Internet Marketing Tips

If Google has banned your site from your use of black hat SEO or other illegitimate tactics, there are a few steps you can follow to try to correct this very vital issue. The first step in the process you would take would be to analyze why your site has been excluded. You will need to contact all prior spamdexing relationships and correct them.

Once you have corrected all of your black hat SEO attempts, you will now have to contact Google via a reinclusion request. According to WebConfs.com, this can be obtained by going to Google Sitemaps and from the Tools menu on the right, select Submit a Reinclusion Request. On the next screen, read carefully the instructions and explanations, fill in the required data and submit your request.

WebConfs.com suggests that you:

• Admit your errors and fix them. It is an extremely good idea to correct your mistakes before you submit your reinclusion request. Why would Google want to grant you reinclusion if you have done nothing to correct exactly what they banned you for?
• Be polite. The worst mistake you can make in your reinclusion request is to be rude. Google will not take your threats of lawsuit or trash talking lightly. This will likely further elongate the amount of time your site is banned. Google is not obliged to provide you with free traffic of any sort.
• Look at their Webmasters Guidelines. Rarely changed, these guidelines may still provide you with what Google recommend you do.
• Don’t spam them. Google does not have the time nor the patience to handle an hourly email from you suggesting to reinclude your site.
• Is it your first time? Hopefully it is, because if not you may be completely out of luck and never be allowed to be reincluded for that particular site.
• Reassure them that it is not going to happen again. Explain exactly what happened and why this occurred. Tell them that you messed up and that you have learned your lesson.
• Consider AdWords. Don’t blackmail Google, simply use their other services to your advantage. By purchasing AdWords, you will be able to generate traffic from Google in another avenue.

While you may not be trying to manipulate Google in anyway shape or form, you may still be subjected to the ultimate fear of having your site excluded from Google’s index. Google tries very hard to ensure that they only punish the sites that deserve it. If you are not sure how you could be practicing the wrong SEO techniques, visit this site that lists the main factors that will negatively influence your site to Google’s bots.

According to WebConfs.com, it is necessary to clarify that the fact your site is missing from Google’s index can mean two things:

a. You have not been included yet, though you have submitted an inclusion request. This is the part of the sandboxing process that you have absolutely no control over.
b. You have been excluded from Google’s index because of violation on your site.

Over optimizing your site can lead to this dreaded day when your site is banned. As a general rule of thumb, NEVER practice any black hat SEO techniques. This includes, but does not limit linking farms, keyword stuffing, invisible text, spamming and doorway pages. Reinclusion can be a very lengthy and demanding process. Correct the mistakes you made immediately, contact any spamdexing relationships you had in the past and file a reinclusion request.

View my next entry regarding reinclusion if this has already happened to you.

Search Engine Optimization will most likely, but not guarantee to:

• Drastically improve traffic to your site
• Exponentially increase your ranking
• Build credibility to your site

Search Engine Optimization is not:

• Purchasing the number #1 sponsored link through Google Adwords
• Purchasing paid placements on search engines

Too often, people think that by hiring a SEO team that their site will automatically be the number one result in the major search engines. This rarely is the case, due to many factors. SEO takes time, persistence and constant relationship building. Additionally, rankings are constantly changing.

Obviously, one’s goal would be to hover around the top five results. However, it is not uncommon for a site to be number two one day and number eight the next day. There is simply constant fluctuation amongst the major search engines. All you can do is put in the time and effort and wait until your site builds enough credibility to consistently be at the top of the search results page.

Can you control the amount of time your site is in a Google sandbox? No, but there are ways in which you can actively help decrease the damages of the sandbox effect. If you attempt to control a sandbox, you will be heavily penalized and in some cases, your site will be completely banned. Therefore, I would highly suggest not trying to fool Google and just wait it out.

According to WebConfs.com, these are the following steps you can take that legitimately MAY allow your site to get out of the sandbox a bit sooner:

· Actively gather content and good links. Constantly update and optimize the content contained in your site. An excellent way to do this is to create a blog within your site. Again, do not rely on the quantity of inbound links, but the quality. Build credible links slowly and steadily.

· Plan ahead. It’s ok to launch a couple of pages at a time. This will allow time to be running parallel to your site development efforts.

· Buy old or expired domains. New sites on new domains will generally take a longer amount of time to be processed out of a sandbox.

· Host on a well-established host. While free hosts are cost effective, they are not generally a good idea for SEO. You can also host your main site on a sub domain and on a separate domain host just some contents, linked with the main site.

· Concentrate on less popular keywords. Depending on the amount of competition your keywords have with your competitors, you may actually be able to appear at the top of SERPs from the very beginning. While you wait to get to the top for the most lucrative keywords, you can discover that even less popular keywords are available to push your site to the top. So, it may not hurt to make some optimization efforts for them.

· Rely more on non-Google ways to increase traffic. While Google is widely considered the most reliable search engine, you can also concentrate some efforts on other search engines that virtually have no sandbox at all.

A sandbox or aging delay is where Google places your site until it matures enough to be allowed to be indexed and appear in the search engine results pages. Even though it is not proven that a “sandbox” actually exists, it can be seen through the fact that no matter how vital or well optimized a new site may be, it will still not rank high on Google. The time period that Google places new sites in their sandbox can vary from around one month to seven or eight months.

The main reason behind Google placing a new site into a sandbox is to ensure that black hat SEO practices, which may illegitimately force sites to the top of the results pages, are penalized. During this “probationary” period in a sandbox, SEO practices are either considered ethical or spamdexing.

Stay tuned to see if there are ways in which you can legitimately alter the amount of time that your website is placed in the sandbox.

Google PageRank primary function is to evaluate the amount and quality of inbound links to a particular site. Currently, it does not take into account the anchor text or content of the referring pages. This is, however, expected to change in the near future. Google’s main algorithm does not currently involve the PageRank.

According to SEO Administrator, this example below shows how each page has a real PageRank value known only to Google and a displayed PageRank range for their ToolBar. They created a system by using this logarithmic scale:
Real PR ToolBar PR
1-10              1
10-100           2
100-1000       3
ect… ect…

This shows that the PageRank ranges displayed on the Google ToolBar are not all equal. For example, it is easy to increase a PageRank from one to two, while it is much more difficult to increase it from six to seven.

The main purposes of the PageRanking system are to provide a quick check of the site’s popularity and to evaluate the competitiveness level for a search query. Again, remember that a PageRank of a 5 or 6 is a relatively high PageRank. It is highly unlikely that a small business will ever achieve a PageRank of an 8, 9, or 10.

Google, unlike other search engines rely heavily upon inbound links. Taking this into account, this serves as a main principle of how Google ranks pages contained within a website. It is vital to understand that each page within a website will have its own PageRank (0-10, ten being the best) and is determined by the PageRank of other pages referring to it.

Obviously, you would want your homepage or landing page to have a very high ranking. Understand, however, a PageRank of 5 or 6 is actually a fairly high PageRank. It is understood by many SEO experts that the “possible frequency of visits” to a page will render its PageRank.

According to SEO Administrator, this is the process of how a user follows links to surf a network, thus ultimately shaping the foundation of a PageRank:

It is assumed that the user starts viewing sites from some random page. Then he or she follows links to other web resources. There is always a possibility that the user may leave a site without following any outbound link and start viewing documents from a random page. The PageRank algorithm estimates the probability of this event as 0.15 at each step. The probability that our user continues surfing by following one of the links available on the current page is therefore 0.85, assuming that all links are equal in this case. If he or she continues surfing indefinitely, popular pages will be visited many more times than the less popular pages.

The PageRank of a specified web page is thus defined as the probability that a user may visit the web page. It follows that, the sum of probabilities for all existing web pages is exactly one because the user is assumed to be visiting at least one Internet page at any given moment.

1. Planning Phase
   1. Set up short and long-term goals for your website
   2. Why should a searcher come to your site?
   3. Research your target market thoroughly
   4. Sell the features of your product(s)
   5. Is there any reason why a searcher would not want to buy from you?
   6. Who is going to handle the website’s complaints or problems? Is this person reliable and easily accessible?
2. Create a Stellar Landing Page
   1. What are you trying to generate from your site? Of course you want a sale, but do you want to personalize a lead or direct some other primary response as well?
   2. Look at the entire buying process and fix any glitches that you may think could possibly arise before they occur.
   3. Understand and answer on your landing page any questions that a user may have throughout the whole buying process.
3. Creative Relative Content
   1. Exploit the benefits of your product
   2. Develop content around your selected keywords
   3. Check and recheck for grammatical and spelling errors
   4. Implement credibility (this can be obtained by the insertion of testimonials and/or a guarantee)
   5. Create a headline that could sell to a blind dog
4. Design & Usability
   1. Ensure that your site is visually appealing, yet still directs a searcher to your selling point without them getting lost or caught up in the graphical elements
   2. Visually guide a searcher down through the content to reach your selling point
5. Optimize
   1. Begin an email marketing campaign
   2. Obtain publicity throughout the media
   3. Implement Google Analytics
   4. Test Google AdWords to see if it proves to be effective with your product
   5. Submit your URL as soon as you finish your site
   6. Hire a Search Engine Optimization team to get your site to the top of the major search engine rankings
6. Test, Retest & Test Again
   1. Constantly reread, review and revise your website’s content
   2. Ask for feedback from your clients
   3. Continually think about how you can improve your site and test your new methods

Obviously, this question has no easy or concrete answer to it. I believe most marketers would agree that the fist step in achieving a strong conversion rate would be to ensure that you have a strong “call to action” or a very convincing offer that will entice users to leave their contact information. One of the most frequent mistakes is simply throwing a “Contact Us” button on your website and just crossing your fingers and praying that this will provide you with valid leads. What’s in it for them? Give them a reason to contact you!

Make sure to not make things complicated on your landing page. Keep it simple, concise and to the point. A user should automatically know what services or products you are trying to provide for them right off the bat. Most importantly, make it valuable. Word of mouth spreads extremely fast. If you treat them to valuable information, gifts, products or services, it most likely will come around full circle.

1. Large photos. Just because a picture has a large file size does not mean that the picture is going to be sharper. This may take a considerable amount of time for the picture to load and the user is going to eventually leave your site.
2. Splash page. Never introduce your site with a splash page if at all possible. “Click to enter” is a waste of time and an annoyance to users. People don’t want to watch the screen and wait for some Flash animation to pop up that has nothing to do with the product or service you are trying to provide.
3. Poor organization. Don’t listen to those marketers who tell you to cram everything on one page. Having no navigational path on your website creates disorder that will not set well with a user.
4. Keep it stagnant. Visitors and search engine bots will have less and less of a chance to visit your site if you simply build it and never change it. Always keep the content of your site updated. A good way to do this is to have a blog within your site.
5. Ambiguity. People should know right away what your site is about. Create content that is descriptive, yet concise and to the point. Pictures tell a thousand words. If you own a restaurant and have an online menu, how many people do you think you lose by not having a picture of a few dishes on your menu on your website? I would gather it would be quite a substantial amount.