27 June 2009

Post in Forums and Generate Traffic to your Blog

Using forum posts to generate traffic to your web site gives you several advantages that other methods don't. One of these, of course, is that it only costs you time, not money, and very little of that. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. Keep reading to learn how to get it right.

Introduction
The modern world of eBusiness has opened up countless opportunities for anyone that has a bit of creativity and a good work ethic. The incredible accessibility of the Internet grants virtually anyone the ability to get online and start his or her own money-making venture. Whether his or her enterprise is a traditional store with a website front, a store run solely on the Internet, or a new type of business that runs on subscriptions or ad revenue, almost everyone has some use for the Internet to bolster his or her business.

The real trick about the Internet’s ability to help a business is that you absolutely must know what you are doing. If you simply put a website online and sit and wait, no one is ever going to find you. There are literally hundreds of millions of websites on the Internet, and your potential customer is not going to just stumble upon yours through luck. Luckily, for the savvy Internet user, there are several key steps to take that will ensure that your customers are flooding into your website, ready to consume your product.

A good place to start looking for traffic to your website is the closest place to it: the Internet. Sure, it is possible to advertise using conventional means (billboards, fliers, commercials, etc.) and get plenty of traffic, but there are key advantages to using the Internet to generate business on the Internet. It is much more likely that someone will take the time to click a link to your website than it is that he or she will write it down while driving past a billboard and type it into his or her computer when he or she gets home.

If you are looking to generate quality traffic on a budget, then there is really no better way to go about doing it than one that will allow you to not spend a dime. One of the best free ways of generating traffic is by posting on online discussion boards, also known as forums. These posts will offer your potential customers the ability to go directly to your website from your posts, as well as find your information on their favorite search engine.
The simplest way to get customers to your website is to give them a link. When posting on a forum, you are often offered the opportunity to include a link and brief description for your business in every one of your posts. Other users do not mind this small amount of text after each one of your posts; often, others will have much more intrusive “signatures.”

The idea behind a link in your signature is that a potential customer will see information relevant to him or her (the description), and if he or she wants to learn more, will click on the link that goes with the description. The traffic that you receive in this manner will be from very targeted individuals who are interested in what you have to offer. The conversion rate (number of sells compared to the number of visits) from this type of traffic is very high. For that reason, direct traffic is also considered “high quality” traffic.

Another means of generating direct traffic is by providing a link to your website from your actual post. If you find a topic that is relevant to your business and post information that contributes to the discussion, then you should feel free to link back to your business website and let everyone know that they can go there if they would like more information about the subject or a product that is relevant. Be careful to read the rules of the forum before doing this, however, as some forums are very sensitive to anything that smells even a little like spam.

Traffic generated from links in posts is even higher quality than links from signatures, because the potential customers that are going to your website are doing so because they are interested in the specific topic that you were discussing, and not just the general idea that you convey in your signature’s description.

One thing you must watch out for as far as this kind of linking is concerned is that it can be very easy to get a negative reputation. If you provide a link to your business in every single one of your posts, it will quickly become obvious that you are just trying to be a salesperson. Also, if the content of your post is not constructive and you contribute nothing to the discussion, people will figure that you are just a personal billboard, and ignore you as such.
A more complicated means of generating traffic for your website is by providing links that help your search engine rankings. Luckily for you, there is very little that you actually need to understand in order to take advantage of this form of traffic generation.

The way it works is that every time you post your link on the Internet, a search engine like Google or Yahoo! will automatically detect your link. Every time the search engine finds that same link in different places across the web, it puts another “tally mark” next to it. This running tally—the number of times your link is found on the Internet—affects how close to the top your link will show up when someone searches for keywords that are relevant to your website. This is the most basic idea behind link building and SEO. In other words, the more times you post your link on the web, the more likely it is that your website will show up in top search engine results.

Another aspect of search engine link detection is that certain search engines can differentiate the different pages of your website based on your links. If you provide links to different pages of your website, the search engines will keep track of each page separately in addition to the website as a whole. In essence, you are getting two tally marks—as opposed to one—every time you post a different link.

If the search engines have a record of each of your specific web pages, it is much more likely that search engine results will be much more relevant to your information. As discussed before, this means that you will get much higher quality traffic, which converts to more sales and more money for your business.

Recently, search engines have begun offering website developers the option to designate certain links as “no-follow.” If you find a forum that has this option enabled, what it means is that you can post as many links as you want in all of your posts and the search engines will never notice. Obviously, this will negatively affect your search engine rankings and traffic generation. What you need to do to avoid this trap is learn the difference between “do-follow” links and “no-follow” links.

In 2005, in an attempt to ensure the highest quality of search engine results, Google popularized an HTML attribute called “no-follow.” The idea is that webmasters can indicate links that are not to their own content by tagging them as no-follow. This feature is often used by websites to indicate to search engines that links generated by users are not to be followed and indexed. Although the theory behind this idea is fairly sound and it is probably true that “no-follow” has reduced the amount of random page results in search engines, “no-follow” is the forum-marketer’s worst enemy when it comes to upgrading your search engine rankings.
Luckily for you, it is actually very easy to avoid forums which adhere to the “no-follow” attribute. You can find lists of such forums on multiple websites.

Once you have found a list of discussion boards that will work for you, you have to choose one or two specific ones that best suit you and your personality. If you would like to make the most of your own knowledge to get the word out there about your business, then you have to choose a discussion board that revolves around a main concept that is in line with your business and/or interests. If you are posting about a topic on which you are knowledgeable and in which you are interested, it is more likely that you will come off as legitimate. The greater the quality of your posts, the more likely people will believe you and follow your links.

Once you have found a forum that supports “do-follow” links and is also related to your area of expertise, you are almost ready to start marketing your own website. There is just one more piece of advice for you: come off well. You can become a respected and well-liked source of information on your topic quite easily if you are respectful and knowledgeable in your posts. However, if you are controversial and rude, it is much more likely that people will come to hate reading your posts. They will not follow your links and your time posting will be completely wasted.

21 June 2009

Better Tracking of Visitors Interaction on your Blog

Do you mind, if somebody uses the content posted on your blog or website pages? I personally do not mind. However, it would be nice if there will be ability to track all the cases, when content is copied, and the proper credit will be presented. The Tynt Tacer free service for web masters make that wish easy to achieved.


What does Tracer do?
Tracer secretly tracks when users copy content from your web site and automatically adds a link back to the original page when your content is pasted. So, why do I need Tracer?
Tracer is a brand new way to:
  • Generate more visits and page views
  • Get credit when content is copied from your site
  • Measure and understand user engagement
  • Improve your search engine ranking


Generate more visits and page views
The automatically added attribution link provides return traffic to your site when your content is shared without your knowledge.

Get credit when content is copied from your site
The automatically added link back ensures you get credit for content that you have created. You can’t stop users from copying from your site but you can improve the chances of getting credit for your content.

Measure and understand user engagement
Tracer allows you to view statistics on how often content is copied from your site, what that content is and what keywords are being copied most. This helps you better understand which content is most interesting to your users.

Our data shows that those pages that users engage with most are not necessarily those with the most page views.

Tracer allows you to identify the most popular content on your site so you can:
  • Provide high quality data to your advertisers, over and above page view stats.
  • Learn which stories users forward most using our copy/paste technology.
  • Produce content more closely aligned with what your users are interested in.
  • Optimize your search terms or keywords.


Improve your search engine ranking
The number one signal that search engines use to determine how relevant your site is, and therefore how high your site ranks, is the number and quality of links that link back to your site. Tracer automatically adds a link back to your site when content is copied and pasted. When your content is pasted onto a blog, Twitter, or another web site it has a direct impact on your search ranking.

By seeing what words and phrases users are copying from your site you can better understand how you might select your keywords, meta-tags, tags, and even ad-words.

Also, Tynt.com is an increasingly popular place for people to find interesting web sites and content and generates visits to your site when content is copied.

Who needs Tracer?
  • Sites that would like to increase traffic and page views.
  • Sites that would like to better understand what content is most engaging.
  • Writers or content creators that would like credit for their work when it is copied.
  • Writers or content creators who would like to see which content is the most engaging and/or the most popular. Keep in mind that page views alone don’t necessarily mean that the user engages with content.
  • Sites selling advertising who would like to find out which pages can drive higher advertising rates.


How to Install
First, you need to register for a free account, to register for an account and as soon as your request will be processed, you will receive an email including:
  • A single line of java script to add to your web page html code.
  • A link to your personal Tracer Statistics Dashboard giving you valuable insight into what is being copied from your site.

Sign for free and get tracer for your pages: http://www.tynt.com/tracer/home


Video Presentation:


16 June 2009

How to Get Included in Google News

Google News can send tons of traffic and help you gather a lot of inbound links. Inclusion in Google News actually puts you far ahead of the general bloggers’ crowd and provides the worldwide exposure, validity, and media recognition. While it might be a challenging target, it is worth to strive and the results will be rewarding in terms of the blog visibility and eventually in related profits generation. For me, personally, it is probably a long way to go, since my some of the conditions, essential for consideration, are not in place. But, for you it might be just few steps ahead.
Image and video hosting by TinyPic 
  
In this article by Ivan Strouchliak it is discussed the Google News editorial and technical requirements.
Editorial Guidelines



Content Requirements
Content must be 100% original. Google News does not support news scrapers. You can sign up for PR wires to track news updates from around the world (along with the clutter of press releases). Having buddies on the “inside” also goes a long way, since you can be the one to break hot stories (Search Engine Land, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Authors/Editors
Google requires more than one author for a website, so if you’re a one-man blog you won’t get into Google News. The number of authors/editors required is not specified, so all we can do is guess. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Round Table managed to get into Google News with five writers/editors and two featured writers, so you need at least several people.

Some forums state that the minimum required number of editors is three, but those are merely guesses.
Google News only includes sites that they perceive as operational organizations. This requires a clear editor/writer structure, author bios, company information, a physical address, phone numbers, etc. In short, it includes anything that shows you’re an operational publication that can produce consistent, high quality, fresh content.

Number of Articles Per Day (frequency)
There is no official statement on this from Google, but it’s obvious they want to see at least two to three quality articles per day.

Number of Articles on a Website
Just as with article frequency, there’s no word on this directly from Google. Common sense tells us, though, that you need a few hundred articles in the archive before they include you.

Content Format
Each article must have a clear title (more on titles in the technical section), author name and date of publication. It should also be a minimum of 200 to 300 words.

Ads
Google is 100 percent okay with ads on the site. In fact, it encourages all Google News publishers to use the AdSense Network. Advertisements also indicate that the site has visitors and a functional business model to support authors and continue publishing.

Multimedia
Google is okay with images within content, but does not allow content that consists of images only. The same goes for videos. You can include You Tube videos, but there must be words in an article to qualify it for Google News.

Overall, Google wants to see quality; this is probably the reason they have no clear qualifications. If a small publisher can contribute to the Google experience, Google editors will include that website, regardless of size.
Also keep in mind that once publisher is accepted in the index, everything else is handled by algorithms, without human input, so Google editors naturally want to make sure that the site will live up to the standards.

Article Titles
Titles should be news-like and clear. Browse CNN and the Wall Street Journal to get a feel for news headlines. They usually summarize content and include the names of the main players. Including names of companies will increase the likelihood of the article showing up for company specific searches (i.e. Google, Yahoo).

Title length should be between two and twenty-two words.
Date and time are prohibited in titles. If you’re using a content management system, you can disable that feature. Article titles should appear in both the <title> tag and somewhere on the page, for example <h1> of <h2> tags.

Google does not support the usage of the title as a link (the usual case on blogs), so you must disable this feature.

URLs
To be included in Google News, article URLs should follow Google News bot standards. URLs must be unique, and each unique URL must point to only one article. URLs must be permanent, without the use of session IDs. Google does not support dates in URLs, so set up your content management system to exclude dates.

Each URL must contain at least three digits. For example:
Bad:
www.site.com/news/article/54.html
Good:
www.site.com/news/article/547.html
www.site.com/news/article/4534343.html
Google cannot crawl articles that include a year in the URL.

URL Attributes that Prevent Crawling
Any of the URL attributes below will prevent the Google News bot from crawling your link:
  • /board/ or /boards/
  • /forum/ or /forums/
  • /messageboard
  • /showthread
  • ?threadid= or &threaded
  • Anything that is similar in nature
Google does not support news posted in a forum format. 

Template
Your website template should look like a news source. Milind Mody of eBrandz recommends staying away from a blog format.

JavaScript
Google News does not support JavaScript in any form, such as links, navigation or content hidden within a script.

Redirects
Google supports redirects, meaning you can plug content (like ads) in between Google News and your article. Guidelines include no session IDs (&ID=), use of 301s for permanent redirects and a minimal number of redirects to get from one page to another. Also set the redirect time period for a short amount of time and make sure that redirects don’t point to themselves.

Many companies show ads with delays before taking users to the actual article; this is why Google supports various redirects. 

To find out how the crawler would see a redirect, disable cookie, JavaScript and CSS support in your browser. You will probably see plain and ugly pages.

Frames
Frames are evil; don’t use frames. Sites that use frames call upon the dark forces from the depths of hell to be punished by low rankings and crawler problems.

Language
Google News supports only one language per page. The best code is UTF-8. Keep only one language version of the article on one page to avoid problems. If you support more than one language, you can contact the Google Team to be featured in other countries.

No Support
Google News does not support PDF articles and non-permanent content (content which sits on a URL but changes from time to time).

Google's news crawler can spider dynamically generated content, such as .php, .asp and others, but it can run into problems which can prevent articles from appearing on Google News. It recommends that you use static URLs rather than dynamic URLs, or set your content management system to produce static looking links.
If you must use both dynamic and static URLs, block the Google bot from accessing dynamic ones to avoid duplicate content penalties. You can block the Google bot in robot.txt file.

Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links
Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Its automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.

Snippets of Content
Google shows content snippets in search results with keyword occurrences. It requires sites to have NO content, other than the article, in an area between the title and content.

Registration and Subscription Content
If you run on subscription revenues, Google can add more ROI to your bottom line. There are three ways to handle this, but first you must allow Google in. The G-crawler has to see content to classify it, and pay-walls prevent this. You can work around this issue by putting in an exception for the Google bot.
  • First, make sure the Google bot is allowed to crawl your pages (robot.txt).
  • Second, configure your servers to serve registration when Google bot comes from 66.249.64.0/20.
Once you let Google bot crawl your subscription pages, those pages will be featured on Google News. From that point on there are several options:
  1. First click free. With this option visitors can reads full versions of your articles when and only when they come from Google News/Web Search. All other clicks on the site lead to the subscription page. Google claims they’ve increased subscription rates for some publishers with this method, and I believe it works best.
    Once users read full articles, they have a clear idea of the quality of your articles, which is better than any marketing message. For example, from time to time I read tech-related Wall Street Journal articles and I am often amazed at their quality, depth and level of connections with stakeholders in the industry. After reading one of their articles I am more likely to subscribe then after reading only a small summary.
    You can contact Google to arrange the first click free feature. Please note that only Google News/Google Search users will have access to the full article.
  2. A subscription page. This one is plain and simple. When users click on the link they are directed to subscription page. This is not effective in getting more subscriptions.
  3. Snippets of the page. You can also feature a partial snippet of the article with an offer to subscribe.


Feeds
Google does not require RSS feeds, but you can definitely benefit from having one. Feedburner offers free feeds, and all blog platforms produce RSS feeds by default.

10 June 2009

Generate Fast and Easy Misspellings of All Your Keywords

“Uncover Thousands Of Profitable Misspelled Keywords Instantly To Drive Tons Of Qualified Visitors To Your Websites!”


Xtreme Typo Generator is a freeware software utility allows generating the keywords which are intentionally mistyped or misspelled.

But, why use misspelled keywords?
If using mistype keywords does not make sense to you, then you have to reorient yourself and look at the issue from the different perspective. In fact, misspelled or typo keywords are as useful as those which are correctly spelled or typed. Many internet users mistype or misspell words or phrases in their search boxes. An SEO-smart website must also meet this fact and adjust to this reality.

About 20% of all searches contain keyword misspellings, and there are those which are more common. Webmasters can take advantage of these misspellings to use in his or her own website by adding them to the website’s keyword list. Having these misspelled keywords would actually raise the traffic and popularity of the website.

Allowing the misspelled words in the body of the article does not look too professional, but using misspelled keywords for labels and categories assignment does not harm the site, especially, if the list of the keywords is hidden.

Thinking of thousands of keyword combinations can be very time consuming and very draining. Double the effort and time, and you can probably make a short list of all the possible and common keywords in typo mistakes. That is why a tool like the Xtreme Typo Generator becomes essential.

What can Xtreme Typo Generator do for you?
  • Create a list of thousands of misspelled keywords in just a few clicks.
  • Up to 6 options for you to choose from on how to you want the keywords to be misspelled.
  • Add your own keyword list in the software for more flexibility.
  • Export in TXT file for easy reference later.
  • Adwords keyword wrapper feature to easily prepare your Adword campaign.
  • Organize keywords in broad, exact, phrase, lowercase and negative case.
  • Saves you a ton of time, effort and spare you from spending thousands of dollars in competing for expensive keywords in the search engines.
  • and much more…


Author: IM Soft Xtreme



The Xtreme Typo Generator Utility is rated 4 of 5 on the RateItAll Rating list of the best free computer programs for the keywords generation. As of today, there are 22 utilities presented on the list. 

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