I Could Spoil You

In the business world today and the aggressive environment, many advertisers route to using competitor trademark names as keywords in paid-search advertising.

In the Search Engines Results pages these trademark names appear for Google, Yahoo! and affiliates and partners when you buy Google AdWords or Overture Precision Match sponsored listings. Thus there are maximum chances that your competitors can drive the significant traffic to their websites by the virtue of your trademark name. A very good example we can see which we have seen at the interviews.com article titled “Google Adwords Under Further Trademark Scrutiny,” Google quoted that: “As stated in our Terms and Conditions, advertisers are responsible for the keywords and ad text that they choose to use. We encourage trademark owners to resolve their disputes directly with our advertisers, particularly because the advertisers may have similar advertisements on other sites.” It is well known that in the beginning, Google AdWords did not sell trademarked keywords. However, it currently sells trademarked keywords in the U.S. and Canada (but not internationally) with the stipulation that the trademark name can’t be used in the ad copy itself.

The Best resistance is a transgression There can be some way to protect yourself from competitors raiding your trademark. The very first option is that we think to hire an SEO vendor to help identify your competitors and then research their search engine advertising activities. The company’s legal department can subsequently use the SEO research data to protect your trademark and reputation. This step will prove invaluable toward defending your future and ongoing business.

Maximum times, it will be the smaller or the struggling companies use your trademark terms as keywords in their advertising. So these companies avoid the threat of legal action the upon acknowledgment of a cease and desist letter. This will help in protecting your company as well as you are damaging the competitors that you don’t want representing your firm.

Another benefit of mining this competitor data is to assist those whom you do want to benefit from using your trademark name. For instance, you may have affiliates, resellers, and a number of associates with whom you can negotiate on a recurring basis. These are the folks you trust with your trademark and reputation — your friends and family marketing network. There’s something in it for you when they profit from your success.

Knowing who is using your trademark in keyword search advertising or in the body text of their web site has a directly positive effect on managing your brand, your trademark, and your reputation. Make sure your SEO vendor covers this critical marketing aspect for your online success.

A statement of prudence It goes without saying that you don’t want to use trademark names other than your own in keyword phrases. Profiting from the use of another company’s trademark or brand without relevance or permission is unacceptable and could even result in legal action against you.

Alexa traffic ranking is being used by many webmasters and web advertisement services to measure the success of websites and has been a topic on many forums and blogs. Most talked about topic is on how to improve your traffic ranking and how accurate the ranking is.

In a nutshell, Alexa rating shows number of page views and number of users particular website receives. According to Alexa, the traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users. However, Alexa only works on Windows systems using Internet Explorer.

So what if your website is really popular by non - Alexa Toolbar and non-Windows users? There are many scripts out there that will generate fake hits to your website, and some users of such scripts reported dramatic improvements in their Alexa ratings. But if the traffic is only tracked through the Toolbar users how can a fake hits script improve your ranking? They shouldn’t and they can’t.

Sill, those scripts are very popular and are sold anywhere between $10.00 and $200. I am almost done writing a PHP script that uses proxies to generate fake hits and you will find it on bewebmaster.com for free very soon. But if you really want to improve Alexa Traffic Ranking install Alexa Toolbar on your work, school, home or any other computer you use to visit your website and soon you will start seeing increases in ranking.

If you have a website then you already know the importance of traffic.
Traffic is to Internet marketing as location is to real estate. It’s the only
thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your
site, you will not make any sales.

Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to
drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the
search engine. Of coarse, you can use advertising, but it’s going to cost you.
Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product)
traffic is the least expensive method known.

Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search
engine visibility, which leads to traffic. They place more importance on
producing a “pretty” website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary
to search engine placement. Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes,
made by many website owners, will help you generate more targeted traffic to
your site…after all, isn’t that what you want.

1. Not using keywords effectively.
This is probably one
of the most critical area of site design. Choose the right keywords and
potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will
see little, if any, traffic.

2. Repeating the same keywords.
When you use the same
keywords over and over again (called keyword stacking) the search engines may
downgrade (or skip) the page or site.

3. Robbing pages from other websites.
How many times have
you heard or read that “this is the Internet and it’s ok” to steal icons and
text from websites to use on your site. Don’t do it. Its one thing to learn from
others who have been there and another to outright copy their work. The search
engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even
prevent you from ever being listed by them.

4. Using keywords that are not related to your
website.
Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine
visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website.
They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as “sex”, the name of a known
celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page.
The keyword doesn’t have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the
keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique
is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes
the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.

5. Keyword stuffing.
Somewhat like keyword stacking
listed above, this means to assign multiple keywords to the description of a
graphic or layer that appears on your website by using the “alt=” HTML
parameter. If the search engines find that this text does not really describe
the graphic or layer it will be considered spam.

6. Relying on hidden text.
You might be inclined to think
that if you cannot see it, it doesn’t hurt. Wrong…. Do not try to hide your
keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some
unethical designers my set the keywords to the same color as the background of
the web page; thereby, making it invisible.

7. Relying on tiny text.
This is another version of the
item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword
phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that
it can barely be seen does this.

8. Assuming all search engines are the same.
Many people
assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has
their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a
point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility.

9. Using free web hosting.
Do not use free web hosting if
you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine
visibility. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free
hosts.

10. Forgetting to check for missing web page
elements.
Make sure to check every page in your website for
completeness, like missing links, graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that
will do this for free.

This is just a few of the methods and techniques that you should avoid. Do
not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do
more harm than good for your website.

Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, you may have your site banned
from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper
techniques for increasing search engine visibility and your net traffic will
increase.

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Everyone packs their website with keywords in order to feed those keyword-hungry search engines spiders.

Just do not starve your potential customers by forgetting to have the food they like:

• ample helpings of benefits

• tips rich in protein (practical)

• automatic weekly feedings (like a newsletter)

If you (affectionately) look upon your potential customers as if they are WIIFM monsters, and understand how to care for and feed them, there will be no scary nightmares (unprofitable websites).

A WIIFM monster is someone that is only interested in: what is in it for them.

It would take days to describe everything you need to know about these monsters. In the end you will see that those monsters are actually cute, cuddly, likeable monsters.

Just by observing these monsters (from a safe distance) you can learn so much …

The moment one of these monsters arrive on your website, you need to start feeding them - immediately. It is best to have many automatic feeders at your website, those monsters are hungry - they must have food, NOW.

An automatic feeder used often is an autoresponder feeder. These monsters can pick what auto-feeder they want to feed from, and start receiving food in minutes. These automatic feeders feed the monster for days, one easy-to-digest helping per day. The monster has the option to at any time stop the feeder.

I MUST warn you about something here. If you do not have a facility for the monster to stop the feeding, the monster will explode. This is NEVER a pretty sight. Humans get their websites taken away, their email privileges revoked and so on.

Another food source is eBooks. They can chew on this for days, before they come back for more. The tastier (valuable, practical content) your ebooks, the better the chance that they will come back to YOU for more. Always have a footpath (link) in the eBook that the monster can find you again in the big jungle where everyone shouts to them: feed here for free, FREE: feed here …

There are many different types of monsters that every website must have food for, but for now I will just tell you about the WIIFM monster.

This is the biggest monster of all. If it is not fed well, feeding all the other little monsters is of no use (like the freebie monsters).

The what-is-in-it-for-me monster is also sometimes ‘affectionately’ called the WIIFM monster. It only wants to know what it can get from a website.

If it is clear to this monster that you have no tasty food, it leaves immediately.

This monster has a pair of very well developed eyes. It can see within 3 seconds if a website has its favourite food (WIIFM content).

These eyes are so well developed that it totally ignores banners. These eyes only go for the real tasty food (quality, practical content).

The monster also has a very, very fast click-claw. If those well-developed eyes do not see food in 3 seconds, that FAST click-claw reacts with a speed that make the speed of light seem like a snail crawl … off goes the monster to find other more worthwhile feeding grounds.

The more favourite, favourite food you give for the WIIFM monster, the happier it gets. This causes this monster to quickly tell all its other monster buddies about this amazing source of WIIFM food. Yours.

These might be monsters, but they are not too stupid. They know that no matter how much of this WIIFM food they eat, their buddies can eat this food too, without the food ever being eaten up.

The food is not actually eaten, it is food for thought!

So, the more your feed these monsters, the friendlier they become. So friendly that they start sending you email and soon after that they start sending you money.

(Things sure have progressed tremendously since those dark ages - monsters can now send email too. That is how that spam-monster was born, but believe me, you do not want to hear THAT story …)

To attract more of these monsters, you build a monster-habitat for them.

What they really like in such a habitat is things like …

• a WIIFM discussion

• weekly fresh WIIFM food at the website

• a weekly newsletter, also with fresh content

• links to other worthwhile food sources

No matter to how many other WIIFM websites you send them to, they will always come back to you - if you really care about them and want to feed them.

You become a sort of a leader of the pack for them. You lead them to worthwhile food sources.

These monsters are very willing to buy food from you. If this food is tasty, they will also tell their monster buddies too. These buddies will also buy this tasty food. You will be amazed at how quickly this good news can spread. For some reason, these monsters are efficient at telling everyone very quickly if you tricked them, so be fair in all your dealings with them.

There are so many stories I want to tell you about these monsters, their different types of food sources, their enemy monsters, how to become their friends, and so on, but my time is up (for now). Time waits for no monster, not even the WIIFM monster …

To sum up the story so far, let us listen to one of the monsters I like best:

Sumarus - he likes to eat lots of tasty food (value content) and then summarize it, oh so brilliantly …

Sumarus (after clearing his throat):

So, to summarize (he always starts just like that)

The sole purpose of a website is to be the feeding ground of WIIFM monsters. The more WIIFM food you dish up in the form of articles, ebooks, newsletters and links to other worthwhile food sources, the more WIIFM monsters you can attract.

Your primary role is in providing tasty food to attract as many WIIFM monsters as you possibly can. The tastier your food, the more you can ask them to pay for your commercial food. If WIIFM monsters see you have no food, they leave - immediately, sometimes sooner !

WIIFM monsters HATE vomited food. They LOVE fresh food you prepared just for them.

If WIIFM monsters and website owners get to know each other very well, this can lead to lifelong, beneficial partnerships for everyone involved.

Sumarus might be too theoretical and philosophical for most humans, so this is what I think he means:

The better you can cater for the daily, practical needs of your website visitors, the better the chance that they will stay with you and continue being a newsletter subscriber.

You should only recommend other worthwhile websites.

Even if there are lots of sources of free worthwhile content, you must add value to what you give your website visitors and newsletter readers.

Initially you must provide value content up front, but will benefit from this later in the form of sales.

Sumarus also suggests that you reread this article to see how many other not-so-obvious tips you can find hidden in it.

About The Author

Article by Alwyn Botha of http://www.leveragedsuccess.com. Leveraged Internet Success website contains: Discussions, eBooks, articles, a weekly newsletter, and email courses. Leveraged = your maximum, exponential Internet success

Lots of research has focused on inbound links to a site, but little has focused on the number of links actually on a page (outbound or to other parts of a site). Many SEO gurus have recently been talking about something they call “PR Leak” which seems to be a theory that the more outbound links you have, the more your page rank on Google “leaks” away. That concept isn’t found in the academic papers published by the founders of Google, but does seem to be accepted by a majority of SEOs. I decided it was time to take a look at the number of links present on a page and how that number correlates with ranking.

The methodology: I gathered the results of the queries that were naturally performed last month by myself and three associates using the two leading search engines and analyzed them. I counted the number of links on the page (references to “href”) and tabulated the results against the ranking of the URL in the search results. The tabulated results were finally converted into a normalized “ranking correlation.” The results for each of the two leading search engines were kept separate so that we could discover any differences between the two leading search engines for this factor.

The resulting graphs show the results for groupings of number of links normalized into a number between -100 and +100 showing the likelihood of being ranked higher/lower. A value of +100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank HIGHER than pages of another value. A value of -100 shows that all 10 rankings were in the proper order to show that pages of the studied value ALWAYS rank LOWER than pages of another value. Numbers in between show the varying likelihood of rankings proportionally between -100 and +100.

That is the number you see on the Y-axis. On the X-axis, we have the number of links found. They are grouped into sets of 10 in order to increase the statistical significance with the amount of data we had available to analyze. Here are the graphs for the two leading search engines:

http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/dey01.gif

http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com/graphs/deg01.gif

(Note to webmasters: Feel free to hot link to the above graphs or copy them to your own site if you publish this report. Feel free to remove this note as well.)

The number of links were grouped in this way in order to increase the number of data points available. Unfortunately it also reduces the precision of the results. One is able to see that 91-100 links rank much higher than 1-10 links, but you are unable to see if 77 links rank differently than 79 links (for example).

The result is very conclusive. Both leading search engines rank pages with more links much higher than pages with fewer links! Once again, it appears that the SEOs touting the “PR Leak” theory are simply wrong. If their theory held any weight at all, we should see the exact opposite. Pages with more links should rank lower on average.

Notes:

1. There was no exercise to attempt to isolate different keywords. I merely took a random sampling of the queries performed by myself and three associates during the month.

2. This is merely a correlation study, so it cannot be determined from this study whether the leading search engines purposefully entertain this factor or not. The actual factors used may be far distant from the factor we studied.

Copyright 2004 Jon Ricerca

About The Author

Jon Ricerca is one of the leading researchers and authors of the Search Engine Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com. For access to the other SERF reports, please visit: http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com

There are many websites that fail to target their required traffic, even if they’ve had some search engine optimisation work done. One of the main causes for this is simply because the website isn’t search engine friendly. This is a basic essential that needs to be incorporated into the design of all websites at the outset - think of it as the foundation to establishing your search engine optimisation strategy.

This article aims to highlight the areas a web designer should think about and incorporate into their design for maximum search engine effectiveness:

1. Search Engine Friendly Pages

It is important that when you design your website you not only bear in mind what your website requirements are, but also what the requirements are for search engines. Best way to approach this is to remember that search engines don’t really care about how nice or complicated your graphics or flash movies are, or how snazzy your javascript is. Instead search engines look at the code behind your page. Therefore if you want to impress a search engine, then your code needs to be nice and easy to read. Now from this I don’t mean adding ‘comment’ tags and breaking the lines of code up with spaces, but to ensure that the elements the search engine is interested in, i.e. Title tag, Description tag, Keyword tag (these days only some search engines really use the keyword tag), Alt tag, are readable near the beginning of the code. Search Engines don’t like wadding through lines and lines of javascript to get to the core areas that can help you page’s ranking. Therefore careful planning and positioning of your page elements is required.

TIPS:
- If you’re using table for laying out your page then make them simple and not too complex.
- Avoid using frames.
- If you need javascripts for navigation purposes, then use smaller scripts to call up the bulk of the javascript from a different file.
- Think twice on how to use graphics - make them relevant to your content and use the Alt tag for all images.
- Position the main content of the page before the images, or at least with the images nested between the text.

2. Keywords

Having good keywords is one of the most important areas to consider when designing a website/webpage.

One of the best tools for this is Wordtracker (www.wordtracker.com), which allows you to identify good competitive keywords for your pages.

In general the range of keywords associated to your pages can be very extensive therefore for good concentration and prominence of keywords it is advisable to carefully select the top 10-15 keywords. You can always export the results to Excel and try out other competitive keywords if the ones you selected initially do not produce any noticeable benefits.

TOP TIP:
Wordtracker offer a one day subscription to their service from which you can squeeze nearly 2 ? days worth of use! Here’s how - Sign-up for the service on the evening of Day 1 (the service will be available almost immediately so you can start searching for your competitive keywords straight away). You will also be able to use the service for the whole of Day 2 and strangely for the whole of Day 3! Enough time to get some good keywords for a lot of pages!

3. Content

Many search engines look at the main body of the page and identify keywords and phrases that are used within the text.

TIP:
Use competitive keywords relevant to the purpose of the page within the main body of the page. Always try and ensure that the keywords are prominent within the text body, i.e. they appear near the beginning of the page, they are defined using the ‘heading’ tag, they are typefaced in bold, or they are used as hyperlinks.

4. Page Title

This is arguably one of the most important areas of a page and needs special attention to ensure that a good title is selected.
Similar to many other areas of designing a search engine friendly page, the Page Title should also have a good keyword which describes the page content.
To keep within the limits of many search engines the number of words for the Title shouldn’t exceed nine.

5. Page Description

Another important area to work on for good ranking is the Page Description.
This is the text found under the META Description tag and is displayed to users in the search results. Again, it is a good idea to pay attention to the use of good keywords when writing the description, which should be short (not more than 20-25 words) and sells your page before the user has even opened it!

6. Graphics

We’ve covered the use of graphics briefly above, emphasising the importance of using an Alt tag containing the relevant keyword(s).
Although the use of images can be nice and very appealing to a website, it is also important to bear in mind that they shouldn’t overpower the textual content of your page. As a general rule of thumb it is best to stick to a 70/30 ratio (70 text/30 images).

7. Site Map

A Site Map is a fantastic way for search engines to find all your juicy pages on your website. There are many free Site Map tools available on the web that’ll create your site map instantly.

8. Navigation Links

Navigation links to other pages on your website should be nice and easy. There are some engines which find it difficult to navigate through to the other pages on your website if the nav bar is too complicated, e.g. complicated pop-ups, use of flash, etc. Therefore if your site does have complicated navigation then it’s always a good idea to implement simple text based hyperlinks to your common pages at the bottom of every page on your website.

Following the basic suggestions above will help lay the foundation to apply further good search engine optimisation advice which will make the difference in your overall search engine ranking.

This finer area of SEO is beyond the realm of this document and will require further investment based on individual needs.

Arif Hanid
Internet Marketing Manager for Ambleton Computing.
Professionals in bespoke Internet Developement and Marketing.

arif_hanid@ambleton.com
www.ambleton.co.uk