content is among other factors that will decide the page rank. You should know that crawlers or spiders (the search engines indexing tools) do not index the content of pictures or a javascript action for example. In case you use extensively images for your page content, you should provide a detailed description for every picture. The main idea you should follow when you add content to your website is to maintain simplicity. In conclusion, the text should be present on your webpages in a higher percent as compared to images, javascripts or others. You must also provide fresh content to your visitors periodically.

4. Optimization of the site navigation system – You should build a site map having links that point to the main parts of your site. For example, Google uses your sitemap to analyze the structure of your website. All links must point to valid webpages. It is recommended to check the validity of your site navigation structure using a link checker. You should pay attention to the internal links that should contain keywords, and the number of internal links must be increased in order to provide a clear site hierarchy and an effective navigation system.

As a suggestion, the use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) will determine a simple and yet rapid site structure, easy to understand for search engine spiders. The external links must point only to quality sites (for example, your page rank will be increased when you link to sites having higher search engine ranks themselves). You should not use links to "link farms". There must be also other links from weblogs, forums or other sites that point to your site. You can achieve this goal by performing a link inter-change process.

5. Optimization of the general site structure – In case your site design does not allow the SEO modifications mentioned, you should change the overall site structure. You can simply do this by using a ready-made CMS (a content management system). It is easy to use and in most cases it’s created having the SEO principles in mind, so you will have to manage only the content, without being concerned owith the design.

These rules are not enough to obtain the maximal search engine rank, but they should be taken as a good start for a complete strategy of search engine optimization.

New Alphabets For the Internet Domains [ My Name, My Language, My Internet: IDN Test Goes Live ]

- Internationalized Domain Names prepared by ICANN


ICANN prepares some new goodies for Internet users from all around the world as the organization will debut a new test next week in order to implement Internationalized Domain Names on the web. In case you don't know its meaning, let me define this for you. What ICANN, which actually stands for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is aiming to do is to allow consumers from several countries to write the URLs straight into their languages no matter it's Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese or Tamil. Basically, the modification refers to the part of the URL which comes before the dot in order to enable consumers to use their local characters.

"This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created," said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. "ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits."

ICANN seems prepared to start this testing session of the Internationalized Domain Names as the program will be debuted sometime next week. The organization sustains there will be only 11 languages included in the test such as Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

"Right now only the ASCII characters a through z are available for use in top level labels — the part of the address after the dot. Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the languages of world," the same ICANN representative added.

Do Perfect Domain Names Exist ?

Tips for domain names selection


Source

When you decide to have a website on Internet, first you must register a domain name. A domain name is a text corresponding to an IP address that makes your Internet presence unique. The domain name will represent the address of your website, such as www.yourdomainname.com. The suffix, .com (in this case) defines the top level domain (TLD). The selection of the domain name is a key factor to your site success.

The domain name has many influences over search engine ranking, website accessibility and if you run a web based business or conduct actions of Internet marketing, it will make your success or not, depending on how good you will define it. It is recommended to choose the domain name in accordance to the products, services or information that your site will provide. If you want to provide a variety of services, for the best marketing results it is preferable to choose individual domain names for every service. In case your web site describes products or services provided by your company, the domain name should be your company name. In this way you can have an online business card 24 hours a day and also the chance to increase the power of a brand, if you previously created one.

Your website domain name should be kept short and easy to remember by your site visitors or potential customers. It is well known the fact that people search often the existence of a .com domain as compared with .info. The top level domain of type .com will be indexed by search engines in a different manner than .info, meaning that .com has a higher priority in this case. The name of your domain could be a single word or two words, like www.mydomain-name.com. You should also avoid having a domain name similar with an existing one, because it is possible to confuse your site visitors and in this case you can lose many of them. If it is possible, you can choose a domain name corresponding to terms that makes the object of popular searches.

Or after you decided over a domain name you should try to conduct searches on various search engines to see other websites and their domain names. You can use search keywords popularity tools for various search engines. The problem is that many searches are performed using key phrases and this method of choosing a domain name will not always guarantee the success of your domain name. Another suggestion for the selection of your domain name is the use of text generators or crossword puzzles.

The perfect domain name is an ideal concept and you refer to it when searching or defining a domain name for your website and following some general admitted rules to make the domain name optimal for your website or business. Choosing a right domain name is not enough to ensure a certain level of success for your website in many cases. This action should be followed by many other marketing techniques in order to gain the desired website or domain popularity.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

How To Choke More Cash from Adsense

Want one of these?


Ah. I thought so.

We all know that the blogger’s primary monetization tool is Adsense. It fast to setup, free to deploy and pretty much set-and-forget. Understandably, Adsense’ popularity readily spawned scores of experts who’d sell you secret adsense tips to generate checks that incite spontaneous salivation. Fork over $79 and you get a PDF chockful of common sense… and lots of free space for your notes.

Let’s save you some cash shall we? For the next few minutes, I’ll lay bare five methods I’ve used over the years to generate at least $2000 a month in adsense revenues for one site.

Tip #1 Ditch the popular notion of blending in your ads. Respectable folks from Michael Cheny to Joel Comm assert that well-blended ads encourage clicks. I’ve found it to be the opposite. Blend in the ads too much and they become invisble. You want sexy ads that compels an almost automatic click, hence I suggest dressing up your ad to look a tad different:





Snazzy isn’t it? With a bit of photoshop savvy, you can create dressy borders for your ads that beg for clicks. Too bummed to fire up Adobe? You can do it the lazy way and buy some images at adsensebackgrounds.com.

Word of warning though. Don’t line up images to the left of the ad, making it appear that the images are bullet points. This can get your Adsense account closed.

Tip #2 Take random headshots of Authority Figures and plant them into your articles on the right side of the starting paragraph. Then, position your ads to the left and slightly below the headshot. Pull this off masterfully, and your visitors will think that the ads are recommended resources of this Authority Figure and click on them all day long! It works great because of the Cialdini Principle of Authority

Here’s a graphical representation of the strategy.



Tip #3 Lavish the top and left side of your pages with big ads- these locations are hot click magnets. Keeping them elsewhere robs 70% of their CTR power.

Tip #4 Avoid the Leader Board or 468×60 ad size. These scream ADS!! and people merrily blind themselves to this abomination. A single 336 x 280 ad per page on the upper fold can be the most potent campaign for your article and blog site.

Tip #5. Position some ads below the Quick Reply button on your blog or forum. People will be forced to read the ad and sometimes they may even click on it accidentally. You hope.



Disclaimer: This last tactic may be deemed black hat so I took it down last year before getting a love note from Google. Nonetheless, it made me so many clicks - almost 300 a day on one blog.

Tip #6 Branch out to Non-Blog sites. Blogging takes a horrendous amount of personal time. Tell me- how long does it take for you to write an article? Ten minutes? An hour? I’m sure you’d love to make money on automatic pilot! I therefore recommend starting sites where the user generates your killer content and click on your ads while at it. Is there such a thing? OF COURSE! And I don’t mean those spammy rss2blog type sites full of scraped content. I’m talking Classifieds, Auction and Job Boards. These are excellent examples. The asian job finder runs on automatic pilot and funnels Adsense, Clickbank and Chitika revenue all without my staff’s management. Employers come in, post jobs and click on my ads. Job seekers surf in, apply for jobs , click my ads, and come back the next day clicking more ads!

Fly high!

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

30 Wasted Domain Names

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Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Cheap Domain Names Fuels Cyber-squatting In Asia

With the costs of domain names falling, cyber-squatting is on the increase. Cyber-squatting has always been a global problem, but now with domain names being as cheap as $3, it is only going to get worse.

Read more here