| LED Digest 2352: Marketing with YouTube |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. February 21, 2007 Issue no. 2352 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Download Options for PDFs & Ebooks ==-- ~ Ron Coble "...how you can force the "Save Target As" option rather than simply opening the file?" --== Marketing with YouTube ==-- ~ David Spahr "I think at this point you ignore YouTube...at your own peril." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Open Source Shopping Carts ==-- ~ Jon Langley "...you could also try creloaded.com which is basically an OSCommerce site..." ~ Donald Nelson "...many hosting companies have Cpanel hosting and have a package of pre-installed scripts..." ~ Mark Roberts "I use oscommerce for my shopping carts..." --== Essential Design Criteria ==-- ~ Tom Aman "...dial-up users should still be considered a potential big factor..." --== Google Backlinks vs Yahoo! & MSN ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "...Google is devaluing about 80% of all the links it knows about." ~ Nathan Holley "...focus on making your own site linkworthy..." ========== NEW =================================== From: Ron Coble Subject: Options with PDF Files and Ebooks I hope someone among the esteemed readers of this group can answer a question for me regarding options for opening and / or saving of PDF files. I personally have been to some web sites in the past that had PDF ebooks available for download and instead of being able to click and open, when I clicked on the icon it gave the what you would get if you right click, i.e., "Save Target As". I cannot recall where these web sites were but I would like to find out if anyone knows how you can force the "Save Target As" option rather than simply opening the file? Your feedback is greatly appreciated. Ron Coble Coble International - International Marketing Services http://www.importexporthelp.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: David Spahr Subject: YouTube As I said before (see issue 2328 http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1716/55/ ), there is an explosion of imagination going on before our very eyes at YouTube. I think at this point you ignore YouTube and it's long term implications to web design and the entire internet at your own peril. We can continue to focus on the minutia of SEO but we also need to look around and see the big picture. Some people are catching on and I think this is just the beginning. I certainly have a video plan for my soon to be launched new website. In fact, I expect to be uploading videos on an ongoing basis that will dovetail with this new site continuing to add new information. I intend to make YouTube videos an integral part of this site eventually. I still need to make the videos because can only be done outdoors at certain times of year. The site will launch without them for now but this will be a continually evolutionary project anyway. This idea is not lost on Vincent Flanders. Check this out. YouTube - Search Engine Optimization Secrets http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv1Ywg560CM If you want to see highly entertaining videos that probably sell the product like crazy, look up "will it blend?" will it blend? - Google Search Click on YouTube links. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=will+it+blend David Spahr * Stereoviews.com * Antique-Photography.com ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Jon Langley Subject: Shopping carts OpenSource Shopping Carts: > I would like your opinions on the easiest [and] best > of the open source carts. I am looking into using a > hosting company that already has it installed. - Bill Pavone, LED Digest 2351 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1749/55/ Not Pre-installed, but you can set up and host and with a bit of work can get something really good. Try http://www.oscommerce.com They have a "Basic" package that you can download and install. There is even a "Test" cart on the site so that you can look at both the buyer and the seller POV. You could "Purchase" an upgraded version. Which will give you other functions not readily available. They have an online forum and a Contribution section so you can download various add-ons to allow you to tweak certain aspects. eg. Worldwide set up, Various payment gateways (I am 99% sure that linkpoint is there). Paypal is installed, but there is a better addon that you can get. All this can be received Free. You just have to set up hosting / MySQL on your domain. If you like the look of this, then you could also try http://www.creloaded.com which is basically an OSCommerce site, but with a lot of extras that don't come with OSC. ie, you get about 3-4 templates already installed. The Inventory set up is a lot better. If you want to see a couple of OSC sites, then take a peek at http://www.sexylittlenumbers.co.uk and http://www.kidalog.net and http://www.heritage-gifts.co.uk All 3 are OSC sites... I was trying to look for another one which has a totally different design but can't remember the link offhand. If you want something that is already installed and can do a lot of other things, then I use http://www.marketworks.com. They do feeds to Froogle / Shopping and other comparison sites automatically, Can list to eBay and Amazon and if you in the US, they can list to Overstock, Yahoo as well as link to Shipworks. Drop me a line if you want to know more.. I can also get you a longer free trial. Jon Langley http://www.jons-all-sorts.co.uk (hosted with Marketworks). -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Donald Nelson Subject: Shopping carts Dear All, Bill Pavone was asking whether there are any hosting companies that have Open Source Shopping Carts already installed. I am not an expert on shopping carts, but I do know that many hosting companies have Cpanel hosting and have a package of pre-installed scripts, called Fantastico, which include OS Commerce. If you find a hosting company with this facility, then it only takes one click of the mouse to install the shopping cart. I use hostgator.com, but there are numerous other hosting companies that offer the Fantastico script package -- just ask about it. Best Wishes, Donald Nelson www.a1-optimization.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Mark Roberts Subject: Shopping carts I use oscommerce for my shopping carts and am in the process of setting them up for a couple of my customers. They have modules for Linkpoint, PayPal and can handles downloadable items. I use the PayPal module and have had very good luck with it. It is open-souce (free). I can also provide hosting services and support for it. (A lot of other people can also). Mark Roberts Roberts Computing Systems webmaster, robertscomputing.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Design > I chose [my designer] because [his] creations loaded > fastest, in a time when dial-up was still an issue. That > was my top criteria... I'd be interested to know what others > think my criteria should be if I were doing a web site today? - Peggy Deras, LED Digest 2350 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1748/55/ If I were Peggy, I would stay with the "web designer whose creations loaded fastest". While many will argue that this is not all that important now because only a very small percentage still use dial up, up-to-date numbers indicate this is not a valid assumption to make. All of the quotes below come from sources dated between February and November of 2006. Depending on whose numbers you pick and how you interpret those numbers, somewhere between 22% and 72% of Americans are on dialup or do not have access to high speed. The population of the United States is estimated to be over 301 million (http://www.census.gov/population/www/popclockus.html) so even at 22%, that gives at least 66 million on dial-up - that is a lot of people to ignore. The percentages vary, depending on the source but any way you calculate the numbers there are many millions who do not have high speed: "as few as 28 percent of American households today have access to broadband Internet" (i.e. 72 percent do not) http://blog.tmcnet.com/wireless-mobility...connections.asp "42% of Americans had high-speed at home" (i.e. 58 % do not) http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/184/report_display.asp "22 percent of Americans who still have dial-up" http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060227-6270.html "Thirty-seven percent of home Internet users still have dial-up accounts" http://www.technewsworld.com/story/54472.html "while 34 percent said they still used analog modems" http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,200606,00.html "56 percent of residential ISP customers subscribe to high-speed Internet service" (i.e. 44% do not) http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006...high_speed.html Except for certain limited markets where the potential customer base is well identified and their Internet connection method well known, it seems to me that dial-up users should still be considered a potential big factor in developing any customer base, particularly when you consider that a large percentage of those may not have any form of reasonably priced high-speed access available to them. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: Backlinks > I fully encourage people to examine the backlinks > of their well-ranking competitors. Do it, do it, do it... > Note specifically which links might be available to > other sites, and which are not accessible. - Dirk Johnson, LED Digest 2351 4 OUT OF 5 LINKS DON'T COUNT IN GOOGLE: Google presently devalues about 80% of all the links it finds (see below). That means 4 out of 5 links are most likely not passing value in Google. Backlink analysis is a large waste of time because no one really knows which links are working for any given site. And also because chasing the link sources that competitive sites have captured links from means you aren't being innovative or doing anything to take the lead. GOOGLE's GOOD 20%: I'm sure people want to know why I say Google is devaluing about 80% of all the links it knows about. I explained this more fully on the SEO Theory blog but essentially Search Engine Roundtable reported the issue in September ("Google's Cache for Supplemental Results Does Not Highlight Query Words" --> http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/006062.html). Recent tests confirm that pages in the Supplemental Index don't appear for queries on unique expressions. That is, if you have a unique expression "X Y D Z" on a page in the Supplemental Index, you'll get no results for that query even though you can see the Supplemental Page if you do a "site:" search. Google is therefore not parsing and indexing the content on Supplemental Results pages, and based on test queries that I and other people conducted on Google between 18 months and 1 year ago, it appears that Google is now reporting only about 20% of the indexed content that it used to report on before the Bigdaddy update. GOOGLE's NOVALUE LINKS: Add to the Supplemental Pages problem the fact that Google has cajoled or strong-armed many Web sites into adopting rel="nofollow", as well as the fact that Google admits to quietly stripping sites of their ability to pass value if it catches them violating its Webmaster guidelines, and even Webmaster Central's link reporting tool doesn't help you. For though it won't report links in the Supplemental Index, it doesn't tell you which links of those it does report are inhibited (either by the Webmasters or by Google) from passing value. YAHOO!'s DOMAIN LIMIT: Yahoo! representatives have implied on more than one occasion that the first link from a domain counts the most. Hence, most people look at the wrong data when they research backlinks on Yahoo!. THE FALLACY OF BACKLINK RESEARCH People are not learning nearly as much from backlink research as they have been led to believe they should. Furthermore, merely trying to replicate the backlinks that a competitive site has is a blind act of faith. Backlinks should be acquired first and foremost for their potential to raise a Web site's visibility and send it traffic. Simply evaluating potential linking partners regardless of whom they presently link to significantly reduces link research time and helps build a focused, efficient linking campaign. Instead of worrying about who is linking to a competitive site, Webmasters should just be looking for ways to improve the visibility and traffic for their own sites. Michael Martinez http://seo-theory.blogspot.com/ -------- new post - same topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Backlinks and Copying Competitor Sites In reply to Dirk Johnson's post about researching competitor's linking profiles... while I appreciate Dirk's thorough treatment of the subject I have to disagree with his premise. I'm not one of the "SEO pundits" that hoists his ego upon the notion that optimizing a site is hard work, difficult to grasp, or a job exclusive to specialists. It can be complex, however, from a managing perspective, juggling on-page optimization, off page criteria, usability and good writing, site architecture and conversion tracking. Not to mention linking profiles and authority scores and cache dates and whatever! The point is SEO has become fairly complex for competitive arenas, and ranking above other sites in a market niche probably requires more than finding out what their links are and attempting to copy them. I still use that technique for my own education, to find where a competitor got their .gov link from, or whatever, but trying to duplicate another's link profile is folly. Much better to focus on making your own site linkworthy, making the content great, and working toward promoting it in creative ways. --> Off topic... Just for the record, I don't think SEO is rocket science... I don't know if many remember, but I caused quite a stir a few months back with my post about "the search guru" [see http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/945/55/ --> Back on topic... Aaron Wall does a much better job than I describing why emulating competitor sites is probably a bad idea: ------------------------- "Sure it makes sense to look at high ranking sites which shouldn't be ranking, and try to get some of their best links, but it is probably not worth replicating everything they are doing (including all of their reciprocal links and low quality links). "You can't replicate their age with a new site... if your link profiles are too well aligned their site will probably get filtered out of the search results, and if their rankings are not stable you have little to gain by replicating what they are doing." Source: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001970.shtml ------------------------- Cheers LEDers, Nathan Holley holleymoney, gmail.com ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains The Archives: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/126/120/ Subscribe: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/52/77/ Unsubscribe, Change Email, or Hold / Resume Delivery: http://www.led-digest.com/content/category/4/17/86/ (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home." - Johann von Goethe |
