How to optimize for Google

Most important for Google are three factors: Page Rank, link anchor text and semantics.

Page Rank is an absolute value which is regularly calculated by Google for each page it has in its index. Later in this course we will give you a detailed description, but for now it's just important to know that the number of links you've got from other sites outside your domain matters greatly, as well as the link quality. The latter means that in order to give you some weight, the sites linking to yours must themselves have high Page Rank, be content-rich and regularly updated.

MiniRank/Local Rank is a modification of the Page Rank based on the link structure of your single site only. Since search engines rank pages, not sites, certain pages of your site will rank higher for given keywords than others. Local Rank has a significant influence on the general Page Rank.

Anchor text is the text of the links that point to your pages. For instance, if someone links to you with the words "see this great website", this is a useless link. However, let's say you sell car tires and a link from another site to yours says "car tires from leading brands", such a link will boost your rank when someone searches for car tires on Google.

Semantics is a new factor that appears to have made the biggest difference to the results. This term refers to the meaning of words and their relationships. Google bought a company called Applied Semantics back in 2003 and has been using the technology for their AdSense contextual advertising program. According to the principles of applied semantics, the crawler attempts to define which words mean the same thing and which ones are always used together.

For example, if there are a certain number of pages in Google's index saying that an executive desk is a piece of office furniture, Google associates the two phrases. After this, a page about executive desks using the keywords "office furniture" won't show up in a search for the keywords ''executive desk". On the other hand, a page that mentions "executive desk" will rank better if it mentions "office furniture".

Now, there are two other terms related to Google's way of ranking pages: Hilltop and Sandbox.

Hilltop is an algorithm that was created in 1999. Basically, it looks at the relationship between "Expert" and "Authority" pages. An "Expert" is a page that links to lots of other relevant documents. An "Authority" is a page that has links pointing to it from the "Expert" pages.

In theory, Google would find "Expert" pages and then the pages that they link to would rank well. Pages on sites like Yahoo, DMOZ, college sites and library sites would be considered experts.

Sandbox refers to Google's algorithm which detects how old your page is and how long ago it has been updated. Usually pages with stale content tend to gradually slip down the result list, while new pages just crawled initially have higher positions than they would if based on Page Rank only. However, some time after gaining boosted positions, new website disappear from the top places in search results, since Google wants to verify whether your website is really continued and was not created with the sole purpose to benefit from artificially high rankings over the short term. The period when a website is unable to make it to the top of search results is referred to as "being in the sandbox". This can last from 6 months to one year, then the positions usually restore gradually. However, not all brand new site owners observe the sandbox effect on their own sites, which has led to discussions on whether the sandbox filter really exists.

Introduction to E-Mail Marketing. The Basics

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• Sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with their current or old customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business;

• Sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing old customers to buy something again;

• Adding advertisements in e-mails sent by other companies to their customers.

Studies have shown that the first thing people do when they turn on their computers for the day is open their e-mail. Because of this fact, email marketing is becoming a primary, effective tool for advertising. By using advertising banners, click through message options, and other routes, a business can interest a new customer as well as entice a previous customer into more purchases.

Internet direct mail has many advantages over traditional paper direct mail:

• It's faster. E-mail can reach the target almost in seconds. You can get out a campaign, get results, and make money in days in a short period of time after sending your e-mail. This compares very favorably to traditional direct mail campaigns, which can take eight to twelve or more weeks to complete (from concept, copy, and design, through printing and mailing).

• Response is immediate. Your customers will give a response the day you send your message, and you will receive 90 percent of your responses in about four days. As you get results sooner, you can plan the next campaign or rollout with confidence.

• Traditional direct mailing is limited by geo­graphically boundaries (currencies, time zones, varying postal regu­lations, and postal systems of varying quality and reliability), e-mail is a global medium. Successful campaigns can easily be rolled out worldwide.

• It's less complicated to produce. The typical Internet direct mailing is a typed e-mail message created right on your com­puter. Unless you want to incorporate sophisticated graphics you do not need a professional graphic designer, Web developer or HTML programmer.

• Costs are much cheaper to send. The cost to send a paper direct mailer is typically sixty to eighty cents per piece. This price includes printing, postage, mailing list rental, and production. At that rate, mailing 100,000 pieces would cost $60,000 to $80,000. E-mailing to the same number of prospects will cost about $300 - $1,500 depending on the services used.

• E-mail services works as well as or better than regular direct mail in many instances. E-mail makes the purchase fast, easy and at a time and place of the buyer's choice. This increases response rates. Personal­ization, which increases response, is easy and inexpensive. You can create powerful presentations combining graphics, text, voice, video, audio, animation, color, and interactivity.

Email marketing does not work as well for a one-time quick hit marketing strategy. Email allows you to build a regular, ongoing dialogue with your best clients and prospects. That becomes self-selecting - those who most wish to do business with you will appreciate the regular communications. Those who do not can opt-out.

E-Mail Marketing

Our next stage presents a new Internet Marketing tool which you can use for business project development. You can create a powerful presentation of your offer and deliver it to the targeted audience immediately and at a low cost. An e-mail marketing campaign can be an answer to many of your marketing needs.

These days people are virtually-living in their inboxes. E-mail is a fast, inexpensive and effective way to target and address various audiences, especially when compared to other traditional marketing channels.

E-mail marketing provides great benefits as part of an Internet Marketing business campaign. It’s a highly effective tool for reaching prospects, customers and specific clients.

E-mail marketers can freely manipulate the message transmission mechanisms, copy content, advertising banners and other options to make a purchase easy, fast, and at a time and place of the buyer's choice. This increases response rates. You should definitely incorporate e-mail marketing best practices into your knowledge base.

What follows is a compilation of ways to start an e-mail marketing strategy, create a reliable mailing list, compose message copy, track results, and run and manage the campaign.

You’ll also get a clear picture of trends and patterns to aid you in mapping your email marketing strategy. By having these guidelines and benchmarking your competition you can develop a Web project and become a successful industry practitioner. The market is constantly changing so tracking known competitors in your field is smart and savvy marketing will be one of your primary activities.

A direct e-mail campaign, like any other promotional effort, should have an elaborate plan and arise from your business's over­all marketing plan. Be sure to track the campaign and measure responses.

Use the Internet more effectively to deliver ads and offers via mailing services to prospects, customers and clients. E-mail marketing is a quick and easy way to drive considerable amounts of traffic of targeted visitors and it can effectively create interest for a new customer as well as entice previous customers into more purchases.

Introduction to Online Advertising

Our next lesson covers the main items for online advertising. Advertising is probably the most important promotion tool for big brick-and-mortar companies. However, with a SEM businesses, advertising is only a supporting factor. The problem is that the majority of SEM businesses lack the scale to be able to effectively contact large numbers of prospects and clients. Furthermore, there aren't many places on the Web where prospective clients come in flocks. Therefore, advertising is largely PPC-oriented.

Actually, online advertising is advertising on the Internet. This particular form of advertising is a source of revenue for an increasing number of websites and companies.

A significant number of firms, from small businesses to multinational corporations, incorporate online advertising into their marketing strategy. Online advertisements typically involve at least two separate firms: the advertiser or agency which purchases or sponsors the advertisement and the publisher or network which distributes the ad for display. Because of the close relationship between technical innovation and online advertising, many firms specialize in both. For example, most search engines couple their search service with an advertising program, exploiting the benefits of keyword-based search technology by including ads in search results.

Let’s look closer on the most popular online advertising form as traditional banner. PPC advertising form will be explained in details in 8 lessons of our next Step. in next posting

What You Should Know before Getting Started with Online Marketing

The good news is that Internet marketing has rapidly grown and offers a broad array of opportunities for small and large businesses. From the previous introduction we became familiar with the Internet marketing science structure and the particular steps to follow do develop an online business.

At this point, before delving more deeply into the subject, let's define some main terms. Online marketing deals with websites and Web pages, search engines, email and the Internet as the base of the World Wide Web. All of these areas are used to advertise and sell goods and services.

Referencing the original Wikipedia encyclopedia project definitions of our basic terms, they are as follows:

The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet.

The hypertext documents, or Web pages, reside on Web servers - special computers that receive requests for Web pages and can "serve" them to the requesting side.

Each Web server, or host, has its unique global address used to find it over the Internet. This address is called an "IP address". A typical IP address looks like four numbers separated by dots. For example, 63.146.123.0 is the address of the server where google.com is situated.

Each server can hold one or many websites. A website (or Web site) is a collection of Web pages, typically bound to a particular domain name or subdomain on the World Wide Web on the Internet. A website is identified uniquely by its domain name, e.g. www.webceo.com.

Domain names are translated into IP addresses by the global DNS - domain name system. That is, when you type www.webceo.com in your browser, the latter first sends a DNS request, and receives the IP address of the server where www.webceo.com is hosted. The browser then connects to that server directly and asks for Web CEO's home page.

Each website is composed of many Web pages. A Web page is a document, typically written in HTML, that is always accessible via HTTP, a protocol that transfers information from the website's server to display in the user's Web browser.

So when a new business is born on the Internet, or when an established brick and mortar enterprise goes online, it starts by creating a website. This is done by purchasing a domain name from an organization accredited to sell domain names, e.g. godaddy.com or register.com. Also, some hosting space must be purchased, so that there's some server ready to store the website. Then, several Web pages are created and linked to each other to make up this website. Finally, the website is linked to the domain name so that everyone can type this domain name in a browser and view these pages.

With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. A client program called a "user agent" retrieves information resources, such as Web pages and other computer files, from Web servers using their URLs.

Most commonly, the user agent is a kind of Web browser: Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Opera, Netscape, or the program that you use to view this lesson. It retrieves content from remote Web servers and displays it on your computer. You can then follow hyperlinks in each Web page to other World Wide Web resources, whose location (including their domain name) is embedded in the hyperlinks. The act of following hyperlinks from one website to another is referred to as "browsing" or sometimes as "surfing" the Web.

To find a Web page, you can always type its address in the address field of your browser. But what if you don't know the exact address, or want to find all Web pages from different websites on a particular topic?

This is when you use a search engine or directory for the search. There are 3 top search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN (Windows Live Search). These search engines are most preferred by Web surfers and every site owner strives to get included in their databases. If people can find your website through search engines, this search engine creates an invaluable source of traffic for you, which translates into income if you sell goods or services.

Actually, search engines are very numerous and differ according to how they work. We have a specific section for "Understanding Search Engines" which includes seven lessons to guide and familiarize you with their core principles.

There is one final point we'll look at, and that is the use of email for your online marketing activity. The topic is email marketing and using this form of communication to send goods and service offers to clients.

Electronic mail (abbreviated "email") is a store and forward method of composing, sending, storing, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems.

Email predates the Internet; existing email systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet. Email was quickly extended and became additional and highly useful tool for the online marketers.

Email Marketing and other forms of Internet Marketing are depicted in this course to select and master your niche for a future online business.

Introduction into Internet Marketing

Starting from the early 1990s Internet marketing made an amazing development from simple text-based websites that offered product information into highly evolved and complete online businesses promoting and selling their services on the Internet.

Nowadays, the Internet marketing industry has become a complicated and branchy science involving a great deal of theoretical knowledge in combination with applied techniques. As a science, it ranges from browser-side and server-side programming and coding on one end to marketing and economics on the other.

Internet marketing means the use of the Internet to advertise and sell goods and services. It includes Banner and Text Advertising, Email Marketing, Interactive Advertising, Affiliate Marketing and Search Engine Marketing (including Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click Advertising).

Our first stage of the Internet Marketing course will start with Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a specific area of an online marketers' business. Mainly, its purpose is to increase targeted traffic from search engines via organic search engine ranking, paid listing and advertising. Here you'll be shown the main principles of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), link building, and paid advertising campaigns.

Actually, every successful search engine optimizer should be aware of top search engine demands and consider them while creating website and improving on-the-page and off-the page factors for Web pages. There are numerous important factors influencing search engine ranking of a Web page. The SEO division of the course provides profound and consecutive lessons depicting each step of your optimization work. Search Engine Advertising is the last topic of the SEM Stage.

There are certain methods that go beyond SEM that can help improve your site online visibility. These include, for instance, creating and spreading a banner / ad network and / or paid link partnerships, as well as email marketing and building affiliate relationships with other websites.

Email marketing is an independent branch which has to be dealt with separately and does not have much in common with SEM. Email marketing is a subject of our next stage and there we will provide insight into the main direct mail campaign steps and guidelines.

Banner networks relate to SEM as long as they touch upon your link popularity (which is a component of SEM).

In the following stage you'll study the Affiliate Marketing division of Internet Marketing. It is a popular method for promoting web businesses when with few marketing dollars marketers can establish a presence and earn a profit recruiting affiliates. Such partner networks can grow with your company business projects and add its profit to your marketing budget.

The most vital stage of the whole course is Web Analytics. Its role can be hardly underestimated as Web Analytics is an essential measure for continually improving web business performance, advertising campaigns, organic search engine results, ranking positions and others. Generally, Web Analytics deals with the traffic already generated at the previous stages. Its primary goal is to improve traffic quality and enhance conversion.

Although it is possible (and advisable) to understand every theoretical aspect of Internet marketing, in practice you may do much better by specialization in a specific area or technique and simply start your Internet Marketing business. Our last stage provides a proper and clear scheme about how to estimate your potential, find a niche, manage projects and promote your services as online marketer, SEO consultant, etc.

WEBSITE MARKETING STRATERGIES

The best ways to build links to our blogs or websites to increase website traffic:

1)Blog Contest:One of the easiest way to promote our blog.We have to announce the contest that we are hosting,the rules and the prizes.

Benefits of blog contests:

many backlings from other blogs join our contests,many trackbacks,comments,buzz,lots of new rss subscribers,new viewers.

Link:http://www.blogcontestsite.com/

2)Mashable.com:It is the largest social networking blog.to increase traffic if we have a good story,cool new web2.0 website,social network news etc we can email them.For link building we have to register a free profile,and rss feeds and make 5 commands per day.

Benefits of Mashable:

-We will get a lot of traffic.It has a lot of site that copy their rss feeds.so if we get featured ,we will have hundreds of anchor text links as well as all of that traffic.It has a PR7 blog,so if we link to any post on Mashable ,we will get a PR7 trackback from the homepage temporarily.Mashable comments give a link back toour website as well as our profile,so wiht a few comments our website can indexed very quickly and our profile rank can get PR4-6

Link:http://mashable.com/

3)Commenthunt.com:It is a search engine for high PR blogs without nofollow tags

Link:http://www.commenthunt.com/

4)Bloggingzoom:It is a new digg like website that is dedicated only to bloggers to help them increase website traffic.If our Posts zoomed, then we will get a good traffic

Link:http://bloggingzoom.com/

5)Mixx.com:It is a good designed and developed social news aggregator that displays news related to our intrests and the topics are voted by the community. We have to start a profile and post good stories to get good traffic

Link:http://www.mixx.com/

6)Linux counter:This is a linux site where they are tracking how many people are using linux,where they are from,and few other statistics.If we want to build hundreds of links we can submitt ourself to every country(205 countries at movement).All of the aged pages are PR2-4,so if we spend some time submitting our site to the entire list,we can expect a great PR updates for minimal work when gogle starts their updates.If we are going to use this technique,we can do a few per day on a set schedule so that google does not penalize your site for building tons of links one day.

Link:http://counter.li.org/

7)SocialMarker promotes rapid link building:It is a website that is basically a browser for submitting links to over 25 different social news and social bookmark websites.If we want to promote a blog post,website,or featured news article we can use socialmarker.we have to enter in some tags,a description,and a tittle.SocialMarker then bring us 30 websites that all allow us to post our link.These 30 websites are all aged and have good PR,so it is a great place to get anchor backlinks from.most of the 30 websites are crawled by the search engines extensively,so we can expect 30 quickly crawled backlinks to get our site indexed very quickly as well.

Link:http://www.socialmarker.com/

8)Link Building With Drupal:Drupal is a massively popular open source framework for websites.It is a community focused system,so their sites allow users to register.So we can create a profile.No verification is there,so we may put our own blog inside.Inside our profile we are allowed to link to our homepage.we can get our own page and a link to our blog will be dofollow(good for search engines)

Inside our profile we can enter in as many intrests as we want.Every single interest we type in has a seperate “tag” page.If we were to enter a large amount of keywords (20 or 30 is more than enough),we will have built 20-30 small links as well as a stronger link from our profile.All of these links will also increase the PR of your Profile Page,which brings more authority to our domain.If we are looking at a short term goal ,we will have a few old profile having PR-6 and drupal.org has a page rank of 9.

Link:http://www.drupal.org/

9)Link Building With Listible:It is a super simple website that displays lists about nearly everything.if we have a list about blog posts that are related to seo,we can make a list for it.there are no rules for what kind of lists we can build.We can add “resources” to every list,which include a search engine friendly link to our website.Since listible is completely text,the search engines absolutely love it.Some pages are PR4-7 and we can put our link on all of them.Otherwise we can make uor own lists.

Drawbacks:

-It is getting a lot of porn spammers on it so do not expect this gravy train to stay.

Link:http://www.lifehack.org/articles/tag/list

10)Link Building With Grazr:Grazr is a web2.0 service that allow us to create to widgets to “monitor online sources and share the results”.Grazr is a PR6 authority site ,and we can easily get a few pages on the site that link to every new post we make.

Steps to getting our own power links:

-Register on Grazr,com

-Visit the big “create ” button.

-Hit the “data” button and enter our rss feed url.

-Go to “info” and make a tittle and hit save.

-go to “share” at the top.It should have a page with some links in it.

-If we see the links,we now have three seperate pages that links to our rss feed.

Link:http://grazr.com/

11)Link Building With Squidoo:Squidoo is a huge community powered site that allows users to write about topics they are “experts” in.In return for writing these articles,squidoo shares half of the advertising revenue with us and gives us anchor text backlinks inside our articles.

Link:http://www.squidoo.com/

12)Link Building With Unasked:Unasked is a service like Yahoo Answers.User of the site ask a question,and the other user of the site do their best to answer them.The more correct answers we give,the higher our “ranking” is on the website.

While we can post links when we answer our questions,they are 100% nofollow,thus making answering questions useless for linking purpose.However every questions we answer links to our profile where we can set our own homepage with a dofollow anchor text link.If we want to build one more link to our site,sign up at unasked.com and then answer a question or two,so that our prifile page will get indexed quickly.

Link:http://unasked.com/

13)Link Building With Gather:Gather is a place where we can share the things that are important to us with tons of different people.Gather is an extremely popular site with over 700,000 pages indexed in google.It has an incredible amount of pagerank,authority,and trust.google crawls the site daily because it is filled with so much contents.Gather allows link builders to write up quick articles and plug a few backlinks in them. At the end of the day we can publish tons of articles on Gather and recieve hundreds of quality backlinks to our website to increase our search engine traffic over a long period of time.

Link:http://www.gather.com/

14)Link Building With Yedda:It is another site that lets users ask questions about any topic they like and the other users of the site can answer the question and the best answer is voted by the community.

With a little planning,we can get automated emails for when a question is asked that relates to our keyword,and then we can answer the question and question and build links from it.For example I suscribed to the keyword 'online dating',and recieved an email with someone asking “how do I get a girlfriend”,through which I answered , “try joining a free online dating Service” and linked that to datepad.com(source)

Link:http://yedda.com/

15)Link Building With Blurtit:This site is basically the same as link building with Yedda

Link:http://www.blurtit.com/

16)Dofollow Driver:It is a hand edited custom google search engine that allows us to search for a keyword we are trying to rank on,and it will find the related blog posts that we can leave a comment on for an anchor text related backlink to our site.The dofollow driver is a constantly updated list that purges blogs that are nolonger dofollow.If we are looking for some easy links that come from a related ninche to us,the dofollow driver is the place to go.

Link:http://www.inlineseo.com/dofollowdiver/

17)Link Building With ThisIsBy.us:This website is almost same as squidoo where we can register and write about anything and earn a share of the advertising revenue.The advertising share is 50% to the writers,10% to the commentators,and 5% for the referrals.The remaining 35% goes to site owner.

For link building purpose,we can register,login,and write an article about whatever we want.To get the most out of our link building campaign with ThisIsBy.us,we should include a bit content and some optimized titles and keywords

Link:http://www.thisisby.us/

18)AmericanTowns:This site ont only help us build backlinks for any posts we might write,but it also has the potential of sending us targeted local traffic ,as well as the possibility of local offline exposure.

Link:http://www.americantowns.com/

19)Link Building With Help:This site is much like Unasked and Yedda but the difference is that HELP.com is a lot bigger and has ton of members that we can link from.Unlike the smaller question and answer sites,HELP.com is gigantic and is now owned by CNET.HELP.com is an authority website with a strong pagerank 6/10

Link:http://help.com/

20)Link Building With Naymiz:It is a free website that allow us to register a profile centered around our name and reputation.The site is like Linkdln.com

To maximize the pagerank that our profile will get,fill in as much fluff as possible,such as uploading a random picture,a random resume and random social media profiles.

Steps:

-visit naymiz.com,sign up,create a free profile,and add our blog under the “links”category.

Link:http://naymz.com/

21)Link Building With LookupPage:It is an online tool for managing our online presence(ranking in the search engines),and for tracking who is looking for us.Basically, we can sign up for a free profile account .On our profile page ,we can write an “about” type page,as well as anything we would put on a linkedln or Facebook profile.At the bottom ,we are allowed to add as many links as we want,and they are search engine friendly anchor text.

Link:http://www.lookuppage.com/

22)Link Building with eBay:The mammoth shopping site Ebay.com is one of the top 20 most popular website of all time.eBay has an area for their members to create their own Ebay blogs.The page blogs.eBay.com has a very nice pagerank 6,and is linking to the most recent blog posts made by eBay members.

The process of leeching eBay's incredible authority and increasing the website traffic to our own website:

-Sign up for an eBay account if we do not already have one.

-Setup our blog with our anchor text as the name of the blog.

-Add a little description to our blog, but save the core description to our actual blog post.

-Add a new post with our anchor text again, but this time include a well written paragraph with a dofollow anchor text link to our site.Feel free to make the link even stronger by adding a bold/italic tag,adding a title tag,etc.

-Publish our blog.

-Check blogs.ebay.com to make sure the PR6 recent page is linking to our new blog.

Now,not only does this powerful PR6 link get our blog/pages indexed quichly ,but it also assisted by the PR4-5 eBay pages of different countries.

Link:http://blogs.ebay.com/

23)Link Building with Expired Domains:A very powerful link building technique that a few people talk about is buying an existing website/domains and then redirecting to our own website.There is a thing called “301 redirect” which tells the search engine that our website has moved domains permenantly,and it forwards all of our rankings and backlings to the new domain.