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e_Marketing Blog Twitter Tools and Strategies - Twitter can be a boring waste of time, or a great way to build and enhance a profile, group of followers, online reputation, etc. It's been around long enough now to have an established track record as a useful social networking forum. Not having months of serious Twitter experience I've been surprised at the superficiality of most tweets, and especially surprised at the kind of filler some people use...but whatever... If you are looking for suggestions on how to leverage the "power" of Twitter for your marketing efforts, check out the resources listed here: Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR, which includes links to resources like the Big Juicy Twitter Guide (Caroline Middlebrook), Newbies Guide to Twitter (Rafe Needleman) and many more. Traffic: Why Links Are Important Why are links so important to website owners? I haven't spelled out the answer to this question in a very long time. So here goes... Web Traffic: SEO and Links You want people to visit your website, and one of the important ways to get these visits is from the search engines. By some counts, around 70% of all website visitors come from search engines. So obviously getting help from the search engines can make a big difference to the success or failure of your site. Question 1: To score well with the search engines you need to impress them that your site is worth visiting. OK, so how do you do that? Answer: You have to convince them that your site is an important and helpful resource for specific search terms. Question 2: How do the search engines determine what is an important and helpful resource for a specific search terms? Answer: They evaluate each and every web page in terms of its "quality". Question 3: How do the search engines determine quality? Answer: There are two important factors: on-page content, and inbound links. Question 4: What do you mean by "on-page conent"? Answer: The text on every web page is analyzed to determine what that page is about. The search engines look for "keywords". They assume when specific keywords are mentioned in a page then that is what the page is about. Question 5: How is the "quality" of a page's content determined? Answer: This gets a bit trickier. There are many factors considered by the search engines, but the most basic are the amount of text on the page that focuses on specific keywords, and the presence of specific keywords in critical places that the search engines assume are important places (e.g., the title tag, the main headline, the first bit of text on the page, etc.) Question 6: How else is the "quality" of a page's content determined? Answer: In-bound links. When the search engines see a link pointing from an outside site to a page on your site, they assume that means your page is important enough to be considered a resource worth looking at. The more links you have pointing at your page, the more important your page is considered and the higher it will rank when people search for the type of content your page is about. Question 7: So links help the search engines determine the quality of websites? Answer: Yes. In the eyes of the search engines - especially Google - links are like "votes". When someone links to your site the search engines assume that is like saying "this is a worthwhile resource worth looking at." The more "votes" like this you get, the more likely the search engines are to consider your site a worthwhile resource. Question 8: So is that the whole story on links? Answer: No. Not all links are given the same weight by the search engines. And some links never get discovered because they are on pages that are never visited by the search engines. So you don't get credit for those links. I'll say more about linking strategies in the next post. Resources: Traffic: Optimizing Techniques To "optimize" each of your pages, here is what you should do: 1. Your primary keyword should appear in the "title" tag - the text that shows up in the blue title bar of the page. 2. Your page should begin with a <h1> heading tag which contains your primary keyword. For example, your title for a secondary page might be "Buying a Golden Retriever Puppy - Some Tips" 3. Your introductory paragraph should contain your primary keyword, and probably one or two instances of other closely related keywords. 4. The rest of your page should focus on related keywords with those keywords emphasized in the text and in sub-headings (using the h2, h3, or h4 tags.) 5. Most "experts" say your closing paragraph should also contain a few instances of your primary keyword. 6. Your page should contain a navigation menu with anchor text using the primary keywords for each page pointing to all the other important pages within your site. 7. You may also want to include a "resources" section which links out to other important resources - including other closely related things you have created - such as articles, videos, products, squidoo pages, blogs, and other websites. Start thinking of your pages from the optimization point of view, and they will begin to do much better in the search engine rankings. |
Review-of-the-week.com features Product Feature Pages — pages dedicated to descriptions or reviews of products or websites. Product Feature pages can include photos and graphics (as long as these are readily available), and can have links pointing back to your (single) site. Product Feature Pages are linked from at least 5 blogs, a number of high traffic article and announcement sites. Google Spreadsheets Begins Beta TestingJun 8, 2006 - Linknet Internet News Antivirus: Download Norton AntiVirus 2006 - Immediate download Language jobs - Get a job using your language skills at languagejobs4u.com. Link Popularity - Linkpopularity durch professionellen Linkaufbau Make Money with PPC Ads - Premierad.com pays up to 75% of advertising revenue. Google Spreadsheets Begins Beta Testing by Rick HendershotGoogle has just unveiled a "Sneak Peek" of a new little utility called Google Spreadsheets. This is part of the company's attempt to create a suite of free or almost free online office tools that will make a dent in the Microsoft dominance in this area. Spreadsheets is still in development, but Google has made the online program available for a limited number of testers. You sign up and they will let you know if you have been chosen as a tester -- assigned on a first come first served basis. According to the online presentation, Google Spreadsheets will let you create basic spreadsheets from scratch, "including changing the number format, sorting by columns, and adding formulas." It will also let you upload already existing .csv and .xls worksheets and retain their formatting when imported. You can give other people access to your online spreadsheets too. Permission is done via email address. You just enter the email addresses of others who you want to share your spreadsheets, and they are sent an invitation. As soon as they sign in they have access, and can view or modify the spreadsheet at the same time as anyone else who is signed in. When more than one team members is signed in a chat window opens up so they can communicate with each other as changes are made. Storage is online (on a Google server), so you have access to your spreadsheets whenever you have access to the web. You can also save them locally in .csv, .xls or .html format. In a recent issue of WebProNews, staff writer David Utter says, "Google Spreadsheets looks interesting, and we're looking forward to playing with it when Google starts inviting people into the controlled beta. But without advanced features like macros or pivot tables, Google's newest Lab experiment just isn't close to Microsoft Excel." I suspect, however, that many Excel users do not use a lot of the advanced features of the program, and, like me, often use it just as a means of creating a table of information. Another problem with Excel is that spreadsheets are not easily put on line and shared with others -- say, when working on a joint project. Google Spreadsheets addresses this problem head-on. The fact is, you often don't need "macros and pivot tables" for these purposes. I can think of two or three current projects I am working on where being able to share information in table form, and where other team members could add to or modify table contents would be quite useful. There have been a few times in the past when I wished putting an Excel spreadsheet online wasn't such a clunky exercise. Google Spreadsheets may not be a big money maker for Google, but it may turn out to be surprisingly useful, and will be another reminder that for many relatively mundane tasks it is not necessary to buy expensive software from Microsoft.
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