» Online Store Marketing 101 – Library Practical Ecommerce Web Marketing

The Forumla for Failure: 3 Simple Ingredients!

Now I am not saying that these are the 3 ingredients which will guarantee success, but they will kill your business if you dont have them.

I guarantee your small business startup, or online retail store will fail if….

1. You don’t improve it on a regular, perhaps daily or weekly basis.

2. You haven’t thought about or really made time/budget for marketing it.

3. You think you can compete against everyone else with nearly identical products/services, without being unique in some way: product/service, delivery, marketing.

I dont need to elaborate do I?

The Ultimate Guide to Link Building – PART 2:
101 Ways to Get Links to your Website

If you haven’t read part 1 of this guide, you may want to hop on over there briefly as it covers several important points on the technical aspects of building links to your site (a.k.a. backlinks), like how to use good anchor text.

Even if you are experienced you may learn a thing or two from this list. Although the list is long, I have used almost all of them at some time or another, and I happen to run several websites that rank well, so pay attention. I created this list from scratch, based on techniques I actually use. I have included some other respectable lists at the end of this article.

Rather than trying to implement all of these, you may want to make your own short list of the 10 best, or most important techniques. I also recommend only targeting 3-5 keyword phrases at a time if you are trying to rank quickly. It tends to be easier than trying to rank simultaneously for 30 phrases.

How many links do you need? You need to look at the competition. Something I will discuss in the future.

This list is organized so that most of the best stuff is first. Basically, it’s either easy and/or powerful.

Rule #1 – Add value to the world.
Write the most unique, engaging, compelling, authoritative, and best content you can. When people read it, they will think, “hey, this is great, I will link to it,” and your job is done as long as you tell people about that content. This doesn’t mean you won’t need to promote it though, but it becomes 10 times easier to get quality links when you do write relevant stuff.

Rule #2 – Focus on Quality:
10 high quality links are better than 1,000 low-quality links. PageRank can sometimes be an indicator of quality, but not always; stay away from most automated solutions, link farms, etc… High authority links are worth their weight in gold, especially if they are relevant.

Rule #3 – Get Links for Traffic Value, not Just SEO Value:
The biggest mistake is only getting links for the sake of search engine optimization. Real people find these sites and click through, although a minority of traffic, and tend to fade over time, don’t forget that you can attract real people too. Often blogs, forums, etc… will use the “nofollow” tag to eliminate any value of a link to your site, however real people count.

Rule #4 – Mix it Up:
One of the most important elements is to switch it up. Don’t use any particular type of link too much (e.g. if 90% of your links are from directories, then you need to mix it up). Here is a great article that I can folly support, that covers this in a little more detail, although you will find much of the same information here.

Rule #5 – Don’t Build Too Fast:
Do a little every day. Don’t try to get 100 links on your first day. It’ll burn you out, and it will not be as effective as spreading them out. It won’t hurt you to get a lot at once per se, unless the type of backlink is all the same. Getting a link or two a day should do well for most small online stores. I might spend an entire day or two trying to get one ultra-high quality link.

Rule #6 – You Must do What Others are Not Generally Willing to Do.
While this is generally true for more competitive industries, it can help for the smallest of stores. The best links are often the hardest to get, but then again, your competition won’t go to the same efforts you are. Everyone is constantly looking for the “easy button” in SEO. Those people usually fail. Be creative, or pick up the phone once in awhile.

Rule #7 – The Links Should be Relevant
You don’t have to follow this role, but it takes longer to rank, and you may have problems with it in some cases. Of course, all your links probably won’t be relevant.

Understanding the Power Behind a Link

You may have noticed a trend in each of these specific link markets, and that is discovering powerfol sites. The basics are these:

PageRank

0 is useless. 1 – 2 is O.k. 3 or more is worthwhile for most of us. Watch out for sites with high page rank on homepage, but once you drill down into a specific page, PR is 0, which is often the case for many free directories/sites.

Alexa ranking

Anything under 1,000,000 is ok; under 500,000 is really good; under 100,000 is great, and under 25,000 is amazing. This is a potential indicator of visitors you might get from the link, and not necessarily how powerful of a link it is. Real people count too.

PageRank

Home page Pagerank, or from the specific page you are getting a link on. It’s not always accurate, so don’t bet your life on it (especially if a site previously got busted for selling links).

Authority

Authority sites can be recognized by their backlinks, their inbound to outbound link ratio, etc… Some of the highest authority sites tend to be .edu’s, .gov’s, news sites, research and industry portals. It is somewhat beyond the scope of this article to really try to explain what it is., but you can Google it to learn more. In short, a high authority site is one that has lots of inbound links from good sites, and then rarely links out to other sites, especially poor quality ones.

Your backlinks backlinks:

meaning, you see a site you want a link from; what other sites link to that site?

Are there lots of other links on that page?

If you desired backlink is linking out to 100 other websites, then the power of that link is divided amongst 100 websites; so you are probably better off finding another site to get a link on—unless it is a really high quality looking page/site.

Age of link:

The longer your link ages, the more valuable it becomes. Typically, you need a few months for links to really start counting.

Overall quality

is it something that is of value to real people such as yourself? Remember the real people factor here, and PR value of a link if you have a unique product/site.

The BIG List

Directories

You only need a few good ones—dump the rest. I always start with these since they are the easiest, and I don’t have to deal with people, or think about it much. But no most sites can’t rank on directory listings alone.
General directories

Free (what I always do, but can take forever and not guaranteed)

DMOZ is the best and the most difficult. Don’t waste your life on it though. Ask a few times, and then move on.

Paid inclusion

Yahoo directory, is one of the most expensive, maybe not the best though, costs $300 per year to be in their directory. However, paid doesn’t mean good.
Business.com is still good too at the time of writing this.
BOTW, and a very few others

Finding directories and sites :

Google the topic/category + the word ‘directory.’ This is good because this means Google ranks them high, therefore better chance of you getting high since you’re linked from them
Use a “directory of directories” type site.

Specialized directories

Generally speaking, the more topics/industries a directory covers, the less valuable it is. Look for directories that cover your industry, niche, or thereabouts.

Local directories.

Finding directories in your state, city, county, etc… can be very beneficial.

PageRank and Alexa are some of your best decision tools here. If they still have Pagerank, especially on the page you plan to get your link on, then it’s probably worth your time. A directory with a high Alexa ranking may send you some quality traffic as well.

Keyword/theme related sites (general)

Search on Google for your keywords and look for information sites that you might be able to get a link on. Did Wikipedia come up? Ok, so Wikipedia doesn’t count, but you might find many other places to get links. This doesn’t mean that because they rank well for that word, then you will.
Using advanced Google searches – See appendix. This is quote simple actually, and if you use SEOBook’s free SEO Toolbar, you can show 100 pages at once, and then sort from highest to lowest Pagerank, so you can find the good stuff quickly..
When using the advanced searches (as seen in the appendix), try to do creative things like use the following: inurl:.edu or in edu:.gov This will help you find possibly authority resource sites.

Backlinks from competitors sites:
This is one of the absolute best ways to find good links. I cannot emphasize that enough. E.g. if Walmart is my competitor, go to Yahoo and type in the search bar: link:www.walmart.com or check individual pages on their site like this: link:walmart.com/tennis-shoes.html

You can do the same thing using Google, but Google shows a few links only because they don’t want you to know everything about how they rank sites; so Yahoo gladly shows this. if you setup a Google Webmaster account, you can see more backlinks recognized by Google, but only to your own website.
When you do this kind of search in Yahoo, Yahoo tends to show the more powerful links first, making your job so much easier.

I suggest using a link-mining program like SEOElite to do this because I can sort the order of the links from highest to lowest PageRank, thereby allowing me to start with the most important ones first.

Blogs
Run your own quality blog and link back to your own site as convenient.
Post highly intelligent, useful, and quality content that people actually want to read, and use your link in the content/signature if acceptable. Personally, I like to answer other people’s questions. Use in moderation.
While you might not have the chance to put keyword in the link (don’t use profile name for that either), ultimately, people, including the blog owners will see your blog, and maybe link back even.
How do you find relevant blogs? Of course, just search on topic/keywords, plus the word ‘blog.’ Or use something like Google Blog search.
Use a blog search engine. E.g. Technorati (use Google of course to find more blog search engines).
Write a response to someone else’s blog post, and then indicate it by commenting that on their blog, as well as contacting the author. Make friends with them if you can. This is one of my favorite techniques
Write a great article, and invite other relevant bloggers to respond in their blog.
If you have made friends with other bloggers, ask them to write something about you or your content.
Ask fellow bloggers to include your site on their blog roll.
Track-backs are less useful than they used to be because spammers abused them.
Check out other blog promotion techniques

Get involved in your target customer’s community

Go to where your users are and interact. Learn what motivates them. Focus on getting links in places they frequent and trust.

Article submission and syndication

By itself, article submission will not likely get you top rankings simply because those articles don’t carry enough power, unless you promote them, and get backlinks to those articles.
Submitting the same article to many sites does not really help much. Search engines realize that this is duplicate content and tends to not give additional reprints much power. You are better off writing more articles.
1. Good content can get you real traffic as those articles get found by users (in small amounts). But exposure might be especially helpful for online stores waiting to be discovered.
If you write additional articles on your own website, be sure to interlink them as appropriate.
You might even want to allow others to reprint the article on their site as long as they link back to you.
Setup an RSS feed, and encourage others to syndicate your content.

Press releases
Press releases are part of public relations, but is often used on its own. Make it good or don’t say it at all, because the more newsworthy and relevant the article is, the more likely it will get picked up by more news sites.

Try to give them a reason to leave a link in back to your site somewhere because news sites like to remove links.

These links can balance your overall backlink profile, and give you some high authority links.
Generally speaking, the more you pay for a release, the better chances it will get into the hands of big news agencies.

Public Relations
Write a great story, and call up a local news outlet or two. Local news is hungrier than national news. Get involved in community events.
Or, if you have money to burn, hire a PR firm, but be prepared to spend a few thousand dollars.

Industry related sites
As usual, you can use Google, local searches, using the words below combined with your keyword or general theme. (e.g. Utah clothing / retail association), to get you ideas of some of these places if you are lacking ideas of your own.
Vendors
Associations
Groups
Suppliers
Industry experts
Publishers
Magazines
Affiliates (not always the best choice)
People that carry your product/service
Other people who will benefit by linking to you

Friends with related sites

It can be very powerful. Give out your business card, and ask for theirs.

This only works if you know people with related websites.
Make friends at conferences.
at local events (ever hear of Meetup?)
via blogging,
with your customers
via popular webmaster forums like DigitalPoint (be careful, because you quality sometimes lacks here)

Forums / GuestBooks

Okay, this is considered by some SEO’s to be bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, but it can be a good beyond link value, as a way to build trust for your site if you know what you are talking about.
Same roles as blogs apply.
Some places might use a “nofollow” tag on the forum threads, but may allow your profile to have a link. It’s an okay way to get your site indexed, maybe get some real visitors too.
Focus on active forums and recent topics.

Social networking/media sites
Get involved! Be a part of the community and create content of value.
Like most any other link, anyone submitting pure promotional stuff will not go far. This is another reason it can be difficult to do SEO for someone else if you are not the expert in their industry.
Some of the more popular sites include:

Digg, Technorati, 43 things, Delicous.com, Squidoo, and the list goes on.
Build community using Facebook, Twitter, etc…
Topically related sites
And topically related social networks (Google: social network directory)

Great content & high quality information sites

Library sites (search Google with your keyword and intitle:library, or inurl:library)
Publish original research and ask for links from other research or authority sites, edu’s, etc…
Use Google Alerts, or Yahoo Alerts to keep you up to date on latest industry news and events. This can spawn ideas for you to write about, as well as keep you aware of what is changing in your market.

Reciprocal links only useful in small amounts

Use very sparingly like you would enhance salt on a good steak, but depending heavily on them is fairly useless.
Ignore SPAM email asking for reciprocal links. They are always scams, and use a variety of methods to trick people.
The new reciprocal link is linking within a community of non-competitive group of people. Think: complimentary. I sell shoes, and another guy sells shoe polish, and another sells shirts. Let’s combine forces and link to each other.
When you do this, don’t just use a “links” page. Instead, put each others links within a relevant content/article.

Paid text link ads.

WARNING – NOT ADVISED! We are covering this one because it is in used, and you should be aware of its existence. If you are buying links in order to rank your site, your site may become permanently penalized by Google. Some well-known industry leading sites however seem to get away with this, but generally speaking it’s not worth the risk unless you are willing to risk losing your site rankings.

How it works: You pick the sites you want links from and pay monthly, yearly, etc… They can be used to drive traffic and SERPS alike, and can be costly in some cases. Again, this is not recommended, but you should be aware that it is a common practice.

Make sure people have an easy way to link to your website

If you think people will want to. Give them a static URL with the anchor text ready to go.
This includes your blog, and any page someone might want to link to

Do what no one else is doing

It’s hard to over-estimate the value of this. This can be link strategies in general, or in specifics like really unique content. Of course difficult unless you are at the top of your game in your market, and what makes the best SEO in the world in my opinion. The truth is though, the more commercial an industry is, the more difficult it is for anyone to get backlinks to their sites.
Generally speaking, you will need to go out and find the great links. Rarely will they come to you, and ask for money (e.g. “we will submit your site to 100,000 directories”).

And the best one of all:

Ask and beg for them! Ask as part of your signature on your site, email, communications, etc…
Whether small or big (I prefer medium), asking people never hurts, but it is hit and miss.

Always remember the most important point:
QUALITY CONTENT = LINKS – it’s like magic. Distribute compelling information, and people love to link.
Where is tip #101? That is up to you!! Please respond below and the best one will get added to our official list above, and win a prize!

Action Items :

Create a spreadsheet and start a list of places you want a link from. Try to track:

Where
When you asked for the link
Which sites did you actually get a link from after submitting it (and when)
What drives the most value?
What things you have searched so you don’t overlap your own efforts.

And when you really want a link bad, try using the phone instead of emailing them.

APPENDIX:

Here is a nice host list on finding link partners, by typing these in to a search engine. I usually look through the first 50 – 100 results on each of these. I also find that by getting a little more precise, I can get better results quicker. I do this by using the “intitle” or allintitle.

"your keywords" + "Add link"
"your keywords" + "Add a link"
"your keywords" + "Add your link"
"your keywords" + "Submit link"
"your keywords" + "Submit a link"
"your keywords" + "Submit your link"
"your keywords" + "Suggest link"
"your keywords" + "Suggest a link"

"your keywords" + “Add site”
"your keywords" + "Add a site"
"your keywords" + "Add your site"
"your keywords" + "Submit site"
"your keywords" + "Submit a site"
"your keywords" + "Submit your site"
"your keywords" + "Suggest site"
"your keywords" + "Suggest a site"

"your keywords" + "Add URL"
"your keywords" + "Add a URL"
"your keywords" + "Add your URL"
"your keywords" + "Submit URL"
"your keywords" + "Submit a URL"
"your keywords" + "Submit your URL"
"your keywords" + "Suggest URL"
"your keywords" + "Suggest a URL"

"your keywords" + intitle:“directory"
"your keywords" + "directories"

"your keywords" + intitle:links
"your keywords" + "related sites"
"your keywords" + "related urls"
"your keywords" + “favorite links”
"your keywords" + “cool sites”
"your keywords" + “cool places”
"your keywords" + “recommended links”
“your keyword” allintitle:useful sites

Regional Specific
"Add url" + "Your Region"

Reciprocal Link Specific:
"your keywords" + “reciprocal”
"your keywords" + “exchange links”
"your keywords" + “link exchange”
"your keywords" + resources
Or, if you want to go the opposite route, and only look for links that don’t require you to link back to them. Just add something like -“link exchange” –reciprocal to your searches.

Variations on the above:
Do the same searches above, but just use your general theme, or industry as the keyword. E.g. if you sell shoes, then your industry may be clothing, sportswear, outerwear, etc…

Article Submission
If you are looking for places to submit your articles, don’t forget about niche directories that cover just your industry. They tend to be hard to find. Here are some sample searches you can use:

“your keyword” + “submit article”
“your keyword” + “submit content”
“your keyword” + article submission
“your keyword” + content submission

You may also be interested in step-by-step instructions on how to effectively ask for a link, and find some other useful tips on this other large list from SEOBook .

Good Luck!

The Ultimate Guide to Link Building – PART 1:
The Technical Aspects of Great Backlinks

In this article, I will focus on technical aspects of link building, while in the second part, I will show you real examples, tactics, and places to find links. PART 1 is more for newbies, while PART 2 is for those who already understand the technical aspects and need fresh ideas for planting and growing links (not on a link-farm, mind you).

WARNING! Before I tell you how to build links to your ecommerce site, let me tell you how not to build links. This guide can apply to building links to most any kind of site actually. Not only because it is less likely to work, but because going any other route is akin to sending out SPAM; a lot of people won’t like you, you will clutter up the web, and rarely works in the long run.

As Eric Ward says ”anyone can Google Map a sewage plant.” Too many online store owners I speak with are looking for an EASY button, for an ecommerce site that has little or no value other than in the generic products it carries. Remember that if it is too easy, then too many people are probably already doing it, and unless you are selling something completely new and different, you may have a tough time promoting your site in any way (not just SEO). Besides, the search engines are always trying to improve what they think is relevant for the people searching on the search engines, so in a sense, they always try to make it harder for us to manipulate them in a sense. This applies to well established sites as well as those who want to open an online store for the first time.

Building links from other websites (a.k.a. backlinks) for ecommerce sites is tough stuff at times, especially if you are trying to be the next Amazon.com. Why? Because if you are selling the same thing as the next guy, why would people link to your website on their own? Your unique selling point can be a huge draw for getting links to your site naturally, or with effort on your part, but the point is, if you think link building is easy for a site that sells shoes, then your in trouble, unless:

A: Your shoes, or the way to deliver your shoes, are distinctly different.
B: You can write content about shoes, or shoe niche, that is distinctly different.

Now that I have told you what link building isn’t, let me tell you what it is:

Basic guidelines for building high quality links

This list is roughly in order of most to least important, so stop reading when you have has your fill.

There’s a lot of nitty gritty detail on how to get good links, but generally speaking it often boils down to this

The higher the other site ranks for related terms, the better it is to try to get a link from them. For a simple example, if you are looking to get ranked high for the term classic 57 chevy’s, then maybe you can find a high ranking directory by searching on Google/Yahoo/MSN using something like: 57 chevy’s directory

Reciprocal links are dead

(e.g. If I link to you, you link back to me). Focus on one-way links. Reciprocal links are promoted by bad SEO companies, and used to death by uninformed website owners . Reciprocal links are not completely useless though, and may be useful for driving relevant traffic between sites, but don’t rely on them heavily for good rankings.

Here is the problem with reciprocal links:Let’s say a link goes from site A over to site B; then a link is placed on site B pointing back to site A. Here’s what you have: A > B > A. Now, let’s repeat this strategy with a bunch of other websites, since I got a lot of friends with websites.

If we did this a lot, and then drew a picture of how the sites were linked together, it would look like a daisy. The search engines see right through this. I know what you are thinking. Even 3-way trades aren’t gonna help you much (A >B > C > A), and could even hurt you if used too much.

Get links from relevant sites and pages

If you have a site about classic cars, and are trying to get a link from a site about alien kittens, think again. More relevance = better. You’d be much better off getting a link from, say a site about hubcaps or something related to classic cars.

Use good anchor text most of the time, but not all of the time

The links should use the keyword in the link text, or anchor text. Simply put, a link should look like this: “hot classic cars“, and not “click here to see hot classic cars”. As you can see, I have the actual keywords in the link itself. Also switch it up a regularly. Using the same phrases over and over can mean disaster. Don’t worry if all your links don’t have keywords in them. You are less likely to control the anchor text on a quality site anyways. For example, if you happen to get a link from a newspaper article, chances are they won’t use your optimized anchor text most of the time, unless it happens to be your business or domain name.

Using PageRank to recognize worthless pages

Getting a link from a web page with 0 PageRank is often an indicator of trust to some degree. Generally speaking, higher PageRank is better, but again, relevance and trust is more important than PageRank*. Use the Google toolbar, or one of these plugins to see Pagerank: SearchStatus (shows on page you are visiting), Firefox plugins: SEO for Firefox (shows in Google results). Links from link farms, or lots of sites with PageRank can spell disaster. I also like SEOinc’s free SEO toolbar for quick digging of info such as backlinks, ranking checker, etc… for Internet Explorer

Get links from trusted sites/pages

High trust sites are not like finding sites with high PageRank, but in a nutshell, older sites, with lots of inbound and few outbound links tend to have higher trust. .edu and .gov sites often fit this criteria which is why sometimes they are sought after. There are various free tools online for find such sites through link hubs. this almost means avoiding spammy, low-quality, link-farm sites. Also get them from new sites. Remember, the point is to mix it up. Even for the sake that a new site can eventually become popular and highly valuable to you in the long run.

Deep link

Don’t think that all links should point to your home page. Get highly relevant links to specific pages within your site, specific to those pages. The more targeted the better. E.g. getting a link from a page on a website that talks about various hubcaps from a 57 chevy, which links to a page on your website that talks specifically about the same thing. How many? Well, the bigger your site is, the more deep linking that should be going on. But for any site, I wouldn’t recommend having more than 90% of your links pointing to the homepage.

Think, complimentary

Obviously you will generally be getting links from sites that are complementary and not competitive.

Remember, human visitors are real people too

Alexa.com and Compete.com rankings can also find sites with high traffic (maybe not high search engine rankings). You can’t forget about real people you know. Not only for the direct traffic, but when people find your site, they may link to it too. Here’s a site that combines Alexa, Compete, etc… results

Recognize the NOFOLLOW tag, and realize its importance

Getting links from sites that have rel=”nofollow” in the code will not help your search engine rankings. You can look at the source code of a web page usually to find out, or use a Firefox extension such as the SearchStatus or NoDoFollow plugins.

Track your results

Go to Yahoo search and type link:yourdomain.com This works for Google too, but Google only shows a few of your back links, unless you are using their webmaster tools. Again, the SEOBook toolbar and SEOinc toolbar mentioned above can help you do this quickly.

Build links slowly over time

Getting 50 links a day from day 1 looks suspicious to search engines. SEO takes time. Of course, if you get that kind of linkage naturally cause your site rocks, that’s okay.

Avoid other bad practices

Examples include: Lots of links from a group of websites owned by yourself, or a couple people is not helpful (same C-class). Sites that are considered low-trust or spammy in the search engine eyes such as link farms.

ALWAYS mix it up

There are a million ways to get links. Think beyond the common practices: directories, article submission, social media, and ALWAYS mix it up. Otherwise, you may shoot yourself in the foot. This even means getting links from sites with PR 0. Focus on relevance! A 100 links all from directories is probably a waste of time if you have very few other types of links.

Natural links are the best

If you can create content and a site that causes people to want to link to it on your own, then you are done. I have done it. It wasn’t cheap. Most often, the best links are links that grow on their own. That is, when people find your site and think, “mmmm… I like this site, so I am going to link to it on my blog.“ The next article will talk more about this in depth, and the alternatives.

Long term

The longer you have a link to your site from another website, the better.

PART 2of this guide is continued here

It will focus on some practical ideas for finding places to get links from. Stay tuned

*This is my opinion. Some things in SEO are more cut and dry than others, and this is not one of them. I won’t always say when I state something that is not always agreed upon, so just be aware of that. I mention this simply because my audience is not deeply trained on SEO for the most part, and you can’t just believe everything you read online.

Basic instructions for constructing a link for newbies (if you are not using a program like Dreamweavaer/Expressionweb/CMS that does this for you). Ignore hte line breaks as they are not important/needed:

Here is an example link that I want to make:

Check out my favorite 
search engine

And here is the HTML code:

Check out my favorite
<a href="http://google.com">search engine</a>

The link goes to Google.com. The anchor text is “search engine”. If I need to tell search engines not to give the link credit, I might also add a nofollow tag like this:

<a rel="nofollow" href="http//www.google.com">
search engine</a>

Oh, and one more technical tip, always use the same version of the link to your pages, such as this example: http://www.example.com is seen slightly different than http://example.com and http://www.example.com/index.html They each take you to the same page, but search engines have trouble with this a bit, so pick one and stick with it.

How to write search engine optimized content for articles and blogs

Overview:

The focus of this ONLINE STORE MARKETING 101 article is to help you write content for articles and blogs that is search engine optimized, with a focus on the fundamentals. It is not an attempt to teach you every last detail about SEO for content creation. It assumes you have researched your keywords well already.

Goals:

The point is to make a unique page on your site/blog for each of your most important keywords that have real value to someone that might read them—not just search engines; even if it’s not totally original and profound writing. If you can write cutting edge, compelling stuff, that’s even better as it will attract people to link to those articles.

Real people will find and read these, so don’t put out garbage since that helps no one. Of course, the more interesting it is, the more likely that a visitor will stay on your website when they find that page too.

This is not a rush job, but I would suggest making a commitment to write at least one article a week till you have a couple dozen of them to start out with. If you can, become the expert in your niche, force yourself to know more than anyone, and be a leader of valuable fresh content in your industry.

Steps:

When making these pages, there are three things to focus on:

keyword proximity
keyword density
keyword cross-linking
keyword targeting

Keyword Proximity:

Basically, the rule is that the early on the keyword appears the better. Don’t go overboard, and make really weird sentences/phrases. But your keyword phrase should be found in all locations of the page including:

The file name
the TITLE of the page (usually the name of the article)
the META description & keywords
the main heading of the article, which should be a H1 tag usually
and equally important, within the body of the content

What proximity means is that it appears as early as possible in any of these elements. For example the title, “Mortgage Leads You Can Count on” is better than “You can count on our Mortgage leads” since “Mortgage Leads” appears at the beginning of the title. The same is true for the others as well (META tags, heading, content). It’s not always feasible, but do what you can, when you can.

The file name shouldn’t be incredibly long either. Maybe 3 or 4 words tops is ideal (separated by hyphens, and not underscores or spaces).

Keyword Density:

Your keyword phrase should appear a few times throughout the content. Ideally, somewhere between 5% and 12% of the total content of the page; in other words, if your article that you wrote has 100 words, and your target keyword phrase “Utah mortgage leads” occurs twice within that content, then that represents 6 words out of 100, or a 6% keyword density. Longer pages need lower keyword density, and you should have at least a couple hundred words per article. You can even research your competitors since keyword density varies per industry and search engine.

Cross-linking:

While writing articles, think how to build natural links across to highly related (or thematically related) articles, including other sections/areas of your site. Let’s say you have a sentence like “we have the best mortgage leads on the planet” You would want to link the phrase “mortgage leads” to your main mortgage leads overview page (assuming you have one) not only because the keyword is exact match, but the site visitor may see that and think “hey, I will click on that and check out these leads.” Cross linking helps site visitors, and search engines to rank your site better for the words you use in the links.

Warning: something like “click here to go to my homepage” is a big no-no. Not only are people smarter than that, but it will only help you if you are trying to get your site ranked high for “click here.”

Maybe even for simplicity’s sake, you could do something like “Related Articles” at the bottom of each page, then link a few related articles.

Careful Targeting:

You can only target one keyword phrase per page—do not try to focus on 2 different phrases on a single page.

You can also use variations on the same phrase (like a plural version) or the words in a different order; sometimes even a synonym is okay too. This are is a bit gray area since for example the word “MLM” (multi-level-marketing) is just another name for “network marketing ” or perhaps even “home based business.” Search engines sometimes understand these as the same, but I wouldn’t count on it just yet. What about “shopping cart” and “shopping cart software“? Might those be considered the same by some search engines?

One thing I do us use “tags” at the bottom of the article that are basically other very similar keywords that someone might use to try to find this article. The tags won’t have a lot of power on their own, but in combination with other words in the article, it helps. Don’t try to fool search engines or real people by putting lots of useless, and less relevant tags on the page. The more you dilute it with unrelated stuff, the less power your page has as a whole, and the more likely your site will be penalized for spamming. I don’t want to scare anyone except for those that are thinking about stretching this principle or any others beyond the natural.

Summary

Great content = great search engine traffic and real visitors.
When you are writing, think about how early it appears in each of the elements. (proximity)
Make sure the keyword appears more than once in the article (density)
When you are done, think about how you can link your articles together to help people and search engines.
Be careful to target your words properly, and make relevant tags if needed.

You can use a free blogging platform like Blogger (not really very customizable, but super easy to setup), or WordPress (you may need help to install on your own hosting account, but more customizable). In fact, this blog uses Wordpress.

If you do promote links to your website form other websites, you can even promote them to link to link to these specific pages even (so don’t ever move pages on your site if you don’t need to). There’s a lot more to it than that when it comes to linking, but I will save that for another day.

RSS for beginners – how RSS helps me as a website visitor

Or in other words, how this site/page can help you best. Maybe this doesn’t sound 100% on topic to this blog, but the reason this is my first article is because I want you to subscribe to my blog in the coolest way possible.

I am always surprised by how many people I run into all the time that are still like “what is RSS ?” And at the same time, so many websites make it difficult to understand. You could just bookmark this page, but how are you going to know when it gets updated with a new article/post? You see, using RSS gives you a lot more power to keep track of things, and maybe even have your reader notify you via email or a pop-up in your computer’s system tray (depending on the reader you are using). Using RSS is very cool and hard to avoid on the web these days–and ultimately it could make your life a tad easier.

How it helps you: Instead of running all over the web for news, updates, etc… you can have the web come to you. It’s sort of your own personal news service. Let’s say, you like to read the New York Times, business section, and you also like to read about high performance car articles from Car and Driver Magazine. Additionally, you like to read a few blogs out there that you are a fan of. So, you just go to your RSS reader, and then you would see all updates from all of those different sites, all on your single page–you see, it’s your own portal to the web. Readers in Internet Explorer and Firefox look just like your bookmarks, except they now update on their own, whenever new info is available.

Here is a screenshot of the RSS reader in Firefox (it’s there by default, no setup required):

As you can see in this example, my bookmarks show the latest news, automatically. If I click on any of those bookmarks, then I will end up at the site so that I can read the full news article.

As you can see, it’s very time sensitive, or time oriented information that RSS really is used for the most. But even sites like Ebay and Amazon often let you subscribe to RSS feeds to watch certain products and product updates.

But how do you setup an RSS reader, or should I say subscribe to an RSS feed ? It’s easy even for most people that are afraid of the internet and other crazy technologies.

If you use Internet Explorer (the blue “E”) to get online and browse the internet, then you can read it here on Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/tour/rss/
In short, any site you are visiting, you should see a little orange symbol in your browsers toolbar somewhere.

If you use Firefox, then try this to get started (they call theirs “Live Bookmarks”):
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/livebookmarks.html

Most email clients/programs like Outlook (2007), Eudora, and Thunderbird have readers built into them (use their documentation to learn how).

If you use Google Desktop, there is one there that even notifies you, or even your Google/MSN/Yahoo homepage can all be customized to show RSS feeds too–as you can see, plenty of options.

There are also plenty of other free (and commercial) programs out there–unavoidable these days. You can do a Google search, or a search on Download.com for “RSS reader” or “RSS aggregator” or “news aggregator.” But I would really count on most of the ones I mentioned previously, especially the ones that can auto-notify you.

Now, in another blog entry, I will talk about how to setup your own RSS for your own website and such. IF you run a blog using Blogger or any other blogging tool, you will see that it is already built in and ready to go.

Practical Ecommerce Web Marketing