The importance of internal navigation (website edition)
So you’ve got your page titles, image title tags, and keywords all picked out.
Your copy is amazing and you have everything in order.
What does your navigation structure look like? Do you have pages labeled “About” “Home” and “Services”? Have you researched the keywords you want to use for your page links? If not, you should be doing your Search Engine Optimization due diligence and research the best keywords for your page links.
For regular websites:
- Make sure your page titles are keywords - Instead of “Home” call that link “Name of Company” so the linkback points to the right page with the company name instead of that page just being labeled as “home” by the search engine spiders.
- For the “About” or “About Us” page - Make it a little more interesting and help the search engines love you. If you were an accountant or financial advisor, call the link “About the Accountant” or “About (your first name)” something a little more specific than “About” will help the search engine know what’s behind the link.
- The “Services” page is more neglected than most pages - You could either split your services into categories and label them accordingly (so the page behind the link matches, thus giving it more weight in the search engine.) Or, you could do something as simple as saying “Financial Services” instead of just “Services.” Again, a little can go a long way, as long as you do something beyond doing the bare minimum.
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Title tags and Google
Images are becoming more and more important when it comes to Google.
When you insert an image into a blog post or a website, you need to be making sure you’re adding the title tag attribute to the picture. The title tag tells Google what the picture is, and pictures hold more weight when Google spiders crawl your site.
If your website says flowers for sale, it could easily be a scraping site just pulling feeds to make some quick cash. But if you take the time to put pictures of flowers on your site, Google thinks that means you are probably more legitimate because you put pictures of flowers for sale on your site.
Make sure you use keywords in your title tags whenever possible. If you have a picture of a flower on a gardening site, don’t just put “flower” or “rose” as your title tag. Put something like “we have the best roses at the best prices.” You could specify red roses or yellow roses if you have different pictures on your site.
Using the title tags can really help boost your SEO presence online, and will also help Google bring you targeted traffic by making sure that when people search for what you have, they find your site, your pictures…and your flowers.
Alt tags, while not quite as important as title tags, should not be forgotten. The alt tag on a photo is what the little box will say that pops up when you hover over the photo. This can be as simple as “You can buy these!” or you could just duplicate what your title tag says. Having those little boxes pop up with words in them entertains your potential customers while letting them know what they are looking at.
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These are the niche marketing secrets
Niche marketing is a simple concept, that can help your business to gain an advantage, even in very competitive online categories.
You know that 20 percent of buyers consume 80 percent of your product, so the idea is that you could sell much more products with much less effort if you can identify that 20 percent and find others like them.
People that’s interested in it, and consume your product, can be thought as a market niche.
So the idea behind the niche marketing is to target, communicate, sell and obtain feedback of your best customers.
Consumers are becoming each day more demanding because their choices trend to expand in this global economy that we live now.
So the idea behind the niche marketing is the need to satisfy and keep that part of the market that really want your product or services.
But not any niche market will be good for you, you need to estimate the size of your target or niche market.
It should be big enough to sustain your business year after year. Once you have identified your niche market you need to have information about your niche market’s size, and the numbers that you need to know are not only the total size of the niche market but, the size of the niche market that’s interested in your products, the size of the niche market that your company can reach with advertising and then distribution.
When you decide to pick a niche market you need to be sure that you are going to have enough sales volume and profitability, and you also need to know how strong are your competitors to attract your niche buyers away from your products.
And you also need to have an idea of how many competitive products are going to be offered to your potencial niche marketing prospects.
You might think that the niche maketing was invented to help the new or small companies, but even the large ones have embraced the niche marketing idea, and keep on trying to divide their market and target it with different offers.
And you know why?
Very easy to answer!
If you are interested in buying a dog, would you care for a shampoo advertise?
You need to offer dogs to the people that want dogs and shampoo to the ones that want to wash their hair, you need to make niche offers to your niche market and then you will maximize your selling chances.
Those that repeatedly use your products, your “heavy users” are the niche market that you should try to dominate.
You should divide the whole universe of your potential buyers, into different segments, based on different factors.
Your can divide them by age, by family size, by gender, by economic status or by geographic locations.
It all depends on: what are you going to offer them?
All these niches need, or are interested, in different goods and or services. And the question is: Do you expertize or have a special knowledge in a certain niche?
For example you might be an experte selling used cars, of fixing bicicles, or writing articles, etc.
No matter what niche market you can cover, you can always atract that specific kind of people to your web site and that’s exactly what you have to do.
If you are trying to sell a mass articles, unless you are so creative that have a unique aproach to the products, it can be very tough to market them
This is an interesting point, you can have a very special niche article OR a very special niche aproach to an article.
The result is the same: look for a very targeted traffic to your web site and you will sell well.
The same that happens to mass articles it happen to some niche markets: they are tough to reach.
So you must narrow the focus of your site, the more narrow the focus, the easiest will be the niche marketing.
There should be tons of oportunities in your field of interest, if you narrow your focus.
But if your business is broad based, then niche marketing is not for you, you should develop a good affiliate’s program, then thousands of affiliates can work the search engines, reaching for their particular niche, and then offer your goods or services.
Theme based content sites are perfect for niche maketing and for making good profit from the search engines.
If you sell dogs, then it won’t be difficult to find a niche for dog’s food, dog’s shampoo, dog’s brushes, etc.
Once you define your niche you must look for the most profitable keyword for that niche, then determine the demand and the suply for that niche market, and this will give you the profitabilitty of each keyword (How to Sell on The Web teaches you how to do it).
When you have chosen the most profitable keywords for your niche market, you only have to start writing good content web pages.
My last words: before starting your niche marketing business, make sure that your niche market it does exist on the web, that’s big enough to produce continuous good profits, and that’s within your reach.
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Devaluing PageRank
Google recently made a stink on the Internet when it devalued some well-known websites of their high PageRank. The reasoning? Well, from most accounts people believe it has to do with selling paid links. Google recommends those who sell paid links to use the No-follow tag. That way the link doesn’t count in the eyes of Google, therefore no ‘link juice’ is passed along.
Google has been promising a crackdown on websites that sell links and apparently have made good on that promise. Many quality websites have taken a hit, which has some questioning just how reliable PageRank is of true web authority.
Eatonweb, a blog directory, announced earlier this month that it will be eliminating PageRank as a factor when it comes to assigning value to blogs. While it isn’t surprising that some webmasters are disillusioned with PageRank, when companies begin to take notice of the flaws in PageRank you know something is wrong with the system.
It will be interesting to see if other ranking websites follow suit and if Google will have any response to their decisions.
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Do Follow Blogs
There is a movement going around the blogosphere encouraging bloggers to remove the nofollow tag that is automatically added to comment links. The nofollow tag was implemented by Google to deter spammers from comment posting since their link wouldn’t count towards a vote for PageRank.
Looking to reward those who leave legitimate comments, bloggers have begun to install plugins or make other adjustments to their blogs that remove the nofollow attribute from comment links. It’s sort of a “thank you” gift to the person leaving the comment. There are even do follow badges that these bloggers can display on their blog showing that they do follow. It is a nice sentiment but it is being exploited by some leaving comments. These unwanted comments have caused some bloggers to go back to using nofollow on comments. Others are wondering if they should do the same.
The do follow movement is a good idea. It can help smaller blogs to build one way links and also encourages people to leave comments. The badge is a bad idea because it doesn’t take long for spammers to target those do follow blogs. This already seems to be happening and causing some to leave the fold.
Better spam plugins are being written everyday to combat those who try to exploit do follow blogs. It’s discouraging to see those trying to do something nice for their readership being exploited. Hopefully the do follow movement will survive since in theory it can be a great way to build one way links to your blog.
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Buying Blog Comments
There is a new company - BuyBlogComments.com - that will actually make spam comments on your behalf to blogs. This is just a bad idea no matter how you look at it. Buyer beware of buying such comments for these reasons.
Comments that look either generic or generated might be past the spam filter of a website but not the blogger. Most bloggers keep a check on their comments as they should. If something looks spammy, then most likely they will mark it as spam or just delete it altogether.
While most blogging platforms use the nofollow tag in comments, some plugins or workarounds have been developed for bloggers to turn off the nofollow. What this means is that those comment links now pass a “vote” to Google for that website when Google updates the PageRank. A lot of bloggers have been proudly displaying their choice to turn off the nofollow tag. Sadly, it hasn’t taken long for someone to decide to exploit this.
BuyBlogComments.com promises to place comments on these blogs that have disabled the nofollow tag. The problem is that these bloggers really care about their comments and the people who comment. So they are extremely diligent when it comes to moderating comments. Let a batch of spam-like comments start hitting all of these blogs, and bloggers will get the word out. They can possibly delete the comments or even blacklist the IP of the commentor.
If you want links from comments, take the time and comment yourself. You will gain the “vote” from the link. You might also gain readership if your comments are well thought out. People will click your website to want to read more of your work.
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PageRank Update?
It has been almost 3 months since the last Google dance, the name given to when Google reconfigures PageRanks. The Google dance happens every three months and there is already speculation from the exact date of the dance to reports of fluttering PageRanks.
For about a week, webmasters will notice a possible change in their PageRank. It may fall to no PR(PageRank) or jump suddenly only to fall back down again. When this happens, this is usually the most obvious sign that Google is updating the PageRanks. Some people are already reporting an influx in their PageRank while others are saying the July 21st will be the PR update.
While Google hasn’t released an exact date, what we do know is that last update was in April, so it is time for another PR update. Google will visit each site and evaluate it. Each link is a “vote” for a website. How much weight that vote counts varies on the PR of the website. A link from a high PR website is weighted more than a link from a PR 0.
Since the update hasn’t happened yet, there is still time to work on securing backlinks to your website before the Google dance. Take part in link exchanges, write compelling content, or leave comments on blogs are all ways to get links. Get busy, because we may not know the day of the dance begins but we do know that one is coming very soon.
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Using article marketing to build rankings fast
It’s not good enough these days to simply get back links. Back links to your site need to be from thematically related websites and more then that, thematically related PAGES and paragraphs and even sentences within pages.The modern search engine examines content surrounding outgoing links on a page to determine its value. The content should be in a similar topical vector. This means if your site is selling golf products you want links from other sports and recreation sites and pages that use sports related terms. Google specifically uses something known as LSI or latent semantic indexing to determine if the content on a page is topically related to your site and if your anchor text makes sense.
The big question is how best to get these topical backlinks.
Well, article marketing is one of the most time tested methods for building quality thematically related backlinks… and fast.
BUT you do not want to simply write an article and submit it to every directory you can find.
Why? The major search engines will not count all these versions of your article. They’ll look at the first few and drop the rest because they’re duplicate content.
Well how do I get them to count? You simply use multiple versions of sentences, words, paragraphs, and phrases within your article and use a content spinner like Jetspinner from Jetpacked to spin them into hundreds of versions of your article all ~30%-60% unique.
Then you can take automated submission software like Jetsubmitter and submit a unique version of the spun article to each of 400 directories. Now instead of getting 1-2 backlinks from your article you’ll get much closer to the full 400.
These method alone is responsible for putting tens of thousands of dollars in my pocket and millions of visitors on my web sites.
Use it wisely!
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Learn To Search Google Effectively
Type in a keyword or even a short sentence, hit enter and go down the list. This is how many people use a search engine but as you will soon see, there is more to Google’s search engine. It has a lot more power that is not known, so people can’t take advantage of it.
Most users aren’t aware that Google automatically assumes the word “and” between all the words in a query. That is, if you enter two words, it assumes you’re looking for pages that include both those words—word one and word two. It doesn’t return pages that include only one or the other of the words
The upshot is that you don’t have to enter the word “and” in your query. If you’re searching for Bob and Ted, all you have to enter is bob ted. Google assumes the “and,” and automatically includes it in its internal index search.
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Youtube Confuses Utube
Youtube is very popular even more so now that Google has official bought the online video company. However many people looking for Youtube are accidentally typing in utube.com which is a company that sells machines FOR tubes.
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