No hat SEO

I'm peeved today, downright annoyed, upset and perturbed. One of our oldest and dearest customers, is being ripped off. We've been providing them with technical support almost since our company formed, but we are not their SEO provider. They've been using another SEO company in Leeds for about 10 months now, and upon checking today their £150.00 per month has bought them about 70 crappy low value links to date. What's worse is that they are really being hit by the credit crunch and there is market share out there for them to grab with a half decent SEO campaign.

I'm just so maddened by this. Anyway, I've decided I'm just going to get their link building properly kicked of for free regardless. Whatever they decide to do about these snake oil vendors I really don't care. They are sat at the bottom of page 2 on Google.co.uk for a term that really isn't that competitive and I'll get them pushed up. They've spent nearly two grand on about 50 quids worth of work, and the on-page work that's been done isn't great either - the title tag is way too spammy, there are loads of outbound links from the homepage, none of which have been nofollow-ed and there's just not enough written content on there, let alone any attention to semantics.

There's not even any point in taking this useless SEO company down a peg or two, since they aren't particularly white hat, grey hat or black hat, more like their hat has blown away in the wind. Of the three major SEO terms they have optimised their own website for, one we're on page one for in fourth place and they aren't even on the first 13 pages, the other two we're on the first page for and I can't find them either (I got bored after page five on those).

okay, anger vented - time to get on with doing some good now!

SEO Reputation Management

When your business has an online presence, reputation management is very important, since on the Internet people pretty much have the freedom to say just about whatever they want about your business, and irrespective of whether what is said is actually libellous or whether you have recource to legal action, it is imperative that you take moves to reduce the visibility of bad reviews and other negative comments about your business.

Do I need SEO Reputation Management?

If you type your company name into a major search engine and negative reviews about your company or website show up anywhere on the first couple of pages of results then the answer is yes. Its a no-brainer that you need to take action to reduce the visibility of these web pages. if you are a relatively small business, you might want to look at the simple SEO reputation management strategy given below, but you might also want to consider enlisting the help of a professional SEO reputation management company.

What is SEO Reputation Management

SEO reputation management is a form of search engine optimisation, the objective of which is to fill up the first couple of pages of the search engines with results for which you are in control of the content when someone types your company name into a search engine. This can be used to push bad reviews and negative comments further down the search engine results, or to provide you with a layer on insulation in the event that such reviews might arise in the future.

The good news is that using SEO to manage your online reputation is relatively straightforward most of the time. The techniques you will need to use though, go against the grain of those usually recommended for effective search engine optimisation.

Using Web Directories for SEO Reputation Management

First off, you will need to use web directories, a source of links for your website which is usually discouraged by competent SEO consultants, or at least discouraged as a source of links which should make up any significant proportion of an SEO campaign.

You need to use web directories that get indexed rather quickly in order to move the reviews down in good time.


www.joeant.com

and

www.mygreencorner.com


are two web directories that get indexed rather quickly, but there are 1000s more to go at. See for instance, our list of web directories here.

When you are filling in the web directory submission form, you also need to do something counter-intuitive for SEO - you need to put your company name and only your company name in the title tag, in the keywords, and also include it in your description of your business. So, you are optimising, not for your keywords, but for your company name. Now repeat this process for as many other web directories as you need to use. and hopefully this should push your bad reviews down in the search engine rankings.

Don'ts for SEO Reputation Management

Don't use paid for directories, because there are many out there for free. If you need to use more powerful websites to push down bad reviews though, you may then need to consider paid-for expedited directories such as Yell and the Yahoo web directory. Usually though these should be used for marketing rather than reputation management.

Don't use social media sites such as Digg, Yahoo Buzz or Propeller. Such social news services are on a timeline and they will rank well when they are fresh but will drop down in the rankings after only a short time.

Google Toolbar 5 beta review in brief

Google Toolbar 5 Beta - ummm, I'm not too keen to be honest. It has the same privacy issues as Google Chrome, which I've blogged about before. When you open a new tab, you get screenshots of your most recently visited pages with links to them. I'm not really sure I like the idea of this since its pretty much advertising who you bank with, what affiliate accounts you have e.t.c. e.t.c. to anyone who happens to be looking over yhour shoulder. I also have a bit of an issue with the new Page Rank-ometer which is now squashed up to a third of its normal size making it difficult to tell a website's Page Rank by eye. I'd say either keep it or dump it, as a demoted feature its just an annoyance.

save time on your SEO campaigns

When embarking on any SEO campaign it is really important that you only chase results on keywords that are going to bring in a return, and that have a decent number of people searching for them. This sounds astoundingly obvious, but it is actually remarkable that there are so many campaigns out there chasing keywords that, even if you drive a webpage up to the top of the search engines for them, will bring in no return at all. In fact, it is not infrequent to find dozens of companies agressively chasing a term which, were they to succeed for it, might be expected to bring in 2-3 visitors a day. Now unless each visitor is potentially worth an awful lot of money indeed, this is a real waste of time.

Google has been kind enough to provide a number of SEO tools you can use to estimate the traffic any given keyword or key phrase might generate, and to get a picture of how popular it might be. Its pays to use these, and do some keyword research using the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator, Google Insights for Search, and Google Trends before embarking on any campaign. This way you can avoid wasting your time chasing something that isn't going to pay off even if you succeed in your objective.

Where the competition for your keywords is particularly fierce, you should also consider using these tools to identify related, mid-range terms which will still generate a decent volume of traffic, but where the competition is less fierce, since this will help you to identify realistic and worthwhile SEO objectives as well.

Social media stalking tool

Whostalking is an excellent social media research tool which allows you to search by keyword across many of the major social media websites. This makes it an amazingly effective link building tool - find relevant posts on Digg, Blogger, Technorati, Friendfeed, Blogtype, Backdigger, Twitter and many more. If you are engaged in link building and website promotion, then you can't afford to be without this resource which we have embedded here for your convenience. Give it a whirl.

Lucky SEO

Put your website in the way of luck

It might seem strange to use the word luck in relation to SEO and Internet marketing, but I'm not talking about leaving things to chance here. What I mean rather by the idea of luck, is that there is really no such thing as luck unless you put yourself in the way of luck. Each webpage that you add to your website is another instance of you putting yourself in the way of luck since it is another potential landing page which might get found and from there convert a visitor into a new customer. Up to here its a bit like buying a lottery ticket and each webpage that you have is an additional lottery ticket which might bring you in a return on your investment.

Unlike buying a lottery ticket though, you can swing the odds in your favour, and you can do this by optimising each webpage you add onpage, by link building for that webpage and by adding more content to it. The more agressively you do this, and the shorter the odds will become that you're putting yourself in the way of luck will pay off. So, in short, to put yourself in the way of luck and internet marketing success, you need to be prolific, thorough and agressive. Write as much content as you can for as many web pages as you can. Get these pages optimised onsite and keep coming back to them and examine what can be improved. Lastly, link build for each of your webpages individually, so that each web page you have gets it share of relevant inbound links.

If you simply deploy your business website as a 10 page brochure site, and don't do anything with it, then you are not putting it in the way of luck and your website will not be lucky.

RIP Woolworths

Woolworths finally closes today

Woolworths, that British high street retail institution we all loved has closed down 200 of its stores today, and the rest will probably follow soon unless they find a buyer - 27,000 jobs are potentially to go and they are apparently £300 million in the red. We never knew just what your purpose was, and never expected a coherent shopping experience, but you were ours nonetheless.

My aunty started a high flying career in our local Woolworths in Brighouse going from punky Saturday girl to supervisor, to promotion to promotion to being headhunted repeatedly and on to some of the most prestigious jobs with British Aerospace and others so this is for her:

Xray Spex - Warrior in Woolworths

WOW Gold Competition

This is it, the opportunity for WOW Gold afficionados everywhere to get a legitimate comment posted. The funniest, or most original comments only will get through approval. Please no comments about how you've made millions out of selling WOW Gold even if you have, and any claims that you are commenting from your Gold mansion on a tropical island surrounded by sun-kissed semi-naked women, men or sheep could be greeted by an IP Lookup which places you in Scunthorpe, Detroit, Bosnia, Adelaide or where ever. Will there be tumbleweed blowing through this WOW Gold competition post, or will I get a deluge of witty one-liners from sharp WOW Gold afficionados? Closing date 31/01/2009.

Or if you've nothing interesting to say about WOW gold, just watch this clip from the South Park WOW episode - It may be the end of the World of Warcraft as we know it.

Two weeks in and the only conclusion is that you WOW Gold marketers just don't listen:

Happy SEO

I'm very happy, nay even smug, right now. I just updated FireFox and for the first time ever, it didn't delete all my SEO plugins, SEO for Firedox, SearchStatus, Google Toolbar, StumbleUpon toolbar etc etc. To top it all I think I just penetrated a multi-million quid industry extensively on Google.co.uk in less than 24hrs with nothing more than onpage optimisation - fingers crossed, touch wood e.t.c. and bring on the commission. A happy end to the day methinks

social media sites that don't exist but should

New social bookmarking and networking sites are popping up every day and, as if there aren't enough of them around already, here are some not quite so serious suggestions for some new ones. This is the dark side of social bookmarking, social networking and news submission websites and gives me the opportunity for some really bad puns. Well it is nearly Christmas.

So here is the definitive 26 social bookmarking sites that don't exist but should:

1. Splutter - viral social bookmarking - pass on germs of wisdom every time you post a Sneeze




2. Sh*tter - whereas Twitter is social networking on your mobile phone this is social networking while sat on the toilet




3. FumbleUpon - post stories from web sites you found while trying to type in the dark



4. GrumbleUpon - post stories from and vote down web sites that you find irksome



5. MumbleUpon - a social bookmarking site for people who are really understated and sotto voce about how good their story content is



6. Flatter - social bookmarking site that let's you say gratuitously nice things about web sites that no one is interested in



7. Wimpy This - vote for web sites you like by giving them a burger



8. Pimpy This - vote for web sites by blinging them up large



9. WindianPad - submit web sites that provide cures for flatulence (sort of like a panty pad but for your bottom)



10. EverSmote - share and bookmark web sites that God doesn't like



11. SkidMarks - vote for web sites you like by giving them a pair of dirty undies



12. Humptags - vote for web sites you like by shagging their leg



13. Rumptags - vote for web sites you like by shaking your bottom at them



14. Redeye - share your holiday photos with people who've been avoiding you for the past 15 years



15. Stalker - a cross between Facebook and Twitter but more honest



16. Fixx - social bookmarking site that lets you vote for yourself ad infinitum



17. Rigg - see above



18. Smug - a social networking site where you can boast about your pointless online
    achievements



19. FoeFeed - regularly update all the people you don't like on how much better your life is than theirs



20. ObamaBin - whether you are a jubilant democrat or a disapointed republican, this is where your deluge of tedius posts should go, all of them!




21. RecycleBin - let yourself believe that your post is being read, voted up and commented upon by thousands of interested readers, but really we deleted it five seconds after you submitted it. You should have read our submission guidelines now shouldn't you?



22. PlugIMP - bookmark your favorite rubber fetish web sites



23. Batter - social networking for chip shop owners



24. Hixx - bookmark your favorite redneck, hillbilly, chav or bogan web sites



25. Flutter - social networking for bookmakers



26. Bleat - get them to follow you just like sheep - baaaa!

Or just think of a word and put some dots in the middle of it:



in.fect.io.us

poi.ntl.es

Or, a few literary social bookmarking sites for bookish sorts:


BookmarkOrange - give their web site a smack over the Gulliver


BigendianPad - for afficionados of Jonathan Swift

Ideas for more social bookmarking sites? Let me know.

10 ways to grow your business and beat the credit crunch

How to expand your business in a harsh economic climate

To undertake any one of these ways to make your business recession proof could really be as simple as adding a new page to your website and marketing it. With so little to lose and so much to gain, this has to be the perfect strategy for growing your business during harsh economic times. Do this agressively and you can beat the credit crunch and stick two fingers up at recession.

1. Use geo-targetted webpages to capture business in new geographical areas. You can either expand around the margins of your current coverage, adding more local towns and cities that you provision. Or, you could even market further afield - the way to do this is to find people in those areas that offer the same services as yourself and ask for cut every time you pass work on to them. Before long you could grow from a local to a national company by adopting this strategy.




2. add new products and services to your portfolio.




3. target new demographics, expanding your appeal to different age groups, genders, income groups, cultures or ethnicities or industries, or even bigger or smaller businesses than your usual target market.



4. product cross placement. Highlight relationships between your products and services and the ways in which they might complement on another and let your website upsell for you.




5. re-package existing advertising for your products and services. Extend your appeal by displaying what you offer in different ways in different places.




6. harness the skills available to you to offer new services



7. Identify synergies with your competitors and strike deals to pass business between you.



8. find new sales channels. There are ever increasing numbers of free places online to showcase your products or services and with a little research you can identify some of these social shopping websites and multiply the visibility of your goods online to well targetted potential customers.



9. sell advertising from your website. You can do this either on a business to business basis or look at advertising schemes such as Google Adsense or an affiliate marketing package. In hard times you will welcome the additional revenue stream.




10. jump on the eco bandwagon. Tell people what your business is doing to help the environment and let them know about any eco-friendly aspects of your products and services. You can also introduce eco-friendly cost saving working practices to help lower your overheads into the bargain.

Today's free installment from our forthcoming Internet Marketing ebook is from the section 'Monetising your web content'. When released, this Internet Marketing handbook will be given away free for the first 30 days. If you would like to pre-order a free copy of the e-book now, email us as seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

Monetising your web content

In this section we cut straight to the chase, and cover some means of making money online. You will find this particularly useful, if you are not selling your own products or services on the Internet but are looking for some opportunities to make some extra cash from home or from a home business. You will find that these sources of online cash can be exploited more effectively if you read beyond this section and get to grips with the task of promoting your website.

You should be aware that get rich quick Internet schemes generally don’t work, and that time and effort is involved in making money on the Internet. Any online article or advert promising you a 6 figure income, or untold riches from the Internet is most probably a scam. However, if you are willing to put the work in, and the research in, your income will increase as you go along and you can make good money and a worthwhile residual income when offset against the amount of time that you need to put in. Think in terms of revenue streams – something you put work into now could still be making you money 6 months, a year or even five years down the line.

Making Money with Adsense

Probably the most common way to turn a website into cash is to serve up Google Adsense adverts on your website or blog. Adsense provides smart ads which will usually match fairly closely the theme of your website.

Adsense these days is getting rather sophisticated, and as well as the conventional Adsense ads for content, you can also use Adsense advertising with RSS feeds, mobile content and YouTube, as well as making money out of putting a Google search box on your website (Adsense for search).

https://www.google.com/adsense/

In order to make a decent amount of money with Adsense you really need to find out what the top paying key phrases might be, i.e. those that Google Adwords users are bidding most highly upon.

You can research potential Adsense payouts using a tool such as SEO for FireFox which has a traffic estimator feature which will also give you an estimated Adwords Cost Per Click on any given Adwords keyword. You can download SEO for Firefox here: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

There is also a very useful list of top paying Adsense keywords here: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

Making money with Affiliate Marketing

With Affiliate marketing you place banner link ads and text link ads on your website and every time a sale is made as a result of somebody clicking on your link you will receive commission.

Find advertisers related to the subject matter of your website and display their banner ads and text ads on your website.

Some affiliate marketing programs that you might try include some of the more popular ones such as

http://www.clickbank.com/index.html

http://uk.cj.com/

here is also a categorised affiliate program directory here: http://www.top-affiliate.com/

Pay per post

If you have your own blog, many companies will pay you to blog on content of their choice. There are plenty of brokers out there who will give you a choice of subjects to write upon, and you can get paid for it.

Blogvertise will pay you £12.00 for every 100 words you put into a positive review of one of its customers.

PerPerPost will hook you up with many advertisers who will pay you to blog about them: http://payperpost.com/bloggers/get-paid-to-blog.html

Warning: There are risks involved in pay per post, and some bloggers have reported being penalised by Google. However, if you are being paid to promote something, then cover yourself and nofollow any links that you give to your clients. See this 2007 article for instance: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2007/12/payperpost

Drop ship

Drop Shipping allows you to sell other people’s products from your website as a retailer, while letting your Drop Ship company worry about the order taking, administration and the shipping. Each time a sale is made through your website you will receive a commission payment, based on the difference between the wholesale price of the product and the retail price which you sold it for.

Some drop shippers will provide you with a ready-to-go sales platform or ecommerce system. In order to achieve your potential, you will need to customise this and tailor the content extensively, so that you can find your niche and stand out from others using the same system. This will also help you to avoid search engines duplicate content penalties and help to get you found on the search engines.

One of the major advantages of drop shipping is that you usually need no upfront cash to get started selling products online.

You can learn a lot about the pros and cons of drop shipping on the Drop Ship forum: http://dropshipforum.co.uk/

Other ways to make money on the Internet

Third party sites where you can create pages and make money:

1. Squidoo gives Adsense revenue share on your squid pages: http://www.squidoo.com/



2. http://www.syncone.net/ - this is a social bookmarking site that allows you to add affiliate marketing and Adsense on your page.



3. eHow will pay you for writing articles telling people how to do something (US residents only). Payouts are based on the amount of traffic your article generates and upon the quality of the content: http://www.ehow.com/



4. You could also add a price comparison service to your website or blog. PriceRunner will also give you a small payout for every click through they get to their price comparison website. You can set this up through Commission Junction (see the Affliate Marketing section): http://www.pricerunner.co.uk/



5. Sell your digital photographs to stock photography websites. Stock photography websites that will buy your images include http://www.stockphotography.co.uk/ and http://www.photographersdirect.com but there are plenty more. Check their terms and conditions, since some require a minimum number of photos, and others have stringent quality guidelines while others are more lenient.



6. Write an ebook and sell it, just like this one – you can do this through paypal or even through download.com: http://www.download.com/

For a more comprehensive guide to making money online have a look at this article: http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1042-top-ways-of-making-money-online/

Tip: One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to start making money online is to start up your own blog through WordPress or Google Blogger, both of which are free and require almost no technical knowledge to set up. Then you can integrate Adsense, affiliate marketing and even some paid for posts on there and start making some money almost instantly.

One of the best strategies here is to write about what you know, and monetise things that you do in your every day life. So if you eat out a lot, maybe start a restaurant review blog, or if you enjoy skiing or golfing write a blog based around that. You could start a blog about places you have visited or even concentrating on your own town, city or suburb – the possibilities are endless. The trick is though to make it easy for yourself and write about something you know, and or participate in, since this will save you a lot of time and energy researching.

Tip: Build up as many revenue streams as you can. The more sources of revenue you have giving you a payout every month, the better insulated you will be from any downturn in day-to-day business i.e. those times when numbers of new on-off customers are less than usual, or when you lose customers. Moreover, with multiple channels of revenue you avoid the risk that many less versatile businesses face of struggling when their major revenue source underperforms or dies off. Take Ford as an example, they were playing a zero-sum game whereby their survival depended on people buying cars. This was a fifty/fifty bet which they would always lose eventually over a long enough timeframe, because people either buy enough cars to keep you in business or they don’t, and once they don’t your business is over, unless you have multiple streams of revenue.

You should also always be on the look out for more revenue streams so that your business grows reliably and steadily.

Everything you ever wanted to know about Internet marketing but were afraid to Google

We have a working title for our forthcoming Internet marketing guide now, and the release date draws ever nearer. We are giving this away free for the first 30 days and if you would like to pre-order a copy, please email me at seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

You can read the introduction to our internet marketing handbook below. and you may also find of interest our recent ehow article on making money online without becoming a couch potato:

FSI Internet Marketing Information Handbook Introduction

This Internet Marketing booklet is your SEO (search engine optimisation) bible and essential online marketing guide which will provide you with the information you need in order to help you get started with your first Internet marketing campaign. Here you will find SEO information for beginners and also learn a few juicy SEO secrets that you might not find anywhere else on the Internet. Most importantly, you should find the subject matter in this SEO e-book an indispensable 101 reference guide for strategies that will help you to get found on the major search engines, make the search engines like you and drive relevant traffic to your website. You will also learn how to harness Web 2 and social networking services to create additional interest in your website.

The role of search engines is to gather, organise and serve up information and the search engines that do this best are the most successful and receive the lion’s share of search traffic. There is a really important lesson here – the quantity of information, the quality of information, the care with which it is organised and the efficiency with which it is served up and delivered are all key factors to online success. This applies to any website or blog just as much as it does to search engines and it is something that you should try to keep in mind whenever you are marketing a website online on the Internet.

The skills required for Internet marketing successfully fall into three main categories:

1. technical – the technical skills needed to market a web site online are often overrated by those not involved in Internet marketing. You will need them and you can’t do without them, but Internet marketers are not nerds, techies or geeks, and usually not IT gurus or web design geniuses, they just know enough to harness these skills in order to facilitate the promotion of their online writing and their web marketing in the most effective way possible.


2. arts/humanities – the ability to write interesting, compelling and useful information, and to a lesser extent to provide attention-grabbing images, is an absolute must for online marketing success.


3. marketing – the ability to gauge what will grab people’s attention and turn them into customers and to provide them with it. The dedication to identify and exploit aggressively the best opportunities for getting online content found and seen. Again essential.

These are all skills that you will develop and cultivate as you gain experience marketing your website online, but be warned, there is no shortcut to learning how to do this, no silver bullet for search engine optimisation, and no such thing as Internet marketing for dummies, guide to SEO in a nutshell or overnight online success. You need to build up a good combination of technical skills, develop your aptitude for writing and your flair for marketing and utilise them all to drive your online publicity machine. This search engine marketing booklet will furnish you with much of the Online know how and many of the Internet resources that you need to drive traffic to your website, but without a flair for marketing and writing your web site visibility will not reach its full potential. Most of all though, you can get a very long way with hard work and perseverance, and if you explore all of the Internet marketing opportunities given below thoroughly then you should go a long way. Good luck!

Carpet Cleaning Los Angeles

Carpet cleaning in Los Angeles

I was just having a scope around for some of the highest paying key phrases for Adsense and was really surprised to discover that carpet cleaning los angeles is fetching 15.17 USD per click, at least according to this list of keywords which gives out the best Adsense revenue: http://makemoneyseotips.blogspot.com/2008/07/free-high-adsense-keywords-listget-lots.html

We have had over a dozen UK carpet cleaning companies on our books for SEO, so I have a fair idea of the industry in the UK. I can only imagine that either the LA market is very competitive indeed or that there has been a serious spate of over-bidding on Adwords by some of the carpet cleaning companies in the City of Angels.

Free Internet marketing guide

Free SEO tutorial handbook

We've been a little quiet on the blog lately, owing to a trip to China and work on our forthcoming ebook reference guide to SEO and Internet marketing. This will be complete shortly and we will be showcasing sections of it on the SEO blog as well giving the whole thing away free as a downloadable PDF for the first 30 days.

To pre-order your free copy of our reference guide to SEO ebook, please email us and we will send you out a copy: seo@foursquareinnovations.co.uk

This ebook will provide a handy reference source for finding resources to help you market your website online, as well as providing some great pointers for both those new to SEO, and more experienced Internet marketers wanting to have SEO techniques, strategies and opportunities listed out for them in one handy ebook.

After 30 days from its release date, this online marketing reference guide will be charged at £1.99 per download, and remain free to our SEO training customers.

the worst long con

This is the worst preamble to a long email con that I ever read. It's so flawed, it's almost poetic:

Dear,

It is with trust and confidence that I make this proposal to you because I have been very careful due to the sensitive nature of this transaction.
I am Ango Karen David, 17years old and daughter of Sir Ekpojuo David Ango, a reputable businessman who passed away in a hospital on 12th, February 2007. His sudden death was masterminded by an uncle of his who travelled with him during his business trip.

I was 4 years old when I lost my mother.

Before my father’s death on February 12th, 2007 he handed over to me all documents of his business and also told me that he never believed that his brother will poison him. He handed over to me the documents of his money which he left in the bank. The total fund is nine Million United State Dollars.(USD$9, 000 000.00). The money is still in the bank and l am with the documents. Please I need your assistance in the following ways:

1. To help me get this money out of the bank and invest it in your country.

2. To help me to come over to your country to continue with my education.

3. To stand as my guardian and business partner until I am out of school to handle any investment which you will set up for me with the money.

4. If you can help me with these three things, I am promising you 15% of the total money as soon as you receive the money in any account of your choice.
Your suggestions and ideas will be highly regarded.

I am waiting to hear from you as soon as possible.

My sincere regards,

Karen David

SEO gives up smoking! stop the press

Not sure that I've really given up smoking. I just couldn't be bothered to go out and buy some cigarettes this morning so I put a nicotine patch on.

The only problem is that I now have about a billion kilowatt hours of nervous energy coursing around my system. Someone plug me into the national grid!

real time search engine position tracker

Live SEO stats from Exact Factor

ExactFactor have launched a free website ranking tracker with several useful features such as a search engine ranking change Alert and a competitor site alert which allows you to monitor the performance of your Internet marketing campaign in realtime.

With the new search engine position checker you can:

• Track your website's search engine positions in various major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and LiveSearch (and receive weekly SEO reports).



• Receive alerts when your website position moves up or down.



• Receive alerts when competitors move past you on Google.

You can check it out here: http://www.exactfactor.com/

How to check up on your SEO company

If you have been asking yourself any of the following questions about your SEO company then this article is for you:

• Is my SEO company giving me value for money?


• Is my SEO company doing any work?


• Is my SEO company ripping me off?


• Is my SEO company giving me value for money?


• Have I fallen for an SEO scam?

One of the problems with hiring an Internet marketing company is that many customers have almost no idea what they are buying or how to evaluate the services they get, or whether their SEO company is living up to its promises. While it is true that there are no absolute guarantees in this profession as to the ultimate results of your Internet marketing campaign, it is possible to get a fair idea of how hard your internet marketing services provider has been working for you and to get a pretty good idea of whether they are living up to their promises.

There are many great SEO companies and internet marketing agencies out there, but there are also a lot of cowboy SEO companies, lazy SEO operators and ones who use dirty and risky techniques to give you what you want, but potentially at a huge cost to you if they get found out. While there is a lot of information available on line about chosing the right SEO company and also what to do if your SEO company rips you off, there seems to be comparatively little about how to evaluate your SEO company while they are working for you - sure there is advice out there, such as to make sure they provide you with reports, communicate well, etc etc, but what about the actual work they are undertaking? If you have mistakenly hired a bad SEO company, then you need to be able to tell so that you do not go on paying them needlessly and indefinitely, for work they are not doing or are doing badly.

Here are some of the things you can check up on your SEO company has done for you.

Content and code changes

If your SEO company was supposed to make changes to your website in order to help it to perform better in the search engines then the place to check this is the WayBackMachine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php). Have a look at your website as it appeared shortly before they commenced work, and then over intervals of time when they have been working. Changes might not be immediately obvious so also look at the source code and look for changes to the title tag. meta keywords, meta description and heading tags h1,h2 etc as well.

Unfortunately you can only do this for up until about 6 months ago - but its better than nothing, and at least gives you the opportunity to compare before and after month by month.

You can also check how strong your website is onsite using a tool such as this: http://whois.domaintools.com/. If you can do this before your SEO company starts work and afterwards then you should be able to see if there is noticeable improvement.

Link building

Your SEO company probably promised, or was contracted, to do some link building for you. They may have promised to find you a certain number of inbound links every month, or they may be working on a more ad hoc basis. The place to check on the links they have obtained for you is LinkPopularity.com. Choose the Yahoo option since the results are more accurate.

You need to check how many links you have, but also look at the web pages that are linking to you. If anything looks suspicious about these web pages then dig deeper. Do all the websites linking to you look the same, for instance? If so you may have been the victim of an SEO company that uses link farms.

If the websites linking to you are part of a link farm then they have very little value indeed and, entail the added risk of associating your website with bad linking partners. What's worse you are paying for nothing.

You also need to check that the websites linking to you are cached in Google's index. Link farms have a tendency to get identified and penalised by Google, and if this happens you may find that all the webpages with links to your website have been removed from Google's index. You can use a tool such as SEO for FireFox to check that these websites are cached. if the number of cached web pages show up as zero then you know you have a problem.

If the websites linking to you are not in Google's index then the links have no value and you are paying for nothing.

Bear in mind that each link your SEO company acquires for you will not necessarily show up immediately or even the next day. Some will take several weeks, others maybe even months.

Unique visitors

The ultimate test of how well your SEO company has done for you is how many more unique visitors they are bringing to your website each month. If your SEO company is not providing you with stats for this then you need to check your Google Analytics account, if you have one, or the web stats provided by your webhost. Have a look at how many unique visitors you were getting before your SEO company started work and then have a look at how many you have been getting in the months since then. Bear in mind that it can sometimes take a couple of months to start seeing improvements here.

Search engine placement

If your SEO company is not providing you with information about where you appear in the search engines for your major key phrases then you need to find this out. You can do this manually, or Google Webmaster Tools will be able to give you some idea of the main terms that you are ranking for. Ideally you need to check this before a campaign starts, and at regular intervals (say every two weeks) while a campaign is underway. This way you can tell whether your search engine positions have actually improved since you took onboard your SEO company.

How to react.

Now this is the important bit - if you have found anything during your investigation that makes you uncomfortable then do not immediately jump to conclusions. If you are reading this you are probably a lay person and are going to need some professional independant advice before you can say anything for certain. The best place to look for this is on large SEO forums such as the Search Engine Journal or WebProNews which you will need to join. The helpful people on there will soon tell you whether or not your suspicions are justified, and give you a good idea of whether you ought to leave your SEO company.

If you are still in any doubt then now is the time to challenge your SEO company about the work they have been doing and see what response you get.

SEO for 404 not found pages

Make every sq inch of your online footprint count

SEO or Internet marketing is mostly about getting high positions in the search engines for your most valued key words and key phrases, however, it is not just about this. SEO and Internet marketing is also about making every square inch of online real estate that you possess count.

One way to do this is by editing your 404 page not found pages in order to direct users back to the major pages on your website or your sitemap, search your website, let them know a little about your business, and even to monetise the page if possible. This way, even if there are a few broken links that you haven't uncovered yet you are keeping your website visitors in the loop through your strategic deployment of 404 page not found pages.

Have a look at this example: 404 Not Found

SEO Misinformation | Misleading SEO article

SEO unhelpful and misleading advice

With all the fuss around about bad SEO suppliers and what to look for in a good SEO supplier, about what matters in Internet Marketing and what doesn't, I was really disheartened to read today's Entireweb.com newsletter entitled 'What Corporates should know about Online Marketing'. This sort of misinformation really doesn't help anyone looking to choose a reputable SEO, web marketing, online marketing or SEM supplier. Just read this:

Tips when hiring SEO experts: - Whenever using a company in order to improve your SEO, always check out the Google Rank of their website. Since SEO is not that well known in management circles, there is a lot of companies that will try to sell SEO skills while there own SEO are terrible.

Really, check their Page Rank! Eh hem, how about finding out what their search engine rankings are like, how many unique visitors they get, how successful their portfolio of past campaigns is etc etc. Page Rank is just no guide at all and this tit bit of information is really going to get the heckles up of a lot of SEO consultants, Internet marketing specialists and professionals, as well as mislead a lot of people looking to improve their positions in the major search engines.

Oh, and what if its a talented SEO consultant who has decided to go it alone and only just started his/her own SEO website - not going to have much of a PageRank, but could be run by an SEO guru. In short, PageRank is the least useful measurables to use in order to check out the credentials of an SEO company or Internet marketing consultant.

They also claim that:

if you could increase your Google rank, your number of new visitors to your website will most certainly increase.

Not the case - Getting in bound links from websites with high page ranks might not do any good at all of A) the website/ webpage isn't relevant and doesn't have relevant content or link text is irrelevant B) the customer/ client web site has bugger all content C) The client website has problems such as not being indexable or is using duplicate content and so forth. Website visitors might not increase, the increased volume of traffic might not be properly targetted, or high ranking inbound links have been used as a silver bullet without properly identifying issues with the client website that need to be changed or improved in order to get results.

They continue:

Also try to get some form of guarantee. It is very rare that marketing companies ever give guarantees about the effects of their efforts, but if they actually do, you know they are serious about their skills.

Wrong - the SEO companies who do give guarantees are often charlatons who over-promise and under-deliver on their Internet Marketing campaigns - promises such as 'Guaranteed first place results', 'Guaranteed first page results' or 'see your online income skyrocket or your money back' are just absolute rubbish. There are no guarantees in this game and it is irresponsible to offer them without very carefully thought out caveats and clauses - SEOs need to be honest about the uncertainties of their profession both to protect themselves and to ensure that their customers make informed decisions. In truth, search engine marketing professionals have no control over the vagaries of search engine algorithms, nor can they have any control over what the competition are doing or how they are performing (unless perhaps if they are engaged in some dodgy black hat practices to knock them down). Ultimately web marketing professionals don't even have any control over what customers can do themselves to ruin their own chances - they can only give good advice, set guidelines and hope that the customer abides by them. The very best Internet Marketers I know are very careful about the promises they make, while some of the less reputable ones are happy to throw out guarantees left, right and centre - '200,000 links in two months', 'immediate search engine placement', 'you can buy a top search engine position', 'get to the first page or your money back' etc etc I've heard them all.

Finally, one small point of contention (I'm nit picking now):

Search engines have the most advanced mathematical algorithms available today

Not true. SE algorithms are indeed complex, but A) we have no real way of knowing how complex B) it is highly doubtful that they are THE most complex or advanced algorithms in the realm of mathematics. For instance, the true LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) algorithm is almost certainly not the exact one used by Google or anyone else online - sure they will be using a watered-down version, but to apply it in its original form, well, many people have their doubts.

I want to weep, after reading this article.

The proof in the pudding is the very next email that landed in my inbox after the newsletter: Read it and weep:

Does your site bring you profit?


Well ,it must!


Mass stream of clients is what is you want your site to bring you!
Your site should not only be repaid but keep on bringing prosperity
to your company. Your site is your very own representative in the
World Wide Web and it's what works 24/7 and independently.


We'll make it work for you, bring you clients and bring you profit,we
shall advance your site in above board ways.

So these guys just farmed one of our business emails and sent out a mailshot claiming with certainty that they will make us money, and make our website successful - All automated - a bot collects our email address, then a mailer sends out a mail shot - no one has even checked that our website has potential, that our keywords are profitable, or even noticed that we are an SEO company or checked what our industry is etc etc - its an obvious and extreme example of shoddy guarantees, and there are plenty out there who sound more credible, but still they're bound to be convincing someone. There are plenty of gullable people out there, and give them some misleading SEO advice about guarantees and they will be just a little bit more suceptible to false promises and the reputation of our industry will sink just a little bit further into the shit.

Make money with affiliate marketing

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

It isn't often that I take a look at forms of marketing other than organic search on this blog, but today I thought I'd do a little to remedy that by taking a quick look at affiliate marketing. If you are new to affiliate marketing then the information below will give you an overview of what affiliate marketing is and how it works

Affiliate marketing is one of the most effective means to increase your online income. If you already have a website that is selling goods and services, it makes perfect sense to add an affiliate marketing account to your portfolio and to start making additional money by selling related and complementary products and services on your website.

The benefits of affiliate marketing

• free - affiliate marketing costs you nothing


• simple - all you need to do is add the affiliate link to your website


• no shipping or admin - once the visitors purchases through your affiliate link, your affiliate partner handles everything, so there is no shipping, no product storage, no customer service, no aftercare. All you do is collect the cheque.


• no billing or invoicing - all billing or invoicing is handled through the affiliated company and all invoicing from you to the affiliate broker is handled by self-billing invoices.


• bonus income - affiliate marketing can help you to increase the revenue that you generate through your website.

Moreover, if you are starting an online business from scratch, then affiliate marketing is excellent for starting up, because it answers the first two questions for you that any new business must ask itself, 'where are my customers?' and 'where is by income?'. Each affiliate partner that you take on effectively becomes your customer. You are providing them with a service when you host their affiliate advert on your website and you get paid by them every time a sale is made through one of your affiliate links. Therefore, you can harness this potential further by advertising them as your customers on your website, as well as putting up their links in contextually relevant places. The effect of this is that you can make yourselves look like an established business with existing customers much more quickly, while gaining more sales through having more affiliate links on your website, and more web pages, which means more landing pages for people to find you by. Moreover, this gives you an additional source of revenue during your startup period, and can ease the financial struggle of starting up a new business.

Sell products with affiliate marketing

The benefits of selling through affiliate marketing are pretty obvious. The beauty of it is that you don't pay a penny for other websites to host your ads unless you make a sale. This gives you tight control over your marketing budget and enables to you manage your margins scrupulously. Plus it gives you the oportunity to grow your online visibility expodentially - the more affiliates who take up your adverts, the more you will be seen and the more your online brand will be visible on the web. You can vet affiliate advertisers before you accept them and give them performance incentives to make them work harder for you - and if they don't work for you they don't get paid, so you are taking very little risk.

If you want to discover more about affiliate marketing then there are many books you can read that will show you how to maximise your sales and make a good profit through affiliate marketing including the following:

Affiliate Millions Affiliate MillionsFor more than a decade, the Internet has allowed people to make substantial amounts of money on both a full-time and part-time basis. Today, with even more online opportunities available than ever before, you can achieve a level of financial success that most people only dream about-and in Affiliate Millions, author Anthony Borelli will show you how.With the help of coauthor Greg Holden, Borelli will show you how to make thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of dollars each month through the process of paid search marketing and affiliate advertising. Along the way, they'll also share the secrets to mastering this often-overlooked strategy and provide you with the tools and techniques needed to maximize your potential returns.Since making one million dollars through paid search marketing and affiliate advertising in his first full year of operations, Anthony Borelli has never looked back. Now, he wants to help you do the same. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, Affiliate Millions will introduce you to this profitable endeavor and show you how to make it work for you.

9 Top Ways to Increase Affiliate Commissions 9 Top Ways to Increase Affiliate Commissions

Affiliate Selling This is the first comprehensive guide to the fastest growing form of e-commerce on the Web...

The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 In One Year Selling Other People''s Stuff Online Affiliate marketing is the ultimate home-based Internet business. It requires no development, buying, storing or shipping of products...

A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing A Practical Guide to Affiliate Marketing was written to be an indispensable handbook for all affiliate managers and merchants, alike. In addition to providing concrete, practical answers to common (as well as not-so-common) questions, the book gives usable ideas on promoting affiliate programs, along with ways to keep affiliates motivated. This guide presents the author's information in a logical, convenient format.

Internet Marketing - the devil is in the detail

With Internet marketing attention to detail is everything

When you are marketing your website online, you really have to pay attention to the impact of everything that you change or update on your website and not only check whether the changes deliver more/ better search engine results. You must also ensure that changes aren't going to have any impact upon your conversions as well. The lesson is that even seemingly innocuous changes can have an affect which can be both positive or negative.

One example is a recent addition of snapshot testimonials to our website scattered across some of the major pages. These testimonials provide a great snap shot of some of our major services such as search engine optimisation and software training, and some of them started to appear in the SERPs as well.

Thus far, the exercise was an ostensible success. Especially when in some of our SEO search engine results the string: "SEO testimonial: You're a bloody genius" was appearing. However, for some software training searches this testimonial was also finding its way into the results; not something we want, since this phrasing might be suitable for our SEO customers, but it is less likely to attract software training customers. In order to rectifiy the situation we needed to change the order of our testimonials so that a different and more appropriate SEO testimonial was adjacent to this particular software training testimoinial. Doing this, all a prospect should now see in the SERPS is the software training testimonial and the tail end of something which reads much more on message for our software training customer base.

This all sounds very dry and finnicky, but sometimes you really need to be sensitive to what people are searching for and how they will respond to the text that appears in the search engine results in order to preserve your conversion rates and so improve your performance simultaneously.

SEO and the credit crunch

Is the credit crunch affecting your business?

If your experience is similar to that of any business which I've spoken to, from small one man bands right through to SMEs and blue chips, the answer is probably no. In fact, the vox emptor (voice of the customer) seems particularly chirpy on the business front at the moment, unless of course they are involved in property or financial services. Northern Rock went to the dogs and not a whimper of a downturn in business, HBOS almost goes belly up and still nothing.

The truth is though that hard times may be in the post and the effect of what is going on in the top echelons may filter down to smaller and smaller businesses. This makes it all the more important to insulate yourself with some aggressive marketing which enables you to reach out to ever wider and wider spectrums of prospects. Bring in more visitors to your websites, tighten up your strategies for increasing conversion rates and either fasten your seat belts for a bumpy ride or lay back and relax as the customers start to flood in. Either way, there has rarely been a more important time to think about search engine marketing as a means of getting yourself out to channel and selling more goods and services.

I would also say, protect yourself through diversification. If you only have one revenue stream, then you are taking a big risk. Look for related, ancillary and complementary revenue streams for what you do. Simple options online are of course affiliate marketing and Adsense, but don't stop there. Are you turning away business from people who are asking you for related services that you don't provide? If the answer to this question is yes, then contact companies who do offer those goods and services and try to arrange a commission or referral scheme. Most importantly, try to dip your toes into more than one industry and/or more than one customer demographic - the more elastic and diverse your business model, the less the credit crunch can hurt you.

Be imaginative about your business and what it can achieve, and if you can't afford to pay for professional search engine optimisation services, then here's what you do - add more content to your website and add more web pages - be bold, don't be frightened - add lots and lots and lots, and you will see more visitors and more inbound business.

Google Chrome test drive

Is Google Chrome any good?

With all the hype over the past few days about the arrival of Google Chrome beta, I thought I best take the new web browser on the block for a quick spin. It can be downloaded from here: www.google.com/chrome, if any one would care to give it a try.

My initial impressions before trying Google Chrome are that I will probably keep using FF as my main browser, although I also have IE7, Safari and Opera kicking about they all barely ever get used for anything other than browser compatibility testing.

Okay, firstly, I'm not sure that a lot of people will want their most visited websites appearing on the home page - in a work environment this is going to be a big no no for anyone who likes a bit of extra-curricula browsing, and well elsewhere, we just don't always want people to see exactly what we've been looking at which could quickly give away which bank we use, who our customers are, our shopping preferences or even a penchant for porn websites to anyone who happens to walk in the room or look over your shoulder. From a privacy perspective, this browser shoots itself in the foot straight off. Ok so you can turn off the internet history as with most browsers, but I doubt more than 10% of users will be savvy enough to do this for themselves.

There is one cool privacy feature that certainly deserves a mention and this is the incognito window, which pretty much says what it does on the tin - Google's Chrome Browser promises that

Pages that you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.

This feature goes a long way to overcoming my above reservations - but don't forget that Google Chrome will store your browsing history and cookies etc, by default, so if you don't activate it then your privacy is at risk not just on the Internet but from those who share your home and workspace as well.

In terms of appearance Google Chrome is very clean and crisp and appears to render CSS in a pretty standard way without any gotchas or workarounds needed - but time will tell here through more vigorous usage.

I'm also noticing that from a search perspective Google Chrome seems to be serving up newer results than google.co.uk results displaying on FF. Either this, or the results are being ordered slightly differently. Anyway, a search for one of my new customers' keywords came up page 2 second on FF and page 1 10th on Google Chrome and the results were the same after several repeat searches on both over a few minutes. This keyword had been showing up as page 2 2nd for a couple of days already, so I can only assume that Google Chrome gets new results faster, which should make it popular with SEOs. This might offer a useful way of finding out more quickly whether you are due to head upwards or downwards in the SERPS, but again don't take me at my word here.

I don't like the fact that there is no reload or refresh option on right-mouse-click. I also don't think I'm really too keen on the fact that the zoom option only has three settings - smaller, normal and larger. This is surely not so good from an accessibility perspective. On the plus side there are some slick features such as being able to add application shortcuts to the browser and use it pretty much as a desk top, the incognito browsing and the tab features, but overall, I don't think this is any threat to IE or Mozilla - 6/10 for Google Chrome.