My Buy Essay

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Many webmasters who have been following the discussions about Google’s dislike of paid links have been confused about what constitutes bad links and good links, in the eyes of the search engine companies. In this article, I will seek to answer many of the questions people have on this topic.

There are two kinds of links that you can pay to have made for you: rented or paid links, and permanent links.

Introduction To Paid Links, Or More Accurately Rented Links

With Rented links, you can generally make your purchase decision based on the PageRank of a page.

The downside with rented links is that Google has stated that they do not like links that are sold on the basis of PageRank, and they are trying to create systems to identify links rented for PageRank, for the purpose of discounting those links. While they may eventually be able to target and negate links developed by systems like Text-Link-Ads or TextLinkBrokers, they will never be able to completely identify and discount all links that are sold for the purposes of PageRank .

In the end, I suppose Google is not going to penalize the Source or Target websites for those links, but they will nullify the value of the individual links in the Google algorithms. Cutts suggested and implemented the “rel=nofollow” a while back as a tool webmasters could use for the purpose of identifying links for which the webmaster did not want to pass PageRank. The only thing that Google’s algorithm will actually do to links identified as rented or paid links is that it will treat those links as “rel=nofollow’s”. If Google succeeds in their quest, the webmaster buying the links will be throwing away his or her money, if they are buying placement on a webpage solely for the purpose of influencing PageRank.

The Story Of Permanent Links

The second kind of link is the permanent link. Permanent links come in many formats, and in most cases should generally be viewed as non-rental links. With rental links, you pay a fee for placement once a month, quarter or year.

Of course, the Yahoo directory is not viewed as a paid link by the Google engineers, because although you “pay” to get the link, Yahoo does not guarantee placement of your link in their directory. Instead, Yahoo says that we are paying them to “review our link.” This is why Google is not discounting links from the Yahoo directory. Those Yahoo links are nice to have, but they still do require a yearly review for commercial websites, which must be paid for on a yearly basis.

Permanent in all cases is in the eye of the beholder. Permanent as a rule in the Internet world means that you will not have to pay another fee later to keep that link on the page, where it will reside. In the context of links on the Internet, permanent actually means that the link will live at that location, until the webmaster who owns the website changes his or her website’s direction OR goes out of business.

In my experience, perhaps 10% of the website’s where we get links placed will go under within one year. Towards the end of the second year, webmasters will look at their Profit/Loss and make a determination whether their income level will justify shooting for a third year of operation. Another 20% will close their website at the end of the second year run. So, 30% will drop out of business, within their first two years. Of the remaining 70%, many of those websites will survive to the fifth year and beyond. I don’t know how long one will be able to count on a permanent link just yet, but links that I built for myself in 1999 continue to produce traffic for my websites today, and those links have sent me continuous traffic for years.

Permanent, One-Way Links

Many permanent one-way links can be acquired on pages that currently have PageRank on them. In those cases, it may simply be a matter of your link being added to a list of links already on someone’s web page.

However, any link created through a content development method, such as pay-per-post or article marketing, will be posted on a new page on the Internet. All new pages on the Internet begin life at PageRank Zero. It is like the birth of a baby. The baby begins small, but grows into a child, then a teen, and finally an adult. All article pages begin their lives at PageRank Zero, and most of those new pages will increase in PageRank as they age. Some web pages will never mature beyond PR1, but others can grow into pages that are as high as PR6 (at least that is the highest I have seen an article page to date).

If you trust Matt Cutts of Google, he has indicated that all new pages begin life at PageRank Zero and in the Supplemental Results. He also said that Supplementals are not the end of the road. Cutts stated that the only thing required to bring a web page out of the Supplemental Results is to have that web page gain PageRank. (For those curious why a page went from the Primary Results to Supplemental Results, the answer is that either Google began counting links differently OR the links that gave a web page PageRank no longer exist.)

Three Reasons Why Article Marketing Helps Link Building

My conclusion from this information, and I might be biased, is that the use of article marketing for link building is a positive in the Google algorithms.

* I conclude this because links developed through article marketing begin on pages that have a PR Zero. So, we are obviously not getting links placed on websites for the sole purpose of acquiring PageRank, not directly anyway. We are placing links for the sake of having links, but with good luck, many of those links will gain PageRank over the long haul.

* By the very nature of article marketing, we can ensure that the links we develop for our websites reside on web pages that are tightly focused and targeted to the content of our websites.

* Most websites that post articles do so through a process of moderation, meaning that all article placements have been human reviewed. That human review process at the other end of the transaction puts most article websites on par with Yahoo’s human-reviewed directory.

When we can get our keywords embedded into the link pointing to our websites, then that is always a much better deal. But, that outcome will be affected by the webmaster at the other end of the process. Each webmaster has his or her own rules for article placement, and some of those folks simply do not permit embedded keywords in our links, either in the body of the article or in the about the author information. A plain text link is better than no link at all, although we always strive to get embedded keywords in our links.

Final Thoughts

When you write a great article people will link to it, no matter where it may reside. So in time, the pages that house your article will gain PageRank.

As the article’s author, you will are in total control of the relevance of the web page linking to your website.

Just as you are in control of relevance, you are also in control of whether people will choose to reprint your article. Write a good article, and people will use it.

Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.

Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.

You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.

Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.

The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.

Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from outside resources should you add your own keyword to the list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for the next step: evaluation.

The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a small number of words and phrases that will direct the highest number of quality visitors to your website. By “quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements: popularity, specificity, and motivation.

Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a search engine which will then bring up your URL.

You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating based on real search engine activity. Software such as WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will probably never scroll down to find you.

Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice. You must move on to the next criteria, which is specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase your goods or services will find you.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of getting a slew of people interested in everything from buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled fenders being directed to your site. In other words,consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you will face.

The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer rather than the seller to figure out what motivation prompts a person looking for a service or product to type in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between “Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second keyword targets people who have decided on their career, have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or her life in between beer parties. You want to find people

who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most motivated traffic to you site.

Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done. You must continually evaluate performance across a variety of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how many of your visitors actually made a purchase.

Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual search engines. There is now software available that analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic. This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you the most valuable customers.

This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your product. This is the most important factor in evaluating the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better profits.

Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work – and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your business’ rewards.

So you’re interested in getting to the top of Google! If you’re interested in search engine optimization then there’s about a 98% chance that it’s the reason you are reading this article. In SEO you have two choices you can hire a company to handle your search engine optimization, or you can read about a thousand articles like this one and learn how to do it your self in doing this I would also learn a little about html, and find a way to do some sort of keyword analysis because if you can not change your text on your website, and you choose worthless key words then your site will not be associated in the right category therefore you will not make any sales.

If you’re still reading this then you’re looking for the great hidden secret to getting to the top of Google. In order to rank high in Google you have to do two things have a better word score then anyone else for your keywords, and have more links coming to your site from sites with high page ranks. In getting a high word score you need to have some text on your home page and in this text you need to mention your keywords as many times as possible. When you optimize your web site for keywords you are basically getting your site ready for search engine optimization which in all reality is just getting incoming links to your site.

Before you submit your site to the search engines you should have a good amount of keyword rich text, Meta tags (Which are not obsolete by the way), a robots Meta tag, and a Google sitemap. Once you have done all these things you are ready to get some links to your site (this is how you get to the top). When you have incoming links to your site it matters a lot that those sites have high page ranks for example if you have a site with a page rank of 7 linking to you then Google’s algorithm will crawl your site every 24 hours which is very good.

There are some things that could have a negative effect on your ranking with the search engines these things are called black hat SEO tactics. You do not want to do anything to get your site black listed in the search engines. Before Google and all the other search engines changed there algorithms SEO Company’s and webmasters would use some techniques to get to there links to the top like hiding text, hiding links, link malls, and link farms. You should avoid anything that might have a negative effect on your page rank.

There is a lot more to Internet Marketing then just search engine optimization however search engine optimization is where it all starts. Search engine optimization improves the volume and quality of traffic to your web site. Before optimizing your site you should have knowledge of how search algorithms work, and research on what people looking for your site search for to get to it. This is one of the key factors in having a productive website, and achieving a good page rank.

Back in the late 1990s, “stickiness” was the big term; how to get web visitors to return to your site &ndash hopefully, again and again. Today, the strategy has evolved into “Outbound Stickiness” &ndash going out and pulling that visitor back in.

Going back in time, there were many sticky techniques including the hosting of tools, calculators, forums/bulletin boards, and of course &ndash my favorite &ndash “favorites”.

“Favorites” pre-dated good search engine results. Back then, you as a site owner would proffer your favorite links. Typically, they related to your industry and gave web visitors the opportunity to explore other related sites. Well, as the search engines of the day improved their results, the favorites section lost its favor.

It became very hard to become an authority site. Many a client of mine back then created a “lounge” or “portal” type of section on their site hoping to be the center of their respective universe. But web surfers soon preferred to get their informational direction from a Yahoo search.

Site stickiness never lost its allure. And now, new techniques have come into play in order to gain that coveted repeat visit. This time it’s an outbound effort. Content is created that travels out from the website to seek out users. It’s driven by RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and it’s used to distribute all kinds of information including news, blogs, and podcasts. We have evolved to Outbound Stickiness.

Currently, most blogs and podcasts revolve around time-sensitive events and writer opinion. However, they are just too darned valuable to be left to those noble endeavors. Businesses, big and small see (or will soon see), RSS and its related content as an opportunity to reach out and touch someone &ndash again and again.

This trend doesn’t bother me in the least. I’ve always gotten educated or stayed current on my industry by subscribing to informative newsletters, magazines, etc., be they of the printed or electronic variety. I even appreciate advertising as an information source in its own right. The difference is that now I have the convenience of having all of my sources being dropped into a central place for pickup. It’s on demand and I like many others are demanding it.

Outbound stickiness is going to include not only news of the day, but education on the tried and true.

In order to be credible, businesses are going to need to educate through these mediums as opposed to simply advertising or branding. If they want to keep you as a subscriber of their feed, value is going to need to be continually delivered. Something easier said than done.

This all presents opportunities and challenges on a variety of levels. First, there is creation of the content. Someone is going to have to acquire and consolidate the content. To get good traction with and grow a subscriber base, recycling someone else’s content will not do the trick for long (sorry, you can’t just steal it from the net).

Next, not all of us are writers or recording artists. Internal or outsourced resources will need to be hired to actually deliver the information in an effective style and format (e.g. blog writers, podcasters, video podcasters, etc.).

You’ll need information marketers to continually review the information that has been previously published for accuracy and relevancy. Because information created and distributed to the Internet is difficult to eradicate, it won’t be a matter of just deleting old files. New information will need to be created to supersede the old. And the whole cycle will begin again.

A credence of mine (that I obtained from somewhere now unknown), is “if you can’t get out of it &ndash get into it”. Let me tell you &ndash you can’t get out of this one.

If you don’t already have a strategy to deliver some Outbound Stickiness, get it going now. It’s just not for news-junkie/conservative/liberal/techie/egocentrics anymore.

My recommendation is to publish by series. If you sell paint, do a series of 5 blog entries, podcasts, etc., on color. Next, do a series on prep and application. Next, on design trends. You get the idea.

By publishing to a series you escape the pressure of continually coming up with and extending your subject. Also, if you need a break, take it between series’. Then you won’t look like you just jumped on the bandwagon, ran out of ideas, and fell off.

Additionally, mix time-specific information and opinion with tried and true educational content.

Good luck with it all! For some of you it will be liberating, for others it’s fingers on a chalkboard (by the way, we’re going to need to come up with a new idiom for that one &ndash who uses chalk boards anymore. Any suggestions &ndash email me).

If you want some advice or have any comments &ndash email me at jboulterbastioninternet.com or visit us at .bastioninternet.com. We’re a web marketing firm located in Southern California and are happy to help.

The first two steps to successfully marketing online and through your website have little to do with online marketing itself. However, it’s critical to complete them before your campaigns begin. These two steps are Setting your Website Objective and Defining Your Online Target Market

Setting Your Website Objective:

Whenever a client is looking to drive more traffic to their website or is trying to raise their conversion rates, I always take them back to the beginning and ask them what the objective of their site is. This is always more insightful (and entertaining), when I’m meeting with more than one person from the company.

… “drive more sales”, “get more leads”, “reduce product support demands”, “gain access to new markets”, are a few of the more common responses. We then take a look at their site. It will often focus on who they are, their history, their commitment to customer service; all noble things, and usually all without a strong call to action that matches their now stated objective.

Setting an overall website objective is not easy but the benefits are huge.

Not easy: Real estate on the web is cheap. Add a page, add 100 pages, there is still plenty of room to expand. So it’s easy to quickly develop multiple objectives for your site.

Additionally, many people in the company will have different views on what the site objective should be. Human resources wants the Career section to stand out. Customer Service wants the Support area to be highlighted. Sales, of course, wants to highlight Product or Solution areas, and so on.

If you’re ruling by committee you’ll have a well balanced, but underperforming site. The winning play is to have one objective that rules all others. If that objective is to drive more sales, then the Home page must be geared to that. It will need to highlight and focus on information and calls to action to take web visitors down that path.

Now, this doesn’t mean that you won’t still link to support and careers sections. You just won’t focus on them on your Home and other main section pages.

Get Specific: Now if “Drive more sales.”, is your first-cut objective, you need to get a little deeper, more specific. Will you actually be closing sales over the internet (a la eCommerce), or are you driving the new prospect to call you or email you. What level of knowledge should the prospect have before they contact you. Should they know the part number or should they just know that your company is one they need to call.

Thus, your objective may evolve to “Drive qualified prospects to contact us to get detailed information on which of our products best suits them.”

So what made them a qualified prospect. Were they qualified before they came to your site (maybe they were driven to your site from a trade show), or did they get to you through a search engine and know very little about what you do.

Your objective may ultimately evolve to “Visitors should find the information to qualify themselves as good potential prospects and contact us to get detailed information on which of our products best suits them.”

Huge Benefits: Once you’ve set your objective, everything becomes easier. Writing content (often the biggest challenge a company has), becomes clear. The path with which you lead visitors through your website becomes clear (e.g. entice, inform, qualify, call-to-action). Site architecture and layout become clear.

You now focus your efforts and resources around fulfilling that main objective. The sections that are not directly relevant to your main objective still support that main objective.

Now that you’ve clearly set your website objective, the next step is to know who your target audience is &ndash and it may not be who you think.

Identifying Your Target Audience

Who do you want to visit your site. Are they researchers or decision makers. Are they likely to “convert” on their first visit. Do they know anything about your company already. If yes, how much do they know. Are they internet savvy. Are they over 40 and likely would appreciate larger type. Are they visual. Are they detailed. Are they a “people person” or do they prefer dealing with things or words. Are they likely to be highly educated. Do they like to have lots of options or lots of direction.

All these questions and a lot more need to be asked and answered. Initially, you’ll use this information to help in the design of your overall site. You’ll want the proper balance of image to text. You’ll want to set the text level at the appropriate level of detail. You’ll want to write to their probable education level.

Ultimately, the answers will drive the theme of your site. They’ll drive the type of online advertising you’ll use. They’ll drive the design of advertising landing pages. They’ll drive the keyword phrases you’ll target in search engine optimization. They’ll drive your call-to-action.

Now you’re ready to start your marketing. Knowing what you want to accomplish and to whom you want to accomplish it with, you’ll be able to structure the right ads, emails, keyword phrase targeting, etc. You’ll be able to focus resources on the proper additional web media (e.g. blogs, podcasts, more web pages, Flash demonstrations, etc.).

To paraphrase Winston Churchill, this will be the end of the beginning of your online marketing strategy, and you’ll be ready to begin a productive and effective online marketing campaign.

The key components of an Internet marketing program include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Paid Placement, Affiliate Marketing and Viral/Social Marketing. The goal of all of these is to increase a website’s traffic (number of people who visit) however each uses a different tactic to meet this goal. An effective Internet marketing program leverages a mix of these components to maximize their value at a particular point in the overall program.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an attempt to increase your website’s ranking in ‘organic’ (non-paid) search results in Google

Click-to-call is an emerging contextual advertising format that will help spark the growth of localized search. It links online users to offline advertisers by combining Internet telephone capabilities. Although it has yet to hit its stride as a platform or even pierce consumer consciousness, the biggest interactive names, like Google, Yahoo, and eBay, are positioning themselves for a future in click-to-call. Let’s take a closer look.

Click-to-call ads (CTC) are delivered, like pay-per-click, through standard online search results. They mostly resemble standard paid search ads, too. The user sees the familiar text in a box, except there is an icon that can be clicked to connect the interested party with the designated advertiser via telephone. This process is fully online until the user activates the CTC functionality by clicking that icon delivered with the ad.

Next, the user is prompted to enter their telephone number, which may or may not be already stored with the search engine. Once the phone number is entered, the search engine calls the user and connects the advertiser at no cost to the user. It should be noted that search engines will be adamant about protecting the anonymity of user phone numbers in order to placate any understandable fears of being added to telephone marketing lists. It will be imperative for search engines to build user confidence because trust is precious, especially when introducing new products.

Since CTC incorporates phone use through the Internet, VoIP specific companies like Vonage and Fusion will be parlaying their niche of Internet telephony into partnerships with bigger Internet properties, as evidenced by Skype’s sale to eBay. Even an online advertising agency like ICMediaDirect.com has to consider the impact of a “hybrid” service, like click-to-call, will have on search marketing. Isn’t it funny how convergence, the calling card of technological progress, can make the telephone cutting edge?

Experts aren’t expecting great revenue generation straight out of the gate, but click-to-call could be at the forefront of yet another giant tech-based advertising expansion. One area that click-to-call may impact is local search. I believe CTC has enough functionality to ignite the long anticipated surge of localized search as a leading format of small business advertising. For example, if a person finally has had enough of a bad back &ndash where do they go to find a chiropractor, the Internet? Could be. That’s where we can research and get a phone number. Just think what a chiropractor would pay per click of that icon that rings his office and the sufferer simultaneously. And you thought pay-per-click was targeted and relevant?

Finding out which businesses will advertise on local search via click-to-call is an easy task &ndash they’re the ones filling the yellow pages of your phone book. These small businesses (think: pizza parlors, law offices, florists) are already heavily vested in local advertising, yet almost none use search advertising because the format has yet to incorporate small business. It’s believed that there are nearly 15 million small businesses in the United States today and almost none are benefiting from local search the way that it’s envisioned. When geo-targeted search is smoothed out and more popular, and CTC gets rolling, local advertising will realize more convenience and more targeting &ndash and the world will witness another online advertising revolution.

Click-to-call is even more targeted than the pay-per-click search format as we know it today. Advertisers are going to pay more for CTC because anyone who takes the time to call is certainly a higher-percentage paying customer than your basic web surfer who indicates interest. While some web surfers may click ads to satisfy curiosity, few visitors will be clicking icons to make idle talk with businesses &ndash as far as I can tell, this isn’t an issue for businesses listed in the Yellow Pages. Click-to-call is a potent ad format and advertisers are going to shell out top dollars for it. Keep an eye out for developments in this format and be ready to adjust your strategies accordingly.

Joseph Pratt

Media Analyst

ICMediaDirect.com

.icmediadirect.com

e: josephicmediadirect.com