Structuring and Planning

How structuring and planning your site relates to Internet Marketing?

Again I will make use of analogy with the real life experience. Imagine that you visit a store where all items are all mixed up and spread all over the store. Obviously takes you hours to find (if you do!) whatever you looking for and at checkout you find out that they don’t take but cash. Would you go back to the same location? I wouldn’t!

The same apply to a website. I have seen sites with thousands of links on each page and with the first click I end up with tens of pop-ups, overlays and so. Some other sites have nothing less than a novel written about one and every item or service and pages are a mile long. I don’t want to see those sites anymore, do you?

Plan and structure your site in a friendly way, the way that will make sense to an average visitor.  When I design (or redesign) a site I start with pencil and paper (actually I use Microsoft Word’s outline feature): I build an outline based on the main menu (main navigation) and under each menu item I write down what should go on that page. I do this for all pages and subpages and then I look it over and make sure it has a nice flow to it. What I like best is to have the main navigation bar at the top of the page and a side navigation bar specific to each page. It makes finding whatever one is looking for a lot easier. It’s also very important from the search engine point of view to have a site map. A site map will also help computer savvy visitors to navigate faster on your site.

A very small detail that most site owners forget is to ad a bookmark button on the header. Why is so important? Let’s just say I like your site and I plan to return at a later date. I have to right click, choose bookmark and then OK. Having that magic bookmark button will make it very convenient. Next time I don't have to performing another search and if I use different search terms I might not find your site again so you lost a potential customer.

Another point I want to make is to avoid lengthy pages. I did not land on your site by mistake, I know what I am looking for and you will not convince me to buy your product or service if you tell me that your grand-grandmother was born in Russia. What I mean is being descriptive but brief and to the point about your products. You can offer more details on a different page and it is my option to take the time to read the history of the world or not but do not force me to do it. Hope you get my point.

Using java and other type of scripts are necessary. A word of caution: not always search engines can follow all scripts and if they do will considerably slow down the process of indexing your site. The best way is to minimize to use of scripts and if that is not possible use robot.txt file to instruct spiders and crawlers what and what not to follow.

So yes, a good planning and a good structure of your site have to do a lot with Internet Marketing. In a couple of days I will talk about the “front of the store” in real life and how that is interpreted in digital world.

Internet Marketing - The Way I See It

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I look at Internet Marketing from the “Real Life” perspective.  I am always comparing marketing in digital world with real life facts. To further explain this I will use as example opening a new business. It could be a retail store, a service company or a manufacturing facility, it does not matter much. So let’s begin!

Planning

Before I even do anything I need to plan real good about how my business will be run. Of course a good business plan is a must. What should be included in this as one of the main items is the location of the business. In real life you have to take in consideration many factors in choosing your location that is specific to the business. In digital world location is translated into the site’s rank on search engines. The higher the rank the closer to the “main street” meaning more people will find you. Part of the Internet Marketing planning is to create a site friendly towards search engines. That implies optimizing the entire site (including all media and links) with fresh keywords and key phrases so when the site is uploaded is ready for searches.

Optimizing Your Site 

Optimizing your site to me it resembles choosing the right location for the business in real life. If you are in retail or service industry you want your location on the "main street" where you will have the most customers. In manufacturing industry you want a location close to main roads for easy shipping and receiving and also easy access for your work force. In digital life a desirable location means top rank on search engines. This can be accomplished in many ways and this blog is all about this.

It seems that now the trend in Internet Marketing is totally focused on Social Marketing and many people start ignoring many other aspects of becoming successful on Internet. I still think that one of the most important aspects is to have a well optimized site with fresh content, optimized internal and external links, fresh keywords and search strings. 

In the next post I will discuss various techniques for optimizing a website. I have some older posts on this topic and you are more than welcome to read them. It contains some beneficial links too.

 

xGenSeo -- Social Marketing Wonder!

What is XGenSEO™? It is a brand new kind of software just released to the market for whomever wants high rank on their online presence by building super quality inbound links from most indexed web 2.0 sites.  It has been designed keeping in mind the business owners who want cutting-edge technology to dominate their competitors and emerge as winners.

XGenSEO™ is fully automated and it comes with an array of intellegent features to help you increase your brand awareness and at the same time improve your revenue potential remarkably. It’s wizard styled intuitive interface makes quality link building a very easy task. Other interesting features include Power Keyword Builder with which you can quickly create or modify a keyword basket/database and Competitor Analysis which allows you to see which top competitors are competing for any specific keyword. Moreover, Powerful Reporting Suite enables you to analyse how your campaigns are going and how XGenSEO™ has helped you to promote yourself or your client websites. Also, there is XGenSEO™ Engine that automatically checks if there is an update available for it every time you open XGenSEO™.

 If you think that these are great features then keep reading! These only scratch the surface of what this next Generation SEO tool can really do. Listed below are key features which make XGenSEO™ Software – Your SEO Secret Weapon:

• Automated Social Sites Account Creator :- It specifically creates several accounts in top social sites. It also verifies all accounts automatically. Or you can add the ones you already have an account with.
• Article/Blog Creator :- It helps you create article or blog posts. Also, the Article/Blog Spinner automatically spins these article/blog posts into different versions.
• Automated Articles Submitter :- It allows you to submit articles to various high PR article directories namely EzineArticles, Article Dashboard, Article Trader, Article Base, and ArticleAlley etc.
• Automated Blog, Wikis & Hub Submitter :- It can submit different versions of your article/blog posts to all the top blog sites, Hubs & Wikis automatically. These include Word Press, EasyJournal, BlogSpot, Zimbio, WikiSpaces, and Hubpages etc.
• Automated Micro Blogging & Social Networking Sites submitter :- It will assist you in automatically posting links of your article/blogs to all major micro blogging & social networking sites including Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
• Automated Social Book-marker :- It automatically takes all the new postings and bookmarks them to major book-marking sites like Delicious, Digg, Backflip, LinkAgogo, and A1-webmarks.
• Automated RSS Feeds Submitter :- It automatically gathers all the RSS feeds from the social sites you submitted content to and submits all those feeds to RSS directories such as: Blo.gs, Feedbase.net, Feedboy, Feeds4all, and Azfeeds.
• Automated Power Ping :- It gathers all the links from the sites you posted content to and pings them all using pinging sites such as: Blo.gs, Feedburner, Blogstree, Feedster automatically.

XGenSEO™ will boost your sales immensely and make your business prosper whether you are a novice or marketing professional. Try this proven SEO tool and see yourself get to highest rankings (TOP 10) on the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing. Not only that, we offer 100% money back guarantee if you are not satisfied by this latest SEO tool and 20% off if you purchase by the end of this month. For a free trail Sign up with XGenSEO™ now!

Links -- A Big Part of SEO

Optimization and marketing for search engines is an ever-changing fight for the highest place. At one time, back in the history, links were non-existent, then start gaining importance and now is like nothing else matters but the quality (juicy) links a site has. So it's crucial that those search links are properly optimized.

How you do a SLO (Search Link Optimization)? Let's look how a common internal link looks like (this will link a text from one page to a different page in your site i.e. for navigation purposes) : 

a href="your-page.php" title="page title" target="_blank" page name; (I intentionally omitted <, /> because it will be treated as a valid html link and will not display but "page name")


There are two areas to be optimized in this type of link. First is title="page title" -- the page title should contain at least one prominent keyword for that particular page description. As an example, on this site (Apex Pacific) I have available SEO Suite that is an All-in-One Seo Software, so in my case title="seo optimizing software" works great. All three words are key keywords and it might look like I am spamming but that is what the product is.

Second area is page name (that is where you put the page name) and in my case I have SEO Suite v.8 As mentioned in previous posts choosing a page name could make a big difference. Again, the page name has to contain at least one prominent keyword. So, you have at least two "money" keywords in one internal link that will be easily indexed by search engines.

Another type of internal link is the image (picture) links. This link will display the image where you place it on the page and it tells the browser where the image is located on your site. All image links have the alt=" " tag. What you should use for alt tag is the image description that it will be displayed instead of the image in case the image is damaged or missing. So take this alt tag and use it in your advantage by optimizing it the same as a text link as described above.

More about links: be careful about outbound links where you link to. The search engine algorithms are very keen against spamming. You should link to other material or products of similar relevance. Specially pay great attention to other people that are allowed to post on your site (such as comments to your blogs or forums). Many times they take advantage of your ratings and embed a link to their low ranking site in their posting. You should not allow that because that will lower your rank. The way to block that is adding a nofollow tag to that link when you moderate: add rel="nofollow" after title="title" and that will prevent search engines to follow that link thus that site is not getting part of your rank.

To better understand how links and page ranks are tied go to this blog.

SEO - The Magic of Success! (part three)

Disclaimer: this blog is intended for average user that would like to know more about ways to improve his/her site ranking. Experts are invited to post their comments, agree or disagree with my posting so this blog will be learning experience for everyone. Isn’t that cool? 

We are done with keywords, meta tags title, description and the content of your site. Before submitting your pages to any search engine or directory is a good idea to see how your HTML knowledge stands out. Checking the accuracy of your HTML code is again quite important. Believe me, mistakes are done even by the most proficient people in the industry. Is always a chance that you forgot to close "" something or you forgot that "&" has to be followed by three letter code and ";" ("&"). 

If your site has several pages with a lot of coding, how you will be able to check for mistakes that will put search engines in a dilemma to continue indexing or not? Luckily for all of us there is an easy way to do it with the help of  W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) . W3C is an international organization that develops standards for the web so everyone will be on the same page. All you have to do is submit your URL to W3C and you will have a report with all the errors in a second or to. 





You might have critical errors that have to be corrected right away and also you might have some warnings in regards to possible mistakes. Go to the line number listed on the error list and corrected if that is the case. Sometimes is part of the code you intended to be that way. W3C Organization is the only authority I recommend to check your HTML with.

Next time we will discuss about optimizing your links, pictures, videos and more.
 

SEO -- The Magic of Success! (part two)

Disclaimer: this blog is intended for average user that would like to know more about ways to improve his/her site ranking. Experts are invited to post their comments, agree or disagree with my posting so this blog will be learning experience for everyone. Isn’t that cool?
So, as you can see time is not on my side this time. It has been quite awhile since my last post. Sorry!

I am assuming that you already built your keyword list using whatever method you choose. And you have checked those keywords against Google's Search-Based Keyword Tool and/or AdWords Keyword Tool. What most people do not realize is that search terms changes constantly. So what one word or phrase has been used 50,000 times today that does not mean will be used the same tomorrow. Keywords gain or loose popularity daily but more noticeable are monthly trends. That is good because you submit your site to search engines on a monthly basis, don't you?



Before submitting a keyword/keyword phrase trend analysis should be performed and any necessary changes should be made to meta tags, your heading and content to reflect the changes. You don't do this you are at risk to lose or not getting any possible higher rank than previous month. Again Google will help you with this trend analysis: Go to Google Insights for Search page and plug in the chosen keyword and select whatever filter will best suit your needs. You will get a wealth of information so you know what kind of changes to make.

The golden rule of search engines: their crawlers and spiders and whatever they use to read and search your pages is that they actually pick up information starting from the top and from the left; it's like you read a book (I admit that few nations have a different way to read like up then down from right to left or whatever other way) but don't go into that -- that means most of your keywords / key phrases should be at the beginning of your page. Your heading should not have more than 150 characters with a keyword density no more than 3%; your content will be best at 300 - 500 characters with keyword density of 5 - 7% mostly on the beginning. And yes, your footer about 100 characters with a maximum ratio of 2%.

Until next time, Happy SEO!

SEO -- The Magic of Success!

Disclaimer: this blog is intended for average user that would like to know more about ways to improve his/her site ranking. Experts are invited to post their comments, agree or disagree with my posting so this blog will be learning experience for everyone. Isn’t that cool?


SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is the top topic for any Webmaster, Consultants, would be Webmaster from the smallest on line presence to largest corporations on line.


It seems that nowadays everyone knows everything and anything about SEO and more and more individuals (a few calling themselves “SEO AGENCY” and/or “CONSULTANTS” doing business in the SEO/SEM niche for decades!!!) are trying to make a fortune on this. I have strong conception that the average website owner (my potential client!) should have some knowledge about SEO/SEM business. It is much easier to negotiate a contract with a knowledgeable client.






What is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimization. In plain talk, you make your site user friendly for search engine crawlers and spiders and implicitly for your visitors. At the very basis of any optimization is choosing the right keywords. Users will always use keywords (or key phrases) to find what they are looking for. Choosing the right keywords is crucial and a site should be build around the chosen keywords. There are many software on internet claiming to make this job a breeze. Choose carefully! Instead you can use Google AdWords itself (highly recommend!) to find the right keywords by going to their Search-Based Keywords page or AdWords Keyword Tool.


Now, you have several sets of keywords, one set for each page of your site. Oops! I didn’t mention that you need to treat each page in your site as an individual website: its own head, meta tags, title, description, side bars and so on. You need to insert those keywords into your page content. I use an elementary method for this. I write down on a large piece of paper all keywords I want to insert in my content. Then I build sentences and phrases with each word. And then I put all together in a meaningful way. I structure my pages the same way I use to do my research papers in school.: it’s quite important to have your header (“opening statement”), the body and footer (“closing statement”) that resembles the header with different words.

That is, what is called, organic way to build an optimized page (site). Keep in mind that in this posting I just lightly scratch the surface of SEO. More to come!