By Erin Ferree (c) 2008 

When I was in 6th grade, track and field was all the rage. I’ve never been particularly athletic. But it was 1984 and everyone in my class was pretty fascinated with the Olympics that year. As you can imagine the school’s annual track meet turned into a mini-Olympics.

So I surveyed the events and the sign-ups for each one. I decided that the long-distance running events held the most promise for glory. The 2 mile, in particular, only had 2 other girls signed up - so I was pretty much assured a “medal”. That sounded pretty exciting. Maybe I could go for the gold!

However, watching the other events leading up to the 2-mile, I soon learned that one of the other girls was a seasoned runner. She knew all about pacing, how many minutes she should be able to run a mile in, and all that fancy stuff. At that point, I knew that first place was pretty much done for. I barely knew how many laps around the track I had to run. I ran the race anyway and wound up coming in second - which was just fine by me.

It’s not all about winníng - a place or a show can be just fine.

Whenever I talk to a client about search engine placement, this track meet comes into mind. The client comes to me wanting to be Number 1 for their chosen search term. But for many small businesses, being ranked first is not truly that important - and depending on the search term, being Number 1 may hurt their business.

How can being Number 1 possibly hurt?

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Having been on the road for a week, and finally getting to my mailbox today, I was perturbed to spot several PayPal-style phishing emails claiming I had received large Euro deposits to my MoneyBookers account.

The emails are very authentic-looking, and almost had me fooled.  Checking the mail headers immediately revealed them as fake however.  They all came from a PacBell.com email address (a USA ISP) instead of from MoneyBookers.com

Watch out for them if you have a MoneyBookers account - as I said, they look identical to the mails received from the genuine source.  Remember the number one rule regarding ANY email from a financial service provider -

• NEVER click the link in the email
• ALWAYS open a new browser window and type the address of the payment provider and log in directly

Worryingly, forwarding the phishing mails to spoof@moneybookers.com resulted in a bounced email with an http 5.x.x error advising they don’t accept direct emails and all communication must be through the contact page inside the site.  This represents a cavalier attitude to fraud prevention and prosecution in my estimation.

Because I’m on the road, I don’t have time to follow this up right now, but I will do so when I get back.

Ed

Want Free Search Engine Traffic?

Choose the Correct Keywords!

by William Lund

If content is king, make your keywords your servants!

It’s pretty simple; good keywords bring lots of traffic, bad ones don’t. If you want that free search engine traffic, the first thing you need to do is to find out what exactly it is that people are searching for in the area that you are interested in. Then you pick key words that relate to your topic of interest, and that people are really searching for. You can have the best content in the world, but if you optimize for the wrong keywords you still won’t get that sought after traffic.

For example, let’s assume I am going to build a site about water heaters, and I want people to come to my site. I need to find out what kind of information about water heaters that people are looking for so I can build pages optimized for the keywords that people are really using.

The first thing I do is go to a keyword tool to do my keyword research.

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By JD Reilly (c) 2008 

Internet marketing has been around for as long as there has been the internet. It really took off, though, once the World Wide Web caught fire in the late 1990’s.

What many people new to internet marketing lose sight of, or perhaps didn’t know to begin with, is that internet marketing is based on the fundamental principles of marketing. It just so happens that internet marketers use those principles with a new medium, the web, to reach buyers.

The fundamental principle of marketing is - if you want to sell anything, you need prospective customers.

For many people, knowing how to generate massive amounts of traffic is the “missing link” to internet marketing.

Everyday there are lots of people who struggle to create websites and products, make them look pretty good and then… nothing. Everything was built and nobody showed up!

This is one of the biggest reasons people quit before they are successful.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There is no exact strategy that is guaranteed to bring you millions of visitors everyday. However, there are proven techniques for generating huge amounts of traffic, some very quickly and some for free.

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Last month I blogged that AbeBooks was leaving the Commission Junction (CJ) affiliates network in favour of DoubleClick Performics network.  This came hot on the heels of eBay withdrawing from CJ in favour of it’s own internal Partner Network.

This week, top leisure products online etailer Barbeques.com has also announced it is leaving CJ in favour of Performics. 

Webmasters have until 6 June (D-Day from World War 2)  to migrate their links and sign-up if they want to keep earning referral and sales commissions from Barbeques.com.

It leads me to ask again, why are so many big names so suddenly leaving CJ.com? 

In our own CJ account, I know we are generating significant ad views, but the click through rate and sales rate from those impressions are dramatically below the rate generated from other affiliate agencies’ portfolios.  It’s enough to make one wonder if CJ are cooking the books on clicks and sales.  Perhaps that is causing them to lose so many publishers that the advertisers are moving on too?  Obviously I have no conclusive evidence of this, it’s just me musing.

Ed

by John Metzler

There have always been do-it-yourselfers succeeding at web promotion and search engine optimization.

In fact, many of the established businesses offering web services today came from humble beginnings, perhaps nothing more than a college student with a laptop, an internet connection, and too much free time. The Web evolves as the result of the innovation and experimentation of individuals. The sharing of knowledge. The do-it-yourself attitude.

As text link brokers and mass link networking decrease in value and use in social media increases, it becomes more important for companies to have an internal approach and awareness of search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong; outsourcing to SEO firms is still a smart option. That said, making the most out of Web 2.0 usually requires some level of cooperation between SEO firm and site owner. You don’t need to be an expert to know the basics of good SEO practices, and that added knowledge will be a great advantage whether you’re working along side an SEO team, or promoting your own site in your spare time.

So if you’re on a “need to know” basis with SEO, the following points should illustrate what an overall plan should include:

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By Sharon Housley (c) 2008 

Webmasters are given the advice that they must attract links, but the key is not just to attract links… they need to attract good links. But what is the perfect link?

The search for the perfect link need not be a quest in vain. Consider the following when attempting to attract links…

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.

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By Mike Small (c) 2008 

The reason Google is the most successful search engine in the world is because they provide the best search results; pages ranked by tangible value.  That tangible value is a combination of content and links, with links being the more important factor (they assume any pages linking in will only link to good content or risk their own ranking).

Here are a few tips that will help you take full advantage of Google’s love of linking…

1.) Link Deep and with Relevance

So why is deeper better and what’s this about relevance?  Google figured out that a link to a homepage is only good if that homepage has the information the visitor needs.  If a person clicks a link for “amazíng chocolate chip cookie recipe” and ends up on the home page, which has nothing of the sort, Google discounts it as a wasted link.  On the other hand, if the link leads to the page containing info on the “Amazíng Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe“, even five levels deep, the link has huge value to the visitor and to Google.

Want some proof?  You already have it if you’ve ever used Google’s AdWords pay per clíck service.  They will not even accept PAID links to pages that are not the most relevant for their visitors, regardless of what you are willing to pay per clíck.  Now that’s saying something!

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