You’ve been thinking about it for some time now. To build a website to make money online, it just makes sense. Economies can change at breakneck speeds and inflation seems to be pinching you hard despite what government numbers may be revealing.  Anyone can build a website, it really isn’t that hard and I applaud your decision.

To build a website that will make money online? Well…that’s another story  altogether.You’ve made a momentous decision and I feel compelled
to warn you.that…
YOU ARE A TARGET!
Those folks who are inexperienced in making money on the internet can easily fall prey to marketing ploys that couldn’t care less if you succeed.or not. You can spend hundreds even thousands when you go down the “rabbit hole” chasing that elusive perfect solution to your hopes and dreams.

Building a website that will work for you is not an impossible task. “Quit Your Day Job and in just 72 hours retire to your own carribean island justn like me!” Do you really believe that line? There are tens if not hundreds of online marketers who are counting on the inexperienced to believe it really is that easy, their sales copy is carefully crafted
to entice you to suspend your disbelief just long enough to pull out
your wallet.

Building a website that will be profitable for you requires you to gain knowledge in an efficient organized manner. This knowledge should be organized and at the very least should cover the following bases:

RESEARCH- Just because you have an idea. Good research will confirm if you are right. You’d be amazed at how many are trying to sell something nobody wants.

CONTENT- What content your website should contain and why. These are. critical
distinctions. How to write content that works is very important especially for those who feel they lack writing skills.

TRAFFIC- There are many ways to get eyeballs to your site. The best solutions are free
(or close to it). While many free traffic systems will hurt you a good training program will teach you which is which.

PRE-selling- This is what great content is all about. Building trust and a brand of your
own will go miles towards overcoming a prospects reluctance to do business with a stranger.

MONETIZING- Believe it or not selling is NOT the first thing you should be trying
to do with your brand new web presence there is much to accomplish first and a good program wii teach you why.

Now I am going to skip over the research part, because all you care about is getting traffic to your website.

Traffic To My Website First Starts Out PPC

Some may not want to hear this.. but I need to know what is going to convert and what is not going to convert. So I run some ads to my pages and see what keywords convert and do some testing. This will allow me to have a better return on my traffic getting campaign.

After I discover the keywords and best performing ads, this is where I take some serious action.

Taking Serious Action On Getting Traffic To A Website

Article Directories: I would grab all the list of article directories and start pumping some major content to the largest ones. Of course this will be unique content, but at the bottom of these articles you will want to make sure the good ol link text of your keyword is there. It really is that simple…

Now sometimes you can put link text in the body and this is great, but test. You could not get your article approved if they think it is too spammy.

Article Directories I Use For More Traffic To My Website

1. Ezine Articles – This is a very well known site for great articles. And people read them… It amazes me how many come to me and ask “how do I get traffic to my website..” and I tell them from people who read my articles on article directories. They get this blank stare and sometimes are off struck by it…
2. Go Articles – I like this site as well, you can post your article link text in the body sometimes.
3. Buzzle – My good ol buzzle… this site is older too but I like the articles and the ability to submit their index.

I Use Forums To Get More Traffic To My Website

You know, forums are really the original social networks of the internet. If I ever wanted to get really targeted traffic to my website I simply would go on theme related forums and post good comments. Be sure to post your bio with a link back to your website so they know where they can more information. This is a great ol strategy many people simply miss.

I Use Web 2.0 Site To Get Traffic To My Website

The game has became more social and web 2.0 is a great way to get some traffic to your website. Below are a list of traffic generation sites if you post content to can bring some great traffic back.

Hub Pages – This is nice site although they do have rules, don’t try to send multiple links to one domain from a post. They will be no follow. If you don’t know about no follows or the tools to use.

Squidoo – This is another UGC (user generated content) site. This site is similar to Hub Pages and can post content and leverage traffic from their network. Just write good content and you will be fine. Try to throw one link in there back to your website or blog.

WetPaint – Ahh… maybe you never heard about this site… but they get decent traffic. The downside is, they don’t pass page rank. But you can get traffic as I seen my analytics pop with this traffic on my business websites.

Traffic To My Website Only Happens By Taking Action

These are a few you can start with… I don’t want to overwhelm you so you get PARALYSIS BY ANALYSIS. So review the sites above and write one unique 350 to 500 word article with a link back to your website or blog and you will see some traffic generate.

Online retail websites face a unique set of obstacles when it comes to improving sales through better search engine visibility.  Repetitive product descriptions, a lack of content and frequent churn of products can all be hurdles to overcome. But with these specific tips for retail search engine optimization, online retailers can turn those challenges into opportunities and maximize their organic search traffic.

1. Add fresh content to the website. Many online retail websites focus on selling products rather than informing and providing value to customers, and hence severely lack content. It’s a good idea to include pages on a retail site that are purely content-based. Not only will informative, optimized content improve search rankings, it can help retailers sell more products by engaging customers.

Try these ideas for adding fresh content to an online retail site:

• Add customer success stories and case studies to the website.
• Create a blog to provide relevant industry news, tips and product offerings.
• Incorporate a resource section on the site with relevant white papers and other content.

2. Eliminate repetitive copy. Another issue online retailers face is that many of their products are significantly similar, with only slight variations. As such, product descriptions tend to use very similar copy. And if other retailers sell the same products, their descriptions are likely similar as well.

Avoid being penalized by the search engines for duplicate content by writing product descriptions that are as unique as possible. Highlight the most distinguishing characteristics of products to avoid duplicate copy. Lastly, ensure keyword phrases aren’t repeated too many times throughout descriptions. It’s an easy mistake considering target keywords are likely found in the name or description of most, if not every, product.

Not only will this technique contribute to improved search rankings, but user experience will be enhanced as well.

3. Draw traffic to static pages. For many online retailers, products are frequently added and removed from their website, some as often as every month or every week.  Adding fresh content to a site provides SEO benefits, but removing it can quickly negate any advantages, as it takes time for search engines to index content.

To maneuver around this roadblock, draw traffic to more static pages, rather than revolving pages. For example, instead of focusing SEO on individual product pages, focus on product category pages.

4. Don’t forget to optimize PDF product catalogs. For many retailers, it’s a common practice to offer a product catalog in PDF format on their website. When devoting time to optimizing HTML pages on a website, it’s essential not to forget about the catalog or any other PDF files. Remember these key points when optimizing PDF files:

• Create text-based PDFs, rather than designing them in an image-based program, so that the search engines have text to read.
• Optimize as you would an HTML page, incorporating keywords in headlines, copy and meta descriptions, and including anchor text hyperlinks.
• Post a smaller sized PDF to avoid search engines – and customers –  deserting the PDF before accessing its content.
• Remember to complete the document properties, particularly the title.

5. Optimize images for search engines. SEO doesn’t end with HTML pages and PDF files. Online retailers’ sites are full of images. Why not leverage those images to gain better search rankings? Including alt text and optimized captions can all contribute to improved rankings in the search engines. Plus, images found via the search engines have the potential to be shared and linked to across the web, also contributing to improved rankings.

Have you implemented creative SEO tips for ecommerce and online retail web sites? What tips would you add to this list?

Everyone and his uncle with even itsy-bitsy knowledge of internet are on social networking sites. From celebrity imposters to real politicians and everyone in between are logging on to the sites like Facebook, Orkut and MySpace. No wonder, Orkut profiles are dissected as a part of postmortem of murder cases and even a serial killer on the prowl is known as ‘Facebook fugitive’.

If that was not enough, a robber was caught because he logged into his Facebook id from the house he robbed and forgot to log out! We are aware of the hazards these sites can be, but we are ready to take the risks because freedom to be expressive and bonding online with friends at a distance has become possible through them. And at the end of the day, it’s fun.

I DON’T WANT TO BE SEEN ON ORKUT ANYMORE
Picking up on online social networking wasn’t all that difficult when it had just started off. Youngsters in India just lapped it all up. “I had opened an account on Orkut in 2005 and later I joined Facebook. I also ended up signing for Hi5 and Bigadda because my friends sent me invites. After a while I stopped signing up for every social networking site that came my way.
As most of my old classmates and friends were on Orkut, I stayed there for a long time,” says Amrita Mehta, an IT content writer in Pune who has just deleted her Orkut profile. “It was very exciting in the beginning as I kept finding or getting a friendship request from people I had lost contact with. I used to be desperate about checking scraps from my friends in the US at midnight while I was still a student. Now these sites are banned at my workplace. And every time I’m surfing from home, I look for quality time on social networking. Orkut seems over crowded and cluttered now. I realised I was even getting stalked there. I had enough reasons to move out of there as many of my good friends have migrated to Facebook as well.”

‘Cluttered’, ‘boring’ and ‘overcrowded’ are words that even those still on Orkut don’t mind using. “What’s the point of this place when everyone is there. Some relatives and classmates that I never wish to meet again in life surface from nowhere and keep poking me virtually if I ignore them. I can’t even delete them out of my network. And at the same time I am happy that I have found some really old pals that I had lost touch with.

“But apart from being on the same virtual network there is nothing in common with some 400 friends that I studied or worked with or related to,” says Vijay Pathak, a banking professional. He has requested a change of name because he still doesn’t want to lose some of the friends. However, he too has gradually started moving his base to Facebook, where he thinks he gets more privacy settings and control in his hands to include or delete from his network.

After competing with colleagues or classmates about who has more number of scraps, friends or testimonials, Amrita says she has learnt her lesson, “Orkut or for that matter other networking sites as well give you this false image of having hundreds of friends – some of them even have thousands – when in reality you have just a handful of people you can actually rely on and share your experiences with.

“Ironically, these places cannot be banked upon for meeting real people for dating.” As more youngsters have a series of awkward experiences of meeting new people through the website, it won’t be surprising if there comes up a need for special counsellors for online social networking troubles.

IMAGE KA SAWAL HAI!
You cannot escape having an online presence at a time like this. But who are your friends and what you do for a living being pasted on your wall, scrapbook or status messages in an open forum, can get you a job and get you fired as well.
“I often end up discussing with my gal pals about how if we are on Orkut, we end up dealing with unwanted ‘franship’ requests from weirdoes. And if I enable the privacy setting, even my real friends cannot get through to me. Some of my work associates wondered how could I still be just on Orkut, and I never realised that a majority of my decent friends were spending more time on other options. I found Facebook a little difficult to navigate initially.

But, gradually I realised it was more sophisticated in terms of presence of people, interaction, applications, games and more,” says Sonal Shah, a HR consultant.

Orkut has run into trouble with users because of the way it advertises as well. As a part of the Google family, it makes use of the user’s personal data to flash them advertisements. Users end up with amateur advertisements about tuition classes to gyms in their areas. In an effort to bring in common elements, Orkut has ended up with more clutter. Though Orkut still enjoys being on top of the number game with more than 15 million users in India, Facebook’s popularity has just resulted in doubling up numbers in the past one year.

It is time Orkut reinvented itself or it may be categorised as the social network of the Third World countries or perish on the path of Geocities in the coming days.

With 300 million users worldwide,Facebook has already started making money. This also means if more people get on board with Facebook with the same enthusiasm, it is likely to be equally overcrowded for Indian users soon.

IS YOUR DATA SAFE ONLINE?
This is a question often asked and almost all major networking sites are facing various kinds of law-suits because of privacy and security issues. Even the American President is aware of that. Barack Obama warned youngsters in one of his speeches to be careful about what they put on these social networking websites. It is tough for parents to keep track of what their teenagers are doing online.

“My teenage daughter Mitwa is in high school and already on Orkut. I couldn’t monitor it properly and there are a lot of nuisances where I cannot sit and see everything she does on the website. My friends suggested both of us should move to Facebook and we can interact and still give each other privacy. I even found some alumni members from MS University there. Our entire real social circle is now there along with her friends, so I feel much safer if she interacts or plays games with her friends on Facebook,” says artist Mahendra Mistry.

For people of all ages, keeping limited data on such websites makes more sense to avoid any fear of personal details being misused.

FACE OF INTERFACE
Along with smooth navigation through a site, the look is important too. As architect Darpana Athale puts it, “Design is the most crucial aspect to a website, apart from content. In fact, design helps bring the content to the audience in a better, systematic and aesthetic way. Good design also helps attract the audience to the site and keep them engaged.” She feels, Orkut’s design could be made more simple. She elaborates, “One of the keys to these websites is their clarity in terms of design and functionality. Graphic elements or logos like the bird in Twitter helps connect with all users on every platform.
Similarly icons used in Facebook are unique to the site, but more importantly are easy to read and decipher, making them effective. Colours and graphic elements add to the ‘brand value’, but they need to be used sparingly so that the clutter is minimised and readability and functionality is better achieved.

DESI VERSIONS OF SOCIAL NETWORKING
Though both Orkut and Facebook are highly popular in India, there are some desi online social networking sites that have tried to make space for themselves in the market. Their features and interface are mainly a local version of Orkut. Some of them are really attractive on the designing part. Out of them Bigadda.com is a widely known name, more so because Amitabh Bachchan and some other celebrities blog there. Bharatstudent.com has higher ratings than Bigadda but  it’s more popular in the student domain. Fropper.com and Yaari.com have their small fan bases too. However, ad revenues are generally their only means of survival and Indian social networking sites have very little appeal among the NRI crowd which is already hooked to the popular international ones.

CONCEPT BASED SOCIAL NETWORKING PORTALS
Linkedin.com: A business or professional networking site for professionals to interact online, but not a job search portal.
Ryze.com: More casual business networking site, focused on entrepreneurs.
Goodreads.com: Network to interact with likeminded readers
Theleakycauldron.org: Quirky social network of Harry Potter fans
Justmeans.com: Asocial-professional network focused on environment issues
Cafemom.com: A social network of moms

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.
2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.
3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.
4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.
5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.
6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.
7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.
8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.
9. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

10. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

Some small business owners don’t see the value of online advertising because they aren’t interested in attracting website visitors worldwide. Local search changes all that.

Studies show that the majority of small businesses draw customers from within a 50-mile radius. The good news is that a variety of tools make it easier for your business to be found by people searching for local businesses. And the tools are getting more precise and more intelligent as the search engine companies invest in local search technology.

Here’s a primer on local search.

What is local search

Local search is a pretty simple concept. It’s when people search in Google or another search engine using a geographical parameter.

For instance, let’s say I want to order a pizza. I might search for “pizza” plus the name of my local city “Medina” or maybe by city AND state, “Medina, Ohio.” Or I might plug in my zip code in place of the city and state if I want to be especially precise.

That’s local search. You may have done searches this way yourself.

But there’s another way local search occurs: when the search engines help out. For instance, some of the search engines can detect from my IP (computer) address where I am located, and will deliver up local search results even if I neglect to plug in the city, state or zip code. The search engine technology “fills in” the searcher’s location.

How can local search for my business

If you want your business to get found by those searching for local businesses, there are a number of specific actions you can take to increase your chances of being located.

If search engine optimization is about organic ranking effectiveness on the web that drives relevant, converting and revenue-generating traffic – wouldn’t online research of organic listings be a good first step? I’d assert it would be a good place to create a short prospect list of vendors to perform due diligence.

Yet many companies receive sales calls from SEO firms which don’t have their SEO act together every day. Educating people to resist this is part of changing the industry’s image, and quality SEOs share responsibility in creating this reality.

Quality SEO is presently a significantly undervalued skill set. Yet it can dramatically transform profitability of a business, as it has superior economics when compared to traditional media spending. However, since this value proposition is not yet understood by many management team executives, it often lacks the executive support it requires both in terms of financial resources and supporting needed operational changes.

It is also competing with large, highly entrenched budgets which are frequently controlled by individuals without a deep knowledge of search engine marketing which adds uncertainties to theselection process.

Let’s examine in more detail the reasons why:

Most executive management teams don’t yet fully understand the economics and far-reaching business implications of SEO. Once established, the marginal cost of each visitor from organic search engine traffic is essentially zero. No other marketing channel matches the relevancy and economics of search.

Search engine marketing’s transformation of legacy enterprise profitability is in its infancy. I have a small business client who had a 45-percent increase in unique visitors to their site. The business owner also reduced his yellow pages advertising by $15,000, yet maintained their revenue for luxury services during this recession. Constant or increased revenue, combined with reduced traditional media spending increased profitability.

Most people outside of the search engine community do not fully appreciate the magnitude of the shift from push to pull marketing. Setting up your organization to be effectively found by people creating their own customer segmentation from search requires infinitely more domain skill and creative thinking than traditional strategy consulting brainstorming followed by push marketing. This is creating a migration of focus to niche brand attributes that search engine technology enables.

Management teams must understand SEO to effectively manage it. To manage search engine marketing at the thirty-thousand-foot level, you have to understand it at the three-foot level. Whether an internal employee or an external consultant, you’ve experienced this problem.

Recently, I was on an “ask anything” panel at CMS Expo and numerous technology professionals expressed frustration with management that did not understand content strategy, web site organizational impact or related change management issues. They asked the panel what they should do. I suggested that they educate the head of IT or CTO and others about these issues, as some people won’t embrace content strategy. Smother people with education about the benefits, and the tide will eventually turn.

Measuring SEO is still an imprecise art form, which Google appears determined to prevent from becoming a science. Recent “localization” schemes, alleged paid link PageRank penalties, rumors of blocking of rank checking tools and other changes that certain management team members seem determined to obfuscate the ability to measure SEO activities.

The strategy may backfire on them in the end, as it’s creating more focus on why these activities are hard to measure. This creates abundant opportunities for entrepreneurial SEO thought leaders to develop measurement and accountability tools that are independent of Google. In the long run, this should be healthy for the industry.

Search engine marketing might be the largest change management project in history. Successful change management must have strong executive sponsorship. This is a major bottleneck as most management teams do not understand search engine marketing.

To increase both forward speed of budget transformational processes to search engine marketing and SEO content strategy, companies must hire a new breed of CEO and CMO. These emerging leaders must have a rare combination of traditional business skills and who have gone through the process of learning search engine marketing and the lessons of relevancy and efficiency.

Executive recruiting needs to look beyond the job title to hire effective search engine marketing leaders. Organizations need to seek out leaders and consultants for their competencies regarding search engine marketing and profit improvement abilities. But they cannot ignore other competencies that go with it, like passion, a track record with analytics and metrics regardless of industry, curiosity, and the ability to bring traffic and awareness via personal branding using both web sites and social media.

Resume databases are simply vertical search engines after all. Unfortunately, they are creating too much focus on job titles rather than competencies, cultural fit and transformational leadership ability.

Search marketing-centric organizations will outperform. Successful SEO involves technology, management, marketing, customer service, process improvement and more than a dash of financial acumen. Executive management teams capable of navigating this complex convergence are in short supply. The dynamic won’t change significantly until there are executives at the top of the house and on the board of directors who fully understand and hold people accountable for search marketing results. Only then will budget shift from traditional brand marketing spending to search marketing and content strategy truly accelerate.

Once understood, it becomes quite clear that SEO is a senior level strategic activity affecting enterprise profitability. So why are most quality SEOs getting paid less than they should?

Likely Answer: Most purchasers do not yet fully understand what they are buying or how to maximize SEO profitability improvement. This means we need to continue to educate people about the benefits of SEO, so that business leaders understand the value and will tolerate nothing less than rapidly shifting legacy budget to acquire the best SEO outcomes for their business.

Let’s start the education process about the value proposition of SEO with the simple step of sharing this article with several people in senior management, co-workers in other departments, friends and other interested parties. Then ask them to share lunch or coffee or a phone call to have a conversation about questions and enable deeper mutual understanding.

I wish that I could give you a step by step guide that will result in millions of people sharing your note but alas, I don’t have the secret answer. What I do know however, is that you can tag people from notes that are posted to your page and thanks to that feature you can begin to have notes spread throughout the social graph. So how do you come up with a note that’s going to be seen by everybody and will be attributed to you?

While I hate to tell people that they should create a note which is similar to a chain letter, Facebook’s note system works extremely well through standard chain letter models. The most important component of a note is that users need to be able to share something personal about themselves. Facebook is a site for sharing and any game or activity that encourages personalized participation is much more likely to succeed.

Create More Effective Titles

Want to really get someone’s attention? An effective title can make all the difference. I’ve previously written articles using advertising headlines that I modified from a book I have about headlines (you can get the book here) and the results have been phenomenal. While the content is extremely important, you will gain or lose the vast majority of readers via the headline. Make sure your note’s title stands out and you’ll be well on your way to developing a viral note. If you want other tips on effective copywriting, I highly recommend checking out Copyblogger.

Create Multiple Notes To Tag Smaller Groups Of People

While you could create a note and tag all of your contacts, it would be more effective to spread your note postings over a period of time. This way more people will see the note and you can also spread out the number of people that you tag in any given note. Tagging people is essentially the way that notes are spread and it can also be leveraged just like the classic game of tag: “Tag you’re it!”

One-way link building is a great way to improve your link popularity and ranking in the search engines. One-way links are more difficult to obtain than traditional reciprocal links, but pay off in securing solid long-term search engine ranking results.

One-Way Linking Sources

There are a number of ways to get links from other sites back to yours. The most important principle to keep in mind is that you will get the most links when you offer something significant to link to. Think of what you can provide that people will want to link to:

1. Natural links given from topic-related websites that like your website
2. Providing free content, such as access to articles, e-books, FAQ’s and white papers
3. Directory links, listed under the category related to your topic
4. Business directory links, listed under the category related to your topic
5. Blogs, submitted to a blog directory and archived online
6. Business associations, listed under the category related to your topic
7. Newsletter text ads promoting your business, archived online at topic-related websites
8. Original articles, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
9. Original press releases, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
10. Original newsletters, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
11. White papers, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
12. E-books, submitted to and archived online at topic-related websites
13. Free software tools provided with required link back to website

For each of these types of content, you will want to have an active link pointing back to your site. Of course, when creating your own original content, always archive your own work on your website to build your content and increase your own link popularity by growing the number of pages on your website.

The extra value of one-way links is the fact that you are also promoting your website from the listing as well as the active link. Articles, newsletters, white papers, directory and business association links may bring in traffic from visitors who are interested in the description of your website listing.

How Do I Know The Links Are Valid?

To gain the most benefit from your links, the link back to your web page should be one that can be followed by the search engine robots. Plain old text links and image links usually can be followed by the search engine robots. More exotic types of links, like JavaScript links, cannot typically be followed by the search engine robots. When you provide suggested linking code, the simpler the better. Don’t be afraid to suggest linking formats to owners of sites that link to you. The types of links that serve your purposes best will generally provide their visitors with the best experience as well.

Check to see if the page where the link will be located can be found in the search engine results. You can search via the entire website or by individual page. Different search engines use different syntax in looking for individual pages and links; refer to the advanced search function for each search engine for details.

Google Search Example:

Shows indexing of all pages listed in website

site:www.websitedomainname.com

Shows indexing of a specific web page in website

info:www.websitedomainname.com/pagename.html

If the page is listed in the search engine results, this means the page has been indexed by the search engine robots. This means the web page is valid for indexing and that your link will be picked up as well.

Research And Quality Content Equal Success

One-way link building means hard work and long term determination to achieve good link popularity. By improving the quality of your website, you improve the chance to obtain good quality natural links. Spend a set amount of time each week to seek out quality one-way links to achieve your goal. By using this long-term game plan you will be able to safely build links for optimum link popularity success.