A Day in the Life of an SEO Pro!

5:30am Get up and turn on the computer. Grab a cup of joe while it downloads my emails. A SEO business is never closed, even though I checked my email last night at 2:00am, there are still over 30 new ones (not including spam!) - mostly from customers.
So I spend the next hour replying to emails and deleting spam.

6:30am With the emails done, I make a start on the real work of the day - linking. I am currently on a linking project for a customers site. The ease is there but I am just ironing out some of the 'behind the bid' issues. The key to a good SEO Pro is to have everything ready automatically so that customers don't have to wait and the site owner doesn't have to deal with every single transaction that takes place.

9:00am I run into a problem with a software script that I purchased yesterday - basically it doesn't work and I need it for a new site. Obviously it comes with support, but I purchased it from an UK company which means that due to the time difference, I probably won't be able to get any assistance until later this afternoon. I send an email anyway and hope for the best.....

9:10am Wow, I get a reply back from the software developer - it must be about 2am in the UK but he is still working! He agrees to fix the problem and install the script on my website. I leave him to it and go to have a beer.

9:30am Ok, more problems, the software guy is telling me that the reason the script doesn't work is because of my web host. I phone them up and they tell me that the problem is with the software - oh great, I am stuck in the middle! Unfortunately, I use one of the largest web hosts so they don't take too much notice when I tell them that my software chap in the UK thinks there is something wrong with their configuration settings!

11:30am Two hours and 4 beers later and I am still going back and forth between the software guy and my host. We don't seem to be getting any further and the last telephone conversation with the host involved them telling me that they don't offer support for third party scripts and there was nothing more they could do. I find this somewhat irritating as I am paying them well over $1000 a year for hosting and support calls and the software guy is earning a fraction of that and still hasn't been to bed yet!

11:35am The web host phones back with a solution, I pass it on to the software guy. His opinion - dump my host.

11:47am Software guy is back and everything works - I thank him for his efforts and work out that it is probably around 6.30am in the UK and he has been up all night. Now that's what I call customer service. This is one of the reasons that I like to deal with small businesses - they care more about you and make a effort to keep you happy.

Happy that the script is now working satisfactorily, I check my emails again - another 25 have arrived since I last looked, so I spend 45 minutes sorting them out.

12:15pm Emails finished and I really want to get the website done so that I can start the next one tomorrow. I am going away tomorrow evening and I want to review it before I go, otherwise it could be delayed for 5 days.

12:30pm I have a brainwave for a new website and get sidetracked into doing a bit of research on the Web to see if anyone else has already set up a similar site.......

12:45pm I can't find anything like my idea on the search engines, so I figure that even if someone has already thought of it, if I can't find it then no one else will be able to. I forget all about the site that I am supposed to be working on and start designing a home page for my new idea.

2:00pm That's the problem with the Internet - it is too easy to get sidetracked into other things! I have just wasted over an hour playing around with a new site - a new site that I have no time to build.

2:15pm Right, I am back on the job and the new website is ready to go. I need to draft up an announcement email to send to my customer to tell him about the site.

3:15pm After typing up a long announcement email, I bore myself reading it and decide it is just too long. I cut it down to a couple of paragraphs and upload it to my mailing list manager for sending tomorrow.

4:00pm I realise that I haven't had anything to eat except for a couple of cigarettes first thing this morning, so I take a break and have a beer.

4:30pm Back at my desk (I am sure I got a full hour lunchbreak when I had a job!) Another batch of emails to reply to and a customer having a problem with finding his links which needs sorting out. Customer service comes before everything else, so I spend the next 30 minutes trying to fix the problem and eventually get things working for the customer.

5:00pm By this time of the day, my eyes are usually getting pretty tired from staring at a computer screen for hours, so I don't normally do anything too 'important'. It is a good time to drink a beer and surf around and see what other people are doing online.

6:00pm Have just remembered that I promised to review an website for a colleague and get back to him today with my opinion - I haven't even seen it yet! I hope it isn't too bad....

7:00pm Phew, it was only 30 pages, so I sent off an email with my comments. Just a few more emails to deal with and then I am turning the computer off for a couple of hours.

7:30pm - 10:00pm Dinner and slump in front of the television time!

10:00pm Quickly check my emails again before going on a beer run. I don't like to leave anyone waiting for longer than 8 hours without a response - I know how frustrating it can be waiting for a reply.

11.00pm Quick check to see if any spammers have hit my favorite forum!

2:00am And it's time for the East coast shift to start. Man, I need a beer.
Thank God it's only Monday morning!!

How To Get Instant Traffic To Your Website For Only A Nickel A Lead!

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective methods of getting leads known to Internet business owners. It gives you instant traffic, and allows you to test your business model in real time.

At the same time, pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is not as simple to use as the PPC companies will have you believe. If you jump into the system without preparing for ‘tracking' your results, doing deep keyword research, establishing your ROI and most importantly, testing your ads, you'll lose a lot of money really fast.

Before we start talking about the major PPC engines, here's a brief overview of what you need to know.

The Basics Of Pay Per Click

There are some terms that you should know if you want to understand any discussion on PPC. Some of these are self-explanatory, some you might have heard before. Either way, go through this section and make sure to read those parts that you don't know of.

The PPC Model

In the PPC advertising model, you have three core elements – keywords , ads , and bids . These three elements are combined with ‘ placement ' to create an advertising model that displays ‘relevant' ads on search engines (in response to keyword searches), portals and websites that opt to display such ads on their pages (the ads to be shown are determined by a keyword analysis of the page).

For a PPC campaign, you need to know the keywords that you are targeting. For example, for a niche site that promotes a time management product, I would create a list of keywords that included keyword groups containing terms related to time management, productivity, saving time, self improvement and maybe even business soft skills. As I've told you before about keyword research, you should have a big list so that you capture most, if not all, of your target traffic.

The next step is to write the ad copy for the ads that will be displayed for your searches. The ad copy is extremely important because along with your bid amount, this will determine the ‘conversion rate' (explained below) of your ads. Write concise, compelling ad copy that highlights the benefits of your website / product, and avoid fluff.

Once you've written your ads, it's time to bid . The bidding mechanism differs from PPC engine to engine, but the idea is the same – your bid amount is the maximum cost (usually calculated in U.S. dollars) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. It's important to know how much you can afford in terms of bidding costs so that you avoid going into bidding wars with your competitors, and also so that you don't spend more than you make through this campaign.

Cost-Per-Click

Cost-Per-Click ( CPC ) is the amount you pay each time a potential customer ‘clicks' on one of your ads that they see on their search engine results or on websites. This is often less than the maximum bid amount you set for each keyword.

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is the ratio of clicks over impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed on searches or page loads on websites). A typical conversion rate is between 2 to 3 percent – that is, for every 100 impressions, you get 2-3 clicks on your ads.

Conversion Rate is closely tied in with the quality of your ad copy , and also with Placement , which I'll discuss next.

Placement

If there is more than one person bidding for a keyword (as is almost always the case), the placement of the ads (which ad comes in on the first slot, which comes in on the second, etc.) is determined by bid amounts of each competitor. The higher your bid, the better your placement (Google adds the conversion rate into their placement calculations, and I'll tell you how later). Your conversion rate to a certain extent depends on how high your ad is placed on the ‘rankings' and this leads advertisers to place high bids just to rank at the top. The trouble with this approach is that you might enter into a bidding war with your competitors and lose a lot of money.

Tracking

Tracking refers to measuring which keywords are bringing you the best leads or sales, and which keywords are bringing you ‘window shoppers' – people who are ‘compulsive clickers' and don't buy or sign up. Tracking your ad campaign will help you further fine-tune your ads and improve your ROI.

ROI

Your Return-on-Investment (ROI) is determined by how much you are spending over how much you are earning in net profits from your ad campaign. It's important to establish a base ROI before your start your ad campaign – assume a conversion rate of 1 percent – so that you don't over-spend and are able to run this campaign within your budget.

The Pay-Per-Click World

Currently, there are two major PPC engines, Google AdWords and Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing ). While there are many alternatives such as Espotting (now Miva), MetricsDirect and Kanoodle, the top two PPC engines are a class apart when it comes to delivering results.

However, one of the first pieces of advice you'll hear from most people is that bigger PPC engines such as AdWords and Overture are too ‘expensive' to break into (with CPC for top positions easily passing $3-$4 for many keywords, and reaching $10 for really competitive keywords).

In reality, if you are just starting out, it's critical that you pick one of the top two PPC engines. Why?

Traditionally marketers judge PPC engines on the following criteria:

Reach – How large your potential target market is.

Cost-per-click

Quality of traffic – Do the leads fit your customer profile? Are the willing to spend on your products?

Quality of service – The tools and help offered by the PPC engines.

Overture and AdWords beat their competition on all of these metrics except CPC. However, the benefits of ‘cheaper' clicks are more than compensated for by the ease of use of the big two, and more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, the quality of traffic from Overture and AdWords is far better than from other PPC engines.

Overture

Overture was purchased by Yahoo!, and recently renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing. The name's not catchy, but with Yahoo! Behind the ‘second-largest' PPC engine on the Internet, you can expect that the quality of traffic and services will improve over the next year. Yahoo's acquisition of Overture is the single biggest reason advertisers have started paying attention to Overture again, although Google AdWords still commands leading respect.

Overture is a manually edited PPC engine. When you write ads for your website, these ads (and the keywords you specify) have to be approved by human editors before they can appear in search results on Overture partner websites. While this ensures that the quality of ads remains above a certain level, this is also a hassle, as new ad campaigns can take several days to be approved, and there is a distinct lag between the time you plan to improve a section of your campaign (for testing) and the time those changes actually go live.

Overture keyword bids are totally transparent, meaning that any advertiser can see at any time what other advertisers are paying for that particular keyword. This is both useful and harmful – advertisers can accurately target their ‘ad placement' positions, but knowledge of the top 2 or top 3 bid amounts can easily lead into a bidding war, and competitors undercutting your ads by posting a bid that is $0.01 higher than yours.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords is the leading PPC engine on the Internet, although it's closely followed by Overture. Combined, the two PPC networks are distributed on nearly every search engine or portal.

Google is totally automated – your ads go live within minutes of being written. This is one of the two significant advantages AdWords has over its competition – no need to wait for ‘approval' of your keywords and ads, which can take a few days on other PPC engines.

Google AdWords, like Overture, does not charge you your maximum bid amount, but just one cent more than the bid lower than yours. On the other hand, AdWords bids are not transparent like Overture – bidders have no idea what their competition is bidding. This reduces the threat of bidding wars.

The second advantage of AdWords is that it includes conversion rate calculations in its ad-ranking algorithm. Simply put, your ad may rank higher than your competitors' even if you are bidding lower, just because you have a higher conversion rate. AdWords rewards ads that are better written, and thus provides a subtle barrier against ad spam.

PPC advertising has become the ultimate marketing tool for testing new ad campaigns, business models and landing pages without spending too much money. Where else can you test a sales page by sending it 100 leads for $5?

If you are looking to promote your website / product effectively but cannot wait for your search engine rankings to show on Google or Yahoo, you should seriously consider PPC advertising as an advertising tool that not only brings in instant traffic (and sales), but is a hedge against ranking fluctuations by ensuring that you stay on the top page for your target keywords.

This is just a general overview of Pay Per Click marketing/strategies. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon, where I'll go into some much more advanced techniques to really ramp up your traffic, all the while spending less money!

SEO Tools

When you think of SEO tools, the first thing that comes to mind is paid-for, powerful programs like SEO Elite. The fact is, there are many no-cost, small-scale and highly useful SEO tools available on the Internet. Looking for keywords? Got it. Looking to check your website's rankings for particular keywords? Got it. Link popularity? Got it. Keyword density? Got that as well.

Free Link Popularity Check

The folks at Axandra have a useful tool that you can use to check the link popularity of any number of websites across several search engines. A must-have tool to keep a regular check on your websites.

Find out more about Free Link Popularity Check.

NicheBot

If you are looking to do keyword research, WordTracker is the tool of choice for building huge keyword lists. But the service comes with a price, and if you are looking for a free alternative that still packs a decent punch, NicheBot is the tool you should be using. It uses both WordTracker (the trial version) and Overture to generate keyword lists, and pulls data from Google to give you basic competitor information and search results' numbers.

NicheBot also allows you to save and export your selected keywords, making it the ideal choice for new webmasters who don't want to invest in a professional keyword research service like WordTracker.

Digital Point

With an Alexa rank of 525 (as of June 2005), DP is second only to WebmasterWorld in this article in terms of popularity. Digital Point boasts a vast array of webmaster and SEO tools, including keyword research tools, back links tools and keyword position tools. Registration, although free, is required to use many of these tools. Definitely an excellent choice for business owners who prefer a hands-on approach to their search engine marketing campaigns.

Digital Point also has a vibrant forum community, which has sprung up around the popularity of the various tools and services that DP provides.

Visit Digital Point Tools and Digital Point Forums.

SEO Tools

When you have a whole web site dedicated to providing quality SEO tools for free, you know that you are getting a great deal. SEO Tools betters many of the ‘regular' SEO tools by mixing up the staple tools such as keyword density and backlink analysis with search engine spider simulations and similar page comparisons, as well as that almost forgotten tool for checking your website in different resolutions (you still do that, don't you?).

Visit SEO Tools.

There are many other excellent SEO tools available for free on the Internet:

Good Keywords – A resource for analyzing your competition for your primary keywords so you know what they are doing, and what you need to do on your own web site to beat them.

Keyword Tumbler – An unusual resource that gives you all possible combinations for each key phrase in your keyword list. Good for a PPC campaign.

Webmaster Toolkit – Another collection of SEO tools targeted towards the practical and not-so-professional SEO webmaster.

As you can see, there are many, many quality SEO resources, forums and tools available on the Internet for free.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

If you don't participate in forums, pick one of the 4 (5 if you include Digital Point) from the list above and browse around. Find a topic you want to participate in. Have a problem you want a peer's opinion on? Register and make your first post. Just a simple step towards interacting with the webmaster community will take you a long way towards helping you build your business.

Anything in the SEO tools list that you think you can use? If you are limited to Overture searches for your keywords, try using NicheBot, and then take your results to Keyword Tumbler. How do you manage your website's progress through the search engines? Take Digital Point or the SEO Chat tools for a spin.

Whatever you do, take something away from both of these lists, and I can guarantee that you will improve your search engine rankings in a significant way.

What is relevance in SEO?

What is relevance in SEO?

“Relevance" is a central concept in search engine marketing, but you will be hard pressed to find any reasonable definition for it. Most SEO Pros take the term for granted, and the rest of us just nod along It is not very complicated, but it does involve some very core ideas, so listen closely.

In SEO, relevance is a criteria used by search engines to determine the importance of a target (page, keyword, website) within a niche. Since search engines are primarily concerned with serving user queries, the role of relevance comes up most often during searches. For example, if I search for the term “search marketing" on Google, the search engine will analyse its index and provide me a list of web pages ranked by how “relevant" they are to “search marketing" – in this case the top result is www.overture.com, now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Note that search engines don't explicitly deal with niches or categories of websites. Instead, an SE treats the Internet as a loosely defined grouping of topical pages, with those topics forming sub-groups of their own.

Search engines and relevance

Search engines assume that websites in general will follow the mantra of “information-targeting", with the ideal website in a niche being the one that is most relevant to that niche. Sounds simple, right?

Here is where it gets interesting. Search engines measure relevance on different levels, or different categories if you may. Once you understand the above definition, they all make sense by themselves. For starters, there is content relevance – is this page's content relevant to a search query (and that query's projected niche)? This is where on-page optimization is so important. Search engines use keywords to measure relevance, but they aren't checking for keyword density; in fact, they are checking for keyword placement in the page.

A second criteria is link relevance – whether the sites linking to you are “relevant" – i.e. in the same niche (or closely related to the niche), and whether the sites YOU link to are relevant as well. This is, in a nutshell, off-page optimization or link-building.

Relevance in search engine optimization has been the biggest stumbling block for webmasters – the concept is so important that every aspect of SEO is governed by it, but yet so obvious that many of us overlook it.

How useful is keyword density

Keyword density was once the single most important criteria for judging the value of a webpage. I'm talking back in the pre-Google era (now if THAT doesn't give you a hint about how outdated keyword density is…). However, with Google's PageRank algorithm and the general trend towards off-page factors determining more and more of your website's rankings – the importance of keyword density as an on-page optimization tool diminished. People continued to theorize about what the ideal keyword density should be, and estimates ranged from 2% to 8%. Keyword density, in case you are wondering, is measured by the following formula:

Keyword Density Formula

d = x / y where:

x = No. of times a keyword is used in a block of content (page)

y = total word count of the page

d = keyword density

The problem with keyword density is quite simple – it is very, very easy to manipulate and spam. Spammers used automated content generators to create highly optimized web pages with high keyword densities. As search engines started to set limits on “acceptable" keyword density, spammers got smarter and smarter and reduced their keyword density as well, making it especially hard for search engines to separate spam content from genuine, useful content.

Search Engines and Keyword Density

Since search engines could not conceivably check every page manually (As a rough estimate, Google indexes 8.1 billion pages – and pages are added daily), and they couldn't tolerate spam in their search results, search engines devalued keyword density as a ranking tool. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if keyword density did NOT affect your rankings – in fact, keyword positioning (placing the keywords in title tags and header tags) as well as thematic keyword relevance (a fancy term that refers to how related your core keywords are to your website's main theme or niche) is far more important in terms of on-page optimization. And that, of course, pales in comparison to how important off-page optimization, or link building, is.

So, if possible, ignore the bounds of keyword density and focus on the following:

Good, useful, quality content

Keyword positioning

Keyword relevance

And once you're done with the basics, move on to the next page (or start building links).

Do web pages need a minimum number of words to rank well?

There's a myth going around in some search engine forums that you should have a minimum word count for web pages to satisfy search engine requirements.

Let's put that myth to rest – there's no minimum requirement for web pages to rank well – in fact, there are many, many web pages that rank at the top position for highly competitive terms WITHOUT having too many words on them – for example, a search for the term “resume samples" on Google gives a top result of a page that has ONLY links on it – no serious content. This is a highly competitive term with over 150,000 searches each month according to Yahoo Search Marketing – a figure that translates to almost a million searches each month on Google.

And a links page is on top of the pile (click on the link to see it - resume samples).

In other words, word count is not the defining criteria for high rankings – you could have 250 words, or 500, or 1000, or even just a 100 words, but that is still a small part of your on-page optimization, which in itself plays a small part in determining your website's rankings.

In practice, you will always have different types of pages – some will be main pages for the website or link pages (both usually lacking too much content), while others will be article or informative pages with loads of content. The key is to work on the right page structure for each type of page, and not the word count.

How often should I change the anchor text in my backlinks?

The short answer to that is: pretty often. The long answer?

Well, it starts with a definition.

Whenever we talk about link-building, it seems necessary to mention organic SEO – where other websites link to your website “by themselves" (as opposed to an “artificial" link exchange) because they genuinely find it useful. Why is this important? Because once you understand what search engines are looking for in links, you'll know how to dominate the rankings.

Relevant to the question, search engines try to measure the “originality" of the link – that is, the chances that this link was natural or “artificial". Since most of the links (and almost all of the ones that you will get in the beginning) pointing to your website are artificial, you have to make them look organic to avoid any penalties from the search engines.

For example, suppose that you are setting up a website on SEO – assuming that you have the on-page optimization done and dusted, let's talk about how you can regularly change your anchor text.

Your Anchor Link Strategy

First, we take your core list of keywords:

SEO techniques

Learn SEO

SEO tips

SEO services

And so on. Now, take each keyword, work it in an attractive headline and write 1-2 lines describing your website – no hype, no keyword spamming – make it attractive and useful to the reader. Make sure that each description is different – it cannot be totally different, but it should change a bit.

If you do that for each keyword, you have 10 or more sets of link details – the headline makes the anchor text and the 2 lines will act as a description. Once you have this set, start from the first combination and switch to the next one after 25-30 links.

This way you can cycle through your list and maybe get to 300 to 400 backlinks before you get through your set of anchor text and description combinations. If you have fewer core keywords (a tiny niche), you can space out the changes – say every 50 links or so.

What to do when the list is up? Alter the anchor text and descriptions for each keyword and do that for the whole list, then start all over.

If you follow this formula not only will you be able to regularly alter your anchor text (and thus make the link-building process look natural), but by targeting so many keywords within the list you can also end up ranking highly for all of them.

Steps You Should Take To Optimize Your Website.

Often, I'm asked, "lowster, what do I need to do to my website to make it rank high in the search engines?". Well, pay close attention to this lesson because I'm going to take a website at random and show you exactly what I would do to optimize this website.

First, we'll go to Google to find a website. I'll enter the search term "toy trains" and hope that it'll bring us back some possible websites that need to be optimized. This is the keyword we're going to try to rank well for.

Ok, after doing this, I'm going to look in the right hand results of Google (Adwords). The reason I'm doing this is because those websites are typically websites that aren't optimized very well. They are websites that are simply paying Google to be located in those positions.

Ok, you'll see that I have an arrow pointing to "www.train-yard.net". This is the website that we're going to optimize.

Onpage Ranking Factor Changes...

The first steps we'll take are to optimize all of the "onpage ranking factors". If you don't know or remember what those are, refer back to lesson 2, I believe...

Page Title

You'll notice that this website does not include the keyword "toy trains" in the title of the page. It's current title is "Train Yard". So, what we'll want to do is change the title of the page to: Toy Trains

The .html code you would use to do this is: Toy Trains

Meta Tags

If we click the "view" link in the menu bar of Internet Explorer, then click "source", we can have a quick look at the .html code that makes up this website. Now, you don't need to understand html to change or add meta tags. Once we've clicked the "source" menu option, we'll see a textfile that contains all of the code that makes up this site

What we want to look for is their meta "keyword" tag, and their meta "description" tag.

You'll notice that when viewig the source code of this website, they don't even have meta keyword and meta descriptions tags! They're using something that says ""

Now, I'm not sure what this actually is. It's definitely NOT a type of meta tag that has any relevance to your rankings. So, what we want to do is change that. We'll completely remove ALL of the meta tags. These include:

both tags

Once we've done this, we'll simply add a meta description tag, and a meta keyword tag. This is what we should insert into our code:

Now, you'll notice a couple things.

I mentioned the keyword "toy trains" once in the description, and also each keywords separately in the description.

I only included the plural and singular forms of the keywords in the keyword tag. (This is because we're only optimizing our webpage for 1 keyword. You should normally choose 2-3 keywords per page, and you would just include those other keywords in your tag as well.

H1 Header Tags

Again, we'll need to click "view" then "source" within Internet Explorer. Once the code screen is open, you'll want to click "edit" then "find" and search for the text: h1. This is the html code used to enclose what's called an h1 header tag. You should always include your main keyword within an h1 header tag.

We do this and can't find an h1 header tag anywhere on the page. An h1 header tag would look like this:

Then your keywords

Ok, so what we need to do is add an h1 header tag. We'll use the html code:

Get Your Toy Trains Here

Once we do this, our website will now look like this:

You'll notice that I've replaced the previous text "Welcome to the train yard" because that really wasn't serving a purpose for the page, and have added the text "Get Your Toy Trains Here", which does contain our targeted keyword. You'll always want to place your H1 header tag towards the top of your website. Preferably the top left hand portion of your page. In this case, we just placed it in the top middle, which will work just fine.

H2 Header Tags

Ok, next we want to add what's called an h2 header tag. We do this exactly like we did with the h1 header tag. Except the code to do this is:

Toy Trains

I'll add this tag below the picture. Your h2 tag should always come after your h1 tag.

You'll notice the h2 header tag above is:

"Limited Time Sale On All Toy Trains" and includes our main keyword: Toy Trains

The code used for this is:

Limited Time Sale On All Toy Trains

If at all possible, if you can include ONLY your main keyword in both the h1 tag and h2 tag, that would benefit you the most. In our example, I added a few other words, but if you're creative, you can figure out a sneaky way to add only your main keywords to the header tags

Bolding, Italycizing, underlining

This is something you'll want to do as well. We'll now just go through this webpage and add the keword "toy trains" throughout the webpage. We'll also bold, italicyze, OR underline maybe 1 or two instances of the keyword. Don't go crazy with this. Just make it look natural.

Alt Image Tags

You'll notice that this website has no alt image tags that contain their main keyword "toy trains". The reason I know this is because I clicked "view" then "source" like we did above. I then did a search for the text: alt

The only alt image tags that showed up were:

Train Yard

Products

Contact Us

Policies

News

What we need to do is remove all of those alt image tags completely. They don't really serve a purpose, other than diluting the effectiveness of the alt image tag that we're going to add.

Ok, if you go to the website and hover your mouse over the top graphic:

you'll see that there isn't an alt image tag attached to this image. How do I know this? Well, let's hover our mouse over an image that I know contains an alt image tag.

I hovered my mouse over the "Train Yard" image located on the top left hand side. When I did this, a little popup message came up that said "Train Yard". This is what an alt image tag does. We know that this image has an alt image tag that says "Train Yard".

So, what we'll do is add an alt image tag directly to the BIG picture located in the middle of the website. The picture of their store. To do this, we'll just take their old code for the image, which was:

and we'll add an alt image tag to this, by changing the code to say:

alt="Toy Trains">

Notice I've made the code I added, red. That's all there is to it. Now, when you hover your mouse over the picture, a little popup will appear that says "Toy Trains".

Moving on...

Adding Homepage Links

Add a link from each webpage within our website, that says "Toy Train Home". This link should link back to our main page using this link: http://www.train-yard.net .

Note: It should not link to: index.htm or index.html

For example, we would click on the "products button" located on the left hand side of the site.

This would take us to this page:
http://www.train-yard.net/html/products.html

On this page, we'd add a link that points back to our homepage. I'm going to add this link at the very bottom of the page, as shown below:

We'll do this with every single page within the website. The more pages we can create for our website, the better we'll rank.

Web Page Titles

Next, we'll add the keyword "Toy Trains" to the page title of ALL of our other web pages. For example, we'll continue looking at this page:
http://www.train-yard.net/html/products.html

The current page title is: "Products"

That isn't a very good title to begin with... but what we'll want to do is just add our main keyword to the beginning of the page title. The new title of this page would be: Toy Trains: Products

We'll do this for ALL of our web pages. This makes the search engines see that our website is all about "toy trains" as the page title is very important in the eyes of the search engines.

Now that we've made those changes, I'm going to save the rest for part 2 of this 2 part guide.

In part 2, I'll be covering a few more onpage optimization techniques that we'll be incorporating into this website. I'll also dive into the specifics of the offpage optimization that we'll be performing.

Hope this lesson was of some benefit, if anything, just as a reminder and refresher as to what the very first steps you should take when optimizing any web page should be.

SEO Power Strategies

Do you own an internet business?

Do you want to make money out of your website?

Are you selling a product online?

Silly questions, right? I can hear the resounding “ Duh " all the way over here. But let's see if you can get the next question right:

What is the single most important factor that determines the success or failure of your online business?

Your search engine rankings

Your subscribers' list

The quality of your product/service

After-sales support

Actually, none of the above .

Instead , the one thing that convinces your visitors to buy from you and converts aimless browsers into enthusiastic, paying prospects is... (drum roll) …

Amazing sales copy.

I cannot emphasize this more – your website's copy will be the critical factor in converting those hordes of visitors. You can jazz up your website with Flash menus, hire the best designer in the world to get a captivating, goddess-like site design, and use the best SEO services and tools to guarantee your #1 spot in all the search engines for all your keywords, but if you don't pay attention to your sales copy…

You might as well be pissing away all the money down the drain.

Sales copy, good sales copy, can mean the difference between lukewarm interest and raging hordes clamoring for your product. It can turn around a flagging product and revive your website faster than you can throw visitors at it.

In a nutshell, copywriting is all about selling . It's that simple. But before I go any further, I'll make one thing clear:

I usually don't give much time to copywriting skills because my focus here is to teach you how to blast your website through the roof in your search engine rankings, not how to convert that traffic. However, most of that traffic is no good if you don't know how to use it. A lot of the websites I've recently reviewed (skimmed over, rather) suffer from a variation of the same problem:

The sales copy needed a LOT of improving.

Here's a truth in marketing – whatever you have, whether its market share or monthly profits or conversion rates, it can always be improved.

Now whether you are pulling in your weight in gold every week or your copy really, really needs to be improved, read on ahead because you will always find room for improvement in your sales writing.

But like I said, this is an SEO newsletter and as such, I will compress a LOT of strategies, little tips and grand principles into as small a space as I can. So pay close attention as we dive headfirst into arguably the most important aspect of selling online.

The Art Of Selling.

Copywriting, like selling, is all about selling to the prospect's wants. In this, you, as the business owner, have to identify your audience as well as profile them – once you begin to understand what your targeted audience wants, how they think and most importantly, how they feel about certain issues, you will have much more powerful copy.

What they want, how they think, how they feel. Pretty basic. Identify your audience, and then get inside your prospect's head, figure out how they tick so you can build a rough profile and most importantly, write down everything you learn about your prospect. This may seem like a tiring mental exercise, and it is in the beginning, but the key here is to know why this is important (I'll get to that in a minute).

Have you noticed how I've not mentioned the features of the product you might be selling? Do you want to know the reason why?

They don't really matter.

Of course, they matter to you, because you've worked really hard and/or spent a lot of time and money towards creating your product. But they don't matter to your prospect.

Your audience doesn't care about features – let me give you an example:

Great user interface on your latest software release.

The biggest French fries in the city.

Pizza delivery to your doorstep inside 10 minutes.

Blah. Don't beat yourself up asking again and again why no one looks twice at that list.

Instead (and here comes the punch line), your prospects are always asking:

What's in it for me?

How can this help me do this?

And the best question you need to remember every single time…

How will this solve my problem?

So the next time you sit down to prepare your sales pitch / sales copy, take your list of features, and your new list on which you have profiled your potential audience, and start brainstorming. Find the links that connect the dots from what your prospects are asking (how can this help me?) and what you are offering (the features).

Tell your prospects exactly how your product can help them overcome a particular problem.

Sell the solution, not the product.

Create A Single Focus

Too many sales letters or websites that I've seen ask the visitor to do far too much – you'll find a newsletter signup box, a paragraph talking about all the wonderful articles on the site, maybe another bit about affiliate products and then something about selling them a product.

And when the average business owner gets to the part where he has to convince the prospect to pull out their wallet and hand over some hard-earned cash, what do they do?

Umm…how about nothing?

More precisely, their sales copy is trying to do too much – like multi-tasking a 100 things at the same time. Possible, yes, but not where selling is concerned and you have just a few seconds to grab the prospect's attention and only a few more seconds to turn that attention into genuine interest.

A common mistake is trying to be everything to everyone – either through promoting the product to a generic audience or worse, writing for a generic audience.

There are usually two reasons why a business owner would do that.

One , they probably forgot to do any serious research on their market and they don't know who their audience really is (and why are you in business again?)

Two , they are scared (or greedy) about the product not pulling in enough money and they want to widen the net so they can “earn more".

Either way, your sales copy is going to be the same stale, dull pile of boring “copy" that graces most websites on the Internet. The sole reason?

It lacks focus .

Get inside your prospect's head. FOCUS on their needs, their wants, their problems. Focus on providing a solution to those problems.

And focus on writing directly to that prospect. Sell your solution to him personally , as if you were sitting right across the table from your prospect and had to make your best sales pitch.

Don't try to be all things to your prospects. Your website is in front of them for a single purpose – to offer them a solution to a particular problem. If you cannot convince them that you have the best answer, they'll walk away with no remorse. And if they don't have the problem you are solving, they'll still walk away.

In your writing and in your research, focus on your prospect, and what you have to do in order to convince them to buy from you. Everything else is more or less pointless, and at the best, secondary.

Focus.

Why People Buy

Here's another question for you:

What makes people buy?

Yes, it's sales copy. And yes, it's because you are selling them a solution and not the features.

But have you ever thought about what goes on inside a prospect's mind , from the time she sees your sales copy till the time the she has an “aha!" moment and decides to buy your brand of detergent (or whatever you want to sell)?

Sales copy is a static medium . You can't use your positive body language, your disarming smile and a confident voice to sell – all you've got is words. Jumbles of alphabets.

How the hell do you sell from that?

The key is NOT what you say - even the most focused and ingenious copy can fall flat if it doesn't have “what it takes" to create that desire, that spark inside your prospect's head.

It's all about delivery. Not visual delivery of your sales pitch but…

The words you use to deliver your sales pitch.

Michael Fortin calls them UPWORDS. Joe Vitale, another great copywriter, tagged the whole process as hypnotic marketing. Famous marketers of an older era such as David Ogilvy and Joe Sugarman swore by the principle.

It's dead simple. You have to translate all that positive body language, all your confidence, all your energy, into a tightly written, powerful, visually stimulating sales copy.

Visual stimulation. Painting pictures for your prospects to imagine . This is what separates the great from the merely good in marketing and copywriting. If you want your prospect to be fully convinced that you are the best deal in town, use your words not only to sell the solution, but to paint that solution as a powerful, eyeball-grabbing picture in their minds.

And once you're inside their heads, you just have to connect the dots and show them (once again using words as a visual tool ) how they can use your product to erase that particular problem that had plagued them until that very moment.

Build your sales copy using your words as visual aids – to support, represent and ultimately sell your solution the prospect.

That's it for now. Go back to your website and take a good, hard look at your sales copy. Are you missing the whole point? Does your copy lack focus? Are you just selling the features and assuming that the prospect will do the mental legwork for you and become motivated by herself?

Are you selling to her emotions or are you selling to her mind?

The importance of learning HTML

The three ways you can build a web page

1. Use a pre-made template: WHAT IS WEB DESIGN TEMPLATE?
Web site design templates are pre-made web designs, which can be customized to reflect your company's branding. Website design templates can be found in various formats like Photoshop and HTML. Many times these templates are compatible with HTML editors like GoLive, Frontpage and Dreamweaver.

Web site templates can be very useful; they can be used by experienced web designers to 'jump-start' the creation of a website. They are also a way for people to put out great looking web sites quickly with little or no knowledge of HTML and web design.

2. Use an HTML editor like FrontPage OR Dreamweaver:
HTML editors make building web pages feel like (to a certain extent) creating a document in Microsoft Word ... it's made pretty easy. But the downside is that you loose a certain amount of control of what you're doing and in some cases become dependent on the program.

3. Hand-code your HTML in a text editor like Notepad:
That means you type in the HTML code yourself. This is the approach we are going to use here, because it's the quickest way to learn how to build web pages, and it is arguably the best way because you have the most control over what you're doing.
Ok, now that we know the advantages of hand-coding web pages, let's jump into just the bare minimum of theory, then we will build our first web page!
What are HTML tags
HTML tags are specifically formatted text that creates 'markers' for web browser to read and interpret. These 'markers' tell the web browser what and how to display things on the web page. Tags are placed in and around text and images (text and images are some of the 'things') that your want to have appear in your web pages.

HTML has a whole bunch of tags (just like the alphabet has a whole bunch of letters) that the web designer can use to build web pages. As mentioned above, tags have a specific structure so that when the browser is reading an HTML page, it knows the tags from the normal text.
Tags are typically words or abbreviations of words placed between angled brackets. So for example: to make text bold, HTML has the 'bold' tag that looks like this:
This text will be bolded
Another commonly used tag is the paragraph tag:

This is a paragraph of text .

You may have noticed that HTML tags come in pairs; HTML has both an opening tag () and a closing tag (). The only difference between the opening and closing tags is that the closing tag has an extra forward slash in it.
some EXAMPLE HTML tags that might make things more clear:
Make text bold
Makes text italic

Tells the browser that this text is very important - the browser usually makes this text really big

Hand coding web pages is easy!