MegaRich – For Internet Entrepreneurs

Internet entrepreneurs need to know about SEO and how to use “seo experts” correctly. Here is an article from Erin Weinger of Entrepreneur Magazine which I think is excellent.

Search engine optimization–the canny use of keywords and other techniques designed to shoot a website to the top of a search–is the make-or-break factor for many new businesses.

It is also the web’s unfolding, and unregulated, frontier. There are countless SEO strategists, consultants and self-professed experts who will claim they can beam your site up into Google’s top 10 search results–for a price, of course. Consultants commonly charge upward of $200 an hour, and most will pressure you to sign a contract that keeps them on retainer for months–at prices as steep as $12,000 a month. Unscrupulous SEO firms not only make promises they can’t keep, the worst of them also use shady practices that might produce no traffic, deliver the wrong traffic or even get you banned from planet Google.

“The SEO business is 80 percent scam,” says Peter Kent, an internet marketing strategist and author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. “It’s very, very difficult to find a good firm.”

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For the startup owner who isn’t well versed in webspeak, hiring an SEO consultant is one of the more vulnerable moments in launching a new business. So before shelling out thousands of dollars, it’s essential to understand what they do, when you need one (and when you don’t), how much you should pay, what you should you expect–and when you should fire them.

First, experts generally agree that SEO firms are most worthwhile at the development stage of a website. For example, for $225 an hour, Kent will take a spin around your site, looking for the elements that will get you to the top of a search–clean URLs, site maps, heading tags, page titles. Ideally, he says, someone like him helps lay a solid, searchable foundation for a site as it’s being constructed. Beyond that, Kent and other experts don’t see much value in contracting with an SEO firm. “Once you optimize the website and everyone on the team understands what needs to be done, there should be no cost moving forward,” he says.

SEO firms that ask for a lump sum payment as well as a monthly retainer–or worse, a long-term contract–are suspect. Yet such deals are common.

Executives at Optimal Fusion, a Los Angeles-based marketing agency, found that out the hard way. The company hired and fired roughly 20 SEO firms in the years after opening its doors in 2005. It paid as much as $12,000 a month for what Optimal president Joel Bess calls, bluntly, “bullshit.”

“They weren’t getting us ranked anywhere,” Bess says. “They would send us reports and say we were ranked. But we were ranked No. 44 [on Google] for the search term ‘Internet advertising in America.’ When was the last time someone actually searched for the words ‘Internet advertising in America?’ ” Frustration finally led Bess to learn the SEO game for himself. He hired an ex-Google engineer to teach Optimal’s team members in a half day what SEO firms said would take at least six months of contracted work to achieve. That not only helped their business, it also gave them expertise to share with clients, which include as-seen-on-TV products such as the Snuggie blanket and Sham Wow, the super-sucking sponge. “If you’re trying to rank the word ‘Ab Circle Pro,’ don’t write on the title ‘exercising is fun,’ ” Bess says.

The Right Keywords
Google, of course, is the web-search alpha dog. But all the others–Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, Lycos–are sniffing out the same stuff.

DIY Web Diagnosis

These free online tools measure your SEO efforts without the $300-an-hour consulting fee.

Google Analytics
Install a snippet of code and receive a wealth of information about people clicking into your site, including visitor data by location, search engine phrases they used and which pages they visit most often.

Yahoo! Site Explorer
Racking up links from other websites is critical to SEO success. This service from Yahoo monitors the number of links to your site and where they originate. You can also view who’s linking to your competitors.

Xinu
This simple tool runs a battery of diagnostic tests on your site in a matter of minutes. Just enter your URL and it will grade your title tags, keywords and show you how many pages and pictures you have indexed on Google images.
What gets their attention? Good, fresh, focused content. Adding a blog is one of the easiest and most straightforward ways to bulk up on content. If you sell hair-removal devices, for instance, start a blog that explores all aspects of waxing, plucking, threading, electrolysis and so on. Over time, your site will accrue searchable heft.

The trick is to be hyper-conscious of your keywords. For example, if you want web surfers on the prowl for “eyebrow waxing” to find your site in search engine results, organically work the exact phrase “eyebrow waxing” into each blog post (maybe multiple times), and use it on all static pages related to eyebrow waxing. Lather, rinse and repeat with every term and phrase you want to rank for.

Before you start writing content, though, research and plan your keyword attack. Is geography important to finding your customers? Then maybe “California eyebrow waxing” is the phrase you want to home in on.

How do you size up keyword quality? One method is to use Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, which reveals how many monthly searches are conducted for a word or phrase. If a search term produces more than 50,000 searches in a month, it will be difficult for your site to compete for Google’s attention using that word or phrase.

But you can also use AdWords like a thesaurus: It handily delivers a list of alternatives for you to sift through to find lower-volume, but more focused, keyword phrases. Using those, you’ll have a better chance of rising up the ranks. Google also has a search-keyword tool that will scan your existing site and suggest keywords.

Relevant Page Titles
So once you have your list of keywords, where else do you use them (besides your hair-removal blog)? The obvious spot is the keyword field, part of the hidden meta data that is attached to every web page. But last fall, Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam, wrote on his personal blog that the search engine behemoth ignores keyword meta tags when ranking websites. The revelation caused quite a stir in the web search world. It confirmed what many experts suspected: Google was combating professional spammers who practiced “keyword stuffing” to achieve higher rankings.

So now it’s page titles–the line of text that appears at the top of your web browser–that are believed to be the most important few words in the SEO universe. (The title is also what shows up on Google’s search result.) A page title tag field is standard on most blog programs, including TypePad and WordPress; any web programmer should be able to customize one for sites built on Drupal or Joomla, two popular content management systems. Another place to plant keywords is each page’s description field. Customize the description for each page of your site, and write them with some care, because the first 120 characters show up on Google, tucked between the page title and address.

Plugging keywords into all these critical spots is time-consuming–but it isn’t rocket science. Getting it done, even if you need to update existing pages, shouldn’t be expensive.

Getting the Links
So what might be a good use of your SEO dollars? One word: Links.

Google uses about 200 data points when sizing up your website. But one of them is whether you’re popular with the in crowd. If reputable websites link to your content, the Google gods smile upon you.

Getting these coveted links is labor intensive, however, and includes hours of groveling, cold e-mailing and link-swapping with bloggers. “It’s the hardest part of SEO,” says David Brown, a partner in the L.A.-based upstart social media marketing company Pure Ground. It’s not impossible to achieve, he says, but many entrepreneurs don’t have the hours to spare. An SEO firm that specializes in getting links might be worth the investment.

To do link outreach yourself, Kent, the SEO for Dummies author, suggests this strategy. Scour the Internet for blogs that correspond to your product or service. Create a simple spreadsheet of contact e-mail addresses for all of them. Craft a polite introductory letter describing your site, and simply ask to be included in any list of links on its site. Offering a reciprocal link, a coupon or some type of promotion can help.

“Convincing the blogosphere to link to you because you’ve got something cool is a really good thing for SEO,” he says. But he reiterates that business owners–or, say, an underemployed college graduate for hire by the hour–can accomplish this. “It doesn’t make sense to pay me $225 an hour to go looking for blogs.”

Still, many entrepreneurs in the startup phase don’t have the hours to spare on mastering the art of SEO. If you must hire a consultant, though, do so with caution. Ask lots of questions. Don’t sign long-term contracts.

And check references thoroughly, advises Zack Brown, vice president for marketing and sales at Optimal Fusion. “If they claim to have some magic formula but don’t want to say what other companies they’ve worked with, I don’t really want to work with them.”

Also, be very specific about the results you expect. “Tie them to performance,” Brown says. Instead of paying an exorbitant monthly fee, suggest a much lower figure with a set bonus, paid only if predetermined results are achieved in a set time frame. If the firm is any good, it’ll have no trouble meeting your goals and getting its full paycheck.

Finally, be on the lookout for “black hat” SEO tactics that try to fool search engines. Frowned-upon tricks include hiding invisible text or unrelated content on your page, copying content from oft-visited sites, or pulling a bait-and-switch that redirects readers to an unexpected site. Such machinations might garner initial traffic but can lead to heartache.

Optimal Fusion’s Bess watched a company with a popular as-seen-on-TV product wind up in a costly legal battle when an SEO firm’s ploys got them banned by Google. After more than $100,000 in litigation, $2 million in lost sales and a lot of begging and pleading, it was reinstated.

Lisa Josephsen, a partner at Rocket and Walker, a Manhattan-based web development company, frequently pairs up with SEO experts when building new sites. In the course of interviewing them, however, she’s come across plenty who are willing to compromise design and usability for the sake of the ranking. Others simply want to lure visitors–any visitors. Bad ideas, she says. Make sure your design and SEO teams understand your business model and are the right fit. “You might be getting 100 calls a day,” she says, “but they might not be from the right consumers.” Josephsen recommends keeping an SEO team on call for three months or so after launching a website to get good traffic analysis and advice as you refine your site.

If your website is a vital component of your enterprise, then the best SEO strategy is to run it as you would your business. Be clear. Deliver what you promise. Provide a high-quality product.

And, Brown adds: “You don’t need to pay someone $10,000 a month to tell you that.”

Quick-Start SEO
Think of Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines as customers, and each page of your site as a box. Your customers want to know what’s in the box, what shelf it’s on and the address of your store. Simple, right?

Google lays out the nitty-gritty on best way to do that in a downloadable Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide as well as on its Webmaster Central pages. But here are some quick-start tips.

* Find it. Every page of your website has an address, or URL. When possible, keep the address short and clean–without equal signs, punctuation characters or underscores–and use detailed keywords that are relevant to the page. So example.com/buy-blue-hats-on-sale is better than example.com/cgi-bin/gen.pl?id=4&view=blue_hats_are_on_sale
* Flatten it. All pages need to link to one another–but you want to keep things as “flat” as possible, meaning that each page can be accessed with only one or two mouse clicks.
* Name it. You might overlook the title bar atop each browser window, but search engines don’t. Give each page a concise, unique, keyword-driven title. If you sell knit beanies, don’t title your page “Keep your head warm.”
* Explain it. In the description field, enter a few sentences about the content of that page. Think of it as the text in a catalog. What makes your blue beanies special? Are they alpaca wool?
* Map it. Your customers would really love to have a map to all the boxes in your store, called an XML site map. Don’t know XML from an X-Box? No worries. There are plenty of software programs that can do the job.
* Tag it. You’d be confused if this article didn’t have a headline, right? Without an h1 heading tag on each page of your website, search engine crawlers have trouble understanding content, too.

The Optimal Optimizer
So you’ve decided you really, really, really don’t want to do your own SEO. Fine. Hire a consultant. But here are five questions to ask before you sign a contract–or a check.

1. “Do you have any references?” Get names, numbers and examples of past work. And actually check them.
2. “What results can I reasonably expect and how long will they take?” Demand a detailed game plan and don’t accept vague answers. Shut the door on anyone who promises the No. 1 spot for a certain keyword or claims to “know a guy at Google.” They’re lying.
3. “What is your experience in my industry?” You wouldn’t expect a barber to know how to fill a cavity. So why would you expect an SEO team that has worked only with nonprofit science foundations to understand your fashion boutique?
4. “What techniques will you use to achieve my goals?” Listen for warning signs of “black hat” tactics. As a trick question, find out if your potential “expert” spends a lot of time working with keyword meta tags. If so, you know this isn’t the right person for the job.
5. “How often will we communicate and by what means?” If you expect instant responses to 3 a.m. e-mails, make sure your consultant isn’t a monthly conference-call kind of guy.

Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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Internet entrepreneurs know the real purpose for having a website. A website is all about being able to develop a presence on the internet and to generate a substantial amount of traffic.

Traffic, in the end, is the most important part of any website. You may spend years and thousands of dollars developing a website with all the latest widgets, banners, and visually appealing add-ons, and your website may be monetized well so that it can earn money, but unless it has a fresh flow of traffic visiting it, your site is practically worthless. On the other hand, you may have an amateurish looking website, but if it has the ability to generate huge amounts of traffic, your little site will assuredly be able to make money. Traffic is everything, which is why successful internet entrepreneurs are masters at harnessing internet traffic and sending it to their own websites. You can do the same.

If you have a website that is not getting enough traffic, you need to invest time developing a web presence for your website. You want people in your target audience to find your website and click onto it. Successful internet marketers use a number of traffic generating techniques to drive targeted visitors to their websites day in and day out. It is simply a matter of finding places where your target audience enjoys spending time online, and then use that medium to introduce them to your site. Over the past few months I have been spending time with a few simple free website marketing strategies, and in less than 3 months I have increased my traffic by nearly 500%. Here are the traffic driving methods that have worked the best for me.

Content Publishing-Nothing drive traffic for free like fresh content. The whole internet runs on content, and publishing content through the right mediums can land you quite a bit of free traffic. Article marketing is an extremely effective way to publish your content to drive traffic to your site. You can also publish content on blogs, websites, and forums. Spreading your content on the web will give you a greater web presence.. and a lot more traffic. Using keywords in your content is crucial to making it as effective as possible.

Social Media advertising-Social media has become a huge marketing arena for many internet entrepreneurs. Sites like myspace, facebook, and twitter have made it easy for marketers to develop communities based around their target audience, communities that they can later market to. I have found twitter to be an extremely simple way to drive targeted traffic to my sites. Build a following and send them to your site. Remember that keywords are important here too.

SEO-Search engine optimization can be a rather large project to undertake, but the results are worth it. The content on your site can generate traffic from the search engines, as long as you follow some rules. The more content on your site, the more exposure you will have at the engines. Make sure and use low competition keywords that can easily be won, make sure all of your pages are only two clicks from the homepage, and get some inbound links from quality websites.

Word of Mouth-Word of mouth is a great marketing tool that not all internet entrepreneurs use. The fact is that the same people that you encounter in your every day life are the same individuals who use the internet on a daily basis. Put your site address on your business cards and other offline marketing aids, and talk about it proudly to people who may benefit from it.

This article comes from…….
Ben is a young entrepreneur who has several successful businesses under his belt, and enjoys sharing information on a wide range of business, financial, and entrepreneurial topics. Visit Wealthy Internet Entrepreneur and the Internet Entrepreneur Blog

“internet entrepreneur”, internet marketing, traffic, backlinks, social media, content publishing, seo, article marketing

Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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Social networking and bookmarking sites are arriving at a rate that defies the imagination.  It is a non-stop trend, so you need to figure out how you can get involved and use them to your benefit, perhaps on a truly social basis or for promoting your business.

With the plethora of “social networks” and “social bookmark” sites online, how do you make sense out of how to use them? From a business angle, it is a fact that the major search engines adore the social networks.  Because of this, you can incorporate social networking into your “low cost seo” strategies for getting “top rankings” on the search engines and subsequently driving traffic to your blog/website/business.

There are dozens of strategies for how to use social networks and bookmarks sites for SEO and getting traffic purposes. Savvy internet marketers know that social networking and bookmarking are important for building a web presence and getting “top rankings” with the search engines.

The following video provides one basic strategy that you can do, although it does take some time and effort.

So please watch the video and let me know your thoughts.

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Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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Top 50 Article Directories By Alexa “top rankings”

Article marketing is one of the best ways to get exposure and back links to your business blog and website.  It is a very “low cost seo” strategy and can help you get “top rankings” on the major search engines.

Here are the top 50, as of 8 January 2010, courtesy of www.vretoolbar.com/articles/directories.php

NF! – this site uses nofollow tag in author’s resource box.

You can submit to dozens, even hundreds, of article directories using Magic Article Submitter.  It is VERY inexpensive and comes with a 90 day money back guarantee!

Click Here! for more information on Magic Article Submitter and ReWriter.

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Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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Many people have blogs and getting traffic to them is one of the major challenges blogger face. After all, what’s the sense of having a blog if no one reads it?

Therefore, I wanted to share some tips that I have been learning from the “seo experts” over at “Ad Domination“.  There are hundreds of  “low cost seo” traffic generation methods out there, but here are some of my favorite free ones.

1. After every blog post I make, I ping my blog post to as many blog directories as possible. These services in turn let other sites know that you have updated your blog so they should check it out.

Here are a few good services to use:

• http://www.pingomatic.com
• http://pingoat.com
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

2. This one takes a bit more work to set up, but once you set up these social network and bookmarking sites they work wonders to increase the spread of your spiderweb of backlinks.

• http://onlywire.com (my favorite)
• http://addthis.com
• http://ping.fm

3. Another great way to drive traffic to your blog is to post comments on other people’s blogs. The challenge here is to make sure you are posting good quality comments and not just entering non-relevant comments – which will be viewed as spam. Your comment should say more than just “great post” so try to think of something meaningful to write. Make sure to post on blogs related to your same niche as it will help to improve the odds of that blog’s readers being interested in clicking through to your blog.

One other thing to keep in mind is to post on blogss that already have “top rankings” with the search engines and have a good pagerank and alexa ranking. This way you are in effect borrowing the page rank of these other authority sites and will have a high quality backlink.

4. Finally, a neat way to get traffic and build up a nice group of followers is to sign up for a blog network and register your blog with them. These are kind of like social networking sites for bloggers and allow you to network with other bloggers. You can easily build up a large follower base using these blog directories.

Here are some good ones to start:

• http://www.technorati.com
• http://www.blogarama.com
• http://www.mybloglog.com
• http://www.blogcatalog.com

I know these methods can help you increase traffic to your blog in no time.

Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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“James Al-Oboudi” comments on the launch of “teamwork revolution power system” where he discusses how things are progressing with this new “business opportunity”.

Hello ladies and gentlemen. This is James Al-Oboudi, owner of “Teamwork Revolution Power System“, LLC. This is an email I’ve been waiting to send for about three months, as it’s time to finally silence all the people all over the Internet (including two desperate owners of a “competing” company) who have made the following claims.

1. “teamwork revolution power system“ will never get the compressions done on time.
2. James Al-Obouid is a “scammer” who is going to steal your money and then just add your email address to his mailing list to spam you for the rest of your life.
3. “teamwork revolution power system“ will never payout on time.
4. “teamwork revolution power system“ will never payout 96.8%.

Well, well, well. Now my time has come to do the talking.

1. The compression was a MASSIVE job. Unless you’ve done one before, there is really no way to explain just how big of a job it is, as thousands of members had to be deleted and have each individual matrix compressed. It was a job that I sincerely thought could take up to two weeks to complete due to the enormous number of people who signed up during prelaunch. However, we got it done in less than three days. I myself am still stunned by that, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my staff for their brilliant assistance with that huge task.

2. So, I’m a scammer, am I? LOL That’s news to me. Not only have I paid everyone every single cent they are due to receive, and when they were due to receive it, but I haven’t even taken my pay yet just to ensure there is plenty of money left in the TWRPS account to cover all upcoming business costs, and I’m proud to say that in TWRPS’ first month in business, we are already 100% debt free and dramatically in profit with all members paid every commission they were due to receive.

3. Not only did we pay on time, we paid out early.

4. I’m SOOOOOOOOOO happy to finally be able to show everyone that I’ve been telling the truth from the beginning about the 96.8% payout. I have listened to endless false accusations from countless people about how I will never actually payout 96.8% and that I’ve just been saying this to trick people into joining my company during prelaunch so I could then change the payout plan on them later. Well, all of you who were just paid can now fully confirm that the payout plan is EXACTLY what I always said it would be.

I know that people in this industry are used to being lied to and used for their money, so I’m sure that when they saw a company come along that claimed it was going to payout 96.8% on top of a mathematically unbeatable spillover rate and break even point, they naturally assumed it was a lie meant to deceive others into lowering their guard so that they could be used. However, I am extremely pleased to now be able to say with conclusive proof that the people who have made these claims (including the malicious owners of competing companies) are ABSOLUTELY WRONG.

It has been my pleasure to silence these people, and it will continue to be my please to silence them by continuing to keep my word about everything I say.

Once we transfer the site to the dedicated server, once I’m able to retain my tech admin full time (should be after January), and when we can get the site translated into dozens of different languages, NOTHING will be able to stop TWRPS, and do you know why? It’s because TWRPS is actually being operated by an ethical, honest person who isn’t consumed with greed. I know that is shocking in this industry, but that’s exactly why I created TWRPS. I stepped down as the second most productive affiliate marketer (at the time) for one of the most successful companies in this industry because I didn’t want to work for companies that were so clearly set up to benefit the owners WAY more than the affiliates. The affiliates bust their butts to make the owners rich, and most of them are never even able to break even, so even though I was making a lot of money, I knew I had to walk away, as I finally realized that I was helping the owners of these companies to sell their lie to the public. That’s when I knew if I was going to remain in this industry, I had to create a company that is completely focused on giving the members an opportunity that is at least equal to the owner, if not better, and that is what lead to the creation of “teamwork revolution power system“.

That’s all I wanted to say. I’ve been waiting three months to send this email but knew I couldn’t do it until I actually proved to the world that I was truly going to payout everything I said I would, as well as when I said I would do it.

I thank all of you who showed enough faith in me to not believe the negative statements of others, or even worse, the malicious lies of my “competition,” as I’m sure many of you have heard these things said about me and TWRPS as well, and I also thank you for continuing to trust me and seeing that I am now also fulfilling my promise to move the site to a dedicated server (the most expensive, most powerful, and fastest one I can find) and remaining completely focused on building TWRPS into the greatest opportunity that has ever existed in the home-based/online business industry.

Thanks,

James

Mark

P.S. Can you imagine how much business you would get if your website was on the first page of Google’s search results? Join us for a complimentary webinar to learn how at Ad Domination Webinars

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