Rank High on Google

Free tips from an SEO expert. Tech entrepreneur Neil Patel has spent  a large portion of his career helping big corporations like Viacom and HP make more money off the web through SEO techniques. Now you can gain the value of his expertise without having to pay the big-corporation price-tag. On his blog Quick Sprout, Patel has some tips to help your business rank on Page 1 of Google without buying a single paid link. As Patel explains, Google frowns on paid links and is constantly on the lookout for link spam. "The problem with buying paid links is, you'll rank really well in the short run, but sooner or later you will get caught," he says. The trick to great results is to build legitimate links. To that end, Patel has a handful of relatively simple techniques to help you boost your business's Google search results. According to Patel, his tips "aren't fun and sexy, but they work."
The right way to deal with employee ideas. Our Leigh Buchanan spoke with the nation's most employee-centric companies and this is what she found.
The "Hello, Ladies" effect. It might not exist. Despite 94 million views on YouTube of Old Spice spokesman Isaiah Mustafa's ads, sales of Red Zone body wash have declined 7 percent, according to a study by SymphonyIRI. Fast Company ponders why the immense online popularity seems to have failed to translate into influence, citing another - successful - spokesman. Remember Dos Equis The Most Interesting Man in the World? Since he signed on in 2007, sales have jumped every year. Why? According to Jonathan Goldsmith, the man who plays the Most Interesting Man, it's all about "life experience" that gives his character intrigue. He tells Fast Company: "If you don't experience life, you won't be a participant - you'll just be a voyeur. You'll watch it go by like a parade you're not involved in." We'll buy that.
Forgetting sunk costs is harder than it sounds. When you've invested valuable time and money into a new project at your company, say a product line or a marketing campaign, it's natural to want to keep wrestling with the endeavor until it at least breaks even (if not turns a profit). But Fred Wilson says that even if you've dug hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project, you shouldn't let that impact future investments. "Even though I was taught about sunk costs in business school twenty-five years ago, I had to learn this lesson the hard way. Most of the time that we make a follow-on investment defensively, to protect the capital we have already invested, that follow-on investment is marginal or outright bad," he writes.
Go ahead, take that vacation. Any entrepreneur can tell you how difficult it is to set their business aside to take a vacation, and Paul Downs is no exception. In a blog post for The New York Times, the founder of Paul Downs Cabinetmakers explains that he hasn't been away from an entire workweek since 2003. Downs just returned from a vacation, however, and it turned out that "the sky did not fall," he writes. "The bookkeeper paid the bills, and we didn't run out of money." While that's not altogether unexpected, he leaves us with a few insights on the underlying conflict many business owners feel when considering vacation time: "There are many times I fantasize about a life without daily obligations. That's supposed to be one of the prime motivators for entrepreneurs--the day you cash out and retire to a life of complete freedom. On the other hand, it's nice to be needed...I think it would be hard for me to start an existence separate from the shop." Perhaps the record-setting heat on the East Coast this summer convinced him a few days away wouldn't hurt. 
The Facebook prejudice? First Facebook prohibited a rep from the Palestinian Refugee ResearchNet from creating a fan page with the word "Palestinian" in it. Now that the "error" is fixed, Valleywag reports that the last name Arab also gets automatically rejected during sign-up. The tipster who discovered the problem says Facebook allowed her husband to sign up using his last name, Arab, back in 2007, but now, neither she nor other members of her family are able to do so. Facebook responded to the initial glitch with page registration saying, "We have an automated system that checks for obviously inaccurate profile registration names. For a short time, this was inadvertently applied to Page creation names." According to Valleywag, this is likely the result of the same issue, but they write, "this shouldn't have been a problem in the first place—especially if CEO Mark Zuckerberg really believes that his site can be a tool for building bridges across cultural divides." source

Key Performance Indicators

Establish KPIs

No matter what type of site you have, you can apply this four-step methodology to maximize the value of the analytics data you gather:

1. Define key site goals and metrics.
   
   
2. Configure the tracking tool.
   
   
3. Analyze the data.
   
   
4. Optimize the site based on the findings.

This ongoing process is most effective when periodically repeated to continually fine-tune a site. The overall process fails if key site goals and KPIs aren't established early on and a method to measure the metrics tied to these KPIs isn't related to information your team can act on to improve your site.

How Do You Use Your Site?

There are different sets of important metrics, or KPIs, for different business types. These metrics are just a starting point for those who feel they haven't been looking at meaningful data in the past.

Over the coming weeks, I'll focus on each of the four commercial site types:

• Lead-generation site
  
  
• Commerce
  
  
• Customer service/care
  
  
• Content

Many Web sites typically don't fall into just one category. Most include two or three different elements. When you define key site goals, divide the site into these different groups so the goals can more easily be defined. This holds especially true when you're analyzing a large site.

Lead-Generation Sites

Lead generation is often considered the most common of the four site types. A good example of a lead-generation site is a high-end real estate site. It offers a product customers typically don't buy directly online. The client needs to entice a visitor to contact the company and arrange for a face-to-face visit to close the sale.

It's important for this company to track online leads and understand how those leads ultimately convert to offline sales. The average lead value can be defined based on the average close rate and the value of the properties purchased.

Understanding the value of these leads drives the need to better understand site behavior and identify ways to optimize the conversion.

Lead-Generation KPIs

The key to a lead-generation site or site section is to capture information about a visitor to use in future communications. Different types of lead generation include:

• Request more information forms or email
  
  
• Apply online
  
  
• Sign up for a newsletter
  
  
• Register to download product or information
  
  
• Get referral to partner site

For each of the following lead-generation KPIs, there are a number of important metrics to track to understand the behaviors that improve each metric. Some of the most common KPIs include:

• Overall conversion. This is a basic calculation: leads divided by site visits. This is a primary metric to watch as changes are made to the site.
  
  
• Conversion by campaigns. How do visitors from different campaigns or visitor segments convert to leads? Understanding the differences can allow for tuning messages based on different audience segments.
  
  
• Drivers to registration process. Look at what content leads visitors to the registration process and ultimately drives them to register and become customers.
  
  
• Step-by-step conversion analysis via the registration process. For longer registration processes, it's important to understand where visitors are dropping out of the process, then focus on correcting steps that drive the most defectors.
  
  
• Analysis of registration process dropouts. When people drop out of the registration process, understanding where they went next is often helpful. Understanding what other information people are looking for can be helpful in optimizing the registration process.
  
  
• Conversion of leads to actual customers. Besides just knowing what types of lead-generation options drive the most visitors to register on your site, it's also important to understand if and how those visitors ultimately convert into customers.

Lead-generation sites are often undervalued. In many cases, they drive significantly more revenue than full commerce sites. Recognizing this is the first step toward maximizing the return on investment (ROI) of your online investment with the help of Web analytics.

Next: Looking at the KPIs for commerce sites.source: 

Active Search Results Announces its New Search Engine Ranking Algorithm

Active Search Results will rank search results higher when there is promoter activity behind the website.

ASR Ranking allows search engines to rank search results higher for websites where the owners or promoters of those websites have a history of performing actions or events defined as Activity.

The goal of ASR Ranking is to rank websites higher in organic search results where there are real active people supporting those websites that are displayed in the search engine results page (SERP).

An analogy would be similar to walking into a store where there are no employees to provide customer service such as answering questions or taking product returns. This is a store with low activity. On the other hand, a store with multiple people providing prompt customer service is a store with high activity.

It is easy to identify this type of activity when you physically walk into a brick-and-mortar store but is very difficult to recognize when you visit an online store (website). ASR Ranking offers the tool to separate the two by ranking a website higher in the search results when that website has higher activity, therefore, a higher ASR Ranking.

Mark McLellan, Founder and CTO of Active Search Results and ASR Ranking, points out that relevancy is still important. McLellan says, "Relevancy will continue to be the top ranking factor at ASR. We will not sacrifice relevancy in place of ASR Ranking and promoter activity." He continues to describe how ASR Ranking will rank the more active websites higher in the search results when relevancy is equal between the websites.

There are many benefits to the Web searcher (end user), website promoter and to the search engines that use ASR Ranking.

End users benefit by having their search results include websites with more up-to-date information about products, services and content; fewer dead links on the visited websites; more search results from websites that are maintained on a regular basis and better feedback from inquiries sent to the website by the end user.

Website promoters benefit due to no direct costs to promote their website(s), an increase in traffic to their website and a higher visibility on the search engines.

Search engines benefit by experiencing increased website traffic from promoters, higher number of promoters that register with the search engines, more promoter demographics, more ad impressions and higher email open and click through rates.

Active Search Results provides an option to turn on and off ASR Ranking. Mark McLellan says, "There are times when one ranking algorithms is more appropriate than another. The end user should be able to decide which ranking algorithms to use. They should also be able to combine the different algorithms. This allows for more flexibility when searching for different types of content."

Even though ASR Ranking is another search engine optimization (SEO) ranking factor, ASR Ranking is primarily designed to complement the many different search engines' ranking algorithms currently in use and to help enhance the end users' search experience. 

source:

SEM - Ultimate Guide to Facebook Marketing

It is an overused practice to start from some "shocking" stats and dissertate on how Facebook is powerful and important for business. So, I will just consider you all know what is Facebook and how cool it is.

What you're about to read is a step-by-step SMM strategy for promoting your business on Facebook. I've gathered all the best practices and tips that I have used myself, together with some advice that I haven't tried but am confident will work well. Ok. That's enough for the intro, let's go!

Where To Start?

1. Brand Ambassador.

First of all, don't use your personal account to promote your business, unless you want your customers to see your childhood pictures and lulz from the recent party. You can create another (purely business oriented) instance of yourself or hire someone to become your brand ambassador. This will be the person who represents your business online and handles all communications, so the info on the profile should be brief and clear and all the pictures neat and professional. Remember that users will associate your business with this guy.

Power Tip: Create a separate e-mail account in Gmail and import all the e-mail addresses of your clients there. Now when you use this account to create a new Facebook profile - the system will automatically find all of your clients in your address book and suggest to add them as your friends on Facebook! What a great start!

2. Creating a Facebook page.

Promotion on Facebook is all about having a page for your business. To create one, go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the "+ Create a Page" button.

Power Tip: "Page Name" is one of the the strongest ranking factors on Facebook search. Don't miss the opportunity to add some keywords you wish to rank for as you are not allowed to change your page name later.

Configuring Your Facebook Page

1. Profile picture & avatar.

Profile picture is one of the few things in the design of your page that you can actually customize, so be sure to make the most of it. Here are two great articles that will help you: "5 Creative Ways to Hack Your Profile Photo"; "Making the Most of Your Facebook Profile Picture".

2. Page info.

The next important thing to do is fill your Facebook page with information about your business. Most of it is stored under the "Info" tab, which you cannot remove or hide. Lots of people visit it, so work hard to make your info as brief and engaging as you can. "Think SEO" and use your keywords, as each of the tabs is indexable by the search engines.

Power Tip: if you type a URL starting from http:// in the info box under your profile picture, Facebook will turn it into a clickable link. So you can easily refer your visitors to your website, blog or twitter account.

3. Applications.

* Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) - allows you to create 10 additional tabs, which can contain HTML/CSS, Flash, FBML, iframes and FBJS;

* NetworkedBlogs - allows you to post your RSS and Atom feeds directly to your wall;

* Twitter Tab - posts your twitter updates to a separate tab;

* Extended Info - adds an additional box which supports html/fbml, images, video and music to the left sidebar of your page;

* Fan Appz & Promotions - helps you handle all kinds of contests, sweepstakes & give aways.

Tip: you'll probably end up with lots of tabs by adding various applications. However you can easily drag them around if you think that some of them are more important.

4. Vanity URL.

To be able to convert your ugly "326727833086?ref=sgm&ajaxpipe=1&__a=7" URL into something fancy-looking, like "http://facebook.com/mybusinesspage" you need to have at least 25 fans. Once you do - go to http://www.facebook.com/username/ and click the "Set a username for your Pages" link at the bottom.

5. Custom landing page.

You need an attractive landing page, which will convert your visitors into fans. Here is when the FBML application comes into play. Using HTML, CSS, FBJS and even flash you can create awesome landing pages that people will not only "like", but link to, and suggest to friends.

Tip: If you've got no development skills you can find some nice facebook FBML page templates that have just started to appear around the template stores.

What To Expect?

Before we start reviewing various Facebook promotion techniques, I'd like to clear things up a little bit. Essentially when someone "Likes" your Facebook page, they will be notified every time you update its status, it's almost the same as following someone on Twitter. To have your message spread on Twitter you need to have your followers retweet your post so that their followers could see it and retweet in turn. On Facebook, the principle is a bit more sophisticated: when someone likes or comments your status update, this fact is being reflected in his profile. And when your status update gets a decent amount of "likes" and comments it is promoted to the Top News section of a user's News Feed, so that more people could see it.

Now let's refer to a famous "90:9:1 Social Behaviors Rule" to understand what it takes for your message to become visible.

Let's consider that "Heavy Contributors" are those ready to comment on your update, "Intermittent" ones will probably "like" it, and "Lurkers" will read it or just scroll through. Say your page has 100 fans. Knowing the fact that only 12%-20% of all your "Fans" will see your status update in their Live Feed, we can see that:

I hope this delivers a clear understanding that Facebook promotion takes an enormous amount of effort to become successful.

Promoting Your Facebook Page Internally.

1. Using your Brand Ambassador.

* Add to friends any people that may be your potential customers or somehow relate to your business. Recently, Facebook has added Skype integration, which can suggest you some Facebook friends from the list of your Skype contacts. Once you have a decent amount of friends use the "Suggest to friends" and "Share" buttons to promote your Facebook page to them;

* Use Facebook Search to discover relevant pages, groups, events, people and even messages. With Search you can easily track any mentions of your brand and provide feedback - people really love that;

* Once you join pages, groups and events, you are able to participate in the conversation, which is a great way of direct promotion. Moreover you can see the list of the group members and easily add them to friends;

* Communicate. Once someone comments on your new status, a photo, or anything else - answer back. Moreover you need to make people love your brand and become active contributors and then brand ambassadors. 1/4 of search results on each big brand is UGC (User Generated Content).

Power Tip: When composing a message put the @ symbol and start typing the name of your business page to mention it, just like you mention someone on Twitter. This can be used as a signature to your updates.

2. Keep the page fresh and interesting.

People join your page hoping to receive some interesting stuff from you, so do not disappoint them. Facebookers usually prefer pictures, videos and links to plain text updates. Here is a comprehensive list of things that you should keep in mind to avoid losing your fans: don't post too many updates; don't automate your content; don't be a duplicate of your website and don't be boring. Your page wall is your social proof and a signal for people to get involved.

3. Cheat a bit.

Ask fellow staff & your team members to post "likes" and comments on each of your status updates to boost its rankings. Only status updates with 5 or more "likes" and comments show up in the Top News section. This will also make your wall look "alive", which will inspire your fans to be more active on your page and participate in the conversation.

4. Fill in your page with media content. * Upload pictures of your products/services, your office and your team at work to make your company easier to relate to;

* Encourage your fans to post pictures of how they use your product;

* Upload pictures from each event you host and tag your fans there;

* Post videos of your team members talks;

* Show your products/services in action;

* Use video to respond to your fans (Bill Clinton frequently does video responses on his page).

5. Treat your fans.

You need to offer your fans something special and reward them. For instance 1-800-FLOWER Facebook page shows the discount code only when you click the "Like" button.You can make some special offers, which are available to your Facebook fans only and are not announced outside of Facebook. It's dead easy to reward your loyal fans by promoting them to the admins of your page, which will most likely turn them into enthusiastic brand ambassadors. Anyway, if there is some prominent fan - he should be publicly rewarded.

6. Send an update to Fans.

Direct messaging is a very powerful tool, but do not misuse it. Think twice before sending a message to all of your fans - it should be really valuable if you don't want everyone to ignore it or get irritated.

Tip: Facebook allows you to send targeted updates. Think of a way you could use that feature for your business.

7. Ask your fans for help.

Now and then you can post a status update asking your fans to help build the community by suggesting your page to their friends. Just refer them to "Suggest to Friends" and "Share" links on your page and measure their response.

8. Build partnerships with other pages.

Notice that each page on Facebook has an "Add to my Page's Favorites" button. When you do this, the logo of this page appears in a special "Favorite Pages" box on your own page. People see it and they might click the link to find out more about this page.

Your aim here is to build partnerships within your niche and be "favourited" as much as possible. Add to favorites pages that you like or that your business is related to and inform their owners about it with a wall post or a private message. Most likely you will be "favorited" back.

9. Use the applications.

There are a lot of crazy apps that you can use to promote yourself. You can even develop one of your own if your budget allows that. But how do the viral applications work in common?

You need something that people would willingly launch. This might be a game or a quiz or any other kind of dynamic content that most people love. Once a person has his score, bagde, vitual gift or any other result - the application publishes it to his wall so that all his friends could see it. The application should have a clear call to action, so that new people could easily get engaged. If the application has some kind of a High Score - people will play it again and again till they outrank their friends. You can (should) use the apps for sweepstakes and giveaways - people love them a lot.

10. Spy!

Yes! Always keep an eye on your competitors, especially on those outranking you. Check what they do and if you consider it to be a successful strategy - do the same. When they fail - try to avoid their mistakes. Anyway, you should always be informed on what others are doing to promote themselves.

11. Ads?

Indeed the most common way to promote your page. But before you use it, check out these stats:

Promoting Your Facebook Page Externally.

1. Facebook for webites.

The Facebook team has come a long way toward making your website more personalized and social. There is a list of great social plugins that can be easily embedded into your website and drive lots of new visitors: "Like Button" plugin, which is almost everywhere now, "Like Box", which let's you become a fan of the website without leaving the page, "Live Stream" which is often used while broadcasting some event. Try them on your website and see what happens next.

2. "Like" and "Share" buttons.

These two are so powerful that they require a separate paragraph. Once you own an online store - those buttons are of exceptional value. Whenever you find something that appeals to you in an online store - you no longer need to copy the URL and send it to your friends to ask for their opinion. Just press the "Like" button. They will see that and comment on it. This applies to photos, videos, games, blog posts, reviews - literally anything that can be found on the web.

3. Put a link everywhere.

Once you have a website, you put its address everywhere - e-mail signatures, forum signatures, twitter info, author bio section, LinkedIn profile, links section of your blog. Do exactly the same with your Facebook page. Highlight your Facebook presence at offline events, print it on your business card, use every opportunity you have.

Power Tip: Take some twitter auto follow script that follows a person whenever he has specific keywords in his tweet. Some percent of the people you've followed will follow you back. Write an engaging request to join your Facebook page and set it as an automatic direct message to people, who have just followed you. Being launched, this system will drive some new fans to your Facebook page on a regular basis.

4. Using video.

Almost every video sharing service allows you to annotate your videos with links. This is a great way to drive some new fans onto your Facebook page. You can make viral videos, funny videos, tutorials, explanations, presentations etc. and include a link to your Facebook page with a request to join. Works perfectly!

5. Other services.

There are a lot of websites where you can get some targeted audience. For instance, upon writing this guide I've gone though dozens of presentations at SlideShare and Scribd. There I've seen many referrals to join Facebook pages specialized on marketing, and I did join some of them truthfully as I enjoyed their presentations. Examine carefully all the websites where you post information or showcase your services and think of the way you could refer people to your Facebook page.

Power Tip: In case you have some kind of a digital product - create a torrent with some demos, name it with trending keywords and upload to all torrent trackers you can find. In the info or in the comments section add a link to your Facebook page. Then go to your analytics and watch your numbers grow.

Wheew... That's the end of my guide. Sure there's a lot more to add, but I tried to keep my tactics brief, to leave some space for your imagination. I'm sure each of you can invent lots of fantastic ways to use Facebook for SMM. I am open for any questions, shoot!

Protect Your Search Engine Ranking

Your website's ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.

The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for "spam" pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engine tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine's index.

The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the "spam" net and tossed from a search engine's index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do - and things you should be sure NOT to do - which will prevent this kind of misperception.

Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links "bad neighborhoods".

You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check and double-check all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven't linked to a bad neighborhood.

The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar. You will then see that most pages are given a "PageRank" which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.

Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.

There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.

Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of a chance to improve your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.

Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye - but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page's link ranking.

Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text - splat! The page is penalized.

The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page ever!

Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called "keyword stuffing". It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called "Keyword Density" to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.

This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering - unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is "renters insurance", be sure you don't use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should not appear in more than half the sentences on the page. 

The final potential risk factor is known as "cloaking". To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you, cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is "cloaked" because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site's search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page's ranking to the top of the list.

Protect Your Business From a Hack Attack !

Safeguarding your Web site -- especially sensitive site areas such as shopping cart software -- against hackers need not be an expensive and time-consuming affair.

With a few basic precautions, you can make your Web site extremely difficult and unrewarding to hack.
Your Web site is most susceptible to hacking through your shopping cart, so choose wisely. Here are three guidelines to help you choose the best one for your business:
Shop around. Use newsgroups such as AOL.com's Search Newsgroups and online reports such as About.com's Web Store Software Selector to verify the products you want to purchase are safe to use.
Avoid free software. Although it might seem an attractive option, downloading free shopping carts is extremely risky for three reasons: the source of the software is indeterminate; you can't check the creator's credentials; you have no one to hold responsible for hacking incidents.
Buy smart. Several ready-to-use shopping carts on the market today, including EasyCart, Monstercart.com, and MerchandiZer, have been designed specifically for the small, online business owner. These are often available at little or no cost.
But be aware: No software comes with a no-hacking guarantee. There's always a chance that a hidden access password, or backdoor, might be lurking.
In 90 percent of all hacking cases, the most vital data had been provided from within the organization. Here are three rules to follow religiously:
Change the default password immediately. Whenever you purchase a ready-to-use shopping cart, your first step should be to change the default password that comes built into the software. Although this might seem an obvious precaution, it's one many people overlook. Change your shopping cart password frequently and guard it zealously.
Change passwords often. Frequently change passwords. Tell relevant passwords only to those who truly need to use them. Use passwords that include letters and numbers, and don't use a password that's easy to guess. Never write your passwords on sticky notes and paste them to your desk or monitor.
Restrict access to passwords. Never allow more than one person the use of your server access password. For example, the person in charge of packaging doesn't need to know your file upload password. If an outside agency designed your Web site, ask for all access passwords and change them immediately.
If any changes need to be made on your site, you provide the password and control access to your server at all times.
Many small, online business owners maintain their central work database and their Web server on the same computer. While this seems convenient -- and necessary for storing such information as product descriptions, prices and images -- any machine connected to the Web is dangerously vulnerable to attack.
Here are two ways you can thwart would-be hackers:
Delete sensitive data from the Web server. Sensitive customer data, such as addresses and credit card information, should never remain on the Web server itself. Even if the server is protected by a password, this data is only a few keystrokes from a talented hacker. Instead, devise an automated system to periodically copy any data stored on your Web server to a machine located on your premises and then delete the data on the Web server.
After the data has been copied to your off-line system, restrict access to that system as well.
Send sensitive data securely. Although the chances of a hacker intercepting data while it's being transmitted are very low, you can protect your customer's most sensitive information by providing a secure connection between your customer's browser and your server.
If you host your Web site on your own server, two companies, VeriSign and Thawte Consulting, offer this security using technology called Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). These companies provide a downloadable device called a digital certificate to verify to your customers that your company is a bona fide business.
If you don't host your own site, ask your Web host to provide a secure connection. Your host probably has a relationship with an SSL provider. It will cost you only a little more and it's worth it; SSL protects your data from hacking and serves as reassurance to your customers.
Regularly and consistently tracking activity on your Web site will help identify hack attacks. Here are three ways to do it:
Monitor server access. Ask your network administrator to install a remote access mechanism that lets you shut down your server remotely as soon as you find evidence of suspicious activity. This will stop any hacking activity in its tracks. Your network administrator should be able to install a real-time alert, such as a beeper alarm or an automatic e-mail message, to inform you of any unauthorized attempts to access your Web server.
Monitor site traffic. Changes in site traffic patterns sometimes indicate a hacker at work. A noticeable dip in traffic could mean something's wrong with your Web site and would require immediate attention. Be sure to monitor site traffic on a regular basis. Run extensive sitewide checks if you notice any inexplicable changes.
Run "preflight" checks. Make it a point for you or one of your employees to check the functionality of the entire site, especially the shopping cart area, every day. Here's a checklist:
Check whether the site is accessible on the Web.
Check whether the home page displays the correct data.
Perform random price checks within the Web site.
Check the help function to see whether any data has been altered.
Click links in the site to make sure they link to the right pages.
Test the results of your search functions.
Add random products to your shopping cart and proceed to checkout.
What if you still fall victim to a hacker's attack?
Develop an action plan to minimize further damage to your system and to avoid inadvertent destruction of evidence. Your plan should include:
Clear delegation of tasks to specific employees in the case of a security breach.
A contact list of your Internet service provider (ISP) and/or Web host, Web site designer, network administrators or any Web security contractors you might want to use to recover from an attack.
A contact list of local and national authorities to inform of the incident, including the FBI's 24-hour service for immediate guidance after the attack.
Periodic tests of your emergency procedures.
And remember: Firewalls and fancy measures notwithstanding, the big break for a hacker will most likely be one little, vulnerable password.
source:

5 Secrets to Selecting Highly Effective SEO Keywords

If there is a single concept that is the driver of much of the Internet’s growth over the past decade – not to mention nearly all of Google’s annual revenue of $25 billion – it is the concept of keywords. Keywords are what we type in when we are searching for products, services, and answers on the search engines, an act that Americans performed 15.5 billion times in April 2010 according to ComScore, the web research firm.

Companies optimize their webpages for search by assigning keywords to those pages. The implications for a business of picking the right keywords are therefore huge. Keyword selection is fundamental to success when it comes to executing a paid search or PPC campaign. It is also integral to a website natural or organic ranking on the search engines.

But keywords are not just about SEO. They at the heart of a company's marketing campaign at its most granular level. Do our customers love our product because it is fast-acting or because it is long-lasting? Are we cheap or the best? Do we provide people with ideas or with help? If you can't immediately identify the most important keywords for your company, it is doubtful that you can effectively market your products and services to your target audience. The following guide will provide you with 5 ideas to keep in mind when you are selecting keywords on which to build your online marketing.

Picking SEO Keywords: Focus on Good Phrases

When it comes to search engine marketing, there may be no larger misnomer, no more archaic term than the ubiquitous keyword. In my view, there should be an official migration to the more accurate term keyphrase, but for now I will be forced to use what I consider to be an inaccurate term. My frustration with this term is that it quite simply implies a single word, which is rarely the strategy that we employ when doing keyword research and selection in the service of PPC and SEO campaigns.

All too often, people dramatically overthink the most basic keyword research concepts; keyword generation should start simply with answering the question of "What products or services do you sell?" If you sell dog food online,  the root words dog and food alone would be very poor keywords because on their own, neither dog nor food do a remotely good job at describing what you sell. Though this example makes it obvious, many times we have to fight through our urge to include those bigger, broader root keywords.

Dig Deeper: How to Be Keyword-Savvy

Picking SEO Keywords: Avoiding "Vanity" Keywords

Now let's look at a trickier example—one where the root keyword arguably does a good job describing what we are selling. Say I own an online jewelry store that sells all types of jewelry. To rank highly for the keyword jewelry would probably be at the top of my search engine marketing goals. And yet this would probably not be a profitable keyword that will drive relevant traffic to my site. That is because, from an organic SEO perspective, you are unlikely to rank highly for this term unless you are a huge, highly authoritative site—or lucky enough to be Jewelry.com, knowing that Google rewards keywords that match website addresses.

In this case, you would do well to go after more specific keywords such as gold jewelry, silver necklace, or women's Rolex watch.  Not only is the competition for these terms less fierce but, from both an SEO and a PPC perspective, those more specific keywords are going to have a significantly higher conversion rate to purchases on your site.

Sometimes we refer to those root keywords as "vanity keywords," because if you do just one search to see who seems to be winning the space, you are likely to pick the single broadest keyword and see who comes up ranked highly. In nearly every case, however, we have found it to be more successful and deliver a significantly better return on your SEM investment by focusing on the hundreds or even thousands of more specific keywords that more closely match the services, products, brands, and locations that you sell or serve.

Dig Deeper: What You Need to Know About Your Website

Picking SEO Keywords: Using Google's Wonder Wheel

This is in my opinion the best little secret of everyone's favorite search engine: the Google Wonder Wheel. Released about a year ago but virtually unknown compared with Google's much more visible search tools, the Wonder Wheel can be accessed by doing a search and then selecting "Wonder Wheel" under the filter options on the lefthand navigation.

What you are presented with now is a visual representation of the way that Google groups together keywords. (Indirectly, you can also deduce how users themselves perceive search terms.) This alone can become the basis of your PPC and SEO keyword research.

Starting with the search term dog food, I see related more specific terms like dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food brands, which can help identify other keywords to focus on. Then, clicking on dog food brands, the search engine automatically expands that keyword to be another hub, with more specific keywords related to dog food brands such as nutro dog food, Purina dog food, and so on.

At my comapny, Wpromote, we use this tool to help shape overall content strategies. Continuing with the dog food example, we can see that ratings, comparison, and reviews all were all grouped as closely related to dog food in general, implying that people that are searching for dog food are very interested in the comparison and review side of things. So from a content strategy perspective, it would be a very powerful takeaway to include a heavy emphasis on customer ratings, third-party reviews, and side by side comparisons to help the consumers make their dog food selections while shopping on our site.

Dig Deeper: How to Take Advantage of Online Reviews

Picking SEO Keywords: The Value of Repetition

One concern we hear frequently is whether it is beneficial or harmful to repeat keywords. In other words, should we vary keywords (dog food, puppy food, and Purina) or repeat keywords (dog food reviews, dog food comparison, and dog food rankings.) The short answer is that the repetition is just fine, as long as the meaning of the phrase as a whole is sufficiently varied. In other words, dog food and dog food online are basically synonymous, and the content that one might expect to find associated with both keywords is the same. However, dog food reviews and dog food comparison indicate somewhat different content and therefore are appropriate to be used in tandem as keywords.

The more important concept to keep in mind is that you want to choose keywords that best relate to the content present on a web page and on a website; if you don't have a dog food comparison matrix, then don't bother including comparison-related keywords; you are misleading your users, and certainly not fooling Google. So in an ideal world, you do have a comparison section, a reviews section, and a rankings section, housed on different pages or sections of your site, with each one tagged with the appropriate keywords. Correspondingly, your SEO and PPC search engine marketing efforts should that content by driving review keywords to the review pages and so on.

Dig Deeper: The 9 Places to Put Your Keywords for SEO Power

Picking SEO Keywords: Guiding Your Content Strategy

Keywords should guide your overall content strategy. We have referred to this concept several times in the preceding tips, but it is important enough to leave as a final guiding paradigm.

Conventionally, we think linearly about content and keywords; we build a website, and then launch search engine marketing campaigns to drive users to our content.  That approach has its limits. When we think about strategy at Wpromote, we think about  a circular process; since our keyword research reflects both what users are seeking and the way that the search engines (particularly Google) "think" about keywords, we let that help to drive our content strategy.

Put differently, to be phenomenally successful, we seek not to take static content and try to pry greater results from it; instead, we leverage the existing needs of the users, and use that knowledge to help us create the best possible user experience. That, in turn, will be rewarded with higher rankings, greater traffic, and a higher ROI from our marketing efforts.

source

Optimize Your Site for Search

Even companies that do big business online struggle to be noticed by Google users. The Web, after all, is home to some 120 million Internet domains and tens of billions of indexed pages. But every company, big or small, can draw more Google traffic by using search-engine optimization -- SEO, for short.

Traffic is directly related to your site's rank among Google's search results -- the higher the rank, the more you get. The specific algorithms, or formulas, that Google and other search engines use to rank websites are closely guarded secrets, but the basic components are widely known. SEO involves tailoring your website to satisfy as many of the ranking criteria as possible.

SEO isn't magic. It probably won't land your site among the Top 10 websites for highly popular search terms. Nor will it drive traffic to a site that doesn't offer anything of value. Still, says Stephen Woessner, author of The Small Business Owner's Handbook to Search Engine Optimization, "you should be able to increase your rankings significantly, and even score some Top 10 rankings on keywords that matter."

Do you need a consultant to do SEO? Only if you don't have time. (Expect to spend about an hour per page.) What follows will help you improve performance on two of the most important ranking factors: the strength of keywords associated with a page and the organization and functionality of the website.

The Basics of SEO

1. Choosing Keywords
The basic premise of keyword optimization is simple: Discover the search words that potential customers are using to find products or services like yours, and then build your Web content around those words. What complicates matters is that countless other websites are trying to do the same thing.

Understand the competitive ratio. Generally speaking, the more popular (or potentially lucrative) the search term, the more websites compete to rank high for that search term. Yes, you want to rank high on popular terms -- but if you don't have limitless resources, it is wise to target search terms for which you have a realistic shot at a high ranking. The best keywords, says Jill Whalen, a longtime SEO practitioner and head of the consultancy High Rankings, are "words and phrases that are being searched but that may have been overlooked by other websites."

An effective way to find such terms is to calculate the ratio of the number of pages a search returns to the popularity of the search term. "You have to look at the competitiveness of every keyword phrase that's relevant to what you offer," Whalen says.

Do the math. First, draw up a list of the keywords -- or, better yet, keyword phrases -- a potential customer might plausibly search if he or she were looking for your product. (A bike retailer, for example, might start with variations on bike, bicycle, and cycling; a specialty shop might also try bike frames and bike components.)

Then, see how often users search for these terms by plugging each into keyword-tracking tools such as Wordtracker (wordtracker.com), Keyword Discovery (keyworddiscovery.com), or Google AdWords's Keyword Tool (adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). The Google AdWords tool is free, and the website SEOBook.com offers a free, though less robust, version of Wordtracker. Besides showing how many times these phrases are searched on average in a day or month, these tools will suggest other relevant terms. You may learn, for instance, that bicycle parts is a much more popular search term than bicycle components.

Next, run each phrase through Google. The more websites returned, the more competition you will have with that phrase. (In general, Woessner recommends devising terms that generate fewer than one million page hits.)

Finally, divide the number of indexed pages by the number of daily searches. The lower the result, the more promising the term. Ideally, says Woessner, the ratio should be 500 to 1 or less.

Narrow your keywords. If your ratio is higher than 500 to 1, you will probably want to choose narrower or more specific keywords. For example, if you do most of your business locally, you would be smart to add a geographic term to each keyword used on top-level pages. (Bicycle shop becomes bicycle shop Poughkeepsie.) Such a search is less popular, but the competition to win it is much less fierce, so it is likely to generate a better ratio.

There's no need to generate an exhaustive list of phrases. However, because each page of a website has a different focus or objective, each should have its own keywords. The homepage should have the most general terms, and keywords should become more tailored and specific as you burrow deeper into the site.

2. Placing Keywords Strategically
Once you have determined the best keywords to use, you need to employ them strategically, in two places.

In the code. It is the search engine that ultimately associates a keyword with a webpage, and the first place it looks to decipher a page is at the top of the page's coding -- within the so-called head tag that defines the page's overall characteristics. (A webpage's code, of course, isn't normally visible in a browser window; to see it, use the browser's "source" or "page source" command.) Incorporate the keywords you have chosen in the title, description, and keywords tags. These are often called meta tags, and the code often begins with that word.

The title will appear at the top of the user's browser window, and the description is often quoted by search engines, so these should be coherent and concise -- the title should be six to 12 words, according to Bruce Clay, a leading SEO consultant, and the description 12 to 24 words. Your title and description should reinforce each other and the page's visible content. If you have a lot of keywords, choose judiciously, because search engines prize natural-sounding language. You can load all your keywords, even misspelled variants, into the keywords tag field.

In the visible content. Your keywords should appear frequently in the text, as well as in the other elements of a page, including the descriptive "alt" tags that underlie images and in the headlines and subheads atop a section of text. Though there is no agreement among optimizers about how much text a page should include or how frequently keywords should be mentioned, they do agree on this: If people find your copy thoughtful and worth reading, a search engine will, too. Never stuff a page so full of keywords that it doesn't read naturally.

3. Building a Better Website
How your site is organized, designed, and built will affect its search-engine ranking, according to Andy Robson, managing director of the optimizing firm dzine it. Organize content into themed categories, what Clay calls silos. "By lining up your content by the way people search, you define to the search engine what you're about," Clay says. You can either group similar pages together into separate directories of folders and subfolders, or you can create "virtual silos" by using links that guide a user from one page to the next.

Other strategies are more technical, so you may need to rely on a Web developer for assistance. The site must be hosted on a fast server. The page code should be free of bugs and fully comply with the standards for website structure set by the World Wide Web Consortium. (You can test this at validator.w3.org.) Include in the site's code a special protocol known as Sitemap, which makes it easier for visiting search engines to scan the site. Sitemaps can be submitted directly to the search engines.

Seeding Links

Once you have optimized your website, you want to attract links from other sites. SEO consultants offer a fairly prosaic strategy: Build a good site with useful content to which other sites will want to send their readers. Here are a few strategies to grease that wheel.

Lend your expertise. Forge partnerships under which other sites can publish your repurposed or original content on the condition that they link back to your site. "Sharing your expertise about the product or the service can differentiate your brand," says Stephen Woessner. "The brand story is what gets somebody to purchase one product over another."

Find out who's linking to your competition. Many of them probably should be linking to you as well. The "links" tool at faganfinder.com/urlinfo reports the inbound links to a website detected by the major search engines. Many of those links will come from directories that are important to your industry or community. There's no sin in requesting a link -- or in trading content for one.

Be choosy about linkers. "You want the best sites, not the most, to link to you," says Bruce Clay. "If an expert links to you, by association you're an expert" (provided the expert is in your subject area). By the same token, avoid link farms, or websites that exist solely to provide outbound links, and services that sell links outright. Search engines, says Clay, will penalize you for the chicanery.

SEO Subterfuge

The techniques we have talked about here are often described as ethical, organic, or natural SEO. By contrast, black hat SEO embraces manipulative or deceptive techniques to game the search-engine system. Search engines work hard to keep these techniques from working, so they are seldom effective for long and could even get you blacklisted. Here are several strategies that you are best off avoiding.

Cloaking: Presenting two different versions of the same page, one to search engines and one to users.

Keyword stuffing, or spamming: Loading up the meta tags with popular search terms that have no substantive connection with the page.

Hidden links and keywords: Concealing them in the background color, outside the visible margins, or in other code.

Resources

Nobody knows what Google wants better than Google -- visit its pages for webmasters at google.com/support/webmasters.

Consultant Bruce Clay's site, at bruceclay.com, wins a high ranking for its free and helpful information.

SEOmoz.org sells SEO tools but offers stripped-down versions and tutorials for free.

There are free sites about search-engine marketing at searchenginewatch.com, searchengineland.com, and searchengineguide.com.

source:

 SEO Book

Click Fraud on Pay-Per-Click Ads

Click fraud is particularly a concern for small businesses with limited advertising budgets. How can you be sure that when you buy pay-per-click advertising that it’s a legitimate customer and not your competitor attempting to run up your advertising costs, a bot, or a person in a developing country being paid to click?

When you utilize pay-per-click advertising, you want to know that each click represents an honest-to-goodness potential customer.

Click fraud remains a persistent, troubling presence in online advertising, despite the continued evolution of detection technology.  "The bad guys are going to get very creative when they get hungry," says Ryan Smith, a principal researcher with Accuvant Labs, a company specializing in business tech security. "As long as there's a way for money to be made, the bad guys are going to find the loopholes."

Two recent lawsuits filed by Microsoft highlight one of those loopholes, a disturbing new trend in click fraud called click laundering.  Microsoft accuses the Texas operator of a science-related website of using sophisticated methods to collect revenues from clicks. Malware is used to impersonate search engines and send unsuspecting users to fake domains. When the user visits the domain and clicks anywhere on a page, they are clicking on a hidden ad, and the advertiser pays for the click.

Despite the aggressive pursuit of click fraudsters by Microsoft and other reputable companies, more than 17 percent of clicks were fraudulent in the first quarter of this year, according to Click Forensics, which monitors click fraud.  That jives with recent research by Visual IQ, which produces marketing intelligence software.  The company estimates marketers lose an average of 16.7 percent of their pay-per-click budgets to fraud.

"Many of our clients don't even know they are victims," says Visual IQ founder Anto Chittilappilly. "After it happens, you can file lawsuits against the fraudsters and the search engines, but to get that money in the bank is going to take a long time."

Click fraud can be particularly crippling for small to mid-sized businesses with limited advertising budgets. However, while you may be somewhat reliant on the big guys to patrol click fraud, there are best practices you can follow to protect yourself.

Common click fraud techniques

It helps to have some idea of what you're up against. Chittilappilly says the fraud might be perpetrated by your competitor, who drives clicks to deplete your advertising budget early in the morning each day. Unscrupulous website operators also try to cash in with fake clicks.

In addition to click laundering, click scams may use one of these techniques:

• Manual clicking. In developing countries where labor is cheap, workers might be paid to click to run up totals
• Software clicks. Automated clicks can quickly run up totals, Chittilappilly says.
• Bot networks. Using malware to harness unsuspecting users' computers, criminals can create large networks of computers employing programs that imitate clicks. "This is really problematic and takes out most of the money in click fraud," Chittilappilly.

Sean Sullivan, security advisor of North American labs for security solutions company F-Secure, says he sees a significant amount of malicious code designed to affect ad clicks. "Some fraudulent activity would seem to yield small rewards, but remember that many participants come from developing nations," he says. "That base of people will continue to grow."

Your click fraud checklist

Being a vigilant, persistent advertising consumer is crucial to protecting your pay-per-click budget.  Experts offer these tips:

• Partner with reputable firms. Don't bargain hunt. Rely on established brokers, marketing agencies and networks, says Kirby Winfield of Mpire, which produces AdXpose, online ad campaign verification and optimization technology. While you might not be able to afford this sort of technology on your own (AdXpose runs about $1,000 a month), you should ask what sort of verification software or system your partner is using. "Ask up front 'Do you provide verification of where your traffic comes from? Do you work with a third party?'" Winfield says. "Establish a relationship with your provider and verify they actually acquire their traffic in a transparent way."
• Limit your campaign geographically. Approximately 44 percent of clicks originating in Vietnam are fraudulent, estimates Chittilappilly. If you're seeing high click totals from countries such as Vietnam, India, Nigeria, and Russia, you're likely the victim of click fraud. You can limit your pay-per-click campaign to where you sell your product or set limits to avoid regions rife with click fraud even if you sell globally.
• Set daily budgets. Evaluating on a daily basis will help you red flag suspicious activity more easily. If your budget is depleted each day, monitor when the action occurs. "If all the clicks are happening at 2 a.m., clearly there is a problem," Chittilappilly advises.
• Watch click-through rates. Realistically, you shouldn't expect more than 10 percent of people who view your ad to click through to your website, says Winfield. Be wary of an explosion of clicks generated through one URL.
• Know where your ads are running. If your ad is supposed to run on a list of sites, be able to monitor how much of your volume went to premium sites, says Winfield.

It's not a case of buyer beware, says Winfield, but of "buyer be aware." Your careful monitoring of your pay-per-click budget is like using the Club to secure your auto, advises Smith, of Accuvant. "When you secure your car, the criminal goes by and picks another car. As long as you implement measures other companies aren't implementing, the other companies are going to be more likely targets."

source: 

The Death of Squeeze Pages

For years now, the squeeze page has practically been the lingua franca of the marketing online world. Whether you're in real estate (and actually, the real estate industry in particular has leaned particularly heavily on squeeze pages), banking, e-commerce or anything else, the conventional wisdom has been to target tightly focused groups of consumers through these web pages/marketing tools.

These pages do OK at helping marketers identify which keywords or keyword phrases do well in terms of attracting targeted traffíc and if they're well designed, at gathering email addresses or other contact information from these visitors. However, there are much better methods of doing keyword research than creating a separate squeeze page for each of your keywords. Additionally, building and maintaining these pages represents an investment of time and money which isn't likely to produce a worthwhile return.

The squeeze page is dead - it just doesn't know it yet and neither do the marketers who still use this direct marketing-style methodology in their líst building efforts. I know there's probably at least a few of you out there reading this that still use them and are wondering what exactly is wrong with squeeze pages.

As it happens, the answer is plenty. They're unappealing to consumers and increasingly, they're seen as undesirable pieces of virtual property by the search engines as well. When you're trying to market your business with a tool that turns off both your target market and the search engines, it's clear that the time has come to abandon ship. I'll explain in more detail below.

They're Completely Unappealing To Readers

You've seen a squeeze page before - and chances are you've hit the back button on your browser almost immediately. These pages almost universally feature incredibly unattractive cookie cutter designs and copy which is generally nothing but sensational hype. That alone is enough to turn off most readers, not to mention that squeeze pages seem all too often to be riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. Put simply, they don't look professional by any stretch of the imagination - but they do look professional enough to fool many business people who are new to the medium of the web into using them at least for a while.

Think of it this way - if you got a flyer in the mail that looked like one of these pages, would you be in a hurry to contact the marketer to sign up for their mailing líst, let alone actually do business with them? Probably not.

As a general rule, if it looks too awful to be true, it's just what it looks like and squeeze pages are a prime example of this. They lack any kind of credibility with your prospective customers, especially when you're in the real estate business. These pages make you look like the online equivalent of a shady used car salesman, not the kind of person that people want to do a real estate deal with. There are other things about squeeze pages that turn off your potential customers, but since there's some crossover with this and the SEO shortcomings of the format, we'll get back to that a little later on.

Google Slaps Squeeze Pages

It's true: squeeze pages are nothing less than poison as far as your performance in the search engines is concerned. Google and other search engines have been working on ways to discount the rankings of these pages, which are rarely the kind of content that users are actually looking for when they use the keywords which these sites target. It comes down to what it always comes down to when search engine rankings are the issue - relevance. A webpage designed to entice visitors to fork over their contact information simply isn't that relevant to many, if any, actual search engine queries, no matter how much content you try to cram onto the page.

Speaking of the content, this is something which has changed about squeeze pages in the last couple of years. Once these pages started being penalized by search engines for their lack of content ("classic" squeeze pages, after all, feature little more than an opt-in form), marketers started turning them into the online equivalent of the long form sales letter - in other words, something no one wants to read, especially not page after page. This unappealing content has led to a further decline in the ranking of these pages in search results, making them even worse marketing tools than they already were.

Squeeze Pages Can Sink Your Main Site

Let's get back to that subtitle about Google "slapping" squeeze pages, because this is one of the most important points I'd like to make here today. If your squeeze pages either link to or are part of your main site, they're more than likely causing a slump in your main site's search engine ranking, making you less visible to your market online. In other words, the exact opposite of what you'd hoped to accomplish. If these pages link to your site, you can be penalized for these links from unpopular sites in what Google considers to be an iffy online neighborhood - and what are the three most important things in real estate? Exactly.

Another way that squeeze pages can drag down your online presence is through having a large percentage of duplicate content. Many businesses throw up dozens of squeeze pages which are basically identical other than the targeted keywords for that particular page. Even if you make an effort to rewrite the content on these pages, there's only so much you can do without putting a disproportionate amount of time or money into the effort.

So if squeeze pages are out, what are real estate professionals to do in terms of marketing online? There's plenty of options, all of which are better choices than building a series of squeeze pages. I won't go into them all here, but as always on the web, it's all about good content which is geared towards readers first and search engines second. When your market sees you as credible and reputable, they'll beat a path to your door and happily sign up for your email list. And where the market goes, the search engines will follow; but no one's flocking to squeeze pages.source