For a number of years, many online marketers honestly thought that the only thing they needed to do to be successful online was to build a website, and the buyers would come to them.

They heard all of the success stories from people who claimed that they had simply built a website, and people just started to arrive in huge numbers.

The story, as it is told, is:

These folks built a website, then the search engines found their websites and started showing people the link to their website. And the people using the search engines saw the link to their websites and saw that it was good. Search engine users saw the link and, as if it were the only link in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), they clicked the link by the thousands. And hoards of people came to the website with fists full of money, ready to purchase what the website was selling.

ome people still believe this is how the search engines work. They have built their websites, and they are waiting anxiously for the “Traffic Fairy” to sprinkle his magic dust on their websites too, so that they can also make lots of money.

Are YOU Still Waiting For The Traffic Fairy?

I hope not.

Those who are “waiting” for anything may wait until they realize they are flushing good money down the proverbial toilet, month after month. When they realize that they still have more money going out than they have coming in, they usually get irritated that the “Traffic Fairy” did not look favorably on them, so they stop paying their hosting bill and quit this scam called, “onlíne marketing.”

The lifespan of most new websites can generally be measured in the amount of time most people will remain members of a subscription website. In case you did not know, this number is 3-4 months. Along about the 4th or 5th month, most people will stop paying their web hosting bill and let their websites die.

Those people who prepay 1-2 years on their web hosting bill will typically allow their sites to remain online, but they will quit the site long before their website runs out of life. Most will stick it out 3-4 months, and if they are not yet making money, they will just walk away from their new “online business.”

This is why you will find so many article directories where you submit your finest work, and no one will ever “approve” your article for publication. There may be nothing wrong with your article. The fact is no one is home to approve it.

The Traffic Fairy Smiles on Those Who Take Action

If you can believe it, in the fall of 1998, Google was a startup website.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin — the founders of Google — were just like you and I. They had a startup website, and they needed people to discover their new website.

In those days, Page and Brin could not simply build their website and “wait” for the Traffic Fairy or Google to find them.

They were Google, and no one was using their website.

What did they do to get Google off the ground?

While building Google in their garage, Page and Brin were doing what you should be doing now. They were getting links wherever they could get links. They were adding their site to directories. They were issuing press releases about their new company. They were trying to get interviews with the press and ordinary webmasters. They were trying to get interviews with newsletter publishers. They were participating in forums and news groups to share their story.

They started their website in September of 1998 and they got their first major press in December of 1998, when they made the top 100 websites of 1998.

It took them three months to get their first major press, and they had been actively promoting their website with the gusto of a 10,000-person marching band.

Yet the average new webmaster barely promotes his or her website and expects to attract thousands of visitors in the same time frame as it took Google to get noticed by the public-at-large.

Are you starting to get the picture?

To Be Successful, Do What the Successful Websites Have Done

Before Google was the powerhouse it is today, its founders had to work their asses off to build their business.

They had to promote, promote, and promote some more. They had to build links, build links, and build some more links. They needed to entice people to visit and use their website, and they needed to provide a method for people to find them.

My point is that the founders of Google wanted to be acknowledged and linked from every corner of the Internet. They chased links for their website because they knew that people used links to get to a website.

Twelve years later, Yahoo credits them with 223,383,603 links to www.google.com and another 6,752,847 links to google.com. siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

You and I are not going to get 231 million links to our websites, but getting links from a variety of resources is the secret to getting traffic to ones’ website. The Traffic Fairy blesses those websites that have a multitude of links to them.

Page and Brin tapped into the basics of building traffic to their website. They made a great website, and they did everything they could do to get traffic to that website.

You should try to emulate them as you build your website and start to promote it. It was the secret to their success, and likewise, it could be the secret to your success.

Traffic Generation 101

The easiest and cheapest ways to get links and generate traffic for ones’ website is going to be: article marketing, press releases, forum marketing, social media marketing, etc.

But, there are at least three-dozen methods to generate traffic to ones’ website, and these are just four of them.

The more successful websites always strive to get traffic through a wide variety of traffic generation strategies and methods.

In my case, I have used 31 of the 35 methods I describe in the 80-page traffic guide, “Multiple Traffic Streams: The Magic of Attracting Buyers.”

This has resulted in my top three websites being on track to serving 400,000 unique visitors and 5 million page views in 2010.

Don’t wait for the Traffic Fairy to bless your website. Take massive action to make sure that the Traffic Fairy would be a fool to ignore you.

And if you do, you might just realize that the Traffic Fairy is real, and he would love to sprinkle his magic traffic dust on your website too.

Have you ever embarked on some SEO work and got that sinking feeling that you might be doing something wrong? You’re not alone. Our expert Mark Nunney gives us the dirty dozen top mistakes he sees being made in SEO, as well as tips on how to negotiate the pitfalls.

1. Missing the big picture

Most SEO advice is given for a single page, word or technique. But if a site is to be responsible for a profitable small business then in most situations it will need hundreds of pages targeting hundreds of thousands of keywords using a wide range of techniques.

All of these pages, keywords and techniques need to work together so you need a plan to coordinate that, including:

Keyword research looking for potential keywords with Wordtracker Keywords Toolß and existing traffic with Wordtacker Strategizer)

Strategy (your prioritized groups of target keywords)

Site structure (matching your target keywords) and navigation to distribute link power around your site

On page SEO

Link building with Wordtracker’s new Link Builder tool and online PR.

To work at any scale beyond a micro-niche business, you must change your perspective from single (or exact match) keywords to keyword niches – groups of keywords sharing the same seed …

… so right now I’m helping a site selling slippers and I might focus a lot of SEO and link building on the single keyword slippers but I’m really interested in tens of thousands of keywords containing slippers, including leather slippers, men’s slippers, ladies slippers, etc.

I designed Wordtracker Strategizer to work with this shift in perspective from single keywords to keyword niches.
2. Not having a keyword or SEO strategy

What are you trying to achieve? Most importantly your SEO strategy should serve the company, marketing and brand strategies. A keyword strategy is a prioritized list of the company’s target markets’ niches, as defined by the keywords used in those niches – the words and phrases used in search engines.
3. Putting too much trust in an SEO company

You need to get whoever you have approached to prove what they’ve done, even when you have a personal reference for that company. You should take a step back and ask yourself, “what is being delivered?” Make sure you are getting your money’s worth.

Often they (businesses) will see a company with a nice website and they may be inclined to trust them because of that. Here are a few simple questions to ask any agency you might be talking to:

Do you always give complete ownership of site analytics accounts to your clients? If not, why not? (The answer is they want to ‘lock you in’.)

How do you build links other than paid, directories, press releases, article sites and using your own websites?

Can you list all the link building techniques you have planned for me, give the weighting you’ll give to each and why?

Give examples of how your strategy and tactics might change with circumstances.

If their given link building techniques include the likes of comment spamming and buying links ask: I understand they can work now, but what happens when Google stops them working?

(Following up on the question above) Remember the Florida update? If the person you’re speaking to doesn’t remember ‘Florida’, ask to speak to an SEO who does.
4. Having a company structure or systems that are unable to accommodate change

Change is always difficult. But combine it with something completely new and you’ve got a problem. The new thing is SEO and online marketing – neither is particularly well understood or even trusted, and in some cases companies have never heard of it.

Change is never going to happen unless those with authority and responsibility absolutely insist it does. This slows down many large companies and allows the small, who do embrace SEO, to do well. Here’s a nice example – do a search for hotels in London, Paris or New York. You would think you would see all the big names at the top, but you’ll see plenty of companies you’ve never heard of.

5. Not coordinating SEO with your editorial, sales and marketing departments

New content without SEO to maximize the number of target visitors seeing that content is a waste.

SEO without marketing to convert those visitors is a waste.

Your content, SEO and marketing should work together as part of a process.
6. Not monitoring response or acting on results

You have to monitor response eg, the numbers buying your product or signing up to your newsletter.

You may find that the market niche you hoped would work ends up being lame. If so, move on.

Monitor traffic, rankings and response for relevant searches. If you are getting good or bad results you need to act appropriately. That might be moving on to the next target niche, or investing more resources into the same ones.
7. Poor content management systems

It’s a cliche to say you need the right tools to do the job. One of SEO and online marketing’s tools is a content management system (CMS) that gives you complete control over most of the content, on most of the pages, including site navigation, menus and all marketing. Not having that is like entering a car race on a scooter.
8. Letting developers control website content

Partly as a result of companies having no existing knowledge and systems to accommodate online marketing and SEO, those who build the website have by default often become in charge of its content.

But letting developers take control of online content is like letting the mechanic drive the racing car. Or buying a car from a Ford garage and letting the mechanics decide where you can drive.

Take control of your website.

The developer’s job is to deliver the functions you want and keep the site working. What goes on the site and where and when is the responsibility of editorial and marketing, including SEO.
9. Not doing SEO now

Here’s a simple point; every day you wait to start SEO means it will be more expensive to get the same results when you do start. If you can get to the top of Google for a collection of keywords this will give you momentum and help you stay at the top, and it becomes cheaper.

Serious search engine success allows for serious business success – put these things together and you’ve basically got a gold rush. If you don’t do the work now it’s going to cost you a fortune to do it in the future. There is a simple reason for this and it’s inbound links.
10. Neglecting the importance of site structure and navigation

Most reasonable sites for reasonably sized businesses are going to need hundreds (sometimes thousands) of pages.

If you have hundreds of pages you need an optimized site structure and an accompanying site navigation. Even on a small site it’s possible to get this wrong and waste all your work.

You might have wonderfully optimized pages and links but if you don’t have your navigation right, or your structure isn’t right then your success will be limited.

What should you do? It’s hard to give a quick answer, but you should organize your site content into categories of related content. Let’s say you had a site selling chocolate – you would have all your Belgian truffles in one place and chocolate cake recipes somewhere else, almost working as different sites with their own home page (category home pages.)

On larger sites, related categories can be grouped together into channels.

Make sure your home page links directly to your site’s most important category pages. See Are your Superman Pages trapped in a basement full of kryptonite?
11. Neglecting your home page

Your home page is by far your most powerful page because most of your site’s inbound links will come to there. Use that power with copy to both target your toughest keyword niches and help other niches with links to their category home pages.

You can test what works, trying keywords of varying degrees of difficulty and ambition.
12. Over-relying on your home page

This is just as problematic. There are only so many different keywords you can effectively target with one page. When success is achieved for a keyword niche with your home page – move that success to other pages using internal and external links.

Facebook is so popular that business owners can simply no longer consider it a site only appropriate for socializing and game playing. In fact, in September 2010, Facebook surpassed Google in regards to the amount of time users spent on their site. Facebook states that users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook!

With 500 million active users, Facebook is the new behemoth on the Web. With its popularity across diverse age groups, integrated email application, and new Bing search integration, a Facebook user may simply no longer need to visit Google for Web searches or log off to use an email application. They may be able to experience the Web fully all from inside Facebook. With more than 50% of the active users logging into Facebook every day, according to Facebook, Facebook is now so important to your potential customers’ lives that it makes sense for you as a business owner to have a presence where your prospects are hanging out on a daily basis.

Let’s clear up a few things that have confused business owners about Facebook. First, a Business Page is not to be confused with a personal profile. They are two separate entities and provide different options and ways to interact with friends and colleagues.

Are Business Pages Also Called Fan Pages?

Many of you who have been using Facebook for a while will remember that Facebook used to call Business Pages – Fan Pages. Additionally, it used to be that someone “fanned you.” Now they “like you.” Don’t get confused in thinking that a Fan Page is a different product than a Business Page – they are one and the same.

All Facebook Business Pages start with the set-up of a personal Facebook profile. That’s right, a personal profile! You can’t just jump to Business Page set up. The email address and name you use for your personal profile must be one tied to a person and not a catchall email like info@mydomain.com. Remember, that if you have an employee set up your Facebook account and the personal profile portion for your Business Page, you don’t want to tie the new account to the employee’s email address. If the employee does so and leaves your employ, you could lose access to your Facebook Business Page, all of your accumulated fans, and information without recourse.

For set up, I typically recommend that one of the business owners create a new email address specifically for Facebook. Once you have set up the personal Facebook profile, you are ready to get started. But, don’t take time to add information like education and other details in this special account unless you plan on using it for your personal use. You are just setting up this account to have a platform to launch and access your new Facebook Business Page.

While logged in to your new personal account, visit this link: www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. It will take you to the Facebook Business Page creation tool to actually create your new page.

On the right side of the creation page under the heading the “Official Page” look for “Create a Page for a:” and then select “local business.” Enter your page name and then tick the box next to the statement that says you are a legal business representative and allowed to own the page. It is important to understand that the name you choose for the title of your Facebook Business Page will appear at the top of your finished page.

I recommend you use proper spelling but not use hyphens or underscores in your selected name. It used to be that you had to enter hyphens or the spaces would show as non-HTML characters in the page name and URL, but Facebook has grown beyond that. For example, enter in “My Business Name” (note the proper use of spacing and capitalization), not “My-Business-Name.” This name will appear in your new Business Page URL as well.

Once you clíck create, the next page you see will be your brand new Facebook Business Page. It is that simple. Later, after you’ve had 25 people “Like” your page, you will be able to select a vanity URL, but we’ll talk about that later.

Do My Personal Updates Show on My Business Page?

After you have set up your Facebook Business Page, you can “lock down” your personal profile that was used to launch your Business Page. To do so, just alter the privacy settings in the personal account to not show your personal information to others who are not “approved” friends.

When Facebook was first created many business owners including myself, started with a Facebook personal profile for their business. Now that Facebook has created Business Pages, you can easily change the privacy settings on your old personal profile to funnel your business traffic to your new Facebook Business Page, keeping your old personal profile just for family and close friends.

When you change the privacy settings on the personal profile attached to your Business Page, it does not impact who can view information about your Business Page. Conversely, if you post pictures of your kids on your Facebook personal profile that is the launch pad for your Business Page, and you have your personal profile limited to “friends only”, your kids’ photos will not appear on the wall of your Business Page.

Why Exactly Would a Business Owner Want a Business Page and Not Just Use a Personal Profile?

Several reasons to have a Facebook Business Page are: the ability to contact all people who “Like” or who “Fan” you with one clíck newsletter type notes, interact with discussion questions like a forum, set up events and invite fans to attend, and even create specialized welcome and shopping pages. Your Business Page can almost be a mini website!

Creating Your Business Page Vanity URL

Once you have 25 people who have clicked that they “Like” your Business Page, you can select a short easy to remember name to promote on your website and business card. Your Business Page goes from something like http://www.facebook.com/pages/Waldorf-MD/mccord-web/129943573719686?ref=sgm to something like this http://www.facebook.com/mccordweb. Just visit this link www.facebook.com/username. You can have vanity URLs for both your personal account and Business Page.

It is very important to understand that once you have selected your vanity URL you will not be able to change the name, so select carefully.

Best Practice Tips for Keeping Your New Facebook Business Page Updated

No one wants to be spammed, but sometimes new Business Page owners get excited and post what seems like a constant flow of information on their wall. It is important to understand that what you post on your wall is posted on the wall of the people who have clicked “Like” on your page. We encourage our clients, when they are doing status updates themselves, to be courteous and post about twice a day. Facebook is not Twitter and so 5 to 10 status updates a day could get you blocked or hidden by fans when they feel you have inundated their wall with your daily or hourly updates.

Conclusion

I hope that this white paper has helped to introduce you to Facebook Business Pages in a way that helps you to feel that you can easily set one up and have fun doing it. If you haven’t set up your Facebook Business Page, now’s the time to consider setting one up. Facebook is only getting more popular and is actively seeking to woo the business community into their portal with demographic based pay per clíck advertising and the new integrated search with Bing.com.

Even the best-run business is guilty of starving the media of good usable content for use by the press. When you have a small team with enormous time constraints, the problem is even worse. Just how do you let the world know how good you are?

PR is an absolute boon for small businesses; it is much more effective than pure advertising and the big bonus is – it’s free! Free in terms of cost, but not in effort.

Developing a PR strategy takes time, effort, clarity of purpose, and an amount of doggedness on the part of the company, but for the majority of companies, time is a really precious commodity that is ‘best devoted to churning out the finished product, project or service.’

Most companies have newsworthy events, things that they could really bang the drum about – if only they had the time and the resources. Lately there has been a solution to this appearing on really well thought-out websites; the virtual Press Office.

What is a Virtual Press Office? The Virtual Press Office is a dedicated page or pages on your website, where you can place information about your organization or industry for use by journalists who may want to create stories, articles or features for their publications. These are also referred to as online media or press centers. In these dedicated areas you will find a host of useful background information about the company, including archived releases, fact sheets, case studies, contact details for the company spokesman, hi-resolution image downloads – in fact, anything that will make life easier for the journalist researching either your company or your industry in general.

While your website might already carry the information in its various pages, why not make life easier for the journalists or researchers by holding specific, relevant information on dedicated media pages?

How useful this actually might be was brought home to us when one of our clients, Drilcorp, a Specialist Drilling Contractor in the UK, suddenly found news articles appearing in one of their industry international journals.

It was obvious from the content that these articles had been lifted directly from their news pages and as their web development and marketing team we realized the potential of having a dedicated area where the media could access and download relevant releases and high quality imagery relating to the news story of the day.

Plus, having a company spokesman’s details on the site also has the potential for additional expansion on the stories. In addition, lifting pictures from a website and then using them in print media produces really poor quality final images, so the benefit of having high-resolution images to accompany the articles is a much higher quality printed article; better for both the journalist and the source company.

To ensure that the news stories hit the right desks, we are also setting up an RSS feed for journos to subscribe to so that when we upload the news, it is pinged right to their RSS feeds.

If you are unfamiliar with RSS feeds, here is a brief overview of how they work: RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ It is a system that automatically ‘pulls’ web pages from a website and displays them on the RSS subscriber’s PC (or Mac!) desktop. It is like subscribing to receive information directly from a website – except, unlike a website which you have to visit, the information from the web page is delivered direct to you. And unlike emails, the recipient decides if they want to receive this information.

How to Develop an Effective Virtual Press Office

The key here is the acronym KISS. (Keep It Simple Stupid) – Put your most relevant and important content in this area, but don’t overload it with everything you have.

– Update it frequently and encourage further contact from the press.

– Always have a spokesman ready with a prepared statement that reflects company policy.

– Make sure that the spokesman is well briefed on what not to say as well as what to comment on.

– Put case studies and photography in here – you would be surprised at how much the press really love unique content, and on this note ensure that the photography is at or at least near to professional standard.

– If you find that you are answering the same question time and time again, compile these questions and answers into a FAQ section or even create a mini ‘White Papers’ for use as reference documents by the press.

This will establish your reputation as the authority for the industry and your articles and opinions will be highly sought after.

– Request notification of any articles that may be published by the participating media; it is cheaper than using a ‘clipping service’ – a paid for service that searches for and collects media mentions about your organization and sends them to you.

As your website is often the first point of contact for your organization, it is worth investing the time to keep it as fresh as possible and as useful as possible. It will repay you many times over and really create a great relationship with the media.

Author: James McRoy

We often get requests in to assist people with building their websites – no surprises there; we are, after all, a web design company.

But these requests often need to be translated from some form of Klingon or other alien language since often it feels as if the potential client is just making a fleeting visit to planet earth.

Some examples:

“Hi, i would like to start an advertising buisness (sic) that allows me to generate money while people are surfing into my web. The problem is I just do not have enough info about Enzine.”

“I require a website that I can use to have customers registering and bidding online, also need to have a feature where users can buy tokens.”

“I want to have a web, graphic and search engine software. If you can’t you can’t design me the software, how about you give a search engine quote. I just want only 5 pages and the rest I will do. I am a web designer so I find it difficult to design search engine for my self.”

We also get requests from people who want to have Facebook clones, Ebay type sites or a shopping cart ‘like Amazon’.

One of the biggest problems seem to be that of unrealistic expectations of what a website can do or cannot do, and how much it will cost.

What people do not realize are some of the following factors:

1. It is a lot more difficult to ‘make money on the Internet’ than other people would want you to believe. It is in Internet Marketers and other ‘gooroos’ best interest to let you believe that making money with a website is as easy as pie.

The hard truth is that turning a profit from a website is really, really difficult, especially one that is aiming high. Even wildly successful internet endeavors such as Facebook and Amazon took years and years before they started to show profit.

2. In a lot of cases, people just do not know enough about the Internet and how it works to start up such a venture successfully.

That is not to say that we are belittling people who want to start ventures such as these. We all have to start somewhere, and even Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at one stage knew nothing about the Internet or websites, but come on… there is a wealth of information available out there today as well as these sites that can be used as case studies. How much did Facebook cost to implement? It is reputed that angel investors poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the site.

We then get requests for social networking types of sites with clear ‘want to make millions’ aspirations behind it and when we try and understand the client’s budget it is in the region of about $1000 – if we are lucky.

3. People seem to really think that getting the site built is enough. They suffer from the classic ‘build it and they will come’ fallacy. There is no clear understanding of what it takes to get visitors to a site, or how to market the site either online or offline.

This leaves us, as the web design company, with an ethical dilemma. Do we implement the site and leave the client to his own devices? A version of ‘take the money and run’? Or do we tell the client that his brilliant idea is just never going to fly.

Unfortunately that means that we will probably go out of business too since about 50% of the websites we build are based on some crazy business idea. The other alternative is to act not only as a web design company but also as a consulting firm, dispensing advice, coaching and guiding the client.

After all, that is really what customers expect from a web design company, not so?

The question is – how much is this advice worth and how does one work it into the business model of the web design company?

This type of advice and consulting takes up an inordinate amount of time and effort and working that into the costing of a website tends to push the costs up even more – try and work those costs into the ‘new cool social networking site that will merge Facebook, Youtube and Twitter, to be called YouTwitFace, site’ and see what happens to website costs!

When you review the keywords from which people clicked to your site, are they only peripherally related to what you provide? If so, your website is likely suffering from BlindWebsititis!

What Is BlindWebsititis?

BlindWebsititis is what happens to websites when those in charge of their content don’t come right out and say exactly what every page is all about. Instead, they use only corporate jargon, non-descriptive copy, or – in acute cases – no copy at all. It’s a horrible condition that affects hundreds of thousands of websites every year. Sadly, the pain of BlindWebsititis goes well beyond the hurt to the website itself; it often spreads to site visitors who have to try to guess what the company offers.

Even search engines aren’t spared from BlindWebsititis. Their symptoms include the miscategorization of the afflicted websites because there’s no way for them to assign relevant keywords.

Rather than dealing with the pain of BlindWebsititis, many users move away from infected sites as quickly as possible, in search of healthier ones that clearly say what they’re offering.

Causes of BlindWebsititis

This condition is so widespread that intensive research has gone into determining the possible causes. One major cause is the proprietary prose that companies use internally to discuss their offerings. While using company jargon within the walls of a business is not unhealthy in and of itself, when it makes its way to the website, it often turns into BlindWebsititis. Companies tend to forget that for every person who knows exactly what they do, there may be 20 others who don’t.

BlindWebsititis Immunity

While BlindWebsititis has been spreading like the flu, research finds that some websites are immune. What gives them this immunity? These companies are interested only in visitors who seek them out by brand name. It turns out that search engines use a special “immunized algorithm” that protects branded searches from coming down with the condition.

The Worst Cases

Sadly, companies who seek to gain new customers from the search engines – that is, people looking for their type of product or service who don’t already know that the company exists – are hurt the most by BlindWebsititis. These companies often stop growing, and in many cases premature death is inevitable.

The Cure

For critical cases of BlindWebsititis, companies must immediately take action! The first step is to let people who haven’t heard of them know that they’re in the right place. Because it’s widely accepted that people using search engines are generally searching for stuff, they are typically pleased when they find their information quickly and easily. The cure with the fewest number of side effects is to display this information as clearly and succinctly as possible.

The Recovery

Research into BlindWebsititis has shown that clarity on every page results in the best recovery rate because there is no beginning, middle, or end to any website. Because each page is a gateway to the rest of the site, when one page is afflicted, the rest are too. Adding clear content to all pages tells users that they’ve found what they’re looking for, which leaves BlindWebsititis with no further mode of attack. In fact, it’s been found that just adding a short, descriptive summary to the top of every page can cure BlindWebsititis immediately. (However, the cure has a longer recovery period for search engines if they have to re-index the previously afflicted pages.)

The Active Ingredients

Best results have been noted when the site creator uses keyword phrases in the most natural manner possible. This means users don’t have to think too hard, which boosts their own immune response to the affliction. Descriptive web writing provides complete information to search engine visitors who don’t know anything about the company or its products and services.

Beware of a Relapse!

While BlindWebsititis may seem to be cured on websites when a paragraph of text is added below the fold (rather than at the top), the affliction still exists, albeit in a dormant state. It may not affect search engines in this form, but because users often don’t look below the fold, they continue to feel the pain. Their suffering often takes the form of scratching their heads in wonderment. The resulting itchiness can become acute if the copy at the bottom of the page is keyword stuffed or slightly hidden with gray text and is suddenly noticed by the user.

Is Your Website Afflicted?

To see if your website has BlindWebsititis, take a look at it with fresh eyes. Perform usability tests with people who are not already familiar with your company and see if they can tell what you provide within a short amount of time. If they are confused or have to clíck around to your About Us page, then you have some work to do. Luckily, you’ll see great benefits when you completely cure BlindWebsititis by clearly describing your products and services. Benefits include increased search engine rankings, more targeted visitors, a decreased bounce rate, and higher conversions and sales.

The only thing better than one search result in the top 3 positions in Google is two search results from a double ranking. This SEO tip works by pushing a competitor off the first page, broadening your websites keyword funnel and thereby doubling traffic and conversions.

Two Results are Better than One

I read somewhere that 87% of search engine traffic for a given keyword is allocated from occupying the Number 1 position in the search engine results page. If you understand SEO, then this post will share a quick method to double your SERP positions and to improve the likelihood of keyword conversions – once you have reached the Mecca for a specific search term.

SEO is predicated on one simple premise, rankings; in order for SEO to be effective, it must produce ranking on the first page in search engines.

Not only is this the crowning achievement of search engine optimization, but once you achieve a top 10 position, then you can pull other keywords into the spotlight as a result of strategic linking. We often refer to this as the buddy system for lateral linking.

Search engine algorithms pay particular attention to individual pages capable of offsetting all of the other inconsistencies of a competitor’s web pages and deem one page worthy above all others for any given search term.

Obviously the metrics are unique for each market, keyword or niche, but the reality is the same, once a top 3 or more importantly Number 1 or Number 1, 2 and 3 positions are present in Google. I have mentioned before, the fastest way to get a top 10 position in Google is to get a link from a website already ranking in the top 10 for that keyword.

It does not matter if that link is provided from your website or another website, rankings are by the page and there is a daisy-chain effect of linking pages together that fuses the pages through a dynamic give and take relationship (based on citation). This citation can provide the algorithmic equivalents of trust needed for the newly linked page to jump in line past others duking it out for that keyword.

Depending on the competitiveness of the keyword or key phrase and the thresholds inherent to the barrier to entry; the time required to initiate a campaign, create all of the necessary content, inbound links and citation from other web 2.0 properties, RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites divided by the amount of time you invest managing or outsourcing the various components involved determine your profitability and return on investment.

With this in mind, from a tactical perspective, it’s better to leverage the SERP positioning you already have than to look outside of your website for off page ranking factors. If you understand the power of a Number 1 position, then you can replicate this next simple SEO tip.

Identify all current Number 1 positions in Google for keywords.

Validate they still exist.

Use Keyword Research to find “related keywords” based on the Number 1 ranking Link from the page that ranks to a new page (using similar anchor text or overlapping keywords to promote the new page).

Let the new page get indexed, then check the SERPs.

Identify: My favorite tool for this is SEMRush, but if you don’t want to use this, there are other programs out there, or even Google webmaster tools can show you your website’s top ranking SERP positions when you log in.

Either way, this is your base, so, identify the keywords which could represent hub status for your SEO campaign and pass along the power of ranking to other pages in your website.

Validate: Check to see if you still hold the Number 1 position, even a top 3 will do, but this tactic works better if you are at the helm of a particular search phrase.

Keyword Research: You should be able to gauge whether or not the keyword is profitable for you based on the frequency of hits and the type of traffic you garner as a result. You can always look through Google Analytics or whichever analytics package you have to assess the keywords that represent the highest percentage of traffic to your website.

Once you know what those keywords are, then use keyword research to find stemmed semantic variations that also fall under the same category or keyword cluster. Those related keywords will become the new focal point for step 4 – linking.

Linking: The closer the shingles (groups of keywords) the more effective this technique is. You can call this padding the search results (if you use similar exact match titles, tags or content), or you can pass this ranking factor along to help synonymous terms.

Simply go back and edit the page ranking in the Number 1 position and add a link to the new target page (with the keyword you intend the target page to rank for as the anchor text). Then, the authority from the page in the Number 1 position will gróup the new page under its umbrella and pull that page into the spotlight.

When the new page gets crawled and the old page reveals the connectivity between the two, typically a double SERP position occurs or a double position accompanied by jump links, breadcrumbs or the [+] with additional search results for that keyword appear in Google to showcase the degree of relevance your website has for the said term.

You can then build additional deep links from other sites or addition internal links to the newly dubbed page. As a result, you should see buoyancy for other pages for multiple keyword variations related to the parent keyword cluster.

With this simple tip you can double your conversions by increasing your website’s semantic array of keywords. Obviously you will know which keywords and traffic is most lucrative for your business model, but this technique is priceless for creating controlled keyword stemming if you understand the implications underlying its premise.

For the past few weeks I’ve been tasked with reviewing a few different sites that have seen a loss in traffic – their owners hoped to find out why. I love these kinds of reviews because it’s like solving a mystery or figuring out a puzzle. While it’s not always possible to determine the exact cause for the traffic loss, I can usually make some educated guesses based on what I dig up in Google Analytics.

Here are 9 steps you can take to diagnose the cause of lost search engine traffic:

1. Determine what type of traffic loss you’re dealing with. Many people look at Google’s overview page, see a loss of overall traffic to their website, and assume that they must have lost their rankings in Google and the targetéd traffic that comes with it. This may or may not be the case. Be sure to check for search engine traffic, and even more specifically Google non-paid traffic.

2. Look at the extent of the traffic loss. Your research will be very different depending on whether there was a gradual decline in traffic or a sudden, drastic drop. I reviewed a site last week that lost all of their Google unpaid traffic overnight! This sort of loss is typically a technical issue such as a robots.txt file or a nofollow directive that keeps search engine spiders from indexing your pages. Sometimes it’s not actually a loss of traffic at all – your analytics code could have been inadvertently removed from all or most of the pages, making it appear like a traffic loss. I have seen all of the above more times than I can count in just the last couple of months!

3. Compare apples to apples. Many businesses are cyclical or seasonal. A gift site may see huge spikes in traffic the months leading up to Christmas or the weeks before other holidays. This means that comparing any month to the previous month may not tell you the whole story. A drop in traffic in January is probably fairly normal for a gift site. If you’ve got more than a year’s worth of data, you’ll want to compare this month’s traffic to the same month in previous years. Ideally, you’d of course want to see a growth in traffic. And if you don’t, then you may very well have a problem on your hands. If you don’t have data that goes back that far, you can compare month to month, but be sure to take the data with a grain of salt.

4. Review and filter out “brand” traffic. Most websites get a lot of Google traffic from people who’ve typed some version of the name of their company as their search query. You’ll want to note whether those visitors have significantly increased or decreased. If you receive fewer visitors for your brand, this could be caused by a decrease in marketing and advertising. Once you make note of the brand traffic, you’ll want to filter it out so you can study actual keyword traffic, which is what real SEO traffic consists of.

5. Analyze which keyword phrases have had a significant decrease in visitors. Now that you’ve filtered out the brand traffic, you should be able to see the keyword phrases that are bringing you the most traffic. If you have lots, you may want to view 100 phrases at a time rather than the default of just 10. Are there lots of keyword phrases that seem to bring far fewer visitors over the last few months as compared to last year at the same time? You may also notice some that are bringing significantly more visitors.

6. Do a quick Google search for the phrases. If you’re not seeing any pages from your site on the first page in Google, it may or may not be a clue (given the fact that everybody sees different search results) but it is definitely a cause to investigate further. If a page from your site does show up fairly high in the líst, it could just be that fewer people are searching for that phrase now as compared to before. Or it could be that your listing isn’t quite what the searcher is looking for based on your title and descriptive snippet. There might also be other results for the keyword phrase that have images or video embedded whereas yours doesn’t. Or there might be local map results showing up that make your result less appealing.

7. Review the landing page for the keyword phrase that lost traffic. Is there any obvious reason why it’s not bringing in as many visitors as it used to? Does it even exist anymore? Did it change substantially at some point during the year? Did it get buried deeper into the site architecture for some reason? Is the content duplicated from other pages within your site or contained on other websites? Were there links pointing to it at some point that no longer are? Does the copy read naturally, or are there a few extra instances of the keyword phrase than really makes sense to a person?

8. Review your long-tail traffic. Since the end of April and early May 2010 a few large sites lost a substantial amount of traffic for keyword phrases that brought small numbers of visitors individually, but in aggregate they made up a lot of website traffic. You’ll want to filter your keywords to those that have only a few visitors (even just 1) and see if there are significantly fewer of those than previously. If this is the case, Google has gone on record stating that they’re doing a better job at sending long-tail traffic to more meaningful and relevant pages than they used to. Which means you’ll have to go above and beyond what you’re currently doing if you want to get that long-tail traffic back.

9. Decide if you’re dealing with a search engine penalty. For drastic drops, in the rare cases where it’s not a technical issue, you’re most likely dealing with a penalty. You can check your Google Webmaster Tools account to see if there is a notification of a penalty, but they don’t usually bother to tell you. Still, search engine penalties are much rarer than people think. In fact, most website owners know what they’ve done wrong when they have a search engine penalty. There are some cases, however, where they may have been duped by a less than scrupulous “SEO” company. The penalties I’ve seen seem to occur on sites that have no redeeming value because they have the same products and content that can be found on many other sites (often ones owned by the same company), plus they are deeply entrenched in massive link farms. It’s likely that they are also hosting part of the link farm on their own site in the form of a link directory. If this is what you find, you may be better off to start from scratch rather than trying to salvage the penalized domain.

I hope these steps help you diagnose your loss of traffic. I imagine they will keep you busy for quite some time!

A number of major media companies are starting to implement tools for third-party authentication for consumers. We spoke with JanRain, which provides a tool called Engage that companies like Tribune Interactive, Meredith, E.W. Scripps, The Dallas Morning News, bizjournals, and the National Geographic Society are all using. With the solution, publishers can authenticate users via third-party logins using as many as 16 different providers, including Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo LinkedIn, etc.

“JanRain is helping these companies to garner traffic to their site via the social web,” a representative for the company tells WebProNews. She also says Engage can let media companies “allow consumers to publish content back to the social networks, increasing the cycle of referral traffic, and capture important demographic data to improve the user experience.”

“Traffic to your website from a social media platform is, by its very nature, more valuable than traffic from other sources,” she adds. “People spend time on social networks for the purpose of sharing information with people they deem important. Trust is high among peers; recommendations and messages exchanged among friends are more likely to resonate than those directly from a company.”

“A goal for any site is to have a visitor login or register, becoming an engaged user and interacting more – making a purchase, posting content, etc. Once a user is engaged, make it easy for them to communicate back to the social networks of their choice without leaving your site,” she continues. “Activity-based social publishing tools enable the user to perform this action from within the flow of your website experience. A user finds something of interest on your website and then calls it out to their community.”

“The engaged user is an effective filter both for their community and your website. When a user decides to share information back to a social network, it is a win for their contacts and your organization,” she concludes. “The circle of referral traffic begins. As the user shares their activity or content from your site to friends on a social network, the post from the initial engaged user drives traffic back to your site, some of whom will login and publish their own activities back to their networks, and so on. Many organizations leveraging this functionality are experiencing 6-25 new referral visitors for each social action a user shares with friends. As this cycle repeats, these organizations create a direct link to the social web and a sustaining stream of new referred visitors.”

In another article, we compared the value of social interactions with content through social networks to comments on the content themselves. There is no question that the social networks can provide additional value.

Google announced that it is putting all of its non-search display advertising offerings together into one network called the Google Display Network.

Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management explains the reasoning behin this on the Inside AdWords blog: “Over the past year, we’ve been focused on investing in display advertising, and we’ve seen great momentum from the increasing number of you running display campaigns with Google. We’ve rolled out new features and targeting options and more precise measurement tools. To provide more places for you to run display ads, we’ve added more publisher sites (through Google AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange) to our ad network of over one million sites. Meanwhile, many of you have continued to run ads on YouTube and our own properties.”

“The Google Display Network will comprise all of the sites (apart from search sites), where you can buy ads through Google, including YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners (our display partners include all of our AdSense and DoubleClick Ad Exchange partner sites that allow text and/or display ads),” he continues. “The Google Display Network offers all ad formats – text, image, rich media, and video ads – enabling you to unleash your creativity and engage potential customers across the Web.”

Nothing has changed about the way advertisers run ads. AdWords bidding and reservations for YouTube and Google Finance, for example, will be the same.

Google says that in the coming weeks, you’ll see a change in the AdWords interface that reflects the new Google Display Network brand.

Nearly a year ago, we looked at what Dmoz (aka: The Open Directory Project) was up to, and if it still had a place in search. The directory was talking about how it was looking for “a little respect” as it prepared to celebrate its 11th birthday (on June 5)

Dmoz has been brought back into the discussion as Google’s Matt Cutts appeared in a new Google Webmaster Help Video answering the following user question:

Why is Google still taking notice of DMOZ? Many have alleged that the editors are corrupt. It’s impossible to get them to list a site even if it is very relevant to a specific area.

“I know that people do have complaints about Dmoz, and we don’t show it in our one-Google-sort of tabs at the top of the page like we used to in previous years, but in some countries, it can be very hard to type in queries. It can take a lot of time,” says Cutts. “For example in something like Chinese or Japanese or Korean, sometimes it might be easier to browse by clicking, rather than typing in the query, and so especially in those sorts of countries, it can be very helpful to show Dmoz.”

“But we don’t use Dmoz in a lot of the ways that we used to. We don’t show the Dmoz categories or the Open Directory categories beneath the snippet, and we used to do that,” he adds. “We don’t show it on the main page like we used to anymore. So if you’re frustrated, you can always try a different category that you also think is relevant. You can always go to editors up the chain. But in general, if you can’t get into Dmoz, I wouldn’t necessarily worry about it. There are a lot of other great places to get links across the web.”

Dmoz continues down the slope it’s been on for quite some time in terms of unique visitors. Google not giving it as much play certainly must play at least some role in this. It does get more than 18% of its referrals from Google:

http://redir.ientry.com/02-13562-2020480-16427701-0-20

Dmoz on its Own Future

Dmoz swears it still has plenty of life left in it, so if you believe the editorial department, there may be new opportunities from Dmoz down the road. In a post earlier this year, reflecting upon the last decade, Bob Keating, Dmoz editor-in-chief said, “Over the ’00 decade, DMOZ has grown to be one of the most successful collaborative projects on the web. It has outlasted its commercial counterparts, and continues to be relevant in the search industry. The keys to its longevity and usefulness are its dedicated community, its open, collaborative editorial model, its non-commercial nature, and open data distribution channel.”

“While DMOZ receives hundreds of editor applications, and lists thousands of websites each week, it needs a new Plan – a new blueprint for the future of how the web is organized, and how human organized data is consumed,” he says. “Using traditional web directories as a means for information discovery is a thing of the past. However, the need for organized web-based content continues to grow exponentially. The future of DMOZ does not lie merely in improving its toolset, making it more SEO friendly, or convincing others of its collective brilliance. Its future lies in turning the entire thing on its head.”

Keating went on to list some goals for this decade, including the development of an API for Dmoz data to allow editors and developers to write new apps using it. He also wants to transform Dmoz from a fixed-path directory to “the largest faceted system for organizing information on the web,” have it become a “major influencer” for bringing the semantic web out of the lab/enterprise and into the entire web, and transforming Dmoz into a “suite of products with multiple levels of participation and engagement.”

Things have been pretty quiet on the Dmoz front since then. The only updates on the Dmoz blog have been from editors talking about their experiences editing specific categories. Perhaps that is because some of the aforementioned goals are in the process of being realized behind the scenes.