Reliable, Respected, Revered or Feared

What is most the most important attribute to developing your reputation? Would you prefer to be known as reliable, respected, revered or feared? Is it possible to be all of these things over time? Constructing your reputation is like solving a Rubik's Cube puzzle. It takes time, several steps and the right combination of twists and turns. It is also important to know what it should look like when you are done. When you have the goal in your mind, then you can go about solving the puzzle.

The GOAL

The goal of developing your reputation is to be true to yourself. Be consistent with your principals and your personal values. Your actions, your decisions and your interaction with others should be a reflection of the way that you live your life. If you attempt to disguise your intentions or beguile your associates, you will not be able to maintain trust or confidence. If your intentions are to help your customers, look for other individuals with similar intentions. If you are content with your own situation, then enjoy the camaraderie of your peers and help them to achieve their goals. If your intention is personal advancement or promotions, be open about searching for people who will support your efforts.

If you define and share your goals, you will either find supporters or other individuals with similar goals. At the same time, be cognizant and supportive of the goals of those around you. Be prepared to listen intently and understand the aspirations of coworkers and customers. You person who listens the most is heard loudest.

RELIABLE

First, establish a reputation for being reliable. Regardless of your position, title or tenure, the foundation of your reputation should be reliability. If you are the leader, manager, director, clerk, associate or representative, maintain a dedicated focus on being consistently reliable. It is equally important to be a reliable customer as it is to be a reliable vendor or supplier. No matter how powerful or seemingly unimportant you may perceive your responsibilities, there are other people who rely on you. Be consistently reliable for the people you report to, to the people who look up to you, the people that you support and to the people who support you.

Even if some people respect you, revere you or fear you, you will have no value to anyone if you are not reliable. Do not forget this basic foundation in the search for power or prestige. You may be respected for your capability, but what good is it if you can not be counted on as a reliable individual? This is based on your ability to perform consistently and to be supportive of others.

RESPECTED

You do not have to be the president or a brain surgeon to be respected. Take a look at the positions and the people that you respect most in your life. Then look to see what these people have in common. School teachers and police officers are respected for their individual sacrifice and dedication to their profession in the service of others. Respect can be earned by great achievements through consistent effort, self-sacrifice and being someone that other people can count on, being reliable. A leader or a coach does not earn respect for the position, but rather by what they do with the authority and responsibility of the position. A coworker may earn respect by diligence, effort or self-sacrifice. Winning the lottery may achieve instant wealth, but it does not earn instant respect.

What can you do to earn respect? You might be respected for your talent, for your character or for your perseverance. Respect may be earned by the way that you use your experience, knowledge or previous achievements. If you want to be respected and do not know how to begin, start by being reliable.

REVERED or FEARED

For centuries there has been a debate regarding the benefits of being revered or being feared. One dimensional leaders often choose one of these attributes for their reputation and dedicate their ambitions toward a single goal, to be revered or to be feared. Machiavelli described the importance of being feared, and many dictators who embraced this approach were eventually rewarded with revolution. On the other hand, individuals who take extreme measures to be liked or revered may run the risk of being taken advantage of, and thereby losing much more than respect.

In the balance of leadership, individuals are more likely to make perform or make sacrifice for something and somebody that they believe in. When performance and sacrifice is demanded through fear, the output is reluctant and can not be sustained. From a personal perspective, are you more likely to repeat a task and improve your personal performance when doing something that you enjoy, or for someone that you want to please? Are you more or less likely to expend extra effort consistently for a job or a person that you resent?

Good decisions are made when clear purpose and goals are established and shared. The predominance of fear impairs good decisions, or even worse, may precipitate a culture that lacks any decisions for fear of being ostracized. Avoiding a decision is the same as making a decision to allow unmanaged consequences.

It is possible to be both revered and feared. By virtue of being respected as a reliable individual, you will become both revered and feared. Some individuals will appreciate consistency, predictability, direction and reliability. By the same token, if you are consistent with your own personal goals and values, you may be feared by other individuals. If your values are self-serving, you will be revered by a small group of like-minded individuals and feared by many. If your values are self-sacrificing toward the greater good, then you will find yourself revered by many and feared by the self-serving. In any case, consistency of purpose and character will create circumstances that cultivate opportunities to be revered, feared or both. This depth of character is far superior to a hollow one dimensional approach of choosing to be only revered or feared.

What does all this mean? Stop worrying about your reputation and concentrate on doing those things that reputations are built on. Listen intently to others. Be willing to make sacrifices for others. Be consistently reliable, and be true to yourself. Do your job with the same principles and passions that you live your life, and your reputation will take care of itself. By coincidence, if you can achieve this dedicated diligence to your values, you will discover an inverse relationship that your reputation will grow as your care less about it.

Words of Wisdom

"Conscience and reputation are two things. Conscience is due to yourself, reputation to your neighbor." - Saint Augustine

"You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do." - Henry Ford

"Regard your good name as the richest jewel you can possibly be possessed of - for credit is like fire; when once you have kindled it you may easily preserve it, but if you once extinguish it, you will find it an arduous task to rekindle it again. The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear." - Socrates

"There are two modes of establishing our reputation: to be praised by honest men, and to be abused by rogues. It is best, however, to secure the former, because it will invariably be accompanied by the latter." - Charles Caleb Colton

Search Engine Tools Not Just For SEO

By Gennady Lager (c) 2007
Sadly, not everyone in the world knows everything about search engine optimization. In fact, very few people know anything about SEO or even what it is. Even fewer know any search offerings that may help your experience as a search engine user, a website navigator, a webmaster or researcher.

I have compiled a líst of free search engine and internet tools handy for everyone to use and improve their experience with some useful resources. Please note that if you are an SEO practitioner, none of these are news to you and you are well aware of these resources. For everyone else, this is a nice little database of handy stuff.

Google Products

Google has developed a smorgasbord of handy tools and products offered for frëe use to everyone. You can bet that they have developed something to almost everyone's interest. Some of the products I frequently use are Alerts, Blog Search, Earth, Analytics, Toolbar, Image Search, Trends, Page Creator, Maps, Gmail, Talk, and YouTube. These are only some of the products — Google offers many more!

Search Engine Commands

Most often used by search engine professionals such as search engine optimizers - very few others know about these search engine commands. Knowing them can really bring information about a specific site and its standing in the World Wide Web to light. Here are some of the most important and generally supported commands:

Site: - Displays all of the pages indexed by the engine of the site.
Link: - Locates some links pointing to the site.
Cache: - Shows the last indexed and cached version of a site.
Info: - Displays general info about a site with other search commands.
Related: - Shows websites that may be semantically or directly related to the site.

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Editor's Note: The above commands all work from the Google search form. Examples of typical usage would be as follows:

site:http://www.yourdomain.com
info:http://www.yourdomain.com
related:http://www.yourdomain.com
etc.

Some, but not all, of these commands will work in Yahoo! and MSN as well as some other search engines.
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Google Webmaster Tools

Google's Webmaster Tools are a godsend. Once verified as the owner via Meta tag or HTML file, you have access to a wide variety of information from sitemaps, to links, to anchor text, to crawl rates and errors. Best of all, GWT are always expanding the information that is being provided and is sure to provide more great features in the near future. In the meantime, I will keep using it and so should you.

Site Explorer

Yahoo Site Explorer is a handy tool, similar to Google Webmaster tools but not as robust yet, that can provide some helpful information about a site. It can display all pages in the Yahoo index which is always helpful in finding indexation and duplicate content issues. But Site Explorer's bread and butter is its "Inlinks" feature which is the most comprehensive external link reporting tool available via search engine. The links can be filtered by domains and URL's, but most importantly, they are sorted from most important to least. Best of all, you can export all of the data to a TSV file.

Keyword Research

Probably not as useful to the casual user, but for the paid search practitioner, webmaster, or business owner, keyword research is an important factor for developing campaigns, pages, and business models. As frëe tools, I like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery although the paid versions of these tools are much more robust.

Markup validation

The World Wide Web Consortium has developed a standard of markup code compliance that all sites should attempt to adhere to in order to ensure cross-browser compliance, proper rendering, and complete search engine indexation. The W3C attempts "to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the web."

DMCA

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a US law that criminalizes the reproduction and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that use methods to allow for the access and ungranted use of copyrighted information. Basically, this law provides that you cannot steal other people's intellectually copyrighted information off the internet. If you operate a website, make certain to understand this.

Quoted Search

The quoted search is a searching technique that is not used as often as it should be. By employing quotations around a phrase, you are searching for the appearance of that exact phrase in that exact order and not just a relevant collection of those same words on a webpage or in links pointing to a page. This is very useful when you know exactly what you need such as product or a famous saying.

FireFox Extensions

FireFox is really cool! I use it all the time and cannot live without it. It also allows for contributions from anyone willing to do some programming and offër up a frëe tool. With that said, there are many SEO tools available as FireFox extensions, but there are also many very useful non-SEO tools for general use on the internet, for developers, and for searching that are extremely handy.

Google In-Search Features

Ever need a quick reference search for a definition of a word? What about a handy calculator? A search for specific file type? Ever need to look for movie information online? Do you need a handy weather report right out of your Google search bar? All of this information and more is available via quick Google search.

Here are some of the commands:

Define:
Form:
Movie:
Weather:
Book:

10 Rules to Keep Your Website Visitors Engaged

By Deepak Dutta (c) 2007

Do you know that most visitors leave a website within 10 seconds of landing on the home page? And they may nevër return to the same site. To keep your website visitors stay longer, you need to engage them. Follow these 10 simple rules to build a set of core loyal visitors who will return to your site frequently.

1. If you have a brick-and-mortar business and you want an online presence, don't just hand over your printed brochure to the web developer for your site's content.

2. Get good text, picture, and video content related to your products or services and organize them into categories for your website publication. How do you get content? You can ask your kids to write content for you. Today's kids are information savvy and know how to do research on right topics. They can help take pictures and videos of your products and provide narrations. If you cannot leverage your kids talents and you don't have time to develop content, buy them from online sources, like distributors of private label rights to articles and stöck photographs. You need a small content set to launch your web site.

3. Ask your developer for some sample websites he has developed in the past and review them. If you find clutter, music, unprofessional graphics, etc. in those sites, run away from the developer. Tell your web developer to use basic search engine optimization techniques for your web site. Use a developer who uses content management systems (CMS) to develop websites. You or your kids and spouse will be able to maintain and add content regularly to a CMS without much effort.

4. You must have an About US page in your website that explains the expertise of your company and your unique selling proposition. Also, you should provide a telephone number and an e-mail address for contact.

5. Publish a weekly tips section in your website. If you are in a business for a long time, you have a wealth of knowledge about your business, market, and technologies related to your business. Make it a habit of jotting down one tip every day. You will have plenty of tips for your weekly publication.

6. Don't use guest books, testimonials etc. These are so Web 1.0 concepts. Use a forum. Let your customers interact among themselves. Develop a value network. You get into the insights of your customers' minds by reading their posts and your visitors know your products and services by talking to each other. As a result, you will be able to provide improved products and services and ask for a premium price.

7. Promptly answer all your visitors' e-mail. This is one thing you should nevër delay. Use your visitors comments, e-mail, and other form of communications to generate ideas for new articles and tips.

8. Tell your web developer to include an RSS feed on your site and publish filtered news related to the market you serve and emerging technologies in that market. Don't use a weather report. Nobody comes to your site to chëck the weather.

9. Publish a frequently asked questíons page related to your products and services. It helps save your visitors' time and effort when they are looking for information on a particular topic related to your website.

10. Did you know that the average person must be exposed to an offër around seven times before they will make a purchase? Make your website an advertising platform for your most popular items. Advertise them throughout your site but don't use any 'in-your face advertising' techniques. You can use side bars for this type of advertising with interesting anecdotes, pictures, etc. Be creative and use your imagination.

Your website is your publishing medium. It is not your online catalog. You want repeat visitors who spend their time at your site for valuable information. The possibility of visitors turning into a paying customers improves when they stick around your site longer.

Top 10 Tips for Using Web 2.0 to Promote Your Business

By Kevin Stirtz (c) 2007

We hear a lot about "Web 2.0" these days. It sounds neat and it's trendy to talk about blogging and social media. But does it really affect our businesses? Is Web 2.0 just for kids and tech-hipsters or is it something we business owners should use to help promote our businesses?

I can't tell you if Web 2.0 is right for your business, but I can tell you it's something to be aware of. Ignoring it means ignoring a possible tool that could be valuable in helping you get more customers.

So, to help you get started in thinking about Web 2.0 for your business, here are some things for you to consider.

1. Have a plan

Don't dive in just because it's cool or because you read an article about it. Be clear about what you're trying to accomplish, how much you're willing to invest and what time frame you are working on. Like any aspect of your business - plan ahead.

2. Make sure your target audience is online

Web 2.0 tools are fun but useless if the people who see your stuff don't want what you offër. Or if they don't look to the Web for information to help them buy what you sell, then your efforts will be less effective. Like any marketing channel, it only works if your prospective customers are there to see (or hear) your message and they are receptive to it.

3. Create good content

Web 2.0 is the social web, but it's still content-driven. Lousy content leads to lousy marketing, no matter how flashy it is. Make your content relevant, interesting and real. Put yourself in your customer's shoes and answer their questíons with your content.

4. Don't sell

Help, inform, educate but do not sell. Web 2.0 is all about people connecting by helping each other. No salesmen allowed! Think education, not advertising. Deliver useful, nuts and bolts stuff or honest opinions they can believe. That's how you build credibility and trust that lead to new customer relationships.

5. Start with a free hosted blog

Wordpress and Blogger both have very useful and simple blogs you can setup for frëe. Use them to start blogging and get a feel for how it works and how people use Web 2.0. Dip your toe in the water before diving in.

6. Talk to kids

Chat with some kids (ages 8 to 18) and find out how they use the web. They are the trend-setters. What they're doing now, the rest of us will be doing soon. Learn what they do and why. This helps you understand the web from a different perspective.

7. Do it yourself

Web 2.0 is about being real. It's real people connecting with each other. It's okay to hire a pro to advise you. But to keep it genuine, make sure you or your employees create the content and do the work. Otherwise people will know you're faking it.

8. Buy a camcorder and start shooting

Go to Best Buy or Radio Shack and buy an inexpensive camcorder, tripod and lapel microphone. Buy 20-30 tapes too. Then take a weekend and shoot film. Practice, practice, practice. Get comfortable being on camera so you're not nervous or dorky. Then, write a funny or useful how-to sketch and film it. Use Microsoft MovieMaker to edit and then upload to YouTube.com.

9. Buy an inexpensive audio recorder

MusicBarn.com has a package that includes M-Audio's MobilePre USB recording interface. Add a microphone and you have a high quality setup to record podcasts and MP3 audio files whenever you want. Then buy NGWave sound editing software to make it sound professional and you're in business.

10. Surf 'till it Hurts

Surf blogs, YouTube, Google Videos, Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Technorati and other social media websites. Get a feel for how they work and who goes there. Become part of some social media communities. Make new friends online. Immerse yourself in the Web 2.0 culture so you know how it works and if it might fit your marketing plans.

The Top 10 Tools for Monitoring the Success of Your Website

By Steven Snell (c) 2007
One of the most important aspects of running a website is monitoring the site and its progress. By monitoring your website you will be able to see how it is performing and how it can be improved. This article covers 10 frëe tools that can help you to optimize your site for maximum results.

1 – Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become the preferred option among frëe statistics programs. Like any other stats program, Google Analytics provides data on the number of visitors, and page views, referral sources, entry and exit pages, and more. Unlike most other programs, Google Analytics includes the ability to track and monitor pay-per-clíck (PPC) campaigns. Other useful information includes the geographic location of your visitors, their internet connection speed, and their screen resolutions. You can sign up for Google Analytics at:

http://bizsolutions.google.com/services/

2 – Google Webmaster Tools

Want to know how the largest search engine in the world sees your website? Google's Webmaster Tools will give you loads of information such as the pages that are indexed, errors found by the Googlebot (dead links), your search engine rankings for specific search phrases, your anchor text on inbound links, internal and external link data, and robots.txt and sitemap data.

By knowing how Google sees your site you will find some basic items that you'll need to change in order to reach your maximum potential in search engine traffíc. You can sign up for Google Webmaster Tools at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

3 – SEOmoz's Page Strength Tool

SEOmoz is one of the leading search engine optimization (SEO) firms and their website provides a wealth of information through their blog, articles and tools. Their Page Strength Tool shows you the "relative importance and visibility" and the "potential strength and ability of a page to rank in the search engines." SEOmoz provides a quick way to get a basic look at the strength of your page. The Page Strength Tool can be used at:

http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength

4 – Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer

Sitening is another leading SEO firm with several valuable tools on their website. The SEO Analyzer differs from SEOmoz's Page Strength Tool in that it checks the internal structure of your site to determine how well it is constructed (in terms of search engine optimization). The structure of a website is the framework for a good SEO campaign, and Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer will help you to build the right framework. Sitening.com's SEO Analyzer can be found at:

http://www.sitening.com/seo-tools/seo-analyzer/

5 – Mike's Marketing Tools

MikesMarketingTools.com has two tools that every webmaster should use regularly. The Search Engine Rankings Tool will show you where your site ranks in several of the top search engines for a specific word or phrase. You can save time by using this tool instead of visiting each search engine and clicking through the search engine results pages to find your website.

The Link Popularity Tool will quickly show you how many inbound links each search engine recognizes for your site. Inbound links are a major factor in search engine rankings and each search engine recognizes a different number of links. From this tool you can also clíck through to see the specific pages that are linking to you. To use these tools visit:

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/free-marketing-tools.html

6 – Summit Media's Spider Simulator

The spider simulator shows you "how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your usability." Search engine spiders see web pages much differently than human visitors do. A page may look attractive and well-designed to a human visitor, but a search engine spider may not be able to find what it is looking for. This page is a great tool to assure you that your site is built for maximum search engine results. The spider simulator can be used at:

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

7 – SelfSEO Page Speed Checker

Your average website visitor will have a very short attention span. To have the best chance of making a positive first impression on new visitors your page must load quickly enough that they do not leave right away. SelfSEO has a Page Speed Tool that shows you how long your page takes to load. The tool allows you to enter multiple pages to chëck at one time. It is a good idea to compare the load time of your page against pages from several other websites. Try entering your homepage and the homepage of several of your competitors. If your page loads considerably slower than the others, try to make the file smaller by reducing the number and size of images or by cleaning up the coding. The Page Speed Tool can be used at:

http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php

8 – Dead Links Checker

Having dead links on your website can frustrate visitors and damage your search engine rankings. However, checking all the links on your site manually is not realistic. Fortunately there are a number of tools online that will automate the process. The W3 Link Checker will crawl through your pages and report which links are broken. To use this tool visit:

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

9 – GoogleRankings.com

GoogleRankings.com will show you which words and phrases appear most frequently on your website throughout the text of the page, title, headings and meta tags. This is a useful tool to be certain that your pages are optimized for the words and phrases that you are targeting.

10 – FeedBurner

If you publish a blog, FeedBurner's service is a must have. Feedburner will provide you with statistics regarding your blog's feed and you can give your readers the option to subscribe by email instead of RSS. There are a number of other features that you can read about at FeedBurner. With FeedBurner you can always see how many subscribers you have and how many of them are clicking through from your feed to your site.

SEO as a Dirty Business

In real life, presidential election campaigns are run behind closed doors and their actors often play dirty tricks on each other; for "All's fair in love and war." The final purpose of the game is political supremacy. Power. In SEM... the top of Google's SERP.

From Graywolf's "How to Be a Dirty Digger" to Greenberg's "The Saboteurs of Search" we learn that online marketing and politics play on similar grounds.That the search engines can be manipulated is no secret, but most SEOs try a positive approach and define their strategies as ethical or "white-hat."

In Aaron Wall's dictionary, there is no such thing as ethical SEO because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ a technique (any) to manipulate the search engines, you "SPAM." The only question is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective?

Part of the answer comes from Google's Webmaster Guidelines (quality guidelines - specific guidelines), more comes from Bruce Clay's SEO code of ethics, and if that's not enough you could always rely on an answer from authority SEO professionals.

Now back to SEO as a dirty business.

Strangely enough in real life it is a lot easier to harm than to heal. Somehow supremacy and power are achieved faster through war than peaceful negotiations. No surprise here: negotiating peacefully takes time to find a compromise which, in many situations, is not what the parts involved hoped to achieve.

SEM is quite similar. For every winner, there's a loser, and many companies that rely on Google for traffic employ questionable SEO tactics to achieve good rankings for their most competitive keyword phrases.

But this is nothing compared to those that employ "political tricks" to harm their competitors. Forbes lists in "The Saboteurs of Search" two techniques (out of seven): Google bowling and Google insulation.

Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a competitor's site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links -- and many links at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period of time, using special software. They'll mostly come from bad neighbors and they'll all have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture complete. Google is just a machine, so there's no real way for this machine to know who is behind the link spam. The "guilty" site might lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn why.

If something like this has happened to your site, all you can really do is to find out who hates you so much. Google bowling is not the only negative SEO technique that might hurt a competitor site.

Tattling, as correctly identified by Forbes, is something that even Google's Matt Cutts encourages, by asking people to report sites that buy links. I really wonder how Google verifies such complaints.

Basically anyone can assume that a contextual link in one of my blog entries is a paid link (what if I monetize my site with V7 contextual?).

There are many other questionable SEO strategies to demolish competition. I happen to consider them a waste of time and energy. The Forbes article quoted above contains a pretty interesting statement: "Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult."

If negative SEO is difficult, we are prone to believe that it seldom happens. I think that, in some niches, it happens quite often. But these are simple theories. As long as I do not have the data to back them up, I prefer to keep my analysis to a minimum of delivering information.

There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scrapper sites harm writers by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand where the "harm" lies.

For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your rankings are harmed, especially if the scrapper site happens to have more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your rankings and your copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright holder) the time to sue for infringement.

Many bloggers wake up one day to find their articles duplicated on obscure sites, MFA sites and so on. They are often frustrated and they ask in forums the classic: what can I do if someone copies my content. Well, now you have a possible answer: you don't need to go to court to punish a site for copyright infringement. It is enough to file a complaint at Google and you've got the guilty site out of the Google SERPs for at least 10 days.

Careful though, a fraudulent copyright complaint can get you in trouble, and not just with the search engines. So don't just go around filing complaints. The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days, but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar complaint and the site's integrity will be seriously questioned. Just remember: what goes around, comes around.

Get top 10 rankings on Google & Yahoo!

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Benefit from a professional SEO method

A search engine optimization method that really works is to analyze the web pages that currently have a high ranking for your important keyword. Since these pages have a top 10 ranking, the pages must have the best settings.

With IBP, analyzing the top ranked web pages is as easy as 1-2-3. IBP tells you how the top ranked pages have achieved that ranking and how you must change your web pages and the links to your web site to obtain a similar ranking.

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How to optimize your website for Google

For example, IBP can tell you to how to rank higher in Google for your favorite keywords.

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Improved Search Engine Rank: Google Page Rank Misconceptions

By Peter Nisbet (c) 2007
Improved search engine rank is attainable through good search engine optimization, part of which is the maximizing of your Google Page Rank through intelligent linking with other web pages. In this first part of 2 on the subject of Google Page Rank, we will look at the argument for attaining high listings through a linking strategy.

Google Page Rank is a buzz term at the moment since many believe it to be more important to your search engine listing than search engine optimization. If we ignore for the moment the fact that Page Rank is, in itself, a förm of SEO, then there are arguments for and against that belief.

Before we investigate these arguments, let's understand some fundamentals of search engine listings. First, most search engines líst web pages, not domains (websites). What that means is that every web page in a domain has to be relevant to a specific search term if it is to be listed.

Secondly, a search engine customer is the person who is using that engine to seek information. It is not an advertiser or the owner of a website. It is the user seeking information. The förm of words that is used by that customer is called a 'search term'. This becomes a 'keyword' when applied to a webmaster trying to anticipate the förm of words that a user will employ to search for their information.

A search engine works by analyzing the semantic content of a web page and determining the relative importance of the vocabulary used, taking into account the title tags, the heading tags and the first text it detects. It will also chëck out text related contextually to what it considers to be the main 'keywords' and then rank that page according to how relevant it calculates it to be for the main theme of the page.

It will then examine the number of other web pages that are linked to it, and regard that as a measure of how important, or relevant to the 'keyword', that the page is. The value of the links is regarded as peer approval of the content. All of these factors determine how high that page is listed for search terms that are similar contextually to the content of the page.

Without doubt, there are web pages that are lísted high in the search engine indices that contain very little in the way of useful content on the keywords for which they are listed, and have virtually no contextual relevance to any search term. However, a careful investigation of these sites will reveal two things.

The first is that many such web pages are frequently lísted highly only for relatively obscure search terms. If a search engine customer uses a common search term to find the information they are seeking, they will very rarely be led to a site that has little content other than links, but it is possible. The second is that they contain large numbers of links out to other web pages, and it can be assumed that they have at least an equal number of web pages linking back.

It is possible to find such web pages for many keywords. An example is on the first page on Google for the keyword 'Data VOIP Solutions'. There is a website there that is comprised only of links. The site itself has little content, but every link leads to either another website that provides useful content, or another internal page full of more links and no content. That is how links can be used to lift a web page high in the SE listings.

Such sites frequently contain only the bare minimum of conventional search engine optimization, but the competition is so low that they gain high listings. You will also find them to contain large numbers of internal pages, every one of which contain the same internal and external links.

It is true, therefore, that it is possible to get a high listing without much content, but with a large number of links. However, is that a legítimate argument for those promoting links against content? Could you reasonably apply that strategy to your website? Could a genuine website really contain thöusands of links to other internal pages and external pages on other websites, and still maintain its intended purpose?

In the second part of this article, titled 'Search Engine Rank: Google Page Rank Misconceptions' I will explode some myths about Page Rank, and explain how many people are wasting their time with reciprocal links, and perhaps even losing through them. It may be that a linking strategy is not so much an option, as a choice between the type of website that you want: to provide genuine information or to make monëy regardless of content.

Improved search engine rank might be synonymous with Google Page Rank, but perhaps only if you want to sacrifice the integrity of your website.

Part 2

Improved search engine rank is difficult enough to obtain without you having to trawl through all that has been written about Google Page Rank in order to find the truth. There are many misconceptions about Page Rank, and Part 2 of this article dispels the most common of them, the first being that Yahoo and MSN have their own version.

In fact this is not so. Yahoo had a beta version of a 'Web Rank' visible for a while, ranking complete websites, but it is now offline. MSN has no equivalent as far I can ascertain. The term 'PageRank' is a trade mark of Google, which is why I refer to it as Page Rank and not PageRank. A small difference, but a significant one.

If you are one of those that believe that the more links you can get to your website the better, then you are wrong. When Google started the Page Rank frenzy by putting that little green bar on their toolbar, they didn't realize the consequences of what they were doing. People fought to get as many links to their website as possible, irrespective of the nature of the websites to which they were linking.

That is misconception Number 2. You do not link to websites, you link to web pages, or should I say, you get links back from web pages, not websites. It is, after all, the link back that counts isn't it? The link away from your site doesn't count. Wrong! Misconception Number 3. The link to your web page counts no more than the link away from your web page. In fact, it could count less. You could löse out in the reciprocal linking stakes if your web page is worth more than the other person's.

Let's dispel that misconception right now. When you receive a link from a web page (not web site) you get a proportion of the Google Page Rank of that web page that depends on the total number of links leaving that page. When you provide a link to another web page, you give away a proportion of your Page Rank that depends on the number of other links leaving your web page.

The Page Rank of the website you get a link from is irrelevant, since that is generally the rank of the Home Page. You will likely find that all these great links you think you have from PR 7 or 8 websites are from a links page that has a PR of ZERO! So you get zilch for the deal. If you are providing them with a link from a page on your site even of PR 1, then you löse! Most people fail to understand that.

No incoming link can have a negative effect on your PR. It can have a zero effect, but not negative. However, if you have an incoming link with zero effect, and an outgoing reciprocal link with a positive effect to the target page, then you will effectively löse PR through the deal. Every web page starts with a PR of 1, and so has that single PR to share amongst other pages to which it is linked. The more incoming links it has, the higher PR it can have to share out.

If your page has a PR of 4 and has three links leaving it, each gets twice the number of PR votes than if 6 links leave it. Your page with a PR of 4 has to get a similar number of PR votes incoming as it gives away to retain its PR. In simple terms, if your PR 4 page is getting links from a PR 8 page with 20 links leaving it, you löse out big time! It's simple math.

No page ever gives away all of its PR. There is a factor in Google's calculation that reduces this to below 100% of the total PR of any page. However, that is roughly how it works. You don't get a proportion of the whole website ranking; you only get part of the ranking of the page on which your link is placed. Since most 'Links Pages' tend to be full of other outgoing links, then you won't get much, and will likely get zero.

That is why automated reciprocal linking software is often a waste of time. If you want to make the best of linking arrangements, then agree with the other webmaster that you will provide each other with a link from equally ranked pages. That way both of you will gain, and neither loses. Some software allows you to make these arrangements.

Another misconception is that only links from external web pages count. In fact, links between your own web pages can be arranged to provide one page with most of the page rank available. Every page has a start PR of 1, so the more pages you have on your site then the more PR you have to play with and distribute to pages on your website of your choice.

Search engine rank can be improved by intelligent use of links, both external and internal, but Google Page Rank does not have the profound effect on your search engine listing that many have led you to believe. Good onsite SEO usually wins so keep that in mind when designing your website.

Affordable Solutions For Internet Marketing

Do you have a website that is getting very little or no traffic at all? Well, there are ways that you can change that even on a small marketing budget. We will review each of the strategies you can use to promote your website, and then we will try to assimilate them into a single, uniform strategy that is both highly effective and affordable.

First of all, TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertising are very expensive. This is undoubtedly the best way to launch a business, but the costs are prohibitive. A full page ad in a prominent magazine or other publication can run as high as $50,000 per ad. TV commercials can run just as high; if the commercial runs during a popular television show or sporting event, the cost will be enormous.

So, if you do not have enough money in the coffers for traditional advertising, you will likely have to use online marketing. This is not a bad thing. Offline advertising (i.e. radio, TV, print ads) is sometimes not effective. Marketing on the internet is cheaper, and if done correctly, can give you much more bang for your buck.

Obviously, the cornerstone of internet marketing is search engine submission and optimization. There are hundreds of different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site for a listing. This is fairly easy to do. Simply sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service. There are literally hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by performing a search on Google.

However, be wary of submitters that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. Such services are scams, and they will submit your web page to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit to the major search engines and directories.

Now that we have covered submission, we need to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which is even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases that best characterize the subject matter of your site, and you need to use proper Meta tags so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.

If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization professional on Google. Steer clear of SEO experts who want to charge $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they really can not help you get to the top of the rankings. Stick to providers who will optimize your site for a one-time fee.

More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be. There are more than a few ways to acquire links, but I have a certain strategy that worked well for me.

My advice to you is to write articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release distribution services who will then distribute your articles and press releases to other websites who will publish them and in return link back to you. Also, you can submit your site to bloggers through a popular service called Blogitive (Blogitive will get blogs to post one-way anchor text links to your site in their blog, which will greatly enhance your search engine ranking).

If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your web site instantly by using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engine listings for certain keywords. This can be extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.

The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. Some internet companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it costs you nothing.

To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to as many directories as possible (there are directories where you can list your affiliate program for free). The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards visited by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online business. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the affiliate program so that the codes used to track sales for each affiliate will work properly.

So, to summarize, you should first optimize your website and submit it to search engines. You should then begin submitting articles and press releases to article directories and press release distribution services. You should also submit your site to Blogitive so that bloggers will write a review of your site and link to it, further boosting your link popularity. You might want to join a link exchange, but trading links often proves fruitless. Also, you should set up an affiliate program. And finally, you should budget a small amount of money to spend each week on pay-per-click.

If you are persistent and use all of these methods, you will continually increase your traffic over a period of time. It will probably take approximately 3 years of performing each of the tasks outlined in this article, on a daily basis, to get where you want to be. Just stick with it and your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.

The Myth of W3C Compliance?

By Sasch Mayer (c) 2007
The past few years have seen a huge íncrease in the number of search engine optimisers preaching about the vital importance of W3C Compliance as part of any effective web promotion effort. But is compliant code really the 'Magic SEO Potion' so many promoters make it out to be?

For those of you not familiar with the term; a W3C compliant web site is one which adheres to the coding standards laid down by the World Wide Web Consortium, an organisation comprising of over 400 members including all the major search engines and global corporations such as AT&T, HP and Toshiba amongst many others. Headed by Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet as we know it today, the W3C has been working to provide a set of standards designed to keep the web's continuing evolution on a single, coherent track since the Consortium's inception in 1994.

Whilst the W3C has been a fact of life on the web since this time, general industry awareness of the benchmarks set down by the Consortium has taken some time to filter through to all quarters. Indeed, it is only within the past 24 to 36 months that the term W3C Compliance has emerged from general obscurity to become a major buzzword in the web design and SEO industries.

Although personally, I have been a staunch supporter of the Consortium's standards for a long time, I cannot help but feel that their importance has been somewhat overplayed by a certain faction within the SEO sector, who are praising code compliance as a 'cure-all' for poor search engine performance.

Is standards compliance really the universal panacea it is commonly claimed to be these days?

Let's take a quick look at some of the arguments most commonly used by SEOs and web designers:

1. Browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Lynx will not display your pages properly.

Browser compatibility is possibly one of the most frequently cited reasons for standards compliance, with Firefox being the usual target for these claims. Speaking from personal experience, Firefox will usually display all but the most broken code with reasonable success. In fact, this browser's main issue seems to lie more with its occasional failure to correctly interpret the exact onscreen position of layers (Div tags - this often causes text overlap) even when expressed correctly, than its inability to deal with broken code.

What about Lynx? Interestingly enough whilst it is somewhat more fragile than Firefox, most of the problems encountered by this text-only browser mostly seem to stem from improper content semantics (paragraphs out of sequence) than poor code structure.

2. Search engines will have problems indexing your site.

Some SEOs actively claim that search engine spiders have trouble indexing non-compliant web pages. Whilst, again speaking from personal experience, there is an element of truth to these claims; it is not the sheer number of errors which causes a search engine spider to have a 'nervous breakdown', but the type of error encountered. So long as the W3C Code Validator is able to parse (*) a page's source code from top to bottom, a search engine will likely be able to index it and classify its content. On the whole, indexing problems arise when code errors specifically prevent a page from being parsed altogether, rather than non-critical errors which allow the process to continue.

* To parse is to process a file in order to extract the desired information. Linguistic parsing may recognise words and phrases or even speech patterns in textual content.

3. Disabled internet users will not be able to use your site.

The inevitable, but somewhat weak, counter-argument to this point is that only an infinitely small percentage of internet users are visually or aurally impaired. However, it is a fact that browsers such as Lynx and JAWS (no, not the shark) will view a web page's code in much the same way as a search engine spider. From this perspective, we once again return to the difference between critical and non-critical W3C compliance errors. As long as whatever tool/browser/spider is used to extract text content from a page's code is able to continue its allotted task, the user is likely to be able to view the page in a satisfactory manner.

Interestingly, one of my fellow designer/SEOs over in Japan has just run an experiment entitled "W3C Validation; Who cares?" testing the overall importance of W3C compliance to long-term web promotion efforts. Whilst the results of this, the world's most non-compliant web page, do initially indicate that compliance does not make much of a difference to a search engine's ability to index and classify a web page, I do rather suspect that further research may be needed in order to establish the long-term effects of this experiment.

At the time of writing however, the page ranks well with Google for the following two non-specific search terms; "Does Google care about validation" and "Google care validation" - not bad for a page which is supposed to be utterly and completely un-indexable. What then is the answer to the W3C compliance conundrum?

In conclusion I would say that ignoring the World Wide Web Consortium's standards at this stage may well have negative consequences in the long-term, as the internet's continuing evolution is likely to place greater emphasis on good coding practices in the future. Having said this, I would also say that the current value of W3C compliance has been overplayed by some professionals in the web design and SEO industries.

Further studies into the effects of non-compliance are certainly needed.

Seven Tips for Successful Keyword Research

Before you set out to march your way to the top of search rankings you'll need to take a good survey of the terrain ahead. You need to do a good amount of keyword research. Surprisingly, many webmasters seem to have stepped past this important starting point, and doing so has most definitely set obstacles, some impassable, in their path. Keyword research is the only way to approach SEO with informed expectations. How competitive are the keywords you are optimizing for? What keywords are you including in your link building efforts? What will it take to succeed? Answering these questions ahead of time makes all the difference.

Here are seven key tips for successful keyword research.

1. Use a proper tool.

Sure, there's a lot of free stuff available out there, but when it comes to keyword research free tools are few and far from powerful. If you're considering investing either money or time into SEO for your web site look at a solid keyword research tool as a necessity.

Some of the better keyword research tools:

a. SEOmoz's Keyword Difficulty Tool - this tool from one of the great SEO innovators gives you a good general idea of how competitive your keyword/phrase is.

b. Trellian's Keyword Discovery Tool - user-friendly, simple, and feature-rich. One of the best keyword research tools available.

c. WordTracker Keywords - second to none, WordTracker has been a leader in keyword research for years. A great value.

2. Identify *viable* targets.

We'd all love to rank well for the most general and all-encompassing search phrase related to our topic, but only a handful ever will. Targeting some ultra-competitive keywords is as good as shooting yourself in the foot unless you've got massive amounts of time and resources to throw at the problem.

Finding long-tail (three words and more) and targeted search phrases that are actually getting traffic can mean the difference between SEO success and failure. Be reasonable in your expectations, and fight the big guys by researching long-tail search phrases that have slipped beneath the radar. You might also find that long-tail search phrases bring better conversion rates for your topic.

3. Keep it relevant.

You may find keywords and phrases that offer inroads to high search rankings, but it's important to remember that the ultimate end is traffic and how you utilize it. In other words, you need to be sure your keywords relate to your web site. If you get a page to rank well enough to bring in some search traffic, but when users actually view that page they either can't make sense of the content or find the page unrelated to your topic (or worse - spammy) that search traffic will do you no good. Not only will off-topic or spammy content affect your brand and drive users from your site, but there's a chance Google could catch on to your irrelevant content or spammy techniques and penalize your domain for it.

4. Don't be too wordy.

No, really. A common mistake is to choose your keywords based on your own perspective rather than that of your target users. Sure, you know your topic inside and out. You know the buzz words, the technical details and a whole lot more, but do your users? What if the user isn't sure what they're looking for? Maybe they know the function but not the name. Keep this in mind when researching keywords, and make sure you consider your choices from the perspective of someone very new to your topic.

5. Consider local search.

One area small to mid-sized web sites can really find a competitive edge is in locally-specific search phrases. These are inherently less competitive and therefore are easier to rank well for. However, go back to #3 and think it through - if your web site is locally specific or if users will want to know your location this is a good strategy, but optimizing pages for local keywords that will look out of place to users can be a mistake.

6. Monitor your web analytics.

One of the great benefits of web analytics is that it allows you to monitor keyword referrals. In other words, you can find out what visitors are searching for when they land at your site. For brand new sites there won't be too much data, but if your site has been around at all and is getting some organic search traffic you will find that your analytics reports are a great source of keyword information. Referring search phrases can be surprising - sometimes including misspellings and other abnormalities. Keep an eye on your analytics, and you might find a keyword worth optimizing for.

7. Constantly reevaluate your position.

While keyword research is definitely the first step in developing your site content from an SEO standpoint it should also be a recurring one. Internet trends shift quickly. While a lot of your core keywords will remain unchanged for the foreseeable future some buzz words will get attention while others fall from the spotlight. Stay on top of your keyword research and you can make the most of new opportunities while recognizing the less-than-ideal keywords that are either too competitive or don't bring in enough traffic.

Scam Alert II: Domain Hijacking

By Douglas Miller (c) 2007
There's a frightening new batch of scams going around now that can damage your reputation as domain "squatters" steal your domain name.

There are a number of ways the "game" is played. The first is entirely legal, if more than a little questionable. In this version, the name of a city or geographic area is grabbed by a domain squatter and pointed to... "sites that you wouldn't want your children visiting."

(We chose that term to avoid getting caught in a lot of sp@m filters for the use of the word "p-o-rn.")

A prominent notice is placed on the sites, offering them for sale at prices that range from $2500 to as much as $500,000!

The idea here is that city officials will feel that enough damage is being done to the reputations of their towns that they'll pay to keep them from being associated with that type of material.

It's obviously safe to say that it's not appropriate to pop those kinds of images into people's faces while they're looking for info on a completely different topic.

That's where the pressure on the cities comes from, and why this is such a disgusting scheme.

In essence, the domain squatter says: "Pay us, or continue to watch as your city's reputation suffers."

Many would call this blackmail...

The second variation on the theme is not always legal. When someone takes a trademarked name (or variation of the spelling of one) or a famous person's name, and does the same thing.

For trademarks or close variations, there's a specific procedure for addressing the problem. (See the resource section at the end of this issue.)

For the names of famous people, there MAY be a remedy. But, it can be tricky -- and expensive.

For example, if someone named John Jones registered http://WalterCronkite.com and pointed it to one of "those" sites, Walter Cronkite could probably force the domain away from him.

However, if someone named Steve Cronkite registered http://Cronkite.com and did the same thing, Walter Cronkite would have no recourse. It would be very hard to demonstrate that Steve registered the domain in bad faith. And if Steve's son's name is Walter, the same is true for http://WalterCronkite.com.

If you feel that your name is likely to be typed into a browser when people are looking for information on you, you should consider getting both the .com and .net versions of the domain if they're available.

It will cost you a few bucks to prevent the problem. Fixing it, assuming you win, will cost you hundreds -- if not thousands -- of dollars.

And there's no guarantëe you'll win.

A third version is a bit more benign. It's common among members of affilíate programs. In this version, names very close to, or even including, the trademark are registered. The sites are created to drive traffíc to the affiliates' URL at the main site.

This may or may not be acceptable to the affilíate program owner. If it is, it's a good technique for getting traffíc. If not, it could get you into hot water. Chëck with the owner of the trademark before doing this. Less benign is an alternative version of this technique where someone grabs domain names that are close to the trademark of a competitor and uses them to grab competitor type-in traffíc. This is often done by finding out the most common misspellings of the real domain name or trademark. Watch for people doing this with your domain. Here's the worst version of this -- and it can hit anyone if they have enough traffíc and don't pay close attention to when their domain registrations expire.

In this situation, someone grabs expired domain names and points them to "those" kinds of sites. This is a "no löse" for the hijacker, as they will profít from the traffíc even if the previous owner doesn't pay the requested ransom for the domain.

The more traffíc the URL gets, the greater the clickthrough value to the hijacker. This means more potential damage to the original owner -- and a higher ransom to get it back.

In effect, your own popularity is your worst enemy in this case.

The solution to this one is simple -- and very important: Don't let your domain names expire!

Useful Resources:

If you find yourself a victim of domain hijacking, there is hope for correcting the problem.

For a more formal explanation of the legal aspects of this problem, visit: http://www.llrx.com/congress/100200.htm

For specific information on the UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy), the procedure for taking domain names that are being used in violation of a trademark, see http://wipo2.wipo.int/process1/index.html .

For information on taking action under the Anti-Cybersquatting Act (A US law that provides for damages in addition to the less severe penalties of the UDRP) see:

Editor's note: Author's suggested resource link was dead and replaced with those below:

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act
FAQ: The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act
Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act vs. Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy

If you have a famous name or trademark, the best defense is to make sure that you register the main variations in both the .com and .net form. The .org is probably only necessary if you are heavily involved with charitable activities. Protect yourself. Scammers come up with new schemes all the time...

So, keep your eyes open.