Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

======== CONTINUING ===============================

<Moderator Comment>

Greetings LEDer,

Posts on the Sandbox are still rolling in. Since the topic requires

fairly lengthy contributions, these posts warrant their own

dedicated edition which we'll publish on Thursday as a Special Issue.

For today, then, no Sandbox discussions -- but please feel free to

keep posting on the topic.

Make it a great week,

-adam

----------------------------

From: Marios Alexandrou

Subject: Ranking tips

Rob Bishop, in LED Digest 2181 you asked about social bookmarking

sites and I thought I'd take a stab at giving you an answer.

In a nutshell, a social bookmarking site is where people create

bookmarks just like they have been doing for years using their web

browser. Of course, since these bookmarks are being saved to a web

site, they're open to the public to view. While this may bother some

people who are concerned about their privacy, it can actually be a

good thing. This is because the public nature of your bookmark

allows other people to see your link, click on it, and even bookmark

it themselves.

If enough people find your bookmark of interest and enough of them

bookmark it or vote for it as some sites allow, then your bookmark

may become popular enough to be "featured" on the home page or in

some top xxxx list. The effect of making it to one of these spots is

that you'll quite suddenly get a lot of traffic. However, this

traffic won't last for much more than a day or two.

As for the non-reciprocating link idea you mentioned, that is

becoming less and less of a benefit. Why? Because many of these

sites are now implementing the HTML nofollow attribute on anchor

tags so that search engines won't consider links from these sites as

endorsements.

There are many of these social bookmarking sites. Aside from

del.icio.us which you mentioned, you should also take a look at

digg.com as it is one of the bigger players. At the moment digg.com

is tech / science focused, but there are reports that they will be

expanding their topic areas.

Marios Alexandrou

http://www.mariosalexandrou.com/blog/index.asp

-------- new post - same topic --------

From: Dale Kay

Subject: Ranking Tips

I found that adding meta name="googlebot" content="index,

follow,archive" and in the robot.txt file adding User-agent:

googlebot got the pages index by Google in light speed time...

Before doing that, nada, zip, 0 for months on some sites... add

that, a few days later it's there do explore robots.txt at one of

the sites...

Google isn't that great of a search engine but one needs to be found

on it. ask.com and search.com work better for me as search engines.

Dale Kay

Inquisitor Betrayer

http://www.inquisitorbetrayer.com

-------- new post - same topic --------

From: Steve Pronger

Subject: Ranking tips

> I understand 1, 2, 4, 5, and 5 - ;) but what does 3 do?

        - Rob Bishop, LED 2181

Oops. Must have run out of fingers. Math never was one of my

strengths. Actually, I meant to include another tip, which would

make it, umm...

7. Write an article and submit it to article directories

There are lots of article directories out there, and software for

multiple submissions, but start with the best:

http://www.ezinearticles.com

Make it around 250 - 500 words. In your recourse box include your

full URL without a period at the end e.g. http://www.yoursite.com

and an anchor text link with your targeted keywords. Here's an

example:

http://ezinearticles.com/?Linking-for-Fun-and-Profit&id=4507

This will get you a high value link very quickly. Take note of the

PageRank of that page and the anchor text link in the resource box.

This is an article I wrote some time ago, but if you search "linking

for fun and profit" at Google you'll see plenty of other sites have

picked up the article and created more backlinks.

But getting back to social bookmarking...

> Sorry Steve, I still don't get the big picture. Can you

> explain a little more? Is this simply non-reciprocating

> links in, for Google Rank?

The concept of social bookmarking has been around for some time, but

it's starting to gain momentum in the Internet Marketing world.

People like Tinu Abayomi-Paul (just search her name at Google) have

long advocated the use of bookmarking, tags, blogs & RSS for

marketing purposes. More recently a guy called Sean Wu created a

stir when he published "Tag and Ping". I did purchase Sean's book,

and yes it's very good, but one thing troubled me (apart from it

being overpriced) and that's the fact that Sean advocates opening

multiple accounts with the bookmarking sites. Sean warns against

abusing these services, but really, opening multiple accounts is

doing just that in my view.

Here's the thing. These sites weren't created for webmasters to get

PageRank and non-reciprocated links. In fact, http://Del.icio.us/

actually use the noarchive,nofollow,noindex meta tag to prevent the

passing of PageRank. But as Rob has already discovered, bookmark a

good quality site and others will too. There are actually dozens of

social bookmarking sites and most do not use the

noarchive,nofollow,noindex meta tag. Many of these sites use

del.icio.us bookmarks.

So what I'm saying is if we use these sites responsibly, for the

purpose to which they were intended (bookmark and share good quality

sites), then there are multiple benefits which we can all share. I'd

encourage LEDers to do their own research on social bookmarking and

"tagging". It's going to be big.

Cheers

Oh, here's a great free script for putting an "Add to..." link for

all the popular bookmarking sites, on your site:

http://www.addtobookmarks.com/

Bookmark it now :-)

Steve Pronger

http://ww.stevepronger.com

-------- new post - new topic --------

From: Chris Nielsen

Subject: AdSense

> I tried Adsense at one time... I noticed that

> 95%+ were to my direct competitors.

        - Mark Roberts, LED 2180

AdSense does allow you to block about 200 domains from showing up in

your ads in AdSense. When I first put AdSense on my SEO site, I did

some of this, and then in thinking about it, I removed the blocks.

Yes, at first it seems like this is something that may be crazy and

hurt your business, but let me give you my view on this.

I decided that if I was that afraid of competitors, that I had

already lost.

If you cannot match product, service, pricing, or other factors that

are important in your industry, then you have problems that should

earn your attention. Customers are going to be checking out your

competition if you have ads or not. I feel that if you have related

ads on your site you are going to get income from those that click

on those ads that are generally not all that interested in what you

offer anyway. If they are checking out the site of a true competitor

(most ads are not anyway) and decide to do business with them, then

I don't see how we had much of a chance anyway, and at least by

providing access to what they wanted, I earn a small amount of

money... FROM the competitor, which is nice. :-)

Now a couple of years ago, after we started to run AdSense, we were

contacted by the owner of a somewhat respect site that lists and

purports to screen SEOs. We enjoyed a nice listing there and

promoted their site quite a bit. We were told that they did not

think it was "professional" to run AdSense and that we had to remove

the ads, even though they were running the same ads on their site!

Of course, this was stupid and we refused and were promptly deleted

from their site. This actually was not a bad thing, since now we can

accept most of the leads that come in and have to refer fewer people

on to other companies. The income from these ads is not very much,

but it is effortless for us, and that is satisfying to me.

Now I related that story to make a point that is bound to come up

about the "impression" that having ads on your site gives. To some,

it is "un-professional" and I can't say that I disagree 100%. In

reviewing sites for our directory, seeing AdSense does serve as a

flag that the site may only exist to serve ads and not have any real

product or service to offer, or any good content. It just makes me

look a little closer and see what the site is really about. I'm sure

there are some that visit our site, see the ads, and promptly leave.

If my business was suffering, then you can bet I would remove those

ads right away, but that's not the case for us.

I guess I would suggest that if your site is getting a fair amount

of traffic, and you see in your web traffic reports that a good

number of people are visiting your site's home page (or other pages)

and then leaving, that you may have the potential to turn that

unproductive traffic into some real income that you would not

otherwise have. Of course, you may also want to try and find out why

your site is driving people away, but that's another topic...

Thank you,

Chris Nielsen

www.nielsentech.com

-------- new post - same topic --------

From: Rod Aries

Subject: AdSense

Mark Roberts stated many of the Adsense advertisers are competitors.

Gosh, this shows Google is working great, as they are bringing

targeted traffic specific to your content.

Google allows you to block competitor ads - just enter their URLs

into the ban box:

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=21593

Having said all that, I always wonder about "retail sites" that

allow AdSense - never really made MeSense. Why bring traffic to your

site to send them away if you are really trying to get sales.  There

are probably a few situations where it might make SomeSense such as

if you have a long distance site and the current value of a customer

at a nickel a minute for long distance and $10 /month is about a $1

/m in earnings or you could sell multiple clicks for long distance

earning about $0.50 to $1.50 per click, over and over, plus not have

customer service issues... then, sure, run AdSense.  If someone is

looking for long distance, they are likely to click on multiple ads,

so you might actually earn $2-3 on each visitor that decides to

click around.

A fan / hobby / info site is the perfect application for AdSense. In

example, if you have a site on parrots or on ISP providers or on the

NFL draft.  All of those keywords on the page will bring up targeted

ads as you talk about Polly or Earthlink or Reggie Bush. You

essentially get paid for talking about what you like to say... that

MakesSense to me.

Rod Aries

==== BILLBOARD ===================================

From: Joe Halbrook

Subject: Blogging revenue

> ... I am finding that [my e-zine] just doesn't pull

> sales the way it did two or three years ago. I'm

> wondering if maybe the blog won't be a better

> way to attract paying customers.

        - Martha Retallick, LED 2180

Hello Martha,

I wanted to comment on your observation of decreased ezine delivery

sales.  I think if you follow all the latest news on email delivery,

you'll find those rates are down drastically compared to the

blissful "pre-spam" days.  Thus, so are sales.

A few years ago, I wrote an application I called ez-feeds, which

allowed email publishers to continue publishing, as usual, but

simply add one more email address to their subscriber list - a

special mailbox that took the email content from their ezine or

newsletter and converted it to an HTML web page that was sent

directly to a toolbar I designed for Internet Explorer.  Subscribers

who used the free toolbar could receive content from any email

publisher - spam-free - from any location.  Spammers could never

abuse this closed system.

The concept was to completely bypass all the server-side and

client-side spam filters and deliver the content via http to any IE

web browser.  I added historical archiving and searching and

pass-along technology to it, so that no matter what location a

subscriber was at, s/he had access to his/her email content via the

browser.  I thought it was a hoot - I even patented the technology!

But, from the publisher side, nobody seemed to grasp the concept.

They couldn't understand how their email content could be converted

to HTML and then routed to a toolbar that dynamically updated and

gave the subscriber a visual cue that something new had arrived.

Seemed simple to me.  But then everybody grew to hate toolbars (due

to the threat of hidden spyware) and then RSS came on the scene.

The moral of my story is that all you have to do is spend one hour

creating a simple RSS feed for your content.  No blogging required.

 Simply promote your RSS feed to the RSS indexes, including Yahoo!.

Then, each time you have a new issue of your ezine or newsletter, in

addition to your usual mailings, do two other simple steps:

1.  Make a simple HTML version of it, and put it on your web site.

(Use < pre > ... < /pre > tags, if nothing else.)

2.  Add a simple < item > to your RSS feed with "ticklers" back to

your web version, and ping the RSS aggregators.

Viola!  You've just enabled anyone who wants to read your content

multiple ways to consume it.  To get them to subscribe in the first

place, simply offer a way to specify whether they want email or RSS

delivery.

Here's a link to a page that shows you step-by-step how to do this:

http://www.info-for-life.com/2

Best of success, Martha.

Joe Halbrook

http://www.ez-feeds.com

-------- new post - same topic --------

From: Jennifer Laycock

Subject: Blogging revenue

> Who has a blog that has had a positive

> effect on company revenue...

        - Martha Retallick, LED 2180

I do. I also know many other folks that do.

The thing about blogging is that you've got to examine the type of

business you are running and the type of audience that you are

serving and then decide whether your blog really needs to increase

revenue or whether it needs to increase customer relations.

The blog that I built for the Lactivist project does a great job of

feeding customers into the accompanying store. That's because it's a

topical blog written from a personal perspective that targets a

passionate audience. Throw in the fact that I promote my actual

products in less than 5% of my posts (save for one ad that runs

along side the posts) and you've got a nice, light selling tool that

works quite well.

There are plenty of other examples out there as well. The major

search engines have launched product blog that are designed to

increase customer relations. Think of Yahoo! Issuing weather

reports, or the AdSense team giving suggestions on how to improve

the CTR of the ads running on your site.

It's my personal opinion (and I could be wrong) that small

businesses can be far more effective at "blogging for sales" than

Fortune 1000 companies can be. That's because small businesses often

rely on personality as a key attraction point for customers. Thus, a

small resort in Costa Rica could probably benefit from a really

great blog that talks about life in Costa Rica in order to attract

new visitors&but Expedia likely wouldn't benefit from a blog that

would have to stay corporate and more generic.

Warmly,

Jennifer Laycock, Editor

Search Engine Guide

-------------------------------------------------------

The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks:

pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains

© Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that