This article target:
* Small to medium sized businesses (1-300 employees)
* Professional services like Tree trimming, financial advisors, Dentists, and hundreds more.
* For ecommerce websites, the methods discussed do apply but ecommerce requires extra help which will be covered in a different article.
Methods discussed here you can certainly do yourself and make Google magic happen and you don’t have to pay a pricey conventional search engine optimization company or freelancer to do them except for some notable exceptions.
But, hold on a minute there a minute Sparky…
I don’t want to give you the impression that you can head south for the Winter once you do as many of these suggestions as you can. No, no, but I am saying do it yourself to learn what the process is like and help your garden grow. It is satisfying and fun when you get results. You will get results.
To get the best return on your website investment hire a search engine marketing professional and do the list below and ask him if you get stuck, find out if he’s doing the same things, if not — Why not? As you become more knowledgeable in the ways of SEO, your professional service provider will come to respect you and will be more attentive to your needs because he thinks you know enough about his methods. It’s an excellent way to get respect and better performance from your conventional pricey search engine optimization professional or your affordable search engine marketing professional.
Listen, I have a few clients that can talk intelligently about DMOZ, or FaceBook, or Twitter, and deep linking. I am always impressed and feel like comfortable talking about my methods to a client who doesn’t glaze over in the eyeballs when the discussion turns to deep Backlinking. I purposely keep my conversation in basic English so as not to put prospects and clients to sleep talking about top level domains and the importance of having 65 characters in your title tag which is the most important
tag in a website’s header.
So, here’s what you can do.
I am assuming the following:
o You know how to use a Google search bar o You have a browser, like Firefox or IE8. I recommend Firefox because you can search for any word on an entire Google search results page. The browser even highlights the word found within the all 100 listings. o You know how to set whatever browser you use to search for 100, not 10 listings. o You need the Google toolbar. You can get if free on Google. Be sure to get the PageRank option too.
There are certain talents that I suppose you can learn, like you could learn to play piano, you could learn to do creative keyword research, but do you have that much time to spend away from your business?
You will l need a search engine optimization expert to do certain things. Don’t reinvent the wheel. For example: o Don’t do your own keyword research. The Google model and new Caffeine architecture requires a formidable professional keyword research talent because your keyword research is the #1 cornerstone of your website’s success.
Don’t try this at home.
- Same with your tag is ignored by Google these days.
- You will run across what seem to be amazing SEO deals on the Internet like “Get your website listed on FaceBook and all the social media sites — or get your website automatically listed on 500 internet directories, or 1000 backlinks for $50.00. These are all scams, mostly run by overseas web-pirates.
- As a small business, if you are paying more than $1000.00 for a one year SEO service, revisit the situation. You need to look harder, compare prices, services, credibility, and trustworthiness.
Here is what you can do to strengthen your website, and how to do it.
- List your website business by category on DMOZ – is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. You have to have a listing. Period. Finding the right category for what you do can be frustrating. Stick with it. You have to be listed. Period, again.
- Don’t pay money to be submitted to a million search engines. Once you’re indexed on Google, the rest fall into place.
- You can get indexed on Google by opening a free Twitter account and Tweet yourself. Sounds painful, but being tweeted is interesting. If you know someone with a Twitter account, have them Tweet. You. What do they Tweet, just the URL of your website. An URL is spelled with the http and: and // but a domain is just the domain name.
- How do you know if your indexed on Google or not? Easy, put the following in the Google search bar. (Not your browser’s address bar, only the Google search bar will work. Exactly enter site (colon)yourdomain com if Google reports: Your search – yourdomain com did not match any documents, then you can’t be found on Google even though you appear when you put your domain in the address bar. Confusing, nope, just read very carefully what was just written. It is critical that you are indexed on Google, or you are invisible to the world and beyond.
- Start building backlinks. Find blogs that are related to what your website is about. Make a comment on the blog and be sure to include your URL, not your domain name. When your comment is published by the blog owner, your website gets 3 Gold Stars from Google. Try to do one or two a day. This experience is great promotion for your site and you get to see other designs, read some well optimized text, see what graphics are useful and which are stupid. You will see blogs that are practically nothing but advertising, OK to comment but pretty worthless as contributing good content to the internet. Many of these blogs are just ad money scams.
- Become familiar with your competition. This is the most important way to promote your site. Do what the top 5 indexed sites are doing. Figure it out do the same. That’s the key to this whole approach, beat the competition.The trick is to find a balance of how much time you can put into the promotion process and the time needed to run your business and maybe do stuff you used to do before you get hooked on this. Some people get addicted to promoting their own website. Balance, and do what your competition does, that’s all there is.
My next article could include more starter methods, maybe not because if you get into the points listed above you will find out more ways to promote your own site. The trick is to find a balance of how much time you can put into the promotion process and the time needed to run your business and maybe do stuff you used to do before you get hooked on this. Some people get addicted to promoting their own website. Balance, and do what your competition does, that’s all there is.
By Gen Wright
About the Author
To learn more about guerrilla search engine marketing methods visit Search Engine marketing Methods. Rob Wallace has provided a wide variety of internet services over a 12 year career. Website design, conventional search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and affordable guerrilla style search engine marketing. More information about Rob Wallace can be found here: Rob Wallace. Click here to view more articles by Gen Wright.
Reprinted with Permission from IdeaMarketers.com, your source for free content.
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Outside of affiliate marketing, driving traffic to an external website is not what a blogger prioritize… We all want to keep traffic on our blog as long as possible. If you do not like the fact that a user must leave your website only to follow you on Twitter, you should know that it’s not possible with Twitter @Anywhere.
We have tested combination of plugins, widgets and developer tools and managed to put together a widget working with hovercards. We also use the “Posted By” area to show an Hovercard of our Twitter Profile.
This tutorial will show you how to do this on your own blog .
What you need :
- A WordPress Powered Blog. (Not tested on blogs hosted by WordPress.com);
- A plugin that will enable Twitter @Anywhere. (We use this one);
- Xhanch – My Twitter for WordPress;
- API Key for @Anywhere.
Part 1 - How to replace the author link with an hovercard :
First, we need to activate and configure Twitter @Anywhere.
Open the plugin configuration page, enter your API Key and enable Auto-Linkification of @usernames and Hovercards.
Now we need to modify your profile page to show your twitter user name.
- Open your Profile Page
- In the “Nickname” field, enter your Twitter User Name and add a @ at the beginning (@submitopresto)
- Set “Display name publicly as” to show your Twitter User Name.
However, adding an hovercard over the author name removes the link to the profile page. Do this unless you want to keep a link to your profile page.
You should now see an hovercard like the one pictured above.
It doesn’t work ?
- Make sure the plugin Twitter @Anywhere is enabled and configured.
- You can also try this plugin : Edit Author Slug and switch the value on your profile page (See picture below). This can help remove the link to your profile page and activate hovercard when displaying your Twitter Username (@submitopresto). You can enter whatever you want since nothing will show up online. As stated, use this only if hovercards aren’t working.
Part 2 – How to Add a Twitter Widget That Work With Hovercards.
First, if you have not activated Twitter @Anywhere, this is the time to do it. (See first part)
Because @anywhere is pretty new, most of the widgets won’t work with Hovercards. However, it is possible to add a Twitter Widget that work with hovercards.
- Download, activate and configure Xhanch – My Twitter;
- Go to the plugin configuration panel;
- Deactivate “Clickable User Tag” and let @Anywhere do the work;
- Drag the Widget to activate.
You can modify the content and look of the widget easily.
Please share and let me know if you encounter any issue.
Posted in Blogging by .
It’s new and official: Google decided to take site speed into account in their search rankings.
How do I improve my website speed? By reducing the number of web requests and improving the response rate of your website for these requests.
Should I rewrite and recode my website to accommodate this new search engine ranking factor? Clearly, no! As stated by Matt Cutts: the current implementation mentions that fewer than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking.
That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page. So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge.
However, we should not ignore the speed rate of our website, not only to improve our search engine ranking but to improve the visitor experience. Do you remember landing on a website where no content would show up because of a poor hosting or poor website optimization? Did you bookmark this website? Did you plan to visit this website again? I guess not.
Increase your website speed, improve your visitors experience and even reduce your server operation costs with these free tools suggested by Google.
Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
WordPress Plugins
If you are using Wordpress, it is very easy to improve your blog speed using these plugins:
WP Super Cache
Author: Donncha O Caoimh
One of the most popular caching plugin on Wordpress, WP Super Cache generates static html files from your blog. 99% of your visitors will be served static html files. Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see regular WP-Cache cached files and your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.
W3 Total Cache
Author: Frederick Townes
Trusted by many popular sites, W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
Autoptimize
Author: Emilio López
Autoptimize makes optimizing your site really easy. It concatenates all scripts and styles, minifies and compresses them, adds expires headers, caches them, and moves styles to the page head, and scripts to the footer. It also minifies the HTML code itself, making your page really lightweight.
External Files Optimizer
Author: Julien Appert
Description: automatically combine and compress css/js files generate with wp_head() and wp_footer().
This plugin greatly reduce the number of queries sent for your website, however, after testing on SubmitoPresto.com, it broke the layout. I think it’s because we are using a lot of plugins and a relatively complex template. So we suggest to use External Files Optimizer only on basic template and test before implementation.
Scripts Gzip
Author: Edward Hevlund
Merge and compress the CSS and JS links on the pages of your Wordpress Blog.
After scripts_gzip. Scripts and CSS files have been combined and compressed.
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Article marketing has now become an essential promotion technique and an effective strategy to target visitors to a website or online business. The low production cost and simplicity to promote online, make articles marketing the number one Internet promotion method for new business.
Internet article marketing, is an Internet marketing technique to subtly advertise products and services via online article directories. Most directories receive a high volume of traffic and are considered authority sites by search engines, which often results in submitted articles receiving substantial free traffic.
Internet marketers will often try to maximize the results of an article marketing campaign by submitting their promotion to multiple article directories. However, most search engines filter duplicate content to prevent the same content from appearing multiple times in searches. Some marketers try to circumvent this filter by creating multiple variations of an article. By doing this, one article can theoretically gain traffic from multiple article directories.
Article marketing is costless
It is a part of the least expensive and most often free ways of Internet marketing. If you are running on a small budget or just love to produce content, article marketing does not require anything more than a few hours to reach a topic to write hundreds of possible articles.
There are a few article directories that show how you can manage your article, including statistics such as number of hits or the exact number of ezines to which your article could have been distributed. It is rather easy to verify if your article marketing efforts are effective or not. You will also have access to all the improvements needed to promote your business online.
Only to name a few…
Many forget about the phrase “The sky is the limit” when it comes to determining what to write about. You can write about your passion, for your hobby, your experience and some other ideas. Do you want more ideas? Just visit the article directories and many will surely tell you the topics and give you the content to write.
In Article Marketing, you can get very targeted traffic, if you promote for ranking in Google, which will help your business very much. Readers read only what interests them and publishing articles for both your company and general info on the subject can lead readers who already are contributing to your business to theservices or products you sell.
Viral Marketing
It is simply no more than the word about what you offer to the visitors of your website. Then a person says to another person, another person tells his/her friends and you have your own campaign of viral marketing.
Article marketing, together with the power of viral marketing works very well. What follows then is that you distribute your product to the majority of all more important directories and ezines. Other method, could be to use your position and rank it on your website and promote – that’s the viral effect that you should seek. As most webmasters do, you will have to place your articles in the appropriate area and the biggest possible number of catalogs or e-zines to attract more and more visitors to your online business.
Article directories have a very good traffic and good Google PR, so if you post your information there this increases the likelihood that people will read and see what you try to say. Furthermore, article directories will allow visitors copy and publish your article, unless the article is not changed and that will remain together with the resource box.
This signifies that your article will end up with your links in several places with a lot of exposure. That on its side means a lot of backlinks and traffic for you. When you convert that traffic into sales, you can earn money. Yes, it’s that simple!
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Many online business owners spend way too much time planning for and developing their website. They put up killer content on their website, and come up with killer products. But when it comes to promoting their website, they are lost. It is not uncommon to come across a website every now and then with killer products, but it feels like a ghost town. There is no one visiting the site!
There are many ways to promote a website.
You can choose to buy clicks, execute article marketing campaigns, or post on blogs. Your internet marketing strategy should encompass as many traffic generation methods as possible. This is because if there is a traffic source that dries up, that would not be the end of your internet business. So many new online business owners make this mistake. They have just one single traffic source and when that traffic source becomes saturated, they stop making any more money.
When you start an online business, you want your business to earn you income month after month. Therefore, you should seriously look at various traffic generation methods that will give you long term traffic. Article marketing and blog posting are two such methods.
Both article marketing and blog posting can give you long term results because all those links are already out there. Since your articles are published on various article directories and blogs, you won’t be so easily affected even if a few of these sites went offline. There are still others that will continue to bring you traffic month after month.
In addition, search engines will find those links, and find your websites. The more links that point to your sites, the better your sites will rank in the search engines. And that is a major traffic source!
The process of building back links with article marketing and blog posting is rather similar. First, you start off by creating an article. You will then submit your article to article directories, or offer them to other bloggers to post on their blogs.
The only difference between the two methods is that you cannot include your links in the articles that you submit to the article directories. Instead, all links should be reserved for the author resource box. Usually, for article directories, they accept up to two live links. For blog posting, blog owners tend to accept up to three live links.
However, you would probably have noticed by now that article submission or blog posting is a very time consuming process. Submitting a single article to hundreds of article directories can take up a few hours of your time. As an online business owner, your time far too valuable to be spent on article submission.
Fortunately, you can easily outsource these tasks to article submission or blog posting service providers. These are professional companies that will help get all the grunt work done for you, while you continue to focus on developing your own business. So seriously consider outsourcing article submission and blog posting, and watch your back links and traffic grow.
by Gen Wright
About the Author
For more information on Article Submission Service and Blog Posting Service, please visit our website. Nationsubmit has provided a trustworthy and effective link building service for nearly 2 years. Click here to view more articles by Gen Wright.Reprinted with Permission from IdeaMarketers.com, your source for free content.
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