What’s the big deal about search engine optimization? Isn’t it enough that you’ve put up a website, purchased some Google AdWords, and sent out an email to everyone you know announcing your site? In short, no. There is an art and science to search engine optimization (SEO), and it is critical for web-based businesses to know, understand and utilize if they want to drive quality traffic to their website via the Internet.

Where do you begin, though? How can you possibly know whom to trust or what to do first with so much information out there on SEO? Do you buy links or not? Pay per click or go organic? And what about those SEO companies who are aggressively promising #1 rankings? When it comes to search engine ranking, there are a lot of rumors and myths about what will increase your rankings and what won’t.

Debunking Some Popular Search Engine Ranking Myths

- Pay per click (PPC) ads will either help or hurt organic rankings. (Organic simply means the process by which web users find websites having unpaid search engine listings.)

Debunked: PPC is categorized differently than organic listings. There is no effect, one way or the other, on ranking.

- Websites are banned if they ignore Google guidelines.

Debunked: While it’s a good idea to read Google Webmaster Guidelines or Google 101: How Google Crawls, Indexes and Serves the Web, you are not banned if you ignore their guidelines.

- Websites are banned if they buy links.

Debunked: Sites are not banned. The links just aren’t counted.

- Copy must be a certain number of words, use a specific keyword density, and contain bold or italicized keywords.

Debunked: It used to be thought that there was a magic number of words used or certain times a keyword or keyword phrase should be repeated. Not so. Same with bolding and italicizing. They don’t do anything for ranking.

- Duplicate content will get your website penalized.

Debunked: It will just get filtered out and not counted.

- Reciprocal links won’t count.

Debunked: Every link counts, to a certain extent.

- SEO companies can increase your rankings without doing any on-page work.

Debunked: Run if an SEO company tells you this.

According to SEO expert Jill Whalen, SEO isn’t magic and isn’t a crap-shoot. “SEO is about making your website the best it can be for your site visitors and the search engines.” Want to help the right kind of people find your website? Then you need to design your site so search engines can find, crawl and index your pages.

Seven Ways to Get Your Website Crawled

1. It’s better to have one main website with numerous domains pointing to the main domain, than to have mini-sites or multiple sites with similar content. Mini-sites and multiple sites with similar content do not increase search engine listings and are frequently viewed by search engines as SPAM.
2. If you do have several stand-alone websites, make sure each serves a different target audience and has unique content with different domain or sub-domain URLs.
3. Search engines need to be able to follow internal links. To make that happen, use tags, text links, image links, and CSS menus. Spiders have difficulty with JavaScript menus, pop-up windows, drop-down menus, and flash navigation.
4. Choose keyword phrases that are most relevant and specific to what your web page is about. Think from the perspective of someone searching for what you are offering on your site. Ask, as if you were they: What would I search for if I am looking for something on your page?
5. Validate your keyword phrases through either paid or free services, such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, or Google AdWords.
6. Check for keyword competitiveness. Take into consideration the size of your business. In this case, size does matter. If you are a major player with a major brand, you can play in a larger competitive pond than a smaller company just starting out. Know what size pond is right for you, and check for competitiveness by putting: allintitle: “keyword phrase” in your browser and check the number count.
7. Once you have your keyword phrases validated and checked for competitiveness, use them in anchor texts, clickable image alt tags, headlines, body text copy, title tags, and meta descriptions. Meta tags aren’t all that important for crawling.

SEO can be both intimidating and exhilarating. Intimidating because it seems as if just about everyone has an opinion on what it takes to get a high ranking in Google, so it’s hard to know what to believe. Exhilarating because, once you understand the method behind the madness of SEO, you see the art and science of it. Then it becomes fun and easy to come up with a strategic plan about where to place keyword phrases, how to write copy, and what size pond is best for your company to compete in. Optimize your website, and they will come.

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Business Coach & Consultant for entrepreneurial women starting up small businesses, Dr. Susan L. Reid is the Award-winning author of “Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success.” For ideas, tips, and support for your business journey, sign up here for our free e-Zine.

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Optimize Your Website and They Will Come

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SEO blog posts are one of the best ways to get your links out there on the Internet. Search Engines love them and people can follow them easily to your site.

As an example I will link this keyword  ”Ghost Writers” here. Notice the link takes you to a site that offers the service related to it. I could have linked any word here but I choose to link one that is relevant and that will help improve keyword traffic.

The big problem for most is how to make the most of their blog. I have found tons of articles about how to seo your blog software, but not much on the topic of optimizing your blog posts.

I will give a few simple things to consider when adding your blog posts:

Post Slugs or Permalinks

Post slugs are how your URL is displayed for each post. In most WordPress Accounts there is a setting for Permalinks. If you login to your admin and click “settings” and then “Permalinks” look for the words “Custom Structure” and put this line of code in:

/%category%/%postname%/

There are many ways to do this, but this way allows the category name and title of your blog appear in your post. If my category was Ghost Writers then the link would be: /ghost-writers/optimize-your-blog-post/

Now, that you have your permalinks in place, click on “write” to add your post now. Depending on your version of WordPress you will either see the words “Post Slug” or “permalink”. Post slug is on the right column and “permalinks” is under the title bar. Either way you can change the way your post URL title will appear.

This is important to follow because some times people use character in their titles like:

How To Optimize Your Blog Posts!

The (!) character will cause your URL to show funny, or if you use (- , “) or any number of characters. So in your post slug or permalink, make sure you remove those characters. Play around with this a bit and see how the URL reads after you change the Permalink or post slug portion.

Keyword linking

This one is simple but very often over looked. Don’t go crazy here with this, but make sure to link 2 or 3 of your keywords to your websites home page and inner pages as well.

The keyword “SEO content” is not very effective if not linked properly. Notice that I linked the word “seo content” to my site. I also added a title tag to the URL for better keyword positioning. In your word press when you highlight a word or phrase you can click on the link icon and it will give you an option for the URL and Title. The title is for your keyword. Since I linked “seo content” I then used that word as my title tag as well. Notice that if you put the mouse over the link a title appears.

Proper Credit where credit is due!

Since many people are not truly inspired writers, many will find content out there and copy and paste it into their WordPress program and revise the words around to make it more original. Though using someone else’s content does not require creative thought, it can help if you convert over 50% of the content around and put them in your own words.

However, it is not professional of you if done without giving credit to the original writer. In your article you don’t have to say this came from some site, etc… You simply choose a keyword in your blog post and link it to the source where you got it from. Don’t be greedy, it looks better anyway when you do this properly and helps with SEO as well. If you are not willing to give up a link, then come up with your own content.

Add a Picture

Very simple, add a photo to your post. Upload a photos, add an alt text and a title tag, it is all provided for you in wordpress. It not only makes your post look more attractive but it again helps with SEO.

Give you photo a file name that is keyword based as well. Download your image, rename it and upload it.

If you hire a ghost writer to write your content, make sure they provide you with the original source and a photo to match the blog content and upload the post yourself or train your writer to do this for you. You will find this is very effective for online marketing.

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Optimize Your Blog Posts!

I frequently rant on Internet marketing and some of the gurus who try to bend your ear. Why? Because many of these so-called gurus trash everything that makes sense in this Internet world, especially when they realize that they cannot make money from the techniques being recommended.

I don’t preach marketing concepts solely for the purpose of selling my products and services. (If you happen to buy my products or services, then awesome, but that is not my point when I share information from my SEO and other marketing campaigns.) I preach the concepts that I have used for myself successfully. Either you can trust me and test the things I recommend, or you can listen to the gurus and drown yourself in pity, when you realize you are not finding the success you seek. (more…)

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How To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Article Marketing Campaigns

Below you will find 10 simple tips to follow that are good for anyone who wants to sell successfully on eBay.

Tip # 1: Identify your eBay market. Come up with a list of items you are interested in and then take a look at eBay to see what’s selling and what’s not. The market research data you collect will be very useful to you later on. Analyze the market and you’ll start to see those items that always seem to sell for a good price.

Tip # 2: Check out your competition. Before investing money, take a look at what the other sellers in your category are up to. Dig in to get an idea about what their strategies are. Make a special note on anything their auctions are missing, because addressing these flaws in your own auctions is a powerful way to move in and beat them at their own game.

Tip # 3: Find a product: If you’re looking to sell the same item over and over again then get hold of a supplier for what it is you want to sell, and see what the best rates you can get are. Also, shop around to get the best deal. Every penny counts. If the eBay prices you’ve seen are higher than the supplier’s then you just might have a winner.

Tip 4: Start small: Don’t start out by throwing tons of money at your idea. Start slowly and see what works and what doesn’t; learn as you go. Remember that it doesn’t cost a lot to try out even the craziest ideas on eBay, and who knows, they might just work! Thinking outside the box is a good way to become successful.

Tip 5: Test and repeat. Keep trying different strategies on eBay until you find something that works. Then just keep doing that very same thing over and over again. The chances are that you’ve just found a good niche or a good way to sell.

Tip 6: Create your business plan: A business plan, even on eBay, is a good thing to have. It doesn’t need to be anything formal, just a few pages that outline your market opportunity, your strategy, the strengths and weaknesses of the plan and a brief budget. A business plan is more for you than it is for anyone else. If you treat your selling on eBay as a business and not like a hobby then this will push you toward success.

Tip 7: Invest and expand: Now is the time to pump money into your eBay business. Get your hands on more product and start spending more time on your business. Set a goal for the number of sales you want each week and increase it over time as you meet your goals.

Tip 8: Make it official: Once you’ve made some money from your eBay sales, you should seriously consider registering yourself as an “official” business. It’s not that expensive or hard to do and registering will go a long way toward credibility. A lawyer is the best person to help you through the process, but you can also get information online or in forums.

Tip 9: Automate: There are a lot of tasks you will find yourself doing over and over, like writing the same emails or auction item descriptions. This is the time to move some of this manual work over to automated software. You can also consider outsourcing these tasks to other people. You can automate a TON of your eBay business tasks.

Tip 10: Never give up: Even when times get bad and you think things won’t work out, don’t stop trying. Push forward until you succeed. If you keep working at it you’ll almost always find you will make a real breakthrough. Countless people give up on their eBay business right before they get their breakthrough. Don’t be one of them.

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Clint Herman is a successful eBay seller with over 6 years experience in the industry. He also loves helping people start selling on eBay. He is the author of “How to Get Started Selling on eBay,” which is a beginner’s guide to selling on eBay designed for people who are new to selling on eBay. The guide is available at http://www.beginnersauctionguide.com

10 Tips to Help You Successfully Sell on eBay

Your boss just read an article on the benefits of online communities… You know, how online community members visit Web sites nine times as often, stayed five times as long, and represented 65% of sales.

or maybe

how 89% of mid to large sized companies have adopted at least one of six community-building tools, such as blogs, wikis, social networking, or content-tagging.

so now he’s asking

“What about our website? Shouldn’t we have an online community?” (Damm you McKinsey! Now I have to come up with an online community strategy).

Developing an online community strategy is a HUGE endeavor.

All too often businesses think that if they call it a “community” their website will magically transform itself into a community. And when the traffic and sales don’t present themselves, they’re left wondering what went wrong?

so what makes a website a community?

1) The community must satisfy a need

Generally there are three different types of communities:

a) Those that satisfy the need for information (i.e. sphinn, car enthusiast sites, etc.)

b) Those that satisfy the need for support (i.e. weight loss groups, cancer support groups, etc)

c) Those that satisfy both needs for support and information (i.e. when I was pregnant with my first child I joined an expecting club - we supported each other with information about our pregnancies and loving support)

It’s important to identify what kind of need your community is going to fill up front. This is because you will have to build the right community components or infrastructure to support that need.

If your community’s need is for information, then an article library may have worked in the old days. Today, that need for information is more likely to be served using a wiki or pligg type type solution.

If your community’s need is for support, then you need to make sure that you build profile functionality combined with easy communication between members like the ability to email or IM your community friends.

If your community’s need is for both information and support then you’ll want to evaluate if one is more important than the other. If they’re equally important then you’ll want to make sure that both types of infrastructure are equally prominent in your community.

2) User participation or interaction

Giving people the ability to comment on your blog is a good start. But a community it does not make. And signing up for your email list does not make me feel like I’ve just “joined your community”. Especially when I’m spammed regularly by your sales offers and incentives afterwards.

One- sided conversation is the most common mistake that I see with Corporate Websites. They are initially built to sell a product and then Community is just a label that’s slapped on as an afterthought with little or no effort given to meeting the needs of your visitors.

User participation can be built into your community in many different ways:

• Comments - not just on your blog but elsewhere on the site too.
• Forums (think Digital Point)
• User Reviews (think Trip Adviser)
• Social Networking (think Facebook and LinkedIn; even Stumbleupon)
• Content tagging (think Delicious)
• Content Aggregation (think Flicker)
• Content Aggregation Plus Ratings & Reviews (think Reddit)

Remember to make sure that you build your interaction in a way that solves the particular need of your community (don’t guiding principles make life easy ?)

3) Ability to get to know other community members

It is impossible to build a community based on the visitors’ lone interaction with the site.

A community needs members.

The ability to get to know other community members is a critical element in meeting a need for support.

But companies must think beyond profiles.

In regular life we are defined by our actions not words. Online, our words are our actions. You will learn much more about me by looking at my comments, by the content that I submit to aggregation sites and by my user reviews then you will ever learn through the crap I wrote in my profile.

There are many ways you can build the ability to get to know other community members:

• Avatars - people are visual. It’s difficult to make a connection with an alias, handle, or even a name. I can connect with an aviator even if it’s anime or a pair of red shoes.
• Allow user feedback through comments. Encourage it through a point type system like SEOmoz. Remember your voice tells me a lot about you… people gravitate towards like-minded people.
• Conversation - Social Networking capability like the ability to email or IM members is a great way to allow your community members to get to know each other.
• and yes, User Profiles :). Especially where the profile can be further personalized through pictures and videos and free form comments (not just filling out a few profile questions)

4) Have a reason to go back

The most popular communities make you feel like you will miss something important if you don’t go back regularly.

The more stagnant your website the less reason people have to go back to it. The converse is true with a community. The more active your members, the more your visitors will need to go back regularly.

So if new information, conversation, content is the carrot then you must build incentives into the design of your community:

• A Visitor Usage Statistics are easy to implement and go a long way. When I first joined Stumbleupon I felt painfully new having less than 100 stumbles. This was incentive for me to become an active user in the Stumble community.
• A Community Statistics readerboard can provide incentive as well. This is because being in the top percentile of content contributors, commenter’s or voters can help to position you as an expert in your industry.
• The more prominent the stats the more incentive they create (to a point). Focus on the positives or it will be a disincentive if new community members are too obvious.
• Points system for contributing where accumulating points gets you additional privileges in the community.
• This can be as simple a concept as allowing do follow links after 5 comments or as complicated as allowing access to premium content if a threshold of points is maintained.
• The ability to elevate your status in the community (member, gold member, moderator, etc) based on your participation can also provide incentive to be active.

Understanding your visitors needs and staying true to these Guiding Principles of Building an Online Community will help you to successfully transform your website into a vibrant Community.

Jennifer Osborne writer and marketer for Search Engine People.

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Key Elements of an Online Community Strategy