The shift from outbound marketing to inbound marketing is happening as we speak. People are not as ready to be sold to as they were a few years ago. If we want something, we go out and find it.

One of the major inbound marketing techniques is SEO (search engine optimisation). This consists, in its crudest form, of relevant on-page content and meta-data coupled with high quality backlinks which act as a vote of recommendation.

But as time goes on, and more and more people are building backlinks for the single purpose of SEO, will Google still consider this as a vote of excellence or as a self-serving activity? How will Google differentiate between those backlinks that are created only to build up a website’s page rank and those that are actual recommendations?

A few years back, Google introduced the ‘nofollow’ tag. Its intention was to stop spammers commenting on blogs just to get a backlink rather than social participation. A ‘nofollow’ can be attributed to any hyperlink and means that the Google Bots are unlikely to crawl it to find your website. They appear now on most blogs and forums meaning that most backlinks that are created in this way are for the purpose of user traffic rather than an actual backlink.

Even reciprocal links do not have as much weight as a one-way link so asking for a link exchange has lost its appeal as Google gets smarter.

So how do we build backlinks ourselves, showing Google that our websites are important without being considered spam?

One answer is article marketing. Article marketing is more than just getting a backlink to your website. It is an opportunity for other people to see it, like it and republish it – building you more backlinks and spreading your company name further.

If someone comes across your well written, attention grabbing article that stands out from the crowd and tells their friend or colleague about it – that’s better than adding another backlink to your collection.

You still get the opportunity to self-promote in the author box or resource box so you do get a backlink from most article submission websites. By convincing other people to republish your article on social bookmarking sites or through social media, the page rank of your page will go up as well, meaning your backlink has even more weight.

Anyone and everyone can build a backlink by commenting on a blog, so if you’re doing it, you should assume that your competition is doing the same. Because anyone can do it, the importance of a self-created backlink diminishes.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be taking part in discussions on blogs and forums just because we don’t get a backlink immediately. They are a great way of getting your name out there to others in your industry and a great way to learn.

As more and more people are building backlinks for SEO, we need to find ways to make our backlinks stand out to Google. Obviously the best backlinks to have are genuine recommendations from clients or colleague but these can be hard to get, especially when you’re starting up.

Because an article provides information to the user as well as a backlink to your website, it is a better backlink to have and it gives you the chance to build up credibility for you and your company.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4841855

Listed below are TEN SEO techniques and tactics every Facebook Page user will need to understand:

1. Decide on the best title for the Facebook Page – and don’t ever change it

Choosing the right identity on your Facebook Page is crucial. For instance, if your name appears too spammy, people will probably be less likely to talk about it with their associates on their own page and more likely to conceal your updates from their Facebook feed. Secondly, don’t give into the temptation to choose a completely common page title. Due to the fact Facebook’s intention for Pages is the fact that they will legitimately characterize businesses, brand names, as well as stars, Facebook has recently been disabling updates for common Pages.

The bottom line: work with your corporation’s true title as the name of the page. And when you choose your Page’s name, don’t alter it. Facebook makes use of your Page name in the title of the Page, and considering that Google dings webpages when their particular titles change, changing your Facebook Page’s name can cost you SEO points.

2. Select the very best URL for your Facebook Page

Facebook recently released the flexibility to choose a title in your Facebook Page, just about the most necessary SEO opportunities on Facebook as of yet. Facebook wants Pages to legitimately stand for the identities of businesses, and brand names having commonly used titles have been suspended rights previously.

The soundest solution would be to decide on a username which authentically presents your online business or company. As soon as you select a Facebook username/URL for your Page, it cannot be altered. So, look for a username you are going to become at ease with and reassured in for the future. If you have a company that specializes in replica watches, make the URL something to do with replica watches.

3. Use the “About” box to place key phrase-thick content at the top of the Page

One critical SEO approach that needs to be utilized in your Facebook Page whenever achievable is inserting key phrase-thick content as close to the top of the Page as it can be. Since Facebook restricts exactly where Page managers can place substantial sections of textual content on the Wall of Facebook Pages, the “About” box basically shows the best location in the CSS structure of the page to incorporate custom content.You will find there’s 250 character restriction, so choose your words and phrases sensibly.

4. Use the “Info” tab to add extra critical key phrases, content, and high precedence backlinks on your Page

Facebook creates an “Info” tab for each Facebook Page which has fields made up of important illustrative data about the Page. It’s imperative that you complete all these fields, for the reason that they supply the opportunity to add keyword phrases, content, and hyperlinks that may increase the content material rating within your Facebook Page for many kinds of Google queries. The specific fields existing could differ based on the type you choose for your Page whenever you create it, so pick out the class which most effectively meets your business needs.

5. Develop “Static FBML” boxes and tabs to place lengthy content material plus more static backlinks on your Page

While chances to place substantial blocks of textual content on the default tab of the Facebook Page tend to be quite restricted, Facebook enables Page managers to set-up supplemental boxes or tabs which could carry any type of subject matter, including text, images, and hyperlinks. Adding content boxes or tabs to your Page could be a terrific way to supercharge the score of your Page.

6. Publish direct backlinks aimed at your website inside your Page’s stream

Status updates offer a highly effective solution to place direct backlinks at the top of your respective Page. Since Google increases webpages which link to relevant internet sites – and penalizes pages which link to irrelevant web pages or add a great number of inbound links too suddenly – posting hyperlinks in status updates can be quite an effective and reliable approach to increase your Facebook Page.

You can find 2 methods to submit hyperlinks:

1. Including the URL within the text of the status update itself.
2. Using the “attach link” function.

7. Add pictures with captions, activities with descriptions, and a conversation discussion board

This just about goes without saying, yet it’s crucial that you regularly be spreading useful subject matter on the Facebook Page, along with always making use of all offered illustrative fields on every single kind of content shared. When posting images, apply lengthy and key phrase-thick explanations.Use the resources Facebook gives to your entire gain.

8. Have inbound links for your Facebook Page from the internet through posting backlinks towards your Page on all your websites

Just like a good number of inbound links from high-authority web pages help improve PageRank for regular internet websites, acquiring inbound links towards your Facebook Page may improve its PR as well. You can accomplish this with text backlinks, but Facebook in addition has developed a badge which it induces Page managers to utilize.

9. Get intra-Facebook inbound links by simply receiving a lot more Facebook supporters

For the reason that Facebook places hyperlinks to Facebook Pages on Facebook users’ profile pages, which might be accessible to search engines, the more fans you get, the more backlinks you will have to your own Page inside of Facebook. For Pages with thousands of supporters, the volume of backlinks will surely mount up.

10. Reinforce intra-Facebook linking by getting followers to review along with like content in your stream

Whenever supporters comment or like content in your Facebook Page’s stream, Facebook links their name back to their own Facebook profile page. Subsequently, once the profile stubs of those supporters who’ve put up feedback and likes on your own Page are listed, Google will discover more reciprocal links between your Page and your Page’s followers, which it will see to be a much better relationship. This results in a cycle of enhanced link weight from the listed profile page stubs to your Page.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6070838

There’s a bit more to it than that, but this isn’t the place to go into the mechanics. The essential art comes in picking the right keywords and putting them in the right places, while still making the copy read well to prospective customers.

It’s been part of what I do as a freelance copywriter for a long time now. And it amazes me how much ignorance there still is about how effective it can be at getting a website to the top end of the search engine rankings. Especially when it costs relatively little when compared with other search engine optimization methods.

Yet so many web design companies still, essentially, ignore it. So many small or medium sized businesses haven’t even heard of it when they’re commissioning a new website. Under-used, under-funded, under-appreciated, it’s the “Cinderella service” of search engine optimization.

What can SEO copywriting achieve?

Correctly done, it will provide an enormous boost to your search engine rankings. It’s often possible to get a site on the first page of the major search engines for a variety of keyword searches.

In fact I’ve written optimized copy for sites that two years later are still on the first page of Google for popular keywords – and without the need for expensive link building or marketing campaigns.

(That said, beware anyone who actually guarantees you a top ranking – or who only succeeds in getting a high ranking by optimizing a phrase that virtually no-one would put in a search box.)

What does SEO copywriting cost?

If you know what keywords you want to use and the copywriter is writing the site from scratch, there’s no reason why SEO copywriting should cost any more than regular copywriting. However, half the skill is in choosing the best keywords. You must be sure that you’re using keywords that people search with, but which aren’t being optimized by too many of your competitors. Researching the keywords does take a certain amount of expertise – and time.

Get it right, and the benefits are incredible. You can not only compete with companies much bigger than yours, you can get higher rankings than them.

Some companies pay thousands and thousands to optimization companies to generate link building campaigns. Others shell out small fortunes to Google AdWords or MSN adCenter, paying for sponsored links. With SEO copywriting, you simply make a one-off payment for a couple of days or so of the copywriter’s time.

Then why is SEO copywriting so underrated?

There’s a variety of reasons why SEO copywriting isn’t more widely used. One is that web design companies tend to focus on the look of a website. Their creative people are designers and they rely on clients to supply copy – ‘the ‘grey bits’ that fit in between their expensive images and beautiful designs. The effectiveness of a website tends to be of very much secondary importance to them. Even now it’s generally only the bigger, more progressive design agencies that actually employ copywriters.

Another factor is that for a long time, good copywriting wasn’t really necessary as far as the search engines were concerned. You could get away with spamming them – for instance by simply repeating keywords over and over again in tiny or nearly invisible text. Not any more. Today, proper, well-written content truly is king for the search engines.

A further reason is that there are a lot of web marketing companies out there which depend on making regular money from optimizing in other ways. From their point of view, expensive and ongoing link building and search marketing campaigns make a lot more sense than a comparatively small one-off copywriting fee.

So is SEO copywriting the be all and end all?

To be fair, there are times where SEO copywriting alone isn’t enough. If you’re in a highly competitive business like travel or insurance, you have to fight tooth and nail to scale the rankings. With instances like these, search marketing and link building campaigns can make sense, although they’re usually costly.

Whatever your business, it also helps regularly to update and add content to your site, even if that copy isn’t optimized. Search engines like websites which are frequently updated.

It’s also still important to design and code your site in a search-engine friendly way, though much less so than it used to be. The site design won’t have much of a positive effect in itself, but it could have a negative one if you’re not careful – certain types of software or page designs make it hard for the search engine spiders to read the page. So you need web designers who know what they’re doing.

Of course, if you’re not interested in getting a large number of visitors to your website, you could just decide not to bother with any kind of optimization. For instance, if you’re a big multinational, people will generally come to you.

But if you’re a small or medium sized business, you cannot afford to ignore the power of SEO copywriting. Without it, your site will likely be seen by few people. Whereas for a comparatively small sum, you can compete long-term with anyone, gain higher rankings – and pick up many new customers. SEO copywriting may be a Cinderella service, but it offers a fairytale ending.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/753680

The one-way backlink leads in one direction only. For search engine ranking many search engine optimization (SEO) experts believe one-way, inbound backlinks have greater value. One reason is that quality, one-way backlinks are more difficult to obtain. Two-way or reciprocal backlinks will lead in both directions and can have less ranking benefits.

When considering backlinks, selecting high quality, well established websites that are themselves high ranking is best for improving your search engine ranking. Also, the websites must be relevant to each other. Backlinks from a poor quality or unrelated sites may have a limited or no benefit to your search engine ranking.

The more backlinks a website contains the higher it can rank. A larger number of backlinks are like being more popular.

This popularity can equate to a higher search engine ranking. Numerous, well placed backlinks can be as good as using the correct keywords or paid advertising.

There are several suggestions for getting the best backlinks pointing to your website. Article submissions is one of the top Internet marketing strategies for gaining backlinks. The articles need to be informative and relevant to your website. With submission to the right article directories your website can gain credibility and you get viewed as an expert in your niche. Also, your articles will contain information about the author and links to your website in the resource box section usually appearing at the bottom of the article.

Commenting on relevant blogs and forums can create backlinks to your website. The comments should offer informative and useful content. Additionally, there is the opportunity to interact with other bloggers and forum members. This gives the added possibility of monetizing these relationships over time. To add comments to blogs and forums you must create a profile along with a signature containing your link.

Participating on social media sites is a related strategy but must be done correctly. Backlinks are best not included in your feeds or URL profile boxes. A link can be added in most bio boxes to achieve a backlink. By syndicating your writing you can earn backlinks on updates to your web feeds through the RSS aggregators.

Social bookmarking is another strategy but somewhat more dicey. There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites.

These websites are used to manage information about different topics and niches. The sites accept content which can include information, photos, bookmarks and backlinks. Some social bookmarking websites are ignored by the search engines resulting no impact on ranking.

Submitting a website to an Internet directory like Open Directory can lead to creating quality backlinks. The submissions are reviewed by live editors and may take some time before search engine ranking results are evident.

The backlinks to your website can be searched using Google or Yahoo! by simply typing your domain name or website page address after “link:”. This will pull up lists of websites with backlinks to your domain or website pages.

The ultimate goal of backlinks is to produce greater web traffic meaning more visitors to your website. Having relevant, high quality backlinks means a higher ranking and increases your chance of generating traffic.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3149840

Building a profitable opt-in list does not just happen overnight. Building a mailing list for your niche market is a painstaking and time consuming process. BUT, if you want to start building a list quickly, here’s one technique that works. Find one or two in the areas of Internet Marketing you need help with: SEO, Mini Sites, Affiliate Marketing, List Building, Google AdSense/AdWords, Copy Writing, etc.

You’ll save time and money by building a prioritized list of those reasons, understanding must-haves and trade-offs, and using that list to spec, evaluate, plan and build a VMS solution tailored to your business. Building a mail list manually is not easy, it can be done, but you have to work at it everyday, adding names – addresses – phone- numbers etc, it is a lot of hard work, and it was just a pain to keep up to date, and then if you wanted to do a promotion it meant preparing a sales letter, then getting it printed, stuffing the sales letter into envelopes, paying for the postage, phew, it was a huge amount of work.

Building a list gives you opportunities to sell to the same customers over and over again. Start building your optin email list in an area in which you have some knowledge. If you’re a smart article marketer, you don’t consider your list building and article marketing project complete until you have thanked key online editors, and invited them to discuss other marketing opportunities.

Generating traffic, nor building an Opt-In list, nor is it finding products to market and it’s not a lack of Cash. JV Your List-Building: Small List – Ok, if your existing list isn’t large enough to warrant a cross JV mailing as described above, here’s a clever way to build your list up quickly. Your list is vital to building your business. The well known guru Mark Joyner has been known to sit back for7 to 9 months, building his list and cautiously targeting his audience, giving away freebies and bonuses.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1510330

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) portion of a website’s foundation must be considered first to develop essential keywords. These keywords are then used throughout the site copy, the attending blog, and the marketing articles which will proliferate incoming links, something the ever-hungry search engines love.

If a gorgeous movie star becomes severely ill, her beauty becomes unimportant. This same concept holds true for website development. By building the functionality first for a website, and then adding beauty – an appealing graphical look – secondarily, the purpose for having the website is well served.

Many people who read web pages and view their images are motivated by what they “like” versus what they “need,” so the key role of graphics assumes an importance right after functionality, SEO, and content. The content plus the graphics appeal are what leads to conversion on a site.

Your website is a marketing tool. It is the key way you gain presence and creditability on the internet. It’s the way you turn eye appeal into buy appeal. The appearance of your website is the representation of all of the ideas you want to put forth under the umbrella of your business and they deserve thoughtful consideration prior to the creation of a graphical appearance.

1. Have you defined your target market and do you know what will appeal to them visually?

2. What is the actual purpose behind your site? To sell, to entertain, to enlighten?

3. What is the product you are offering? How should it be positioned in the market and how should it look?

4. Is your graphics theme consistent? Is your branding carried throughout the site as well as in your product line?

5. Have you gathered fill in photos or created consistent graphics such as bullets that match in color and typeface?

The design of pages in a website must first be functional, and then have eye appeal graphically. A great web designer will use the appropriate software to permit all jpeg and gif files to either load quickly or to hyperlink the images to load in a new page. A great web designer will use alt tags to describe the images in the coding behind these images so that the search engine spiders and read them and rank the page accordingly.

Some key graphical elements that can be used in website design are:

1. Branding. Think of branding as predefining what a company is all about in the minds of its clients. It encompasses all the factors that makeup both the recognition and interaction parts of doing business with that company. Branding helps to establish a sense of perceived value for your company, your product and your delivery of a service. Simply by seeing your graphics pieces, people will begin to identify with what values you are striving to achieve.

2. Logo. Your logo should represent what your company stands for and what function it performs. The best logos are sophisticated and simple, and they are challenging to design. Your logo should have a strong, balanced image with no extras to clutter its look. Bold logos are easier to see than those with thin delicate lines.

3. Tag Lines. You would be well served to research the tag lines of other companies before you design your own. These few words can become part of the branding that tells people graphically who you are, what you do, and how you do it. My tag line is “Where Your Ideas Become Distinctive Designs.”

Try to keep the size of your web pages in the vicinity of 50K. When you hire a website designer, this size web page will still give a relatively fast download time on a standard modem, although dial up access to the internet has waned with the insurgence of broadband and FIOS. If your site or any of its pages loads slowly, you will have to ask your designer to size down the graphic images, replace them with a smaller images, or replace them with the HTML default bullets, horizontal rules, or colored heading text.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/3560945

Andy Edmonds – Former lead of analytics for Microsoft’s Live Search team, and head of StomperLabs (which has created Stomper Scrutinizer, Site Seer, Super Bookmarker, Linker, and more)

Dan Thies – Architect of this entire course and is considered by many to be the world’s leading expert in keyword research and analysis – he’s also the author of the highly successful SEO Fast Start

Leslie Rohde – A militant advocate of proper site structure, Leslie was the first person to reverse engineer link quality, and is the creator of Opti-Link, the first professional SEO software ever.

Jerry West - SEO Guru in his own right, and one of the most comprehensive marketing testers on the planet – Jerry’s tactics allow him to make millions in the cut-throat affiliate game (and do it under the radar)

In addition to the cofounders Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon:

Andy Jenkins on the other hand is an expert in building and promoting e-commerce stores he started by creating a store for Medieval Weapons which he was very interested in. Andy?s store prospered and continued to grow till the point it was making him more money than his day job at Microsoft, later Andy met Brad Fallon who added to his knowledge about SEO techniques and they decided to start their project of ?Stomping the Search Engine? which is now free.

Brad Fallon earned a degree in economics from Claremont McKenna in 1990, after he graduated 2nd in his class, he went to the University of Florida College of Law in 1997. After that Brad decided to go into the internet and work in internet marketing. Brads first company which is a marketplace for ideas went from 1.2 million to 32 million in 2006. In 2008 brad and a team of marketers including Andy Jenkins started Stomping the Search Engine 2 or STSE2 which made 18 million dollars in orders in the first 24 hours. Brad Fallon is the authority on Wedding Favors niche on the internet and his website is No. 1 for almost all related keywords, in all search engines.

by Eugene

To know more about SEO and Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon please visit us at my-house-stuff.com

Why it is important to get traffic

Finding a way to generate traffic has become a very big concern for many online marketers and has caused a significant stress level that has become the reason for failing in the online business industry. Making money on the internet like all jobs requires work, and efficiency. Of course you will need certain resources such as a website, a list, and a product to promote or sell. Yet, only having those essentials is simply just not enough. Due to excessive competition in this industry, you will need to get visitors and subscribers to your website.

The essentials in the online industry

More than ever, the online industry demands at least the basics to be set up in order to run a successful online empire that will generate you floods of income and profitable products to sell. These basics require a few simple things to be organized and you will simply be on your way to success. Let’s look at some things that you will need in order to become a “successful” online marketer.

• A website ( a very simple one)
• A list
• A product to sell and promote
• Good marketing habits and ideal ways of promoting products and services
• Traffic! (being the most important one)

Understanding the value of traffic is very important. As without traffic there is no hope of selling anything especially, if you’re product is really worth it. No matter how good your product or service is, it will be useless without the right audience and potential target customers. There are simple tricks to getting traffic that are out there that not many online marketers are aware of. However some procedures can be quite expensive and costly especially for many beginners. There are a list of things that you can do to make sure that your site is indexed in search engines to make sure that you have the best visibility possible for your site based on the target keywords related to it.

• write articles
• buy cheap non-targeted visitors
• joint-ventures (pair up)
• get some coaching available to you from top guru’s of this industry. (not so cheap)

That pretty much sets the basics of how to get started. My advise on this specific topic on getting more traffic and visitors to your website is to begin by getting some non-targeted visits to your site and get it indexed faster as mentioned earlier. That way, whatever keyword that you choose based on research credentials will be searched up and bring your site up more often than others.

How does this help?

Getting non-targeted visits brings up more visibility for your site on the major search engines, and will create nice backlinks for visitors pertaining to your keyword related contents.

Get more non targeted visits by clicking on Non Targeted Visitors.

There are cheap packages that you can take advantage of almost immediately so don’t wait! Visit, http://www.platinum-offers.info for the package that’s right for you.

See you on the other side my friends.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ali_T

By Ali T

There are many ways to promote your site in driving traffic to website. One of the most effective ways to get traffic is to try and get in the top ten positions of Google, Yahoo and other search engines.

However, attempting to get your website returned on the first page of search engines is very ambitious. It means that you will have to optimize your web pages extremely efficiently for your chosen keywords and key phrases.

Whilst it’s difficult to get on the first page of Google, Yahoo and the rest, you can find lots of resources on the internet, many free, to assist you in this objective.

I did a search on Google for – optimize website free resources – and it came back with over 68 million hits! So there’s plenty of assistance available to help in driving traffic.

If you’re looking for help, here are a selection of resources which I have found particularly useful:

http://www.sitereportcard.com

Free website analysis, optimization and promotion reports.

http://www.seocompany.ca/tool/free-seo-tools.html

You will find useful optimization free tools here.

http://www.spiderhelp.com/optimize/

An excellent checklist covering the elements of optimizing your site.

These sites will be a good starting point for you if you’re looking for that ultimate of traffic objectives – to appear in a top ten position on the search engines.

If you use these resources wisely and effectively, you will find that there are many ways of driving traffic to website.