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Archive for May, 2009

Tips for building your online business

May 30th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business | No Comments »

The internet is a great market for building any online business. However, like any form of business, there are some tips to be followed to ensure your business flourishes well.

The most important thing you have to do is to decide on the goals and the vision you think is the most for your business. This means you have to decide how many sales you have to manage in a say a year (or break it down into per month if you prefer), and how you intend to work at reaching this.

It is advisable that you have to write all these thoughts down and keep on reading it for inspiration to do more for your business. This is widely recognized as keeping you focused and motivated.

Now that you have noted your goals down, you have to think over all your creative ideas, and carefully plan how to reach them. Write down all the steps you intend to use to reach your short, medium and long term goals, so that you will be able to make plans for reaching them.

Work at reaching your goals one at a time

This will enable you to simplify the whole process and decide which tasks you think you can do and which tasks may have to be outsourced, and to whom.

It is also vitally important that you do not try and achieve all your goals at once. You have to work at reaching each goal one at a time in a logical manner.

If you try reaching all goals in one go, it is very likely that you will end up getting confused, frustrated and unproductive and then you may not be able to complete any goal at all.

You should always decide how much investment you are willing to put in now at this very important stage. And in striving for improvement your investment won’t stop there, as it will continue in to the future too.
These are just a sample of tips that you should consider when starting a business, whether online or offline. I’ll be regularly posting tips just like these in the future so be sure to keep a look out.

Legitimate white hat tips for search engine optimization

May 19th, 2009 | By Simon In Lead Generation, List Building, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

The previous post gave you an insight to some of the most common, and effective white hat SEO techniques to use for optimum search engine optimization (SEO). Here are a few more tips you could and should use.

Besides uploading your website files on the server, you can also upload the robot txt file, because this file is effective in telling crawlers which directories to crawl or not to crawl. This way, you can prevent the crawling of pages of your site that you don’t want, such as a “terms of service” page or a “policies” page, or even other pages that don’t actually give value to users from search engines.

The pages you make should be meant for users, and not for search engines. This does not mean you have to try displaying different content to search engines and users. This is considered a form of deceit, and is called ‘cloaking’.

Web spammers are of no use

Though web spammers may have sites with a decent page rank at the moment, it is very short term focused, and therefore not advisable to link up with them. Any alliance with them will only lead to your ranking and PR getting affected by the links.

Similarly, you should not take part in any link schemes that seem to increase your site rankings and PR, these do not work either.

It is always better to submit your website to directories and search engines manually. This way you are sure of where you submit your website, and are sure you are not involved in any black hat techniques.

Never attempt to use hidden text or links on your website as this is a black hat technique. Similarly, don’t attempt using cloaking or any other form of sneaky redirects.

Doorway pages only block your passage

Though it is better to have more web pages in your website, you have to ensure they are unique. Creating various pages, sub domains and domains that lead to duplicate content will only end up with your site getting blacklisted in Google.

In the meantime, don’t create any ‘doorway’ pages that have little or no original content in a bid to increase the number of web pages in your website. This is not entertained by Google.

Don’t attempt sending automated queries to of any form to Google and don’t attempt to use any unethical tricks to improve your search engine rankings. It may create a momentary increase in your page rankings; however you eventually end up blacklisted in Google.

Tips for optimum Google optimization

May 15th, 2009 | By Simon In Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the best ways to ensure long term quality racnkings in the search engines.  Though there are many legitimate forms of search engine optimization, there are many webmasters who use unethical methods.

This type of strategy, often called “black hat” can lead to the removal of the site from Google rankings and even getting penalized by reducing the site’s page rank. A penalized site will not show up in Google rankings as prominently, if at all, and so you may want to take a look at these tips for a legitimate means of SEO.

• The site you create should have clear navigation, text links and hierarchy. Make sure all its pages can be reached from a minimum of a static text link while other relevant sites link to your website.

• Include a site map in the website which your users can easily use to link to all parts of your website. However, limit the number of your links to less than 100. It is better to create an information rich website that has pages which accurately and clearly describes all the contents of your service.

• It is always better to include words in your website content that users will most probably use first to find your pages. It is also better to use text instead of images to display the important keywords, links and content of your website.

• The site HTML has to be correct, whilst there should be no broken links around. In addition to this, your Title and ALT tags should be accurate, descriptive and relevant to your website content. However avoid JavaScript, frames, cookies, Flash and DHTML as with all this on the website, search engine spiders find it difficult to crawl your site.

• It is very important that you submit your site to Google, while submitting an xml sitemap file at Google. This way, Google can learn about the structure and coverage of the site.

• Besides Google, you could submit your site to relevant directories like Open Directory Project and Yahoo Directory and other related expert sites. Failing that, if your site is good quality (in terms of content) then the other search engines will more than likely find and index your site anyway, so this is worth keeping an eye on.

There are many more tips you should follow for legitimate, “white hat” SEO, and these will be discussed in coming posts.

More article marketing tips

May 9th, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Lead Generation, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

After discussing a few effective article marketing tips in a previous post, there are a few more tips I have to mention to help with effective article marketing. I have to mention that it is not sufficient to just write an article and post it onto article directories; you need to also ensure that you use the resource box effectively.

The resource box is an area at the end of an article where you can define your company details or information about yourself, in order to prompt the visitor to visit your website.

So by defining your company, what it is you do and including your website’s URL –visitors interested in learning more about your website and your product will just have to click on the link to reach your website.
Another effective article marketing tip is to submit your articles to ezine publishers, who are always looking for fresh articles. This way, your article becomes familiar and popular on other websites, meaning you should get more traffic and also importantly, your website gets more incoming links.

Your resource box cannot be changed

Other website owners who decide to pick up your article to post somewhere else have to do it while maintaining your resource box, so they cannot change it to look like their work. This way, you can expect more traffic to your website as more people visit it while clicking on the URL of your resource box found in these articles.

It’s certainly a good idea to post as many articles about yourself and your website as possible as this is likely to improve your ranking in the search engines. Also, the more articles prospects see written by you, the more authority you appear to have in your field and this is also a very important asset.

Once other people see your articles in search engines and article directories, there is potentially a better chance of your receiving more visitors and therefore more business. Article marketing is definitely a relatively inexpensive, but effective means of marketing your business.

And if you are not comfortable writing articles, remember that there are many writers out there who will be more than ready to write your articles for you, so you don’t necessarily have to do the work yourself.

Article marketing tips

May 1st, 2009 | By Simon In Building Your Business, Traffic Generation | No Comments »

One of the best ways to get people to visit your website is to use the help of articles. It is because of the increased search engine preferences that more and more people are using the help of article marketing to draw traffic and visitors to their site.

When you intend to use article marketing, you have to remember that just writing an article is not sufficient for an effective article marketing strategy to succeed. You have to place emphasis on the readability and content of the article so that the article maintains a good page ranking.

To get a good or better ranking, it’s a good idea to periodically add fresh content to your website. In fact, content is considered to be king in raking traffic to your site as Google and other search engines love fresh content.

So if you keep submitting fresh content to your website, you have an increased chance for improved page rankings in the search engines.

Another point you have to remember when you use article marketing for networking purposes is to remember that keyword density is important in the article. Don’t overdo or have too low a keyword density.

In fact it is widely regarded that a well written, readable and original article will have all the necessary requirements for the search engines to rank it well, so there’s no real need to have to scientifically calculate your keyword density to last percentile.

Proofread your articles

After writing your articles, you have to proofread them for mistakes. Look out for grammatical and spelling mistakes, and mistakes in sentence structuring. Proofreading only once is not enough; do it twice or thrice for perfection in your articles.

If you are not comfortable with writing articles, you can hire ghostwriters to do it for you. And if you don’t have the time or patience to proofread the articles you write, there are many proofreading services on the internet you can use for proofreading your articles.

After writing your articles, don’t just publish them on your website, you have to also submit them to article directories. You will find search engines picking up your articles; and once your article is submitted to article directories, it quickly gets indexed to bring instant visitors to your article and thus website.

Keep a look out for more article marketing tips in the next post……