Picture this. You advertise something for sale on line, maybe on Craig’s List, eBay, whatever.  You get an email from someone interested in purchasing your item. After settling on a price, he sends you a cashier’s check for quite a bit more than the price you agreed to sell it for. When you point this out, he apologizes and requests you cash the check, take your share, and return the overpayment to him. You do so, only to find out weeks later that the cashier’s check was a forgery, but of course, the money you sent was not.

This is one of the fastest growing scams on the Net. Be careful.

Until recently, it was assumed that the best way to improve search engine rankings for your website was to liberally sprinkle a group of relevant key words throughout your site. But in the rapidly growing and increasingly competitive Internet of today, specialization is necessary.

General key words no longer work well, nor do a wide array of keywords or phrases. The main goal, of course, is to be the number one listing (or at least on the first page) in Google, Yahoo, and/or MSN when internet users type your phrase into the search box.

Today, it is a good idea for each individual page of your website to be primarily optimized around a single phrase. That’s certainly not to say that you shouldn’t use other key phrases as well, but giving one of them priority is a wise strategy. That’s what we mean by specialization – a single well-focused key phrase.

Your primary phrase should be something that people are likely to type into a search engine, and it should also be descriptive of your page’s content.

You will generally see better results when your pages are optimized for more specific “niche” terms, rather than highly competitive terms that lots of people are trying to rank for. That’s why it can be much more effective to choose a creative two to five word key phrase rather than single key words with lots of competition, such as “travel” or “finance”.

Finding a relevant, popular key phrase that you will realistically be able to rank for certainly isn’t easy, but it’s definitely worth doing. In today’s competitive world, you need every edge you can get. If you would like help implementing or updating your website’s search engine optimization (SEO), please contact us.

Blogging is fast becoming an addicting pastime for everyday internet users with opinions and information they wish to share. But beyond these casual bloggers, many savvy internet marketers have also discovered that blogging is an effective way for business owners to keep in contact with their customers.

As recently as a year ago, blogging could really increase traffic to your website. Since then, the search engines have begun to adjust the level of importance they attach to a blog entry. So can blogging still be used as a way to boost your search listings ranking and generate traffic?

In short “yes” but the rules have changed. Today, more than ever, the content of the blog must be meaningful and relevant to your website. Otherwise, search engines may disregard it or even penalize you.

If you are thinking about adding a blog to your site, here are some guidelines to consider

1. Do you have an interest in blogging as a way to communicate with your clients?
2. Do you have enough content to deliver to your customers on an ongoing basis? You have to have enough content to spark an interest and a following from your visitors and customers or else it is a waste of time.
3. Does what you have to say provide any value or usefulness to your website visitor or customer? Do you have an opinion, offer advice, product reviews or service information that is of benefit to your readers?
4. Do your customers use the internet and would they interact using this medium? If customers do not use your method of advertising or promotion, how can you expect them to find your information?
5. Do you have the available time to spend blogging? Most bloggers will post to their blog every few days, but at least monthly.

If you answered “no” to any of the above questions then blogging is NOT an effective medium for you.

But if you answered yes, then blogging can be an effective tool to:

1. Make your clients or customers aware of new products, services or information.
2. Be newsworthy and write reviews, tips, articles, links to non-competing resources and more.
3. Receive comments and feedback from customers and blog visitors. You can learn more about the needs of your clients through the feedback of your readers.
4. Receive back links from other blogs and article sites (if you send them to directories). More back links usually translate into higher search engine results.
5. Improve search engine rankings and increase traffic to your website.

So there are real benefits to blogging if you have the time, the inclination and something to say.

These days we all get so much email that it is hard to know whether to even open most of it. A clear subject line is always helpful. Now, you can now have specific email from your website show up in your mailbox with a pre-determined subject line.

For example, let’s say you have a link on your site where visitors can request more information. Normally, the visitor puts whatever he or she wants in the subject line, and that can be misleading. But instead, you could have the subject line automatically say “Information Request” or “Newsletter sign-up” or anything else you like.

Here’s an example with the subject line “Tell me more.” Email me.

From now through June 30, 2007, we will add any subject line you like to any email link on your website.

You’ve optimized your web site, you have great content, but you’re still not getting a lot of traffic? The key could be linking, or more specifically, the number of other websites that link to yours.

While linking is not considered the most important technique in search engine optimization (SEO), it is quite important, especially to Google, the #1 search engine. Google uses the number and importance of inbound links to determine PageRank which partially determines how high a website is listed in their search results. But it is not only Google which considers links important; all other search engine spiders travel along links to search and index web pages, so we can assume links are important to all search engines and essential to Google rankings.

Effective linking strategies take time to develop, but the time spent developing links to your site could very well be the most profitable time you could spend to increase traffic to your site.

Not only is the number of links important, but you must pay attention to the quality of sites which have links to yours. Your site is given a higher ranking if the site that links to yours is also a highly ranked site which offers rich and relevant content. However, just linking for the sake of SEO can lead to a site being penalized by the major search engines. The sites that link to yours must be related sites. This shows the search engine that you want to provide the online public more information and that you are really offering value. This makes the practice of contracting linking to companies that guarantee you links dangerous, as you are not aware of their linking methods (perhaps they just link all comers together) and a mistake could cause you to be banned from a search engine.

So how do you go about the business of getting the right links pointing to your site? There are a variety of ways to do this.

Writing Articles
This is the favorite of a lot of web sites. Articles relating to the content of your site should be written clearly and concisely. You should focus on providing information that is relevant to someone who is interested in getting information on that field. It could be in the form of current news about that sector. For example, a real estate site might offer articles about trends in real estate or it could simply be an article that answers frequently asked questions in the field. Be sure to mention your website in your article.

And how do you get these articles out? You submit them to article directories. These are large repositories of articles. Webmasters come to pick up content for their sites from these directories. Examples include www.ezine.com and www.articledashboard.com as well as others. You will not be paid for your labor, but for every site that picks up your article, that is one positive vote on the Google PageRank algorithm.

Reciprocal Linking
This is probably the hardest part of link building, since it involves finding a relatively high ranking site, convincing them to link to yours, and usually linking back to their site in return. The latter is easy, since the Internet allows you to link to other people’s sites without permission. Getting a high ranking site to link to your site, however, is a challenge.

The first step is to find the most suitable sites. Sometimes the best candidates will be your direct competitors, believe it or not. You can expect them to be hesitant to place a link to your site (then again, who knows?), but you must still ask. There will probably be a webmaster@mysite.com you can contact. When requesting reciprocal linkage, you should provide your site’s URL and description (not too verbose), stating how such a link will benefit their visitors, and consequently, their website’s PageRank and profitability. Other candidates for reciprocal linking are your suppliers, customers, other related businesses, trade associations and discussion groups.

This stage cannot be rushed. You cannot aggressively pressure another site with a request for a reciprocal link. Be polite and subtle and of course, be honest. If you are reciprocal linking with your direct competitors, don’t cheat; place their links on your page.

E-books
Another way of ensuring that a large number of sites have links pointing to your site is to write e-books and offer them for free, while giving the web sites that pick them up the option of selling them to their audience or giving them away also. The browsing public love freebies, so this is an excellent way of ensuring that a large amount of websites have your e books (anything from six to sixty pages) with loads of links back to your site.

Offering others a chance to make money if they join your web site’s affiliate program (if you are offering a product for sale online) will also ensure a large number of websites provide a link to your site, all of them doing the initial pre-selling that is so essential to the sales process. Other linking strategies include submitting your website to directories and advertising on sites through link buying on their sites or on web journals. Press releases are also excellent ways of getting news sites to link to your website.

Content, Content, Content
Remember that content is king. All your efforts are moot if your content cannot keep the searchers once they get to your site. Without good content, no webmaster worth his salt will link to you, so you must offer informative content and a website which truly helps the browsing audience. Good content will ensure the success of your site. The value you deliver with quality content will give you great free PR: word of mouth endorsement on forums, articles and e-zines, in short, “cyber buzz.”

Give your site a Thanksgiving flair. You can have falling leaves appear on your home page or any other page you like. I’ll add this animation for free and I’ll remove it after the season, if you like) (*Note – This effect looks best against light backgrounds. The turkey is optional.)

Take a look at an example: www.nexxite.com/Leaves.htm

Virtually everyone with a website would like more traffic, i.e., more people visiting their site. There are many ways to increase traffic, such as off-line advertising, public speaking, writing articles, word-of-mouth, third party publicity, etc., but I like to focus on search engines. This is because studies have shown that as much as 85% of web traffic comes through search engine listings. So they are extremely important. And yet, it is difficult and often confusing to improve one’s ranking in the search results.

Today, I want to talk about one way of enhancing your search engine rankings. All search engines place a significant value on the visible text (content) on your important web pages and how that content relates to the words or phrases people are searching for. The process is simple to understand and hard to do well. You first need to come up with two or three words (or phrases) people might search for when looking for your kind of products/services. These are your keywords. They should not be so common that millions of people use them and thus millions of sites contain them, nor should they be so obscure that nobody searches for them at all. It is an art to find this middle ground. There are free tools that can help you see how many people search for any given phrase. (One is http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srch/index.php.)

Another caveat is that the words you think people would use may not be the ones that actually help build traffic. Here is a fascinating example of this phenomenon. A woman launched a website selling cat and dog vitamins. Like most online business owners, she realized she wanted better search results  She decided to add keyword phrases to her site. Given her products, she chose the keyword phrases “cat vitamins” and “dog vitamins.’ She built these into her website but had very little success. Then a search engine expert recommended that she instead focus on the reasons people might want these vitamins. She changed her keywords to “hair loss in cats” and one or two other like phrases. She immediately saw a five-fold increase in traffic and business.

So, choose your words carefully.

Once you have identified a good set of keywords, get them into your text, the higher on the page, the better. Ideally, these words or phrases should be in your titles and in the first sentence or two on your home page. Note that they should not be in pictures which search engines cannot read. They must be in the actual text.

There are other places on the website where the keywords should appear as well, and some are a bit more technical to implement. In addition, there are other techniques that enhance rankings, such as linking strategies and pay-per-click services. We help many clients with these services and would be glad to discuss them further with you.

Buyers don’t rely on the Yellow Pages like they used to. Customers’ buying behavior has changed – for good. Traditionally, people headed to the Yellow Pages precisely when they were ready to buy, but new research by The Kelsey Group in March, 2005 found that 70% of US households now use the Internet as an information source when they are ready to buy. And this is often when they are shopping locally for products and services. These buyers aren’t going to the Internet for online purchases, nor to find distant providers. They intend to spend their money in their own community.

The Kelsey Group also found that interviewed individuals felt the search engines were a “better source of purchasing information than the Yellow Pages, newspapers and magazines.” The trend is being driven entirely by Internet users. Related data from other sources show that consumers who search online for purchases spend more than those using the printed directory.

The Yellow Page industry is a fifteen billion dollar industry in the US. While there are more choices of printed Yellow Page directories than ever, the buying habits of the public have moved away from using them. Computer-savvy buyers know the easiest way to find the information they want is through search engines (and since May, they can do searches on the run, on their cell phones). But many small or local businesses aren’t even listed online.

The Kelsey Group’s data is consistent with other statistics showing that the Internet has overtaken the newspaper for cars and real estate (major purchases). And it’s becoming the “go-to” place for information. A study by Imedia Connection found the Internet is “second only to spouses for finding referrals.”
To stay competitive, small and mid-sized businesses will be compelled to make sure they’re included in search engine databases. Enterprises that can’t be found by online searchers risk losing sales to businesses they find instead.

Improving search engine rankings is a specialty of ours at Nexxite. We stay on top of the research in this constantly changing field. So if you or someone you know has a website that needs help getting a better search engine presence, by all means, get in touch with us.

I’m not sure if anyone will be interested in this one, but it is an amusing little gimmick you might like for one page of your site. Just for fun, I will add a custom cursor to any page of your website.

You can have the cursor turn into a pumpkin or a tiger or any number of other things.

To see an example of this in action, and see various cursors, click here: http://www.nexxite.com/CustomCursor.htm

 As you probably know, Google is the most widely used search engine on the Internet today. But did you know there is a lot you can do with it beyond basic searches?

You can learn more about how Google has indexed your website (assuming it has) by typing the following commands into the Google search window. Of course, substitute your domain name for the word “domain.” And when researching a particular keyword or phrase, type that word or phrase where it says “keyword.”

 link:www.domain.com returns a list of backlinks that Google has indexed. Only
a small selection is listed, however.

 related:www.domain.com returns a list of sites that Google sees as related
to the topic on your page. At present, it’s not very accurate.

allinurl:keyword returns a list of pages and sites that contain the ‘keyword’
in their url.

site:www.domain.com returns all pages of the domain that Google has crawled
and indexed.

allinanchor:keyword returns a list of pages and sites that contain the keyword
as anchor text in their backlinks.

cache:www.domain.com will show the current cache that Google has for the page.

info:www.domain.com will return information that Google has for the page.

allintitle:keyword returns webpages that have the specified keywords in the
title.

intitle:keyword returns listings of web pages that have only the specific keyword
as the title.