Top 10 Myths About Online MarketingPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services As a business owner, everyone wants to be online, market their site there and crack a sale with each visit on their website. But does everyone seriously undertake what it takes to be successful online? Or do you get swayed by [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

7 Things Politicians Can Teach You About BusinessPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services You may think of politicians as being extremely phony types of people who seem to have a permanent smile plastered onto their faces while they pucker up to kiss babies, but the fact is that they have some valuable [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

7 Tips a 10 Year Old Child Can Give You about MarketingPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services Back when I was ten years old, the world was a much simpler place. Cell phones came in brief cases, an iPhone was a phone you had your eye on and marketing often meant putting [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh.  A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

Related posts:

1. Where is Google Going with Google+ Pages?
2. What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?
3. Top 10 Retail SEO Mistakes UK Brands Are Still Making

View full post on SEOptimise » blog

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

• “Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

In December’s post, Google mentioned:

• “Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.”

A month earlier, Google announced its freshness update to search, which prioritises recent, relevant and timely results.  Joe Crowther, of Metro news site explains, “The quicker you get the image up the better. Google tends to assume that the first to break a story or image is the source. As the story develops, it will re-adjust, dependent of other signals”. As image search succumbs to the freshness update, we can deduce that Google is continuing to include image search within all its major algorithm updates.

Last week, Google announced 30 subtle algorithm changes. This ‘monthly series’ instalment was different to any previous one due to Google publishing the codenames attached to each change. In its newfound approach to communication, Google mentioned three updates specific to image search.

• “Image Search landing page quality signals. [launch codename “simple”] This is an improvement that analyzes various landing page signals for Image Search. We want to make sure that not only are we showing you the most relevant images, but we are also linking to the highest quality source pages.”

This update is rather reflective of the Panda update, which favours high site quality.

• “Better spam detection in Image Search. [launch codename “leaf”] This change improves our spam detection in Image Search by extending algorithms we already use for our main search results.”

SEOptimise’s Matt Taylor explains the possible implications of this for an SEO campaign: “When Google rolls out something from the main search to image search that wasn’t there previously, it may be possible to spot patterns on what Google deems as spammy by noting which sites disappear from the search results. If you notice images from your site disappear from the image search, this gives you an indication that Google thinks you are spammy”.

• “Improvements to image size signal. [launch codename “matter”] This is an improvement to how we use the size of images as a ranking signal in Image Search. With this change, you’ll tend to see images with larger full-size versions.”

The improvements to image size present opportunities for ecommerce sites. Bigger images will rank better, and if these sites have good size images of their products, they may be able to pull traffic from image search for products that may be difficult to rank for normally.

These changes not only signal that image size is now important, but also that the quality of a landing page (or the page on which the image sits) determines how an image is ranked. Along with added spam detection, all these updates point to a “cleaning up of image search”.

Yesterday Google announced its “+1 Your World” project, which confirms and further enhances Google personalised search for users based on their social circles. Search queries will now deliver results from the anonymous web and results from the user’s own personal networks (providing that the information has been shared with that user). Image search will be no different. However, the personal image results will only be truly useful depending on the information that is attached to the images. Images posted with the original JPEG filename will not rank well in personal search, just as you would expect in a public search.

This update strengthens Google’s previous attempts to clean up web images by rewarding well classified image information.  It is apparent that Google Image Search is being targeted with algorithms that reflect the ideas behind the major  Google algorithm update, which would suggest that this area of Google’s business is becoming more important.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Signals Are Google Sending About Image Search?

Related posts:

1. Google Test: Multiple Meta Descriptions Work as Expected, Social Search Does Not
2. Introducing the new Verbatim search tool from Google
3. How Google Search Plus Your World Will Impact SEO

View full post on SEOptimise » blog

Wondering what all the fuss is about?
Here’s a great read:
Wikipedia -> Stop Online Piracy Act

Who supports SOPA?
Domino Project’s SOPA Supporter List

What sort of organizations are opposed to SOPA?. It was such a bad move that Wikipedia was publicly contemplating a blackout of the service just to make it clear how bad the bill is!

There’s also a few very active/current discussions over on Reddit in the r/technology section that give a good ‘nerds eye view’ of the bill reading.

Wonder why Google was opposed to the bill? Here’s a humorous take on the essence of their fears:

If I had to personally sum everything up into a TL;DR I would have to go with:

“Artist and labour groups who don’t have a nerdy understanding of how the internet works and how to approach piracy are joining with other anti-piracy groups to fast-track an ill-considered and potentially dangerous bill.

While most folks don’t understand the internet enough to argue the bill as experts the general reaction today has been “we are rushing something we don’t understand and we can’t proceed”.

With any luck that’ exactly how bill H.R.3261 will end, some potential, but not ready. *fingers crossed*

View full post on Beanstalk’s SEO News Blog

5 Things to Know about Being a SalespersonPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services

As an Internet marketer, your job is basically to be a salesperson. You are trying to sell products or services to your customers and that means learning the techniques a salesperson uses. Even if you never meet a customer face [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

4 Realities You Need to Understand about SEOPost from: Quality SEO Services & Link Building Services

Today, I’m going to share with you something that few SEO professionals share with any of their customers. Too many SEO professionals want to pretend that they can work miracles and they have all the answers. Or they make it [...] View full post on SEO Blog – Quantum SEO Labs

View full post on Website SEO Marketing

In the course of writing the book I carried out a lot of research around how people meet and what it takes to develop a strong relationship, which has had a tremendous impact on my understanding of successful blogger outreach. On Wednesday morning I sent out 100 e-mails to YouTube video bloggers and so far I’ve received 77 replies (not bad when most sources suggest anywhere from 3% to 25% is a good response rate for an outreach campaign).

In this post I want to share a few tips and tricks I’ve learnt about outreach from researching, writing and marketing Get Noticed to help you improve the success of your outreach campaigns.

Image Credit: ekai

I’m going to assume that you’ve already done some blogger outreach and know the basics like finding the right bloggers to target, personalising your e-mails, sending them at the right time and including obvious call-to-actions. This one’s for the pros

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Marketing Get Noticed

A 5 second meeting in person is worth 100s of e-mails

When contacting high-profile bloggers, a five second in-person introduction has an incredible impact on increasing the likelihood of that blogger helping you out. Busy people tend to use ‘filters’ to manage their time efficiently, and one of the major filters that busy people use is ‘have I met this person in real life?’

I cannot emphasise enough how beneficial it is to attend blogger conferences as a means for improving your outreach campaigns. Second to this, a simple tweet telling the person that you dropped them an e-mail seems to significantly improve response rates as it suddenly presents you as a real person in their world. Being ‘real’ to someone outside of their inbox is effective for outreach.

Scalability is awesome IF combined with quality & selectiveness

It’s common sense that sending 100 e-mails is more effective than sending 10 e-mails, but there are two other parts to this equation: quality + selectiveness.

E-mailing 100 bloggers is pointless if your product or offering isn’t good enough. The key to getting a good response rate in an outreach campaign is to give the blogger an irresistible offering. I personally like to sit down with a pen and paper before writing an e-mail campaign and list every possible benefit that I can offer to the blogger, so that my e-mail naturally becomes focused around them and not what I want.

Also, being selective can be very beneficial. Rather than e-mailing 100 Average Joe blogs, could you use the time spent contacting them to get featured on five or six major blogs that would then influence 500 bloggers to write about your product? If your product or offering is awesome, you should be able to get featured by high-profile bloggers.

Picking up the phone is the most effective way to get what you want

A pretty simple concept that I’ve talked about before; a phone call can sometimes take a little bit longer than an e-mail, but it gives you the ability to adapt to the blogger’s immediate response, which is not something you are able to do over e-mail.

If a blogger doesn’t have a phone number listed, I’d recommend dropping them a tweet asking if it’s okay to get in touch by phone with them.

Busy people are better at time management

I remember reading an interesting concept in the book Predictably Irrational, which suggests that busier people tend to be better at responding to e-mails. The theory behind this is that busy people tend to be better at time management and actioning opportunities.

When contacting people for pre-publication reviews of Get Noticed I was shocked to see the first replies come in from CEOs of major corporations and various New York Times Best-Selling Authors.

Don’t be afraid to contact the A-list bloggers just because they’re ‘out of reach’, you’d be surprised at how accessible they are.

What I Learnt About Blogger Outreach From Writing Get Noticed

Be in the right place at the right time, all the time

One of my favourite chapters in Get Noticed is ‘How to Be in the Right Place at the Right Time, All The Time’. Most of us assume that when we we’re supposedly in the right place at the right time, it was a stroke of luck. There is in fact more science and probability at work than we might immediately recognise. Lets break it down:

• You were prepared either subconsciously or consciously with specific and clear objectives about the type of person you wanted to meet.
• You were both in the same place (either geographically, or virtually)
• You were perceptive enough to make the connection with them.

The first step to being in the right place at the right time, is knowing exactly what that place is. Who are the people you are trying to meet and where do they spend their time? If the answer is tech bloggers, then analyse where tech bloggers spend their time and be there. Attend technology conferences and meet-ups, write for the blogs they read, spend time in the cities notorious for tech blogging.

Being in that place ‘all the time’ requires you to analyse how your time is spent and replacing the ‘unsociable’ hours with sociable hours. I met a lot of great people by being ‘in the right place at the right time’ whilst writing Get Noticed by writing the book in cafés and restaurants (a sociable venue) rather than in a home study or office (an unsociable venue).

Broadly speaking, there are three main categories for how we spend our time: at work, at home, at hobbies. Working out how you distribute your time in each category and finding ways to make each aspect more ‘sociable’ can increase your odds of meeting more of the people who will help you.

Understand and be sensitive to a blogger’s accessibility

Just like celebrities, bloggers are both accessible and inaccessible in different places. Understand where it is that bloggers are most accessible and use that channel to cut through the competition and get their attention.

My experience has shown me that e-mail is relatively ineffective when contacting high-profile bloggers, when compared to Twitter and attending conferences, which are both channels where bloggers tend to be far more receptive.

Some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, some will consciously or subconsciously design their site in a way that pushes you towards their preferred channel of communication (i.e. if they have their Twitter link or phone number at the bottom of every post and only a fairly hidden link to their e-mail on one page, you’re probably best contacting them via Twitter or telephone!)

Utilise your existing network

When you do things for altruistic reasons it makes you feel genuinely good about yourself, especially if you’ve helped out a friend. Utilising your existing network is a powerful way to reach bloggers if your current network is likely to know the sort of people you need to meet. Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I ask for a lot of virtual introductions to new people who are relevant to what I’m doing. This works amazingly well, as I always link to those who help me out as well as those who I virtually meet in the blog posts that I write.

If you need to meet sport bloggers, send a few e-mails to your friends or send out a tweet to see if anyone can help you out – don’t feel like you’re burdening your network, you’re not, in fact you’re helping them, too.

Be likeable, genuine, and understand a blogger’s motivations

I receive a fair number of outreach e-mails to my personal website e-mail accounts, and the #1 reason why I don’t reply to some of them is because they’ve forgotten to mention or outline what the benefit is to me.

Why should I waste half an hour helping someone I’ve never met increase their rankings and profile by blogging about them? There are plenty of reasons, such as: it gives me extra content, I could receive affiliate commissions, a free product to test, promotion from their company’s social media accounts or an invite to an exclusive webinar, but they rarely mention my motivations.

Also, remember that only 7% of communication between humans is ‘what you say’, 93% of what you say is non-verbal communication, which means that if you’re e-mailing someone, 93% of your communication is lost in translation as the recipient cannot see your body language, facial expression, and to some extent, tone.

This means that you need to make ‘what you say’ compensate for the lack of non-verbal communication by ensuring that your tone is likeable and that the core message to your e-mail is genuine and honest.

Further Reading on Blogger Outreach

As a special offer, SEOptimise readers receive a 15% discount when purchasing an eCopy of Get Noticed before November 1st. To get your copy visit WeGetNoticed.com and use the discount code ‘R3T1634N’ when checking out.

I also recommend checking out James Carson’s 12-step hustle process here and also giving this Dale Carnegie approach to blogger outreach a read.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Everything I Know About Effective Blogger Outreach

Related posts:

1. 30​ Web Trends You Have to Know About in 2011
2. 30 Ways to Use Social Media for Business People
3. Christmas Crackers: Top Comments from 2010

View full post on SEOptimise » blog

If you run a product base site then generally you get one 1% conversion by SEO activity but there is no guarantee always. SEO is a magical tool or increasing the brand awareness globally as well as locally. After solid planning, seeking the current trends of search marketing and regular changes provide the good results. Solid search engine optimization programs may increase the online and search visibility. Before selection of SEO Packages you know know the all about seo work and estimate.

SEO is a challenging task but you make it easy if you keep few following tips in your mind and your SEO investment give the effective results.

Evaluation & Analysis:

Evaluation to give you an overview of your website and it’s search visibility status and we can say SEO evaluation is first step of search engine optimization. Analyze the content for search engine friendly characteristics within the site structure, page coding style and page content. Performing an SEO evaluation is becoming very popular with Internet and Online Marketing Managers realizing that search is the fastest growing media you can use to gain visibility for your organization on various search engine, social search engine and other search platform.

Step of Evaluation:

1- Find out if Your Website is indexed on major search engine.
2- Check Your Rankings, Where you are stay in ranking
3- Check for SEO Obstacles.

Planning:

Proper planning is solid foundation of SEO programs. Before SEO activity execution you have clear specific goals and expectations. Clear goals will help to you decide which SEO Activity is most important, which we do first, and what resources are require and when. What metrics is helpful for measure the SEO Success?

Focus on the relevant keywords for your industry and market. Keyword analysis will be based on. Brand Awareness, Product Descriptor, Product Category, and Product Affinity and include current search trend.

Resources:

Good resources ensure you can implement the SEO activity effectively. The most common reason for an unsuccessful SEO program are lack of good resources like content, delay from web-developer and designer side, talented manpower and other digital assets. So when you plan for SEO program then keep in mind which resources are require and what are importance all of these.

Promotion:

SEO is an on-going activity so maintaining and improving the sites organic ranking is achieved through a consistent level of SEO work. A well-optimized website will increase your search engine rankings and help your target audience find your services and product over that of competitors. Place your website URL on your business card, in your email signature, and promote it online beyond the search engines in social networks, blogs, forums, comments, post reviews, articles and anywhere that it can be useful. All of activity constantly sending traffic to your website and you can increase the search visibility of your site.

Success Measurement:

Success measure by different metrics like after SEO program where your stay and what your current ROI and how much leads you get and more.

Basically every website owner wants to increase the leads and sales so bottom line is get maximum revenue from the website. Keep the records of all SEO activity and tack every thing what we do and what we gain.

SEO Innovation:

These days website in to a highly effective marketing machine! In today’s highly competitive online arena therefore, Search Engine Optimization is a necessary. The online world is constantly changing, every one want the top ranking in search engine and will do the better work. A solid SEO Activity program is an ongoing investment that requires you to adapt and innovate to ensure your website stays at the top of the rankings and top of mind with your consumers. If you slow down and not updated then your competitor comes on top because every one in queue and want top ranking.

About SEO services

SEO Services is leading Search engine Marketing (SEM) company offer Internet Marketing Services around the world.

SEO services offer affordable SEO packages for your online search visibility and business growth.

Author: Carlodanie Jenne
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Sponsored by: Free WP Themes

View full post on Website SEO Marketing

One of the few products Google doesn’t offer yet*

It seems Google wants to inundate us with new tools, products and services these days. Is this a way to divert attention away from all the bad news about antitrust lawsuits, the FTC and the like? I don’t know. In any case, there are lots of new tools to test.

Many of these will have a huge impact on search and the Web as a whole in future.

Others mights seem less noteworthy at first, but they underscore the long term Google strategy which focuses on social, mobile and HTML5 among others.

Either way, I assume that every business person has to know about these tools, as there are plenty of opportunities here and in some cases also pitfalls.

Google+

Google+ is a fully fledged social network that Google has started to compete against Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It consists of several services in itself, including groups, chats etc.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/introducing-google-project-real-life.html

http://searchengineland.com/googles-facebook-competitor-the-google-social-network-finally-arrives-83401

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social/

Google +1 (button for websites, worldwide in search)

Google +1 is the Google ”like” button. You can now find it in search results, on websites that include the button, as browser extensions and in most Google products (Blogger, Youtube, Shopping Search etc).

WDYL (What Do You Love)

WDYL is a personalised interest hub for Google users that lets you combine most of Google services around your favourite subjects.

http://www.wdyl.com/

Google Web Fonts V2

Google Web Fonts allow webmasters to replace their boring web safe headlines with some more appealing free fonts. Also, the Google Web Fonts are faster than some of the older font replacement techniques. The new version, V2, is far sleeker than the old one. I’m not sure about the user experience though.

http://www.google.com/webfonts/v2

Social interaction tracking in Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics

While many people provided JavaScripts to track Google +1 votes in Google Analytics, the tracking wasn’t easy to use and wasn’t very insightful in most cases. Now Google has not only launched built-in Google +1 tracking in both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, but also allows tracking of other social sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Delicious. This requires additional coding though.

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/06/1-reporting-in-google-webmaster-tools.html

http://www.google.com/support/analyticshelp/bin/answer.py?topic=1316551&answer=1316556&&hl=en

Postrank (Analytics)

Postrank has been one of the best known tools for measuring the social impact of one’s posts. It also provided a great social media analytics tool. Google has acquired the service and stopped sign ups.

While in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, you need some coding to track your social media performance. Postrank just makes you verify your social accounts and lets you add a URL. I hope Google won’t neglect Postrank like they did with Feedburner.

http://www.postrank.com/

Google Offers (Groupon alternative for daily deals)

Google Offers may be the biggest news of all the news services when it comes to business. Google Offers is a Groupon competitor focusing on daily deals.

http://www.google.com/offers/business/

Authorship attribution

In HTML5 you can use so-called microformats to indicate that you’re the author of a posting or article across different websites. Using a meta tag and your Google Profile where you connect your websites and blogs, this will make content creators recognisable across web properties and inside search results.

http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/06/highlighting-content-creators-in-search.html

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=1229920&&hl=en

Google Swiffy (tool for converting Flash files to HTML5)

This little tool may have a huge impact. It allows you to convert Flash files to HTML5. I don’t know how good the outcome is, but even the idea of being able to adapt your Flash content to the modern Web is a clear sign of the times.

http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/

Google Sites mobile landing pages

One of Google’s main focuses is the mobile Web. Google Sites, the search giant’s own website editor for starters, has added a mobile option to make these websites mobile friendly.

http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/06/mobile-ize-your-business-with-google.html

Have you tried these tools already? What do you think about this unparalleled wave of new services Google has been announcing recently? Does Google want to cover our every need on the Web? How do you plan to use these tools for your business purposes?

* Image by missha

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 10 New Google Tools, Products and Services Every Business Person Has to Know About

Related posts:

1. 50+ Advanced Web Analytics Tools for Business Use [2010 Edition]
2. Everything Webmasters Need to Know About the Google +1 Button for Websites
3. 30 Social Search Tools & SEO Resources for Power Users

View full post on SEOptimise » blog

Probably you haven’t noticed yet as I haven’t told you yet: starting from 2011 I’m stepping up my efforts on SEOptimise. I write more regularly for the blog and I’ll help the SEOptimise team with their blog SEO among others. So I start with the basics: broken links.

Blogs amass a record number of broken links over the years as they often deal with short-lived developments or news.

The Web deteriorates fast and with it your site quality when you link out. In my last post I argued that linking out is important for SEO. That’s true but you have to keep in mind who you link out to. Seeing hundreds of websites either disappear or move without proper redirects can teach you a lot about the Web and links. What did I learn?

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t care for broken links

You might assume that companies owning search engines themselves would get the issue of broken links on their own sites. They don’t. There are plenty links to fix here. Google is really awful, many URLs do neither return a 404 nor a 301 to the new version. Yahoo and Microsoft sites like MSN tend to offer proper 404 pages bu does not bother to redirect to newer URLs. So in case you care about longevity you better just link to the blog posts that announce a new service by Google as these tend to stay online longer.

Startups tend to disappear after a year or two

In my highly popular tools list which I compiled over the years but even with a list covering web analytics I saw a considerable number of dead links. I’ve seen that before on my own blog over at SEO 2.0 – tools disappear fast, especially tools based on third party services liketter. Almost all of the first generation Twitter tools from around 2008 had disappeared by the time I update it in late 2010. At the same time most of the blog links were still working. Even those that get acuired are often gone, either by getting swallowed completely by the company that bought them or by sheer neglect.

Sites by people who comment for SEO vanish fast

When installing Broken Link Checker for WordPress and letting it run for a while on a blog that has been online for a few years you might experience a shock: hundreds of links are broken! Soon you’ll discover though that most broken links stem from blog comments. Most of these are not your regular commneters but those who offer less value and comment mostly for SEO purposes. It’s amazing how many comments, track and pingbacks lead to nowhere after a while. It’s often generic sites the likes of expert-internet-marketing-services.biz that vanish the fastest.

Some well known SEO publications do not redirect all posts to new URLs

Pronetadvertising.com was one of my favorite sites over the years. Also Kevin has linked their posts as far back as 2007. They are still around but some seemingly still valid posts have changed URLs or disappeared completely. I could restore some of those links manually both on SEOptimise and on SEO 2.0 I was surprised though to see SEO experts forget this. There are many reasons for such issues, sometimes the blog gets rid of old outdated posts. In other cases the company restructures or the blog gets underfunded in the long run so that obvious tasks like redirecting to new URLs get forgotten.

Even flagship blogs sometimes go offline after a few years

This is probably the saddest part of checking broken links: witnessing the demise of your idols’ blogs. Well known and respected industry blogs doshdosh.com and tropicalseo.com are just two sad examples of blogs from acknowledged experts that are no more. So long out is always a bit of a hazard n the long run. Even the best of us can fail to keep up their blogs after a few years.

Black hat SEOs hijack your legitimate links

Linking out to bad neighborhoods is even worse than linking to broken pages as your site is not just full of holes due to broken links but also may inadvertently become part of spammy link network. Thus you have to check redirects as well not just 404s. Often links get redirected to

How can you check your blog/site for broken links?

You can use lots of free or affordable tools.

1. Google Webmaster Tools
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
3. Broken Link Checker for WordPress
4. Xenu LinkSleuth
5. Website Auditor
6. Web Link Validator
7. Orchid Box Broken Links Checker

How to link out for longevity?

Link out to news sources from stable websites or blogs not the actual tools you describe. The tool might be long gone while the article will be there for years. So you better link to an NYT article about a new feature by Google than the Google feature itself which might disappear altogether in a year. Remember Google Wave and Google SearchWiki. There were gone within a year.

How to fix outgoing links without breaking your posts?

• Link out to archive.org for important sites. When doshdosh.com went down I linked to the archived versions of Maki’s articles.
• Use a site:brokenlinkurl.com “headline of linked post” to find it elsewhere on the site.
• Unlink the the link altogether when it doesn’t hurt the value of the post
• Delete the whole post whenever a post only consists of the link or is built around on it. Many early posts on SEOptimise were tumblogging short notes consisting mainly of a link.
• Make a screen shot and link to it for pages where you expect a quick change (like AFP stories on Google News or Wikipedia that might get deleted soon)
• Save a local copy and set up a mirror once the original disappears you can use the Firefox extension ScrapBook o save web pages with ease

Why check and fix broken links at all?

The SEOptimise blog exists since 2006, yes it’s already five years old so it’s only logical that many links are not valid anymore. Google seems to assume that older blogs have lots of broken links as I couldn’t see much of an positive impact in search results after fixing of hundreds broken links on my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

At the same time I’ve seen static pages jump back to top results after an update with the obligatory link check. It may depend on the level of change or on the fact of adding a new date.

Still I highly recommend fixing your old postings as it directly harms the user experience and ultimately your reputation when visitors end up on outdated content full of broken or misleading outgoing links. Sometimes even internal links break. As search engines often show older content people will end up on your outdated pages as well.

So at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether Google really takes broken links into account as a direct ranking factor.

You have to fix links anyways to stay a credible source over the years. It’s also not just about the broken links. Years old advice or suggestions are often not true anymore or there are better solutions by now. Thus I sometimes replace old links with new ones to a completely different resource.

© SEOptimise – Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. What Checking Broken Links Can Teach You About the Web & Linking Out

Related posts:

1. Linking Out Instead of Link Building to Rank in Google
2. How to Write Highly Popular 30+ Item List Blog Posts to Get Links and Traffic
3. Advanced Blog & WordPress SEO: 30 Points Most Bloggers Overlook

View full post on SEOptimise » Blog

In fact, many internet entrepreneurs waste a great deal of time, energy, and momentum because they do not fully understand internet marketing. Don’t let this lack of understanding undermine your income potential.

In order for you to better understand internet marketing and its impact on your internet business you must know the answers to these three key questions:

1. What Is Internet Marketing?

2. What Is The Cost Of Internet Marketing?

3. What Is The Benefit of Internet Marketing?

What Is Internet Marketing?

Marketing is actually rather simple. Marketing is communication about an idea, product, service, or organization. Marketing therefore encompasses advertising, promotion and sales as well as the various techniques and forms of communication used to advertise, promote and sell.

Marketing is broader than simple advertising or promotion in that it includes researching the market to learn what consumers want and then setting out to meet their needs with the appropriate product, price, and distribution method. Marketing includes market research, deciding on products and prices, advertising promoting distributing and selling.

Marketing also covers all the activities involved in moving products and services from the source to the end user including making customers aware of products and services, attracting new customers to a product or service, keeping existing customers interested in a product or service, and building and maintaining a customer base for a product or service.

Internet marketing includes these same activities but also pulls in various internet tools including web sites, email, ezines, banner advertising, blogging, RSS, text links, search engine optimization, affiliates, autoresponders, and other ecommerce applications.

What Is The Cost Of Internet Marketing?

The range of expenses for internet marketing is huge. There are a number of promotional and marketing ventures that can cost you nothing or only pennies a day while other advertising efforts can cost you thousands a day.

It is important to consider your goals — both long-term and short-term — as well as how much each prospective customer is worth to you. This will help you determine a workable budget for your internet marketing campaign.

Many internet promotions are free, you can set up a web site and/or blog for $250 a year, and you can buy text links for $10 a month. You could easily spend $25-50 a day for advertising but there are many cheaper ad options available.

The best program is to start small and cheap and slowly build as you test and learn what is successful for your market and product. There is no perfect acvertising solution that works wonders for everyone. Each marketer and each product has a different formula.

What Is The Benefit of Internet Marketing?

Internet marketing offers more benefits than many traditional marketing mediums. The very nature of web sites and blogs is that they continue working to promote and market your product long after your initial marketing effort is over. Similarly many advertising efforts, such as ezines, newsletters, banners, and text links also continue to increase in power over time.

Email marketing can be a tremendous surge in contacts and sales and offers the ability to personalize your message as well as reach a targeted audience so your chance for sales goes up exponentially.

The other tremendous benefit of internet marketing is that it offers convenience and immediate satisfaction. Your potential customer sees your marketing message when it is convenient for them — and often when they are seeking information about your specific topic. Then you offer them the ability to act on that interest right then. They can locate your product and buy in the time it would take to watch a commercial on television or turn a page in the newspaper. That is the power of internet marketing.

Now that you have the answers to these three key questions, you are ready to begin your own internet marketing campaign — and succeed with your internet venture.

Experienced webmaster Deanna Mascle is glad to offer Answers About Internet Marketing at http://answersaboutinternetmarketing.com.

Author: Deanna Mascle
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Sponsored by: Website Value

View full post on Website SEO Marketing