Press Release Grove

LINKS
Links are very important in today’s Google rankings, but just how many links you need will depend on both the competitiveness of your target phrases, and the quality of the incoming links themselves.

Essentially the number one rule of links is to keep it relevant! Topical relevance is very important in order for inbound links to give your site the most value. If the page that links to you is relevant that is good, if the entire site linking to you is relevant, that is better.

First to get an idea of how many links you may need, take a look at the top 10 ranking sites in Google and record how many links Yahoo is noting for each site. (This is because Google does not display anywhere near all the links they have noted). The average of this count is often a good indication of how many links your site may need.

There are many different ways to get links to your site including the age old reciprocal link trade, directory links, article based links, and links from press releases.

Reciprocal Links
Reciprocal linking has seen its value drop considerably over the past few years, however, if the site you are trading with is relevant you can still receive value from these links.

Paid Links
Google frowns on paid links, however that is not to say that they don’t work. Often you can find highly reputable and relevant websites which are offering paid advertising spots. If these links are coded to link directly to your website without passing through any tracking redirects, you will in many cases see value in the form of both direct traffic and increased link densities and rankings.

Articles
Writing and distributing industry specific articles is a great way to help boost both your link counts and site traffic; for examples of such content see StepForth’s SEO Blog News articles. Consider writing articles on a regular basis and submitting them to some of the more popular services such as EzineArticles. Be sure to include a link to your site from somewhere within the article, or at the very least within your bio. Try to use a target phrase as part of the anchor text for additional value.

Press Releases
If something of importance has happened to your company such as a new product launch, or other notable achievement – essentially anything news worthy, put out a press release. Submit this press release through services such as PRWeb or PRNewsWire. Again, be sure to include a target phrase as part of the anchor text.

There are also a number of places you can get links that have basically turned south, and are not generally recommended. These include signatures in form posts, guest books, and other typically free links.

Forum Posts
Forum posts can help to marginally raise your link counts; however, with this one you must be careful. Only add a link to your site in your signature if both the forum allows it, and you are a respected member of the forum. If you are a solid contributor and your posts have depth and meaning, and the forum is highly relevant to your site, then having a link in your signature may give your site some juice. Posting wildly to random forums will in most cases get yourself banned, and will be both a waste of time and potentially make you and your site look bad.

Guest Books
In nearly all cases, do not post your link to guest books. If you happen to stumble upon a guestbook that is highly relevant to your site, the other comments are relevant to your site, and you have something useful (and again relevant) to say, then perhaps consider it, but typically focusing on links from guest books is considered SPAM and is best avoided all together.

Blog Comments
Having a link from your blog comments is not necessarily a bad thing. If you find a relevant blog post of use, and have something relevant and constructive to say, don’t be afraid to enter your link into the “URL” field of the form, but don’t try stuffing links into the comment itself.

Link Farms & Bad Neighborhoods
These are sites that allow you to simply post your link no stríngs attached. They are mostly long scrolling pages with countless links. Stay away from them. If you see one, run in the other direction. These links are bad, will not help with your rankings, and in some cases can actually damage your rankings.

Stay away from sites that cross link with obvious spammers. These networks of SPAM sites are not ones you would want your site associated with, and if you achieve links from enough of these sites it can adversely impact your rankings. Even more important, NEVER link to any of these sites – as that will certainly tie in your connection to them and give Google reason to discount your rankings.

DMOZ, Yahoo and Other Directories
Directory based links can be of significant help, especially if they are from highly reputable directories, the two biggest being DMOZ.org and the Yahoo Directory.

Getting a site into DMOZ is like Gold. Google loves links from DMOZ and your site will reap the benefits. The big catch however is actually getting your site into the directory in the first place. Find the perfect category for your site and check to see if it has an editor. If you see a link “Volunteer to edit this category” try and find another relevant location. Pages without active editors take much longer to get listed into. Once you find the perfect directory submit your site every 4-6 months until listed. If you are lucky you will get in eventually.

Yahoo Directory is seen as an authority in the eyes of Google, and getting your site in will help your link reputation. This link does come at a price of $299 per year, but will play a role in helping your website achieve top rankings.

There are a number of other valuable directories out there that can help you with your search rankings. Before submittíng to any directory the key is a combination of relevance and authority. If the directory is relevant and active, it may be worth considering.

GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS
Google Webmaster Tools can be very useful for your optimization efforts. It may not directly help you obtain higher rankings, but can help you trouble shoot if you are experiencing problems. It will also allow you to remove URL’s that you don’t want indexed and set various preferences such as your domain, crawl rate, and geographic target.

XML Sitemaps
This is the most common reason people use Google Webmaster Tools – the submission of their XML sitemap. While you can use your robots.txt to have Google find your XML sitemap, by submitting it directly to Google you can check up on the spidering status.

Error checking
Webmaster Tools is also quite useful for checking on various error URL’s that Google may know about. Under the Diagnostics > Web Crawl you can view any errors that Google has to report on your site. By cleaning up any errors you can help boost your chances of rankings.

Links
From inside Google Webmaster Tools you can get a much clearer look at what sites Google is noting as having links to you, and give you a better indication of the need, if any, to raise your link counts.

WWW Preference
Be sure to select your domain preference under Tools > Set Preferred Domain. In nearly all cases you will want to select the version including the “www” .

SUMMARY
Inbound links play a significant role in successful Google rankings. By focusing on relevant links, as well as by diversifying where you get those links from, you can build a solid foundation for your search rankings today and into the future.

Stay tuned for Part 3 (of 3) where I will discuss other considerations including redirects, HTTP headers, and a number of other factors which play a role in successfully conquering Google.

About The Author
Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc., based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Scott’s articles and those of the StepForth team at news.stepforth.com or contact us at StepForth.com, Tel –             250-385-1190 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 250-385-1190 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , TollFree –             877-385-5526 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 877-385-5526 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , Fax – 250-385-1198

In this three-part series on How to Optimize for Google we will touch on a number of important aspects for top Google rankings including website optimization, links, Google Webmaster tools, and a number of other considerations.

The focus of Part 1 will be with on page website optimization.

THE RIGHT KEYWORDS
This article is not about keyword research so I will not spend too much time on this topic, however, I felt it was important to at least brush on this slightly. If you are interested in reading more, please see Keyword Research for Organic SEO.

Make sure that your targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords, it can make your entire optimization experience essentially a waste. Choose keywords that are attainable but yet still provide a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Your phrase selection should also be targeted to bring qualified traffic to your site.

Using the hotel industry as an example, targeting the word “hotel” would make very little sense but by narrowing it down to “Victoria BC hotel” you now have less competition, and a more qualified audience. Keep your targets in perspective and go after the obtainable rankings.

WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
There are many on-site factors that play a role in your search engine rankings. Here are a number of those factors and what you can do to increase your chances of success.

Title Tag
The title tag plays one of the most important roles in search results at Google, and is almost always the heading Google chooses for each of its listings. Placement of your target phrase is best used near the start of the tag and repeated again in the middle or near the end. Three uses of your target phrase may be helpful in some instances, as long as it is not too overwhelming. For best results each page on your site should have a totally unique title tag.

It is also important to remember that because Google will use this title as the main heading for your listing, you will want to keep it attractive to potential searchers. Try to also add a call to action, or other wording to help make your listing appear attractive to searchers.

To help illustrate the fact Google takes this tag into consideration, simply do a search for your target phrase and take a look at the titles of the top 10. I tried a search for a rather broad term “hotel” and saw that all 10/10 listings had it in the title tag, and 6/10 had it as the very first word. A quick scan showed that the entire top 30 either had the word hotel, or hotels in their title tags.

If you do only one thing to your website, make sure that all your title tags are relevant, unique, and contain your target phrase for each page.

Meta Description Tag
The Meta Description tag is still occasionally used by Google as the description which appears in the search results themselves. While this used to be a more common practice Google tends to use it most often on sites with very limited content, or those which are flash based. I have seen it still used for content rich sites, however this is less common.

The Meta Description tag still has an impact on search rankings. Your best bet when using this tag is to keep it short and sweet with your target phrase close to the start and not repeated more than 3 times. Like the title tag, each page on your site should have its own unique description tag.

Meta Keyword Tag
When it comes to Google this tag is useless, and won’t influence your rankings. There is some speculation as to whether a spammy keyword tag can however, have a negative effect on Google rankings. As a result, if you do utilize a keyword Meta tag for the smaller engines, it is best to keep it clean and play it safe.

Density
Keyword density plays a role in overall rankings; however, it is not as cut and dry as it once was. Once upon a time there was a magic number that when used could almost guarantee top rankings.

This is no longer the case. Today the ideal density varies from industry to industry, phrase to phrase. To find out what density you should aim for, take the top 10 or 20 search results and see what percentage those sites are using. In most cases you will find that the majority of these sites have a very similar density to one another, and this average density is a good estimation of what you should aim for.

Body Text and Keyword Placement
The location of relevant text on your site will help establish the overall importance of your target phrase. While you do not want to overwhelm the engines and site visitors with a bombardment of target phrases at the top of the page, try to sprinkle in some instances as close to the top of the page as possible.

Synonyms
Be sure to include various synonyms for your target phrases within your body text on your site. Google will use these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page for your main target phrases, which in turn can improve your odds.

To find possible synonyms you can use a thesaurus, but the best way is to search Google itself and see exactly what they consider to be similar. Simply search in Google for your target phrase preceded with a tilde, such as “~hotels“. Next scan through the search results for any text Google has bolded. These are all words that Google considers to be related. Using the “~hotels” example Google brings up phrases such as ‘travel’, ‘tourism’, ‘accommodation’, as well as various hotel chain names such as ‘Hilton Hotels’.

Keywords in Domain
There is still some speculation if having a target phrase as part of your top level domain (TLD) is of use to search rankings. From my experience, yes, there is value here, although, nothing like it was several years ago.

If you are starting off in the online world and are contemplating which domain to go for, consider one that uses your target phrase, assuming that it is both relevant to your business name, and uses no more than a single hyphen. While multiple hyphens in a domain can be successful, they are very common with highly spammy websites, so it is best to not take that route if possible.

While having a keyword located within your domain can provide some ranking juice, I would not suggest heading out and doing a domain swap. In most cases you would be better off working on your existing site than starting from scratch with a new domain.

Keywords in page specific URL
Using keywords for specific page URL’s can also help add a little bit of value to your site, providing you use them responsibly. Consider using a keyword as a directory name and as part of a file name where it naturally makes sense to do so. If you have a website that focuses on tourism and includes local hotel listings, you may want to consider the following structure for your page on the Hilton:

MyTourismSite.com/Victoria/Accommodations/Hotels/Hilton.html

Heading Tags
Placement of target phrases within heading tags helps to establish the importance of those given phrases. That said do not over do it, or abuse it. Only place target phrases within a heading tag if it makes sense to do so, and don’t flood a page with numerous tags. Heading tags are not as critical as they once were, but still a good contribution to a well optimized page.

Link Anchor text
This is the actual text you clíck on as part of a link. When full or partial target phrases are used within your text links they help pass on some value to the linked page for those phrases. This is also true when considering surrounding text. When the content around the link is also relevant, the link holds slightly more value.

While a link that simply states “clíck here” or “www.domainname.com” does have its place, they provide considerably less value than a link that would use “discount hotels” as its anchor.

Image Alt Text
While image alt text still plays a minor role, its biggest part is within the use of image based navigation. If you have an image linked to another page, the alt text will be attributed much the same way as standard link anchor text is.

Image Alt text should always be short and to the point and should accurately describe either the image itself, or the page the image is linking to. Do not use alt tags as a place to stuff keywords.

Inline Links
These are links that are found mid sentence or mid paragraph as opposed to a simple listing of links as found in a menu or possibly on a sitemap. Links found mid paragraph tend to pass on a little more value from the surrounding text and can provide more relevance to the linked page.

Site Navigation
It is absolutely imperative that your website be fully spiderable by the search engines. This may seem obvious, but often webmasters overlook Google’s ability to crawl a website. Google has become very advanced in what links it can follow and how it can spider a website, but there are still some things that can cause significant roadblocks.

- Flash: One of the most commonly made mistakes is the use of flash. If flash is used as a sole means of site navigation then you can count on Google not viewing your internal pages, and having a significant disadvantage in terms of site rankings.

- Java Script / DHTML: These days most Java Script and even DHTML menus can be spidered by Google, however, this is not always the case. If your site utilizes any kind of fancy navigation and you are wondering why Google has not indexed your internal pages, check out Google’s Cached Text version of your page. If you do not see any text links, then your navigation may be invisible to Google.

- Images: Image based navigation has been safe for many years now, but if your site uses this form of navigation it is essential to have brief, relevant alt text on all your buttons. This alt text will act much like standard anchor text for text based links. This is not only for the purpose of search ranking value, but take a look at Google’s cached text version of your page. If you have image based links that do not have alt text, those links do not appear. This doesn’t mean Google won’t follow them, but for anyone viewing your site on a text based browser, your links will be invisible to them.

URL Structure
Avoid long elaborate URL’s with extraneous characters. While Google has reached a point where they can index massive URL strings, it is best to avoid them if at all possible. For dynamic sites consider utilizing mod rewrites to significantly clean up the URL to not only make it more search engine friendly, but more user friendly as well.

MyTourismSite.com/?locid=”victoria”&catid=”accommodations”&type=”hotel”&comp=”hilton”

stands a better chance if cleaned up to read:

MyTourismSite.com/victoria/accommodations/hotels/hilton.htm

SUMMARY
Basic website optimization is a critical component for successful placement in Google but is only part of the overall picture. Stay tuned for “How to Optimize for Google – Part 2 of 3″ where we will discuss Links and Google Webmaster Tools.

About The Author
Scott Van Achte is the Senior SEO at StepForth Web Marketing Inc., based in Victoria, BC, Canada and founded in 1997. You can read more of Scott’s articles and those of the StepForth team at news.stepforth.com or contact us at StepForth.com, Tel –             250-385-1190 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 250-385-1190 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , TollFree –             877-385-5526 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 877-385-5526 end_of_the_skype_highlighting , Fax – 250-385-1198

What is Wrong With the Old Methods?

Old marketing methods are failing because users are beginning to wise up (Rise Up) against the old brute force advertising that tries to win users over through sheer volume, using abrasive web-page banners, unrelated Adwords displayed on the page, or repeated newsletters (most being restricted by anti-spam laws).

The old methods no longer work effectively for two key reasons. One is the fact that they are a “flash in the pan”, directing users to websites only so long as you continue to pay for the campaign, the second reason is consumers are now at the stage where they either ignore them or go out of their way to block them (with plug-in based browser or email filtering).

Let’s quickly run through some of the “traditional” ways to market on the web, and their failings.

• Paid Campaigns – (These only work while active) Paid campaigns may lure people to your site, but they are regularly not your target market and after arriving they promptly leave (High “bounce” rate).
• Banner Ads – People hate banner ads. Most of the ads on the Internet are loathed because they aren’t relevant. Seeing a banner for a better ínsurance rate when on a gaming site is a massive disconnect for the audience and a significant portion of banner ads are plain abrasive to users. Filling one third of your page with banner ads will not íncrease the likelihood anyone will care.
• Adwords – Adwords (PPC, Pay Per Click) have the same problem as banner ads, though to a lesser extent. Adwords work by displaying “sponsored results,” in search engine results. Adword results are separated from normal search results so not many people select them and the unknown quality in the user’s eye causes distrust (how do I know that a sponsored result is better than an organic result). Competition is fierce, with prices spiraling upwards, and returns staying constant. For more information see our article about Google marketing pitfalls.
• Newsletters – One word: Spam. Because of the spam epidemic, users are becoming ever more wary signing up to receive mail from any online source. Legislation and the ever increasing ability of spam filters mean a continually shrinking audience (Restricting the ability to send newsletters, and filtering them before they reach your audience).

The “Old World” marketing relied on one or two large marketing sources to drive traffic with big budgets and marketing firms. You have to get people to create the “news” then you pay other people to distribute the “news”, so you are pulling people into your “store” to show them what you have (whether they want it or not).

New Methods for Marketing

These days having others create and distribute your content for you is in vogue, this can mean syndicating your articles for other users to repost, paying users to review or rate your services, guiding users directly on forums or having users sign up to receive exclusive information. In every case, the handiwork of distribution is left to others.

Lets quickly run through some of the new “Web 2.0″ ways to market on the web, and the reason you should try them:

• Blogs – Blogs are a goldmine to both the reader and the writer. Blogging is less time consuming and considerably cheaper than traditional marketing. Blogs give you the ability to convey your personal thoughts on happenings in your industry and your personal and corporate life, letting you really connect with your audience. Another positive is the viral marketing component where you are referenced through various social media websites, search engines and other blogs, increasing both your credibility and searchability, making it easier for consumers to find and trust you.

• Forums – Forums give you an insight into what people are talking about, letting you get directly into the heads of potential customers. An easy way to find an appropriate forum is by asking existing customers what forums they frequent. Join in conversations, threads, contribute to the community and become a trusted member, then you can give your professional advice and mention what you do for a living. You should approach this as a way to get insight into what people are talking about, with the side-effect of possibly generating leads. If you approach this as direct marketíng, the community will quickly tell and either ban you, or develop a healthy disdain of you.
• Articles – Articles are a great way to show you are connected to the issues in your industry and the wider world around you. You can either submit your articles through a syndication service, or post it on your blog; even better is a combination of the two: Choose a topic you enjoy talking about and write an article (like this one!) with your personal opinion or some helpful advice. If it is well-written and educates readers, you will already have an edge on your competition.

The theme of the new marketing methods is tailoring your content to the audience. The intent is to create something readers want to read. Marketing is not about trickery or insincerity, it’s about communicating your ideas with honesty and authenticity. If it is worthwhile to your users, then they will happily talk about the content and spread it around. You have to communicate authentically with your customers and it simply doesn’t happen using “traditional” onlíne marketing.

A word of caution: if you try any of the above methods but approach them traditionally (as a direct marketíng channel) then not only will you annoy a great number of users, you will also damage your company image. Again I stress the above point, make the content something people want to read, not just marketing material.

Old Marketing Methods That are now Approached Differently

Benjamin Franklin said insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This is increasingly true for some of the more traditional forms of onlíne marketing. It’s not so much what people are doing, but more a case of how they are being done.

Let’s take a look at how we should be approaching some of the old marketing methods today.

• Press Releases – Before we start, I’m sorry to tell you, but unless you are in the 5% of the market that people pay attention to, no-one reads your press releases – at least no potential customers do. A high percentage of companies marketing on the web use traditional methods of delivery, either in print or on a section of their website. Consider changing your press release to positively present your company then send it through a syndication service for papers and online news sources to pick up and republish.
• Search Engines – Previously you had to specifically tailor your site to search engine specifications to ensure you had a high pagerank and were located at the top of search results. To put it simply, the important factor was how your site was presented to the user. These days although page display has an impact, it is far more important to have the right content on the site. Search engines now care more about content. Structure your pages logically and efficiently with appropriate content for each page, and be sure to link to those pages wherever possible, especially if you are engaging in blog or forum marketing.
• Mailing Lists and Newsletters – With new anti-spam laws coming into effect, coupled with users increasingly annoyed at anything email based, mailing lists and newsletters are becoming far less effective. Ensure all the users on your mailing lists and newsletters have agreed to receive them. You don’t need to re-ask permission from your existing líst, but be sure to let users op-out, and put an optional op-in form link in your communications.

Old-world communication can still be effective, but you need to ensure it is not your only approach.

The Conclusion?

Reevaluation is the key to a healthy online presence. You need to be constantly measuring and reevaluating your marketing methods to ensure you are not wasting money, and can take advantage of effective new methods.
About The Author
Sam Law and Julian Stone – Project, Task & Time Management specialists for: ProWorkFlow, ProActiveSoftware & Julian101.com

1. Related

The best links should come from related websites which contain similar and related content but not the same type of material or content. For example: A link for baby clothing would benefit from a link that discusses baby care.

2. Anchor

The anchor text (the “text” that is used in the link) should include keywords that relate to the topic covered on the web page that is being linked to. Anchor text should be varied; links that all have the same anchor text will appear manipulated and contrived to the search engines. Therefore, the text links should contain a variety of related words.

3. Deep Link

The links should direct visitors to a related page within the website. Do not make the mistake of directing all of the web links to a website’s home page. Deep linking, and directing visitors to material that corresponds to content that is closely related to the text link is key. Deep linking appears more natural to search engines, whereas links directing all visitors to a single page or the home page seem unnatural, and could be interpreted as an effort to manipulate search engine ranking.

4. Domain And Page Authority

Search engines trust some websites more than others. Links from “authority” websites have more weight than links from lesser-known websites. Google is said to use PageRank as an indicator of authority. Keep in mind that PageRank is not the only factor used to determine a website’s authority. Authority websites should still relate to the website it is pointing to.

5. Nix NoFollow

Links should not contain the NoFollow command. The NoFollow command directs search engines to not “follow” the link. If a link contains “NoFollow” there is no search engine benefit from the link; the only benefit to having the link is any organic traffic that results if the link is clicked. As a result, NoFollow links are nearly worthless.

6. Mix It Up

Links should come from a variety of sources. Fewer links from a larger number of websites will generally “weigh” more than a large number of links from a small number of websites.

7. Surrounding Text

Some search experts claim that the text surrounding a link can influence ranking. Whether this is true or not is difficult to determine. It is more likely that links containing surrounding text are more likely to be relevant, and as a result those links tend to be worth more.

8. Link Position

The location of the link on the page can also influence the value of the link. Some search experts claim that footer links carry less value than links which are integrated into the actual web page content.

9. Type of Link

There does not appear to be a difference between a “text” link’s value and an “image” link’s value, if the image link contains ALT text. The search engines use the image ALT text in the same way they use the anchor text of a text link.

10. Number Of Outbound Links

A page with fewer links is better than a page with a large number of links. This is because a webpage passes along what is referred to as “link juice”. The more “link juice” passed along, the more valuable the link is. The link juice is divided up over all the links on a webpage, so popular websites with few outgoing links are more valuable than those with a large number of links.

11. Link Age

Search engine critics cannot seem to agree as to whether older links or newer links carry more value. When information is vague, it is best to garner both aged links and new links to websites.

12. Vintage Domain

The age of the domain is said to influence link power. More than likely the age of the domain simply contributes to the trustworthiness of the website, and links from trusted websites tend to have more value.

13. One Way Links

Links that are not reciprocal carry more weight than those which are simply link-for-link exchanges.

14. Page Content

A web page that is mostly just a líst of links has less value than a web page that contains a mixture of links and content.

15. Updated Pages

Web pages that are updated frequently will typically be spidered by search engines on a more frequent basis. The update will not influence the power of the link, but it will mean that the link will be picked up more quickly by the search engines.

16. Link Surges

Webmasters should be encouraged to gradually build links over time, rather than all at once. The gradual improvement is more natural and will have a stronger impact on organic search rankings.

The quest for the perfect link can be frustrating and elusive, but the fact is: the perfect link is logical, appears natural, and grows over time. Best of luck in your attempt to find the perfect link.
About The Author
Sharon Housley manages marketing for FeedForAll software for creating, editing, publishing RSS feeds and podcasts. In addition Sharon manages marketing for RecordForAll audio recording and editing software.

In the beginning of targeted online advertising, there were banner ads. As many people recall, these were supposed to drive the Internet marketing industry in its infancy. Scads of publishers paid scads of money based on a CPI (cost per impression) model or simply paid huge dollars for banner ads and other targeted online advertising on well-trafficked sites.

Then something crazy happened – nothing. It turns out that the banner advertising technology on the Internet was not the magic bullet it was purported to be. The old way of making money based on providing content (the way magazines and newspapers ran advertising) just didn’t seem to work in this context.

This new advertising technology was part of the reason for the collapse of the dot-bomb era. All the talk was about “eyeballs,” “stickiness,” “bleeding edge,” “cradle to grave,” and several other terms that, in retrospect, would have sounded more at home in a Wes Craven movie than in an emerging industry. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of business models depended on a traditional marketing strategy working more or less the same as it always had when introduced into a non-traditional setting.

All the while, one company, originally called GoTo, then Overture, and finally bought by Yahoo!, actually formulated a targeted online advertising system that worked – keyword advertising. Companies could bid on a per-click basis for certain key terms, which sent valuable traffic to its website.

Obviously, the improvement in advertising technology had to do with the model itself, which was perpetuated on relevance. By only bidding on keyphrases that you wanted, you could only pay for visitors who had already shown an interest in your products or services. This targeted online advertising model was soon copied by Google, who tweaked it and made it better.

There were not many raised eyebrows at this time, in terms of privacy. After all, the user was the one entering the query, and nobody suspected at the time that search engines might one day actually create individual profiles on users. We were all just really enjoying “having the information at our fingertips” without the potential hazards of ink stains and paper cuts that traditional research required.

Google then took a similar idea a step further. Instead of just serving up targeted online advertising on its home page, the company created a content distribution network called AdSense. In this program, owners of websites could sign up to have the ads placed on their sites. Google would then use a “contextual” logic to determine which ads to place where. In other words, Google would “read” the content on a page and then serve up targeted online advertising in the area provided by the site owner that was relevant to the content.

There were a few missteps with this new advertising technology (one classic example was when the online version of the NY Post ran a story in 2004 about a murder victim whose body parts had been packed into a suitcase. Running alongside the story was an ad that Google served up for Samsonite Luggage). Yet this targeted online advertising service also caught on, with nary a cry from privacy people. After all, you don’t have to visit the sites. And the site owners don’t have to sign you up for the service, right?

Suddenly, Gmail was offered and that raised some eyebrows. Gmail, of course, is Google’s free email-based platform. Gmail gave people an (at that time) unprecedented 1 gigabyte of email space (Yahoo!, if memory serves, offered 4 megs for free email accounts and charged people for more memory). The only caveat – Gmail would use a similar advertising technology platform as AdSense, but it would decide which ads to serve up by reading through your emails.

Well, this new approach to advertising technology creeped some people out, and privacy advocates were a bit more vocal about using targeted online advertising by parsing through people’s emails. A California lawmaker tried to introduce some legislation preventing the practice. International privacy groups chimed in with their own concerns. In the end, however, the fact remained that one had to sign up for a Gmail account and everyone that did was (presumably) aware of how the service worked before they did sign up. So it was an opt-ín system – If you didn’t want Google parsing through your email and serving up relevant, targeted online advertising, you didn’t have to use the service.

So there we all were, happily surfing away, not a care in the world. What most of us didn’t realize was that enough free cookies were being distributed to each of us to turn the otherwise docile Keebler elves into tree-dwelling Mafioso erroneously plotting a turf war.

These cookies, of course, are the ones that websites place on your computer when you visit – little packets of information that record your visit, and sometimes, your activity there. Certainly, there’s a legitimate reason for this. When you return to a website, it can help if it remembers your last visit and you can pick up where you left off. Assume, for example, that you were making multiple purchases from an e-commerce site and had a bunch of stuff in your shopping cart but were forced to abandon the site before completion. It’s nice to go back and pick up where you left off without having to do it all over again.

Digital advertisers, however, saw another opportuníty for targeted online advertising. They invented advertising technology that would scour through the cookies on your personal machine, figure out what you liked and disliked by looking at the types of sites you went to, and then feed up highly targeted online advertising based upon your browsing history. These companies included aQuantive, DoubleClick, ValueClick, and others. Of the companies I mentioned, only ValueClick is still independent. Google snapped up DoubleClick, while Microsoft snapped up aQuantive. Clearly, these companies believe in the future of Internet advertising technology and also believe in the long-term legality of this technology.

Now some real red flags were raised. I’ve written about this advertising technology before, so I’m not going to go over it all again here. Suffice to say that some government regulators were pretty skeptical about this new form of advertising technology and there have been numerous suggestions for regulation. The lack of uproar from the public, however, has not really created any backlash for the companies in question. It could be because there is widespread ignorance about Internet advertising technology (and I believe there is, based on conversations with people of average Internet experience). Perhaps a part of it is also that privacy has been eroding on the Internet one incremental step at a time.

To be continued in part two…
About The Author
Scott Buresh is the CEO of Medium Blue Search Engine Marketing, which was named the number one organic search engine optimization company in the world in 2006 and 2007 by PromotionWorld. Scott has contributed content to many publications including The Complete Guide to Google Advertising (Atlantic, 2008) and Building Your Business with Google For Dummies (Wiley, 2004), MarketingProfs, ZDNet, WebProNews, DarwinMag, SiteProNews, ISEDB.com, and Search Engine Guide. Medium Blue serves local and national clients, including Boston Scientific, DS Waters, and Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. Visit MediumBlue.com to request a custom SEO guarantee based on your goals and your data.

It is expected that by early 2008, all the various social media sites will have more than 230 million members. That number is predicted to grow until 2009, with a leveling off on the number of new members expected by 2012.

The combined revenue from these sites, which in 2007 reached almost $970 million, is estimated to balloon to a whopping $2.4 billion by 2012.

Membership growth in social media sites varies greatly from region to region. The Asia Pacific region accounts for the lion’s share of users, with 35% of the total users expected by the end of 2007. EMEA accounts for about 28% of all users, North America follows closely with 25% percent, and the Caribbean and Latin America trails behind with 12% of all users.

With the inevitable crowding of the social media site industry, many observers feel that consolidation of the market is a sure thing. This has given rise to some predictions that the smaller individual social media sites will be swallowed up by the bigger players in the field. Some experts feel however that this is not necessarily the case. In particular, social media sites with a focus on special interests are expected to survive the trend towards consolidation.

The extensive hype and excitement currently surrounding social media sites is perhaps what inspires the comparison to the dot com boom, but in the midst of all the buzz, there is a certain degree of trepidation felt by many as well. While many investors are naturally excited about the potential of social media sites, the fact that these types of web sites have not been proven for the long term is causing some hesitation. The promise of riding on the wave of the next big Internet phenomenon is a tempting prospect, but it is tempered by the uncertainty of social media sites as a long term sustainable industry. The most cautious industry observers have even gone so far as to suggest that most social media sites would do well to hold off on an IPO for the time being.

The founder and chief executive of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has officially stated that despite his company’s spectacular growth, Facebook is still many years away from flotation.

While there is no doubt that social media sites are a genuinely groundbreaking innovation that is changing the way we communicate in many significant ways, past experience with similar Internet phenomena shows that the hyper charged atmosphere of excitement cannot last indefinitely. The industry is currently characterized by easy capital, plenty of media attention and widespread user curiosity – all of which directly boosts creativity – but all that will come to an end eventually.

This does not mean that there is no future for social media sites. On the contrary, the future is just as bright as ever and at this relatively early stage of the game, it is hard to predict just how huge the whole industry can get. What companies and investors should do however is to adapt their approach to be prepared for the changes that will inevitably come in the future.

In a report published in 2007, Ri Pierce of Grove Technology and an analyst at U.K.-based Datamonitor has detailed a few suggestions that will help companies deal with the changes. Many of these suggestions revolve around understanding market strategies and various technological developments.

One of the most important things that companies can do to roll with the punches is formulate a two pronged approach to deal with the hothouse atmosphere that the industry is currently experiencing as well as the eventual cooling off that is sure to follow. This strategy will involve companies becoming more heavily involved in establishing and maintaining the infrastructure that is needed to run these types of web sites. They would also do well to find effective means by which to support social-networking services especially in the aspects of scalability and availability.

As for the social media sites themselves, the most effective means of ensuring continued popularity is through social media optimization. There are a number of ways commonly used to do this but five rules have been particularly effective in attaining this goal. Formulated by Rohit Bhargava, these rules are: Increasing the linkability of your social media site, making the tagging and bookmarking process easy for your audience, rewarding inbound links, helping your content travel, and finally encouraging mashups, which are web applications that combine data from more than one source into a single integrated tool.
About The Author
Mikhail Tuknov offers ppc search engine marketing services http://www.infatex.com.

Search engines want you to believe that ranking well is all about building a great website with great content. Build a site for your users, keep your users happy, and you will do just fine in their eyes. After all, isn’t this the main principle behind organic search results; let’s keep it real, honest, and user-friendly. Boy, I wish that were so. What I don’t understand is why all these so-called experts and webmasters are spouting the same foolish nonsense all over the Internet. Perhaps it’s because they don’t want us to work on improving our own rankings as their ridiculous articles are improving theirs.

It’s almost like these experts and webmasters are afraid that if they tell it like it is, somehow Google will find out what they’re saying and drop their site a few points. Gee, but I thought the results on the left side were purely organic. Besides, if it were that easy, I would just start posting all kinds of articles and claim they were written by my competition. Sure there are some “must haves” for onsite optimization, but any web owner could learn these in an afternoon. The reality, however, is that all the great content and onsite optimization in the world will only get you to the starting line. Links is how you run the race.

The best way to acquire these necessary links, the experts say, is to once again build great content. It’s the old “if you build it they will come (and link to it)” line. This is nearly ludicrous. First of all, how would people even find your “great content” if you’re on page 50? Because no matter how great your content is, and no matter how much onsite SEO you do, you’ll never get closer than page 50 without back links (unless you’re vying for a top position with a keyword or phrase that gets searched less than 100 times a month).

Now even if a few people do find your site, what makes you think that these people have their own websites? Most Internet users do not have their own websites, and even if they do, they probably do not know enough html to properly add a link in their own code. They especially wouldn’t know that they are supposed to use your “keywords” in the anchor text (many webmasters don’t even know to do this).

Now, let’s pretend that a few knowledgeable webmasters do find your site and really enjoy the content. This does not mean they are going to go through the trouble of creating a link on their site to yours. This takes time, effort and energy. Why would they do this unless they have some incentive (but if you give them incentive, doesn’t that undermine its organic nature)?

Nevertheless, if you do everything right, eventually people will link to your site. This is true. However, it will likely take you about 2 years to acquire enough relevant, high PR back links with proper keyword anchor text to move you up just one point in the PR scale. That will possibly move you to page 49 in the search results. Congratulatíons, only a few dozen more years to go. (The only alternative you have now is to pay for results on the right side of the screen, and that my fríend gets expensive.)

The fact is, you could hire a SEO company and pay them millions for onsite optimization of your PR 2 site. Then, you could spend months creating unique and user-friendly content that perfectly integrates all your keywords and phrases in a symphony of optimized perfection. Then, when you’re nearly on top for some obscure keyword phrase, along comes some PR 5 website that just coincidently adds an extra page to their site that just happens to have your key phrase spliced throughout the title tag. Guess what? You just got beat. Even though they haven’t done one thing to optimize their site or page for these keywords, and even though there is zero “quality content” on this add-on url, it just usurped you in the ranks.

Now I know what you’re thinking. If acquiring links is so incredibly important, then why don’t I just spend my time doing this? Well, this is easier said then done. I’ve just recently been told that reciprocal link exchanges, directory listings, and 3way link exchanges no longer account for very much in the eyes of the search engine gods (although this is still up for debate). Writing letters to relevant high PR sites is almost a ludicrous task, in that only maybe 1 in ten ever even respond to your pathetic, though eloquently written e-mails. The ones who do usually have some wonderful explanation of why you should look into paid advertising on their site instead. And of course, paid links and link farms will possibly get you banned completely from the search engines (which is about the worst thing that could ever possibly happen), though I’m not sure how they distinguish between an add and paid link, a directory and a link farm. Nevertheless, it’s enough to keep your head spinning.

So what’s my conclusion? I guess your witnessing it right now. I’m writing articles. It’s a lot better that spending hours trading links that never seem to help, or adding links from partners who never exchange the favour. I know there are a lot more ways to acquire back links, so I guess I’m now opening it up to responses. This, after all, is the million-dollar question. If you can succeed at the link game, you will be rich beyond your wildest imaginations. Just look at Plentyoffish.com, and other sites that rank in the top five for well sought after keywords. I for one wouldn’t mind finding myself in their position.
About The Author
Jack Strawman is the cofounder of the popular new website Late Night Chat, Dating and Hook Up at UStillUp.com, a totally free late night chat, dating and social networking site for late night fun.