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Following are some resources that I can personally recommend!

Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.

One of the BEST ways to market your web site is to show the Internet audience that you KNOW your stuff!

If you would like to write an article about any of the following topics and submit it to our Newsletter, we would love to review it for inclusion in future issues.

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Contact us today about your article(s) and get yourself promoted!!

Editorial

You know, almost every one of my potential clients asks "How long will it take before my website is in the top 10 of the search engines?"

My answer is always, "It depends."

It depends on the age of the domain name, the length of registration period of the domain name, the amount of content on the website, the number of pages on the website, the originality of that content, the keyword phrases chosen for the pages and the number of incoming links to the website pages (just to name a few).

But, in general, if the domain name is more than a year old and if it's registered for more than 2 years and if the content is original and lengthy then the average amount of time is 3-8 months.

How do I know this? Well, I've been marketing websites since 2000 and I've seen this pattern literally hundreds of times.

Just to prove this point, a friend of mine opened a new website 6 months ago. JustViva.com. This website sells fine costume jewelry. Anyway, she created the website herself and I helped her with the optimization process. I told her it would take 3-8 months before she saw much action and I know she heard me but I also know she didn't want to believe me.

I can't blame her. Anyone who opens a new website wants business to come through that website immediately. But, unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way.

Anyway, just yesterday she received a call from a very large department store. They are interested in selling her jewelry in their stores. How did they find her? On the Internet! And today, she called to tell me she made her first online sale!

So, it's been 6 months and the website is finally beginning to gain ground in the search engines and the result of that is that traffic is coming in and sales are beginning to come in as well.

It's very exciting to get those kinds of phone calls and I do get quite a few of them! After all, my entire goal is to get websites into the top of the search engines AND to increase conversion rates. I don't just want to get visitors to the website, I also want those visitors to turn into clients. And believe me, that is not a quick and easy process. So, be patient. If your product or service is good, it will sell. I have no doubt.


Sincerely,
Esther C. Kane
Eckweb Designs, Inc.
678.765.0120
Search Engine Optimization Services

Cool Tools

I receive so many questions about the types of tools that I use not only for Internet Marketing but also for business that I decided I should add a section to the newsletter about them. So, each month (or so) I'll try to add a new tool to this section. Of course, if you have any tools you would like to recommend, please let me know!

Group Mail Is A Great Way To Send Out Professional Looking Emails

I love groupmail! It's so easy to use and set up! And to top it all, it's extremely affordable! I use groupmail to send out emails notifying my newsletter subscribers that the new edition of The SEO Lady is ready. I also use groupmail to send out monthly markeitng report notices and any other special notices. The one piece of advice I can give you on sending out mass email is to check with your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to find out what is their limit on spam email? In other words, how many emails can you send out at one time before your ISP considers it spam? My ISP (Charter.net) has a limite of 100 so when I create the lists of emails to send to in my groupmail program I limit each list to 100. That way, none of the emails get returned for spam.

Not Your Usual Marketing Tips

Not Your Usual Marketing Tips
Vol. 5, No. 8

August 7, 2007

It’s August.  It’s hot.  I’ve got some juicy projects I’m working on, and I want to give them my full, focused attention.  So I’m going to make this short and sweet.  And perhaps even more fun than  educational.

Welcome to this Dog Day’s edition of Not Your Usual Marketing Tips from JDK Marketing Communications Management.

Thanks to graphic designer and colleague Tim Faragher for bringing this fascinating subject to my attention…

We all watch commercials.  Did you know, according to author Seth Stevenson on Slate.com, that there are but 12 basic ad formats?

There’s:

1. The Demo
2. Show the Problem
3. Symbolize the Problem
4. Symbolize the Benefit
5. The Comparison
6. The Exemplary Story
7. The Benefit Causes Story
8. The Testimonial
9. Ongoing Characters and Celebrities
10. Associated User Imagery
11. Unique Personality Property
12. The Parody, or Borrowed Format

Check out this entertaining video to see what he means.  Chances are you’ll be nodding along knowingly as you watch.

Click Here For The Video

Enjoy, and have a good rest of the summer…until we meet again the first Tuesday of next month, for another telegenic rendition of Not Your Usual Marketing Tips.

Joel Kweskin
JDK Marketing Communications Management
704.846.4835, office
704.575.8850, cell
704.841.2746, fax
www.jdkmarketing.biz

This great video by New Fangled explains how the "search" aspect works in search engines and how refining your keyword phrases on your website pages can help to bring targeted traffic to your website.

The SEO of Everyday Pages
by Bill Slawski
August 2, 2007

There's a kind of page that shows up on websites that I think of as everyday pages. These are commonly appearing pages that you might see on almost every website, such as the "contact" page, the "about us," the "terms of service" and the "privacy policy." These are pages that I see small business sites not taking advantage of enough.

Often, these pages are sadly underutilized from a search engine optimization perspective, with such imaginative titles as "Contact", "About Us," "Terms of Service" and "Privacy Policy." I've also see "Glossary," "Directions," and "Frequently Asked Questions," or "FAQ." Considering that a page title is one of the most important elements of a page for SEO, chances are that these pages were overlooked as a possible entryway into those sites from search engines.

The content that appears on many of these pages isn't much better. Privacy policy pages often appear as if they were written by a lawyer or copied from a template, with language either thick with legalese, or so generic that you could be on a page of almost any type of website at all. Directions pages often show a couple of maps and no text at all, or bland lists of turns and twists and stops along highways and back roads.

Your privacy policy could create the impression that you've included it because you felt that you had to, or because you value the visits and contacts that you have with your present and future customers. There's nothing quite so satisfying as being told that the reason why someone selected your business to do business with over others was because of the way that your privacy policy was presented.

Keep in mind that these everyday pages are some of the most linked to pages on a website, with access to them via link in the main navigation or footer navigation of almost every page of a site. Are you taking advantage of them?

How hard are your everyday pages working for you? How well are they acting as evangelists for what you have to offer? By linking to them so heavily on your site, you are telling the search engines that these are some of the most important pages of your site, and they may just be.

Compare for instance, a contact page where you're told, "Please use the form below to contact us," with the following:

Jones Virginia Ham Emporium is a family run business, entering its fourth generation of offering fine quality Virginia baked hams. The secret to our success is our belief that the customer is always right, from the quality of our customer service, to the speed of our shipping, to the taste of our virginia baked hams. We'd love to hear from you. Please use the form below to get in touch, and let us know what you are thinking. We'd really like to hear from you.

There's more substance to the page in the second version, and more of a chance of ranking for some keyword phrases related to the business that can be placed within the content of the page.

Geography and everyday pages

If you have a site that supports a business with a physical presence, you likely want to make it as easy as possible for people to find your location through a search on the Web. Your everyday pages hold some opportunites to be found in geographically related searches that you may not be taking advantage of, in web searches and local search results, and in universal search results.

One of Google's patent applications, Assigning geographic location identifiers to web pages, describes in detail how Google might associate geographic relevance to pages that don't contain geographic information. This association may be based upon their relationship to pages on the same site that do contain geographic location information, looking at how many clicks away those pages are from each other, and whether the anchor text used in links appears to indicate the existence of geographic information. So, a page that links to another with the anchor text "directions" might be assumed to be geographically relevant to an address listed on the directions page.

Another Google local search algorithm aims at finding the web page that should be the authority page for a specific location, to associate that web site and related business with that location. One of the factors that is used in making that decision is how much information about the business is contained on the pages of the site. In addition to the mailing address and phone numbers, information like hours and days open, parking availability, and accessibility for people with handicaps can improve the chances that the URL for a site is associated with the address listed in Google's local search.

If you have a web site for a restaurant, your "directions" page might benefit from providing walking directions from nearby well known landmarks. Someone planning a trip to Seattle might search for places to eat near the Space Needle. If your restaurant was a block or two away, a link to your site could show up in a search for [space needle restaurant] in Google, Yahoo, Live.com, or Ask.

Question answering (Q&A) results and FAQs

It's possible to type many questions into a search box at one of the major search engines these days and get answers that aren't organic search results. For the query [where was louis armstrong born], the top search results aren't Web results, but rather Question Answering results. Yahoo provides a Yahoo Shortcut answer, Live.com delivers an Encarta result, ask.com gives us an answer from who2.com, and Google shows a PBS result.

There are possibly a few different ways that the Question Answering database repositories get their answers for questions like that. One likely involves a crawler from a search engine finding facts presented in key/value pairs on pages, in a format like that found in the vital stats section on the Louis Armstrong page at who2.com.

A recent paper from Google explores another approach, where a focused crawl (based upon a search for pages that used [allintitle:FAQ]) of FAQ pages, was used to populate a database of answers to questions. It's possible that if you have a well written FAQ page in the right format (where it's easy to distinquish between the questions and the answers, and to understand which questions go with which answers), one of your answers to your FAQ questions might show up in search results as a Q&A result.

Definitions and glossary pages

Another type of search result that is similar to the Q&A results are definitions results. At Google, you can ask for a defintion by using the "define" search operator, like this [define:word]. You can also ask the question [what are word] and often see a definition at the top of results. Google describes a process for choosing definitions from glossary pages in their patent application System and method for providing definitions. I've broken that down into more detail in Looking at Google Definitions.

Conclusion

Your everyday pages are easy to take for granted, but they shouldn't be. They have the ability to rank well in organic search results because they are often linked to by many pages of your site, if you include within them terms that people will search for. They also may show up at search engines in some of the other results that are becoming more prevalent with the emergence of blended and universal search. Make sure that they are working for you, everyday.

Bill Slawski is Director of Search Marketing at Commerce360, blogs at SEO by the Sea, and has been one of the Business and Marketing Forum moderators at Cre8asite Forums for the last five years. The Small Is Beautiful column appears on Thursdays at Search Engine Land.

Click Here For The Original Article From Search Engine Land

Remember 411? - Try Google!

Okay, remember when we used to pick up the phone and dial 411 to search for a phone number?

This used to be a free service but then the phone companies started charging for it. It's been so long since I've used it I don't even know what the fee is anymore.

Well, now Google can do it for you for FREE.

Just call 1-800-466-4411, give the recording your city and state and what you're searching for.

Google will not only give you the top 10 listings for that information they will also give you the address, phone number and they'll even dial the phone number for you!

Spread this information to your friends. If it catches on, your website will begin getting traffic not only from Internet users, but from phone users as well!

Scalable On Page SEO Strategies
By Stephan Spencer

Original Article on SearchEngineLand

Optimizing a website that has tens of thousands—or even hundreds of thousands—of dynamically generated pages, requires thinking differently. Old school SEO, where you assign each page a keyword theme based on keyword research and hand-craft a title tag, H1 tag and intro copy, then figure out the best internal links to send to the page, just doesn't scale with big sites. Particularly when you're talking about the magnitude that our (Netconcepts') clients are operating at—typically over 10,000 SKUs and over 100,000 indexed pages.

It's essential that you focus your SEO efforts in such a way that the effects will cascade through your site. For example, come up with "recipes" for optimized titles for product pages, for category pages, for articles, etc.—yet allowing for those recipes to be overridden with a hand-crafted title tag when required. Getting the title tag right will make a big difference. For example, the website SlideShare.net has over 40,000 tag pages indexed in Google, but the titles are suboptimal. They all follow the recipe of "SlideShare » Slideshows tagged with [keyword]." A better choice would have been "[keyword] tagged PowerPoint slides, presentations and slideshows." Such a change is usually easy to implement and is likely to pay big dividends in rankings and traffic improvements.

Don't stop at the title tag; optimize the entire HTML template. Use SEO best practices: 1) separate out the content layer from the presentation layer; 2) make sure you're using semantic markup; 3) employ heading tags (e.g. H1, H2) when appropriate; 4) cut the bloat out of the template; 5) make sure you're not using the same meta description and meta keywords across the whole template. Make that template really hum.

Then move on to your URLs. Granted URLs are harder to optimize, but it's usually worth the effort. Particularly if your URLs have more than a couple parameters (i.e. more than two equals signs). Google engineer Matt Cutts told the audience at WordCamp this past weekend that dynamic URLs and static URLs are treated the same by Google—with the caveat that as long as there aren't more than 2 or 3 parameters in the URL. Nonetheless, I'd rewrite your URLs to remove the query string (i.e. question mark) altogether, using a server plugin like mod_rewrite or ISAPI_rewrite. If rewriting your URLs and otherwise deploying your optimizations are difficult/slow/expensive due to IT department bottlenecks or ecommerce platform/CMS limitations, there are proxy server based workarounds like GravityStream (which fellow Search Engine Land columnist Chris Smith recently described as "automatic SEO"). However, whenever feasible you want to fix your native site.

It's been our experience that static URLs perform better in the engines. As a bonus, such URLs look nicer to users so they tend to garner more links too. Ideally you should go for keyword URLs. A URL like http://www.mysite.com/kitchen-sinks.php is superior to a URL like http://www.mysite.com/product-34962.php. Matt Cutts also announced at WordCamp that underscore characters are now going to be treated as word separators. So no need to worry about whether it's an underscore or a hyphen you're using to separate words—at least as far as Google is concerned. Oh, and make sure that your old URLs respond with a 301 permanent redirect to the page's new, optimized URL.

I like to think of my collection of web pages indexed by the search engines as my virtual sales force. Each unique, indexed page at a unique URL is like a virtual "salesperson." The more virtual salespeople working for you, the better. Unfortunately most of these salespeople are freeloaders, sitting around doing nothing for you—not attracting a single search engine visitor. Increase your indexed pages while at the same time decreasing your freeloaders. Employing spider-friendly URLs decreases the percentage of freeloaders.

Effective tactics for adding more pages to your virtual sales force include deploying faceted navigation (such as Endeca's "Guided Navigation"), pulling in content through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, such as that provided by Flickr), and leveraging your visitors as content co-creators. Your visitors can be invaluable unpaid employees for you—populating your site with product reviews, discussion forums posts, blog posts, blog comments, wiki articles. The great thing about user-generated content is that it incorporates your consumers' vocabulary into your site. So even if you're wedded to an industry buzzword (e.g. "kitchen electrics"), you can rely on your visitors using the more popular synonym. When your visitors won't do your dirty work for you, turn to the "Mechanical Turk, " Amazon's scalable human-powered service that surprisingly few SEOs utilize. Imagine an army of humans paid in micropayments to do your bidding. Mechanical Turk can tag your products, tag your images, translate your English language content, transcribe your audio, and much more. Whatever you can't scale algorithmically, you can probably scale through the Mechanical Turk.

Encourage people to syndicate your content (and links) by providing numerous RSS feeds powered by your data, sliced and diced in different ways (most popular, top rated, clearance, newest and latest, by category, etc.). This propagates deep links into your site from blogs, aggregators and aficionado websites (and yes, from splogs too...sigh!). Also prominently display and encourage visitors to use social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us throughout your site, in order to add your content to their bookmarks and tag them—again, for the deep inlinks.

Another thing that decreases your percentage of "freeloaders" is your internal linking structure. Your navigational hierarchy plays a key role in passing link gain deep into your site. Pages too far down the site tree won't get enough "juice" to warrant high rankings. Optimize your linking structure by creating a rich web of interlinking within your site. Whenever appropriate, include links to related products, related articles, related searches, etc. While you're at it, ensure the anchor text is optimal (i.e. wipe such phrases as "view related" and "click here" from your link text vocabulary). Tag clouds are one of my favorite methods of interlinking with keyword-rich text links, done in an attractive Web 2.0 way. Don't just use the same tag cloud across your site; tailor the tag cloud to the page or category within the site.

I've seen search engine optimization scale across very large websites through automation and delegation, rather than old school SEO tactics. Just like with most things, the secret lies in working smarter, not harder.

Stephan Spencer is founder and president of Netconcepts, a 12-year-old web agency specializing in search engine optimized ecommerce. He writes for several publications and blogs at the Natural Search Blog. The 100% Organic column appears Thursdays at Search Engine Land.