Dot Com Note

If you want to drive organic traffic, make your site human friendly and search engine optimized. Search engine optimization is not brain surgery. Anybody can learn the basic principles and apply them to while developing web sites. You also don’t have to buy tons of books and spend thousands of dollars.

Though most of the SEO techniques are as old as the web and they will remain timeless in the future, lots of people still wonder what is SEO and how they are going to implement it in their web site. By following the steps described in this article, you will be able easily incorporate the most important SEO techniques in your site.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aloshbennett/2427637199/

1. Know what people are searching. Before you rush to develop your site, you need to do some keyword research. You don’t have to buy any tool. Use the Google Adwords keyword tool. It is free. Let’s say that you want a website to sell oranges. And the thing that differentiates your business from thousands selling oranges online is the freshness of your product.

Using the Google Adwords keyword tool, you search “fresh orange” to obtain approximately 50 key phrases that are related to fresh orange. For example, a few of these key phrases are: “fresh orange”, “fresh orange juice”, “fresh orange cake”, “fresh orange juice recipe”, “fresh orange chocolate”, etc.

These keywords are what people are searching in the Google search engine. Your site should effectively use these key phrases to improve your search engine rankings. The list will help you guide in your SEO efforts.

2. Every body has a title so also a web page. You can see it in the browser’s top left hand corner. In the HTML language, the language used to write web pages, this is called a title tag. Your home page should have a title that is short but descriptive enough to convey what your site is all about. Don’t use the same title for all your pages. Use different titles for different pages to describe what the pages are about.

Use keywords in your title that makes sense to human reader. Don’t stuff keywords hoping that search engines will love your pages. Search engines are becoming smarter and soon they will figure out that your site is designed for ranking higher in search engines rather than informing your visitors about your site’s contents.

Using the keyword list you have developed earlier, construct an effective sentence for your home page title. For example, your home page title may be: Buy Fresh Orange From Orange Store. Call 1-800-xxx-xxx.

3. Meta is all about a web page. The second element of SEO is the meta tags. Though there are lots of debates about the effectiveness of meta tags in SEO, Google still uses the meta description of your site in the result pages. Put your unique selling point in your meta description. For your orange store, you may say: Guaranteed fresh orange shipped to your door. Price starting at $2 per pound. Free shipping on orders of $100 or more. Call 1-800-xxx-xxx.

4. Contents need headers, emphasis and links. Use one top level header (H1) tag in the very beginning of your page. Use your keyword in the header tag. Separate different sections of the page using H2 and H3 tags. Use key words in those sub-titles. Emphasis key words using bold element in paragraphs. Don’t over do it, otherwise it will look like you are trying to game the search engine for higher rankings.

From your home page contents, link to other pages using keywords in the anchor texts. If you have a page that describes how to prepare fresh orange cake, use the phrase in your anchor texts. The keyword list that you have created during the keyword research phase will give you ideas for creating contents that use those popular and longtail keywords.

5. Images should speak. Use images related to your products. You can use flickr images for free. However, use only the images that are released under creative common license. When you search in flickr, go to advanced search and narrow your results to images that you can use for commercial sites under creative common license. Creative common license requires you to acknowledge the source. If you acknowledge the source using active links, use a nofollow tag in the anchor tag.

Give some meaningful names to your image files. Here again, the keyword list created earlier will help you. Use the alt and title attributes in the image tag. The alt attribute should be short and it should use an appropriate keyword from your keyword list. Title attributes show the tool tips when a user moves the mouse over the image. Use the title tag to completely describe the image and use only one keyword in the title tag.

Though the basic search engine optimization techniques are not difficult to master, many websites skip this important step in their zeal to develop a web presence as quickly as possible. You will reap organic traffic benefits by knowing these simple timeless techniques and implementing them in the initial stage of website development.

Whatever the experts say, email is marketing is still one of the most effective marketing technique. It does not matter whether you are running a small online business or a local eatery, your budget is limited and your challenge is to keep getting new customers for growth and turn your existing customers into repeat buyers for business sustainability.

You can use a variety of advertising options depending on your budget. Email marketing is a low cost solution that you must use regardless of any other methods you pursue. However, if you don’t know how to start an email marketing campaign in a right way, you soon will be become the biggest spammer in the town and may lose everything you have due hate and litigation.

 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/piccadillywilson/68766132/

Start with email addresses you have in your existing contact list. Explain them what you are up to and emphasis the benefits your business provides to ordinary folks. Don’t use any sales pitch. It should be informational with the emphasis on benefits. Keep it short because people don’t have time to read long emails. Also, encourage them to spread the news to their contacts.

As customers start coming to your establishments, get their emails and tell them what you intend to do with the email. Make a commitment to your customers not to sell their emails to third parties or spam their inbox every day with.

Start with a newsletter to share your expertise and insights. For example, if your business is catering to the lunch crowd, start talking to about nutrition, recipes, how to save money on lunch, etc. Forget how you are going to benefits from the newsletter. Take it as mission to help others by giving good information.

Talk to your family and friends to solicit tips and ideas for your newsletter. Form a network with other related businesses. For example, if you offer Greek foods, bring in businesses that offer Chinese, Italian, and even Greek foods. Talk about benefits of Italian pasta in your newsletters and suggest some delicious dishes from your friend’s Chinese restaurant. 

Once your customer start realizing that the newsletter is not meant to spam their inboxes by incessantly promoting your business, they will start trusting you and your business. You will be able to grab their precious attention. We are moving towards the attention economy where it will become extremely difficult to get people’s attention by traditional advertising.

Because you make a commitment to your customers not to sell their email addresses, as a principle, you also should not buy email addresses from a third party. Moreover, because you don’t know how the third party has obtained the addresses that you are going to buy, you may as well be buying emails obtained without the owners’ consents. Build your own email list slowly and you will get the reward in the long run.

Stick to a monthly schedule of sending your newsletters to your subscribed list. You do more often, you lose your recipients attention and they more likely to drag it to their trash folder. Sporadic and irregular campaigns will not generate interests and anticipation.

If you don’t have time to create a newsletter regularly, outsource the activity to a third party with strict guidelines. Engage your kids to find information and write articles and tidbits for your newsletter and compensate them. Go to your local community college and hire somebody for researching and writing your articles and creating the newsletter.

The email marketing should be all about connecting with your customers and building trusts. It should provide value to your customers. Once you build trusts, your customers will be your fans and help spread your business virally.

You should try hard to get inbound links from authoritative sites. The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

 Picture Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thunderchild5/758403119/

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes.

If your site is a good fit for outbound links from government sites, start with usa.gov site. It is a central information hub for everything government. On the bottom of the page, you will see About Us and Contact Us links. Read their linking policy by clicking on the About Us before you contact them.

You don’t have to confine yourself to the US government sites only. Explore the possibilities of getting links from foreign government sites also. But keep in mind that your site should provide some values to citizenry of those countries and people wanting to do with them.

For example, most government embassy sites don’t display their embassy addresses in interactive maps. If your site pulls their addresses displayed in simple texts in a web page and place those addresses on Google maps for interactivity, you can contact them to put a link back to your site. Explain to them that your site adds additional value to their visitors by providing richer user experience.

College and university sites provide a good opportunity to develop some authoritative inbound links. The key here is to provide services geared towards students. You may also be able to get links if a faculty member is interested in your contents.

Don’t start spamming university forums, guest books, etc. People may attack your site and bring it down, report to your web host company or domain registrar. You will lose your credibility and reputation. Try to establish relationship by helping others. Let them know that you know your topics and are willing to share with them.

If your site provides some valuable services to students, approach the appropriate university authority for linking. For example, if you have a tool that compares student loans from different sources and suggests the good ones depending on a student’s financial situation, university loan office will be willing to link to your site as a resource.

If you have a blog with original and regularly updated contents that talk about impact of the technology on the society, you may approach a faculty in sociology to link to your site from his or her home page located in the university server.

Government and university sites provide good opportunities for developing inbound links if your website has a match with their requirements. The key to that is quality contents and useful web tools. Once you meet their requirements, it is worth pursuing these entities for spreading your website links to them.

At last it is confirmed. Asus Eee PC 900 will be on sale in the USA starting on May 12. If you don’t know what an Eee PC is, this Wikipedia entry will help you know every thing you ever wanted to know about Eee PC.

The earlier Eee pcs (the 700 series) had 7 inch display. This new 900 series Eee PCs will boast a 9 inch screen size and a price tag of $549. If you can perform your computing chores under Linux, you will be rewarded with a 20GB of flash storage. If you prefer Windows XP, you have to live with 12GB of solid state memory.

Picture credit http://gizmodo.com/381768/asus-eee-pc-900-hits-us-may-12-for-549

What is so exciting about Eee PC? Being a 2lb sub-notebook, it is the cheapest in its class. The runaway success of Eee PC has created a new market segment for this low cost, ultra light notebooks. Other PC makers are racing to enter this newly created market with their own offerings.

This will be a perfect computing device for most of my daily needs - reading and writing emails, reading blogs and news, writing for a blog post and instant messaging with video.

Though I will not use it every day when I am at my desk, I intent to buy it for using it when I am away form my desk, like when I am lying on the bed and watching TV, when I am on vacation, or when I am out of town on business trips.

I did not like the earlier 700 version because the scree size was too small and it looked like a toy to me. But this one will meet my ubiquitous computing needs for now.

Writing quality articles for your blog and article marketing campaign is essential to establish yourself as an authority in your chosen niche. Every day, people post tens of thousands of articles in blogs and article directories. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to start producing authoritative and resourceful articles that others will read, bookmark, and promote using social media sites.

A quality article provides benefits to its readers. Neither it should be detailed and lengthy to put readers to sleep, nor it should be a laundry list of items for others to scan and forget. It should have enough information to put the written words into actions, but not more.

 Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikebaird/1510017912/

Before you start writing an article, make a list of all the non-textual contents that you will include in the articles. Non-textual contents may be images, videos, sketches, links to other resources, etc. Collect all the non-textual resources in one place, preferably in a folder in your laptop.

So, where do you go to find all the resources you need before you start writing your article? People who churn out low quality articles rely on Google search engine and article directories. While Google search engine may be a source, you should never use an article directory as a resource for your article-writing project. Finding a good article in an article directory is like finding a needle in the haystack.

Start with your own online bookmarks. You should have already developed a habit of using an online book marking service like delicious to store links to interesting contents. These online bookmarking services allow you to tag your bookmarks for easy organization and later retrieval.

Also, check out the marked articles in your RSS reader. In your RSS reader, you should always mark quality contents that you may use for your own articles later. In the Google reader, you can use the star mark and get to those marked articles later with a click. 

Use blog directories like Technorati and Goolge blog search. You will find more recent articles in the search results of a blog directory, compared to a web search using Google. Use keywords like best, top, and reasons in the search query. You will find what others have said about the same subject. For example, if you are writing about benefits of eating apples, search for top reasons to eat apples.

Use Flickr for your image search. Click the search box to go to the search page and than click the advanced search link. Scroll down and check the creative commons check box. The Creative Common license allows you to use Flickr images in your blog, provided you credit the original source with a link.

For videos, use Google video search. It will find videos from YouTube and other social video sites like Metacafe, etc. Please review the licensing requirements of each site before you publish it in your site. You don’t have to download the video. You should get the embedded code for the video and embed that in your page html.

Locate a niche database using Google search. For example, if you want to find nutrient values of banana apple desert, search in Google using key phrase food database. You will be able to locate the USDA nutrient database. Similarly, you can locate movie database, etc.

If you want to build your blog readership or people who will specifically look for your contents in an article directory, quality article is the only way to go. Search engine optimization techniques on poor quality articles will not benefit you in long run. People will lose trust on your materials. In the future, trust will be one of the most important factor in generating sustainable online incomes.

If you want to become an instant webpreneur and make money online, you should start setting up as many niche sites as possible. The first step of the process is to find what people are buying online. How do you do that?

You need to know what others are searching in Google for the purpose of buying. Everybody goes through three stages of online search before they make a purchase. In the first stage, one gathers information about the product. Searching to compare prices is the second stage. Third stage of searching is done for the actual purchase.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiaramarra/490464375/

In the purchase phase, most people will use keywords like purchase, buy, shop, new, cheap, etc. Google Suggest will help you determine what most people are searching for the sole purpose of buying. These people are ready to buy the product they are searching for.

Now I will tell you how to do a search in Google Suggest to find out what others are searching to buy. Go to Goolge and click more on the top link. A drop down menu will appear. Scroll all the way down and click the link even more. You will go to the More Google Product Page.

There are two columns on the More Google Product Page. On the left hand column under Explore and innovate heading, click the Labs link. You will now be on the Google Labs page. Scroll down and you will see Google Suggest link on the left hand column. Click Google Suggest link and you will be on the Google Suggest page that looks like Google web search page.

Use some of the keywords like purchase, buy, shop, etc., put a space and then start experimenting with different letters like a, b, etc. in the search box. For example, when I enter “shop d” in the search box, I see a drop down box as shown below. As you can see, lots of people are ready to buy Beyonce’s Dereon Fashion Clothing line. See how easy it is to find a niche.

Now you need to a find an affiliate program for Dereon clothing. Go to the Google web search page and search for “buy Dereon”. You will see AdWords ads of Dereon products on the right hand side of the search result page. Look for advertisers who are exclusively advertising for Dereon products. Visit a few Dereon product sites and check out if they are offering any affiliate programs.

In many cases, these AdWords advertisers are affiliates themselves. So you need to click on one of their product and go the site that offers the affiliate program. Once you find a merchant offering affiliate programs for Dereon products, sign up with them. Create you niche site and start promoting your Dereon product line.

Is free email dying and the growth of blogs is slowing down? If the social networking using Facebook and Bebo has exploded in 2007, the year 2008 has started with the growth of a different type of communication medium. It is microblogging. Using short texts, and sometimes pictures and videos, you share your thoughts and actions. Its popularity is its simplicity. It frees you from hard thinking and wordy texts.

If you are comfortable sending text messages from your cell phone, you are ready for microblogging. However, instead of sending text message to one person, you use microblogging to broadcast to your social network.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pearbiter/566128230/

What are the tools available at your disposal for this new and exciting medium of communication? The last few years have seen the birth of a dozen microblogging sites to carter to your various needs.

Twitter is the leader of the bunch. As soon as you create an account, you are ready to publish your micro-contents using your web browser, cell phone, or the email client. You can also follow interesting people like artists, athletes, bands, politicians and check out their insights regularly.

Want to share your files, events, and links using microblogging? Use Pownce to send your stuff to your friends. Pownce also provides a desktop software for you to download and install on your computer so that you don’t have to use the browser.

The site Tumblr has a refined and simple interface. Use it to publish photos and videos from your cell phone. Even if you are not wordy, you will be able to share your love and hate with others.

If you prefer talking, instead of writing, use MySay. You call the MySay service and leave a message. People in your contact will be able to listen to your thoughts using their phones, emails, or computers.

If don’t like texts or audio, use Hictu for video micro-blogging. Use your webcam to video your actions and publish it in Hictu with the click of a mouse.

IRateMyDay has an interesting angle to the micro-blogging. Instead of publishing mundane activities of you daily life, you rate your day on a scale of Worst to Great. You can also give some explanation for your rating.

Are you emotionally upset? Instead of using IRateMyDay, use EMotionr. If it is one of the happiest day of your life, rate it the highest possible 10. Don’t rate the lowest 1. It can’t be that bad.

Moodmill is where you should go after rating your day or emotion. This site is for managing your mood. Use the mouse to slide the mood indicator and share it with your friends and contacts.

If you are at ease with French or German language, you can use Frazr. It has all the features and functionality of Twitter.

2008 is the year of microblogging. As the free email was a radical communication medium a decade ago for the most folks and it eventually made the letter writing a lost art, micoblogging will surpass blogging within a few years.

So you want to save a few hundred dollars but don’t want to give up your morning latte? While it is easy to preach how to cut your daily habits to save a buck, it is difficult to practice the same for most folks. However, there are other ways to cut your expenses without sacrificing your daily habits.

In today’s technology driven society, we spend a lot of money buying electronics gadgets and accompanying services to make our life easy. Sellers know that we have disposable incomes and they push many services that we absolutely don’t need.

 Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cpchannel/123672666/

When you sign up for a cell phone service, they will try to push the loss-damage warranty for $5 a month. When did you last use that warranty to claim a new phone? In most cases you don’t need the service. In the worst case, if you loose or damage the phone, buy a cheap phone from eBay to carry you over till your contract expires.

If you are an occasional mobile phone user, get a pre-pay phone. Using a pre pay phone card that charges 10 cents per minute for talk time, you will be able save a few hundred dollars every year.

If you are in the market for a computer, buy the one on sale in your local electronics store. Every week, all national retailers have laptop and desktop computers on sale. Avoid mail-in rebates. Go for instant rebates.

Today’s cheap computers provide most functionality for majority of users. Don’t buy a high-end computer because the sales person says that the one on sale has slow Internet speed or other such nonsense.

Just buy the computer and don’t buy any software or warranty even if the sales person insists that you absolutely need that anti-virus and word processing software for an additional $300. Check with your broadband provider or the company you work for if they provide anti-virus software for free to install in you personal computer.

Use the Google search engine to find open source anti-virus and word processing software. The key word here is open source. You will find a few excellent open source word processing and anti-virus software. For example, Open Office for word processing and spreadsheet and clamWin for anti-virus.

Don’t buy any computer accessories like memory or hard drive from your local retailers. They charge way too much compared to online stores like newegg, ecost, etc. Sign up with newegg and ecost to get their newsletters full of items on sale every week.

Before you decide to buy a gadget, visit price comparison sites like pricegrabber, bizrate, pricescan, shopzilla, mysimon, etc. Also regularly check out bargain hunting sites like techbargains, dealtime, etc. Don’t forget to search for the item you are looking for in amazon, the grand daddy of all online retail stores.

Drop all those premium movie channels that your cable company has sold you as savings if you purchase them in a bundle. You only need one premium channel. Why subscribe to three and pay an additional $5 to $8 every month?

If you are renting your broadband cable modem for $10 or more every month, buy a new modem for $50 to $75. These modems last for long time and you will recover your money within six months after you drop the modem rental. You will be on you way to savings of at least $10 a month.

If you are paying more than $20 a month for your land phone line, drop it immediately. Get a cheap VoIP phone from lingo for $10 a month.  If you are a heavy land phone line user, you will still save by switching to a VoIP phone.

If you frequently drive in unknown places, get a car navigation system. But don’t buy a factory installed in-car navigation system. A car navigation system gives driving directions and suggests alternate routes to take to avoid traffic congestions due to accidents, road constructions, etc.

Factory installed systems are over priced. The price of a portable GPS navigation system has dropped below $200. You can also move your portable system to another vehicle that does not have a navigation system.

We will be spending a lot of money in the years ahead on more gadgets to improve our productivity, make life easy, and for the sheer joy of living. Knowing how to squeeze every penny from those expenses will definitely improve your personal finances.

Google search engine indexes images in your web pages. When someone uses Google Image Search to find images on the web, what chance does your website have to show up in the search results? If you know how to optimize images in your web pages, your images will have high rankings in the image search results. Using higly relevant and properly optimized images in your web pages will bring quality traffic from Google Image Search. Use the techniques described below for optimizing Google Image Search.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nikonvscanon/1348462114/

1. Use the alt attribute in the html img tag. This is the most important one. Use a specific keyword or a key phrase that identifies what the image is all about. If the image is a red rose, use the key phrase ‘red rose’, instead of rose or flower, in the alt attribute.

2. Use the title attribute in the img tag. The title attribute is what people see when they hover the mouse over the image. You can use the same text for title that you use for the alt attribute.

3. Use both the width and the height attributes for the image. If the image height is unknown, use the image width. You should always use the image width from a design standpoint. Unknown image width can break your horizontal layout forcing your web site visitors to scroll horizontally which is very annoying.

4. Don’t use image1, image2, etc. for the image file names. Instead, Use descriptive names. For example, use red-rose for a red rose image file. You can use the same text that you use for the alt attribute. Just hyphenate the words if it is a key phrase.

5. Put some description texts just beneath the image. For example, ‘a red rose blossoming in a quite morning’ for the red rose image. Make the key word, red rose, bold. When Google displays the image in the image search result page, the result page will also display the texts surrounding the image.

6. Choose your anchor texts in links to images carefully. Instead of ‘click here for larger image’ as the text link to an image, you can use ‘a large red rose picture is here’ as the anchor text.

7. Put all your images in a root folder and, if you prefer, categorize your images in sub-folders under the root image folder. Make sure that your robot file does not limit access to the image folders. Use the img and src tags for images on your web pages. Avoid all types of java script tricks. Goolge search engine spider will be able to index all your images. If you have descriptive image files names, they will have high relevancy in Google image search results.

8. Use Google trends to find hot topics. Use your creativity to establish a credible relevancy between you images and the hot trends. For example, if ‘Hunt for Red October’ is the hot topic, you can use ‘Hunt for Red October Rose’ as your image text.

9. You should already have your website verified by Google. If Google has not verified your website, go ahead and get it done by opening an account for Google Webmaster Tools. Once you have your site verified, enable enhanced image search for your site by logging into Google Webmaster Tools.

What is the most important thing for the success of a web site? It is the traffic. However, driving thousands of people to your website may not turn that traffic into money for you unless that traffic is targeted to the type of products or services you are selling. If you are selling apples and your visitors are on the lookout for oranges, they will not change their mind to purchase your shining apples.

How do you drive targeted traffic? Don’t jump into the link exchange. The link exchange is very archaic, unproductive and may be damaging for a search engine ranking. Follow the techniques describe below for better results.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/poagao/172973533/

Publish an ebook with full of information that is beneficial to the visitors of your website. If you are selling apples, write an ebook describing all the health benefits of apples. Put your web address in the ebook and give it for free. Even if your accidental visitor is not looking for apples, she will be glad to get the free information. If your book is compelling enough, she will visit your site in the future to buy apples. We have already entered the age of freeconomics where the selling lies in giving away free stuff for possible sales in the future.

When visitors come to your site, ask them to register using their names and email addresses only. Don’t ask for their mother’s maiden name. Ask for only two pieces of information – name and email address. Tell them that you will be sending them a weekly newsletter full of valuable information like recent findings on health benefits of eating apples, nutritional values of different types of apples, discount coupons, etc.

Partner with sites who are selling oranges. Send you orange seeking customers to you orange selling partners. Your partners will reciprocate and they will send people who are on lookout for apples to your site. These are not link exchange partners. These are partners who will promote your sites and you, in return, will promote their sites. Seek only a few partners. This is a collaboration to turn each others non-targeted traffic into targeted traffic.

Check out a few forums relevant to your site. If you are selling apples, forums related to healthy eating, fruit gardening, etc. should be your target. Visit these forums a few times every week. Help others by posting answers to people’s questions. You can use the web to find answers to many questions posted on the forums. Post your opinions on these forums and back them up with sources from authoritative sites. Start interesting discussions using new threads. Slowly you will establish as an authority on your topic. Don’t forget to put a link to your site in your forum signature.

Use a free keyword tool to research keywords related to your site. Search for free keyword tool in Google and you will find a few. Try domains related to your site with spelling mistakes. Buy a few of these domains and redirect them to your site. Look for expired domains and domains sold in auctions that have certain traffic and indexed in search engines. If available for cheap, buy a few domains of these types for redirecting to your site.

Targeted traffic is the key to making money on the web. The rules have changed. The old type link exchanges do not work any more. Giving away valuable information to your site visitors for free and right partnership with other site owners are some of the techniques you can use to drive traffic that converts.