Internet Marketing Tips

Press Release

§ http://www.free-press-release.com/members/login.php

§ http://www.prlog.org/pub/manage.html

§ http://www.i-newswire.com/submit_free.php

Directory Submissions

§ http://www.seobook.com/archives/001583.shtml

§ http://www.dmoz.org/

§ http://www.submitedge.com/index.html

Bookmarks

§ http://delicious.com/

§ http://www.toprankblog.com/tools/social-bookmarks/

Blog Posts

§ http://www.thoughts.com/

§ http://mashable.com/2007/08/06/free-blog-hosts/

§ http://www.xanga.com/

URL Submission

§ http://www.google.com/addurl/

§ http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSUT

§ https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit

Being that the Internet is still relatively a new medium, new provisions embedded in this channel of information are continuously being debated. SEO and SEM are no exceptions. To most, Search Engine Marketing is the broad form of marketing that you can perform in order to better promote your website and Search Engine Optimization is one of the avenues of Search Engine Marketing that you can follow to accomplish this. My personal view of the two is as follows:

An Search Engine Marketing campaign may include, but may not be limited to the following:

• SEO
• Pay-for-placement
• Reputation development
• Return on investment management
• Video marketing

An Search Engine Optimization campaign may include, but may not be limited to the following:

• Internal & external link analysis
• Landing page optimization
• Meta tag edits
• Sitmap.xml
• Robots.txt
• URL submission
• Keyword analysis
• Indexing analysis
• Duplicate content analysis

Search Engine Marketing mainly includes the promotion of your website and online advertising. Search Engine Optimization allows your website to be more aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to the user while also improving your ranking on search engines. Regardless of how you view these two forms of marketing, they both need to be utilized and managed effectively in order to increasingly generate traffic to your website.

Creating a presence on the Web is a must in today’s society. However, just obtaining that presence alone will not automatically ignite sales for your establishment. Below are the top five ways that I feel will help you create interest and build credibility to your site:

1. Social Bookmark. By having other likeminded people bookmark your site, you automatically establish the opportunity to create traffic and build credibility with search engine robots.
2. Offline Marketing. If you send direct mail or advertise in any other medium, make sure to let potential customers and existing clients about your new site.
3. Get Links. Obviously, by getting more links, you open the door to new traffic and once again build credibility with bots.
4. Create Valuable Content. A website is only as good as the content it contains. Attracting using by flashy design and sound does absolutely nothing if it does not create interest to a user.
5. Be Creative. Let your imagination run free. Write your company’s website in sidewalk chalk, hand out pens, think of anything that your competitors may not be doing.

With Google being such an advanced search engine, they have built in their algorithm a few helpful additions that the typical searcher may have overlooked. The ones that I have found the most useful in my career are as follows:

1. Track a flight. All you simply have to do is type the airline, followed by the flight number in Google’s search box. For example: Delta flight 5586. The departure time, arrival time and flight status will automatically appear.
2. Conversion. Google’s powerful conversion calculator can convert practically anything in any country. Say you are in Australia and you want to convert dollars to Australian money, you would simply type: 10 U.S. dollars in Australian money in Google’s search box. The conversion will automatically pop up without having to click anywhere else.
3. Local time. In order to get the local time anywhere in the world, simply type: What’s the time in _______. The time and day of the week will automatically be shown.
4. Track your stock. Simply type stock + the name of your stock to view its latest report. Example: Stock AMS
5. Find meanings. In order to define a word that you may not be familiar with, type define:yourword to view its meaning.

Although every SEO (search engine optimization) expert will most likely give you a different answer, here are the five skills sets that I believe are the most vital in attaining a successful SEO campaign:

1. Keyword Use in the Title Tag
   1. The title tag is the single most important factor of your entire SEO campaign. The title tag explains and sums up in one single phrase exactly what your site is about to the search engines. If you are not optimizing your title tag with your keywords, you are performing an injustice on the optimization of your campaign.
2. Keyword Use as Anchor Text in External Links
   1. Having anchor text that links back to your site through external sites include your keywords is also very critical in the success of your campaign. Of course, the more “backlinks” or external links you have back to your site, the better.
3. Age of Your Site
   1. Obviously, this is one aspect of SEO that you do not have much control over. However, once your site has been indexed for an extended period of time, you will reap the benefits and most likely gradually see an increase in your ranking.
4. Content
   1. As easy as this sounds, keyword prevalence (not overuse) and creating content that is in the same subject realm as your keywords is also significant to your campaign’s success.
5. Fluid Content
   1. Stagnant sites may appear to search engine robots as being outdated. A fluid site can be attained by simply keep a blog where you make at least one entry per week.

The anatomy of a search engine is extremely difficult to describe, due to the extensive differences with the various algorithms in all the major search engines as previously mentioned in my earlier blogs. However, after scouring the Internet for quite some time, I discovered an in-depth paper written by two students at Stanford, Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page, which includes a pictorial effort to explain exactly the flow of information of a search engine (see below).

To more thoroughly examine the differences between the major search engines, I have summarized the major points that SEO Book has revealed through their intense research.

Yahoo!

• is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
• has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program, both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search

• new to the search game
• is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
• places way too much weight on the page content
• their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
• likes bursty recent links
• new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google

• is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
• looks for natural link growth over time
• heavily biases search results toward informational resources
• trusts old sites way too much
• a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
• they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
• if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. On-page variation and link anchor text variation are important. A page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier.
• crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Although the main fundamental backing for all of the major search engines is the same, there are some essential differences. The differences may be small, but they lead to large-scale changes on SERPs. The various algorithms amongst the different engines are widely opposite and ever changing.

Yahoo! and MSN consider on-page keyword factors to be of primary importance, whereas Google chiefly relies on link building. Also, sites that have been indexed by Google for a long period of time gain substantial credibility, whereas Yahoo! seems to render no preference. Therefore, a Google PageRank may take substantially longer than that of a Yahoo or MSN page ranking.

Tomorrow, I will go into further detail and examine each search engine more thoroughly.

Webconfs.com does an excellent job of explaining exactly how a search engine operates. The first aspect of search engines that you have to accept is that search engines are not humans; they are mainly text-driven robots that search through websites to understand what they are all about. This is why it is so important to ensure that your site is content optimized.

The main progression that a “bot” or “spider” takes is: crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving. These bots or spiders follow links from one page to another and index everything they find along their way.

It is virtually impossible for a bot or spider to visit every page, every day being that they are over 20 billion pages on the Web. Therefore, this is part of the reason why when you submit your site to the major search engines it may take up to three months to see that your site has been indexed. This is also why SEO efforts are sometimes not seen for a few months. So, do not be discouraged if you see little results after your initial SEO efforts. It is very unlikely that you will see any positive results right away.

Once your site is crawled, the spider indexes your site into a database. (Visit this Spider Simulator to see exactly how a spider will crawl over you site.) Basically, the spider identifies the words and expressions that best describe a particular page and assigns the page particular keywords in this stage. Next, the search engine process the page and compares the search string in the search request with the indexed pages in the database and ultimately calculates the relevance of each page to the search string using various algorithms. Finally, the search engines retrieve the results and displays them in the browser according to relevancy.

“Beyond the click” tracking is the process of tracking a visitor’s activity after he or she has clicked on your email and has been directed to your website. Not known to many, you can implement your analytics tracking tool into your email system and in your selected pages of your website.

According to Dave Chaffey, the links from the email to the landing pages should be tagged with standard campaign tracking parameters, which are name-value pairs as part of the query string for the URL (denoted by everything after the “?”). UTM refers to the “Urchin Tracking Module” on which Google Analytics is based.

To more thoroughly understand the Google Analytics tracking process, please click here.