Online Assistant

Every owner of a website on planet Earth knows that getting a constant flow of traffic is the key to making money online. The world wide web attracts such a massive number of buyers that regardless of what you sell, you will make some really good money when you have lots of traffic.

Internet marketers are constantly coming up with newer ways to expand their reach across the Internet because no website can survive without enough specific traffic. In their quest to obtain more of the elusive traffic, the website marketers have come up with some rather creative ways to bring in greater amounts of traffic in a short period of time and with little effort.

My email inbox has been flooded with sales letters promoting some automated software or seldom used secret that promises an explosion of website visitors within 30 days. The disturbing part of all this is that it goes against the teaching of our early years; that nothing good comes easy and there is no quick path to building a successful business. As a result of these promises of abundant website traffic and exploding sales figures, many have abandoned those time tested methods of attracting real targeted website visitors that are prepared to take some kind of action. Keep in mind that website traffic isn't something that you can just get, but visitors will come to your website when you have something to provide, enticing them to click on your link.

Too many people are cashing in on a person's desire to get to the top without much effort by offering some really useless website marketing techniques that could actually kill their search engine rankings. The fact is that these are nothing more than 'Marketing Fads', that may produce some huge results in the beginning, but when the newness wears off their effectiveness will fade away forever just like the telephone booth.

Remember when pop-ups and pop-under advertising came out years ago? This was the hottest marketing tool since the time of placing fliers on cars in parking lots. However, when people around the world started using pop-ups to promote their websites there were windows popping up every time you visited and exited a website. Internet users worldwide got so sick of all those pop-up windows that someone invented pop-up killer software. The search engines even started penalizing websites that were using pop-up scripts and soon after that method of website promotion faded away.

I will attempt to identify and explain some of these useless website promotion techniques that should be avoided at all cost. Using some of these bad website marketing techniques could certainly kill your search engine rankings.

These free search engine submission websites allow you to put in your URL, keywords and a description of your website. You then click Submit believing that your website is on its way to being indexed on thousands of search engines. Not so! First of all, the major search engines require manual submission by hand and even implement coding script to prevent auto submission. Secondly, when you click on that Submit button you have no idea where your website link will end up going. Your website link could be automatically posted to illegal or international directory websites that are nothing but a colony of spam links. If Google crawls your website and finds out that you have links to your website coming from other websites with rotten content, then your website will pay the price in low rankings.

There is absolutely no substitute for manually forwarding your websites to the search engines. You will have complete control over where your link is going, and the search engines will automatically crawl your website to get your title and description.

You may have seen those places that claim you can blast your website to over 2 million websites and directories. As a general rule, please stay away from anyone that uses the word 'Blast' because this is just another way of saying Spam. It sounds like you are literally placing your link on millions of other websites and getting tons of instant backlinks to your website. Those FFA or Free For All websites are nothing but a link farm containing links from sites with bad or irrelevant content. The search engines won't ever see your website as being respectable enough to rank high in the search results if it is affiliated with that type of environment.

I once got an email that said, "Héllo Webmaster, My name is John. I have been searching the Internet for some business opportunities and came across your website. I just wanted to know if you are still in business today. Please email me at this_email@emailaddress.com and let me know. Thank you."

I replied to the person giving them more information about one of my websites. That particular email was forgotten until I got a few other emails with the same content from different names and email addresses. This matter sparked my curiosity and prompted me to do some further investigation to find out why these emails turned up so frequently.

I discovered that this was the work of lead generation software that extracts website links and email addresses from the Internet for any category. You just type the keyword in the search box and the software literally pulls in millions of email addresses. The software even allows you to email all those addresses. On the surface it appears to be the perfect way to put your website link in front of millions of people in the same industry as you.

This has the look and smell of spam, but because the one sending the email does not attempt to sell you anything, it's not quite spam. This marketing technique is not very effective because the email is generic, impersonal and did not give the reader a reason to respond. Your emails should speak to a person's needs and not just at them. Readers respond to emails if you find a way to reach their interests, giving them a reason to take action.

Google loves websites that have lots of quality backlinks, considering such links votes on the importance of those sites. Somebody got this crazy idea to automate the link building that Google loves, hoping to get huge numbers of valuable links and move to the top of the search engine results. Google has now gotten smart and has found to way to detect how you are getting your backlinks and even the speed at which you are getting them. So, if you are still buying links or using software to get instant backlinks, then chances are Google will find out and penalize your website. Nothing can substitute for writing valuable content that will automatically attract quality backlinks.

Writing high quality articles is a great way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Again, someone invented a way to automate this process as well. They came out with article submission software that they claim will automatically send your written articles to hundreds or even thousands of dírectories. There is even software that will take one written article, spin the title and words around, and send them to more directories. This software sells like hotcakes because people don't want to do the labor intensive work of writing their own articles and sending them manually to article dírectories.

The real, authentic article directories that can syndicate your articles are getting smart and have installed a special code that disallows auto submission of articles. They have also installed a special script that can detect articles that have been spun off from the original. Most of them manually approve articles before they are published in their directory and can easily detect duplicate and spinned content.

Widespread use of these automated website marketing techniques has taken away the need to apply really genuine website promotion that gets real results and replaced it with push-button marketing. You may see some quick and positive results, but only for a short period of time. Treat your website like an infant; give it lots of attention, feed it some healthy content, protect it from dangerous spam activity and let it grow naturally over time.

With Microsoft and Yahoo combining their muscle in the search space, it is imperative that you do not ignore it in your search engine optimization efforts, especially since it will be the Bing search engine that works behind Yahoo search as well. There have been countless articles written online and in technology magazines comparing Bing to Google, but you need to know the differences between how these two search engines rank their pages so that you can optimize your web pages for both of these as well as Yahoo.

Why Would You Rank Higher in One, but Not in Another?

Most small business owners get frustrated that their site either ranks highly in Bing, but poorly in Google or vice versa. Here are some of the reasons why this may be happening and more importantly some workarounds to tackle this problem.

1. Amount of text: Bing places a lot of importance to content, so if your pages have more than 350 words, then you have better chances of ranking higher in Bing. Not so in Google, for which it doesn't seem to be of importance. So, you need to optimize each and every page individually to meet Bing's page score requirements.

2. Natural Language: Bing places a lot of importance on relevancy, so if your website is optimized with LSI keywords, then you are likely to be ranked higher in Bing. Google is soon catching up, so maybe it's a better idea to optimize based on LSI rather than mindlessly repeating exact keywords. You can also get a firm offering professional link building services to help you out here.

3. Title tags: Bing places more importance on title tags than Google, so make sure that your keywords appear in your title tags as often as possible.

4. Back links and outbound links: Bing places more importance on links in general than Google, and the higher the number of relevant back links you have, the better your chances of a good ranking in Bing. Google used to penalize sites with a large number of outbound links, but Bing likes them, and so you may want to have a judicious amount of these as well in your site. Here again, if you get a professional to work on this area, their link building services team would identify the right places to place links for you, so that it actually translates to a better page rank.

5. Domain age: Both Bing and Google seem to favor older domains, so if you are trying to start off on a new business, it is better to purchase a domain name, that's been around for some time.

As a business owner, you would want all the traffic that you can get whether from Bing, Yahoo or Google and the best way to do this is to optimize it for all the major search sites out there. The best way out is to hire professional link building services to help you in your optimization efforts. If you do not do this, you may miss out on a sizeable chunk of traffic as more and more users start using Bing for their searches.

Most niches are so competitive, that on page search engine optimization and good content is no longer enough to rank well in the search engines. To achieve high positions in search engine results, you need back links. Not only do you need back links, but you need them to come from a diverse range of sources to achieve the best results.

Focusing all of your link building efforts on just one source, and on just once anchor text, will appear unnatural to search engines, and you will lose out because of this. You should spread you links between a wide range of sources to encompass directories, blog comments, article writing, social bookmarking, web 2.0 profiles and blogs, and forum posting. Even more valuable than this is obtaining links from high page rank relevant sites. This can be tricky for most small new websites though, if not impossible. Therefore webmasters of these sites should concentrate on obtaining links that are attainable.

Directories are website that list links to other websites based upon categories. For example, a directory may have a category on food, which will in turn have sub categories on Asian food, European food, and so on. You should submit you website URL to the category that best describes your websites content. There are large amounts of directories in existence, a link from a directory is not worth much, but when you have several links from several directories, the link power soon adds up.

Blog comments are a great way to direct targeted traffic to your website, as well as build links to your website for search engine rankings. You can search for blogs that are related to the theme of your website, and post a constructive comment on one of their articles. Within that comment you should post a link back to your website. Other readers of the blog may choose to follow this link and visit your website. These links can be very powerful for improving your search engine ranking, particularly if they are on high page rank blogs.

Article writing is my favourite method. You submit original content articles to article directories such as ezine, on a wide range of subjects. Within the article, you place a link back to your website. Not only is this method great for driving traffic, since the article directories have a huge reader base, but you also get a high value link for search engine rankings. Just a few of these links pointing to one website is enough to improve that websites ranking, provided the niche is not too competitive.

Social bookmarking your URL in sites like digg and reddit will again not only drive traffic from readers of those sites, but also give you another valuable link for search engine rankings. You should post your URL in a relevant section with constructive comments. If your link is considered spam it will be deleted.

Forum posting is also an extremely successful way of driving traffic and gaining links. Join a forum on a subject related to your websites niche, and start becoming a valued member of the community by posting helpful information and advice. You may be allowed to leave a link to your site in your signature. As your online presence grows, you will soon see traffic coming from the forum, and the links will also help improve your search engine rankings.

Finally, another of my favourite methods is creating a blog on web 2.0 sites like hubpages. Links from these sites are very powerful, and the online blogging community is huge. If you create a valuable interesting blog, many people from those communities may also choose to visit your website.

These are some of the cornerstone methods that new webmasters can use to build links. The key is to ensure that your postings are relevant and not spam. If you provide useful content to accompany your links, you will surely be on the road to search engine ranking success.

Video SEO is about optimizing the search potential for online videos. When performed effectively, it can increase traffic to your site and lead to higher conversions in sales or whatever the purpose it of your site is. There are a few simple tips which can be applied easily to any online video to yield better SEO for your video.

Selecting appropriate target keywords for your video is the first important tip in relation to video SEO. Each video should not use more than two or three keywords. The keywords must be such that they give an exact idea of the video content.

After you have selected your target keywords these are to be used wherever possible - in the title, tags, description etc. When you create back links to your video use these target keywords. By selecting good target keywords and optimizing your video to use them, your video will be ranked more highly for the same search terms.

Google, probably the most popular search engine, owns YouTube. As such, posting your video on YouTube possibly affords some advantage for your video so far as video SEO is concerned.

You are not in any way restricted in posting your video to any number of sites in the internet, but you should give major consideration to a posting on YouTube.

If you want strong SEO for your video you should create separate page for each. As each page has a unique URL, each of your videos will also get unique URL which gives certain advantages like using your target keywords in the page title, metadata and in the description of your video on this page.

In order to improve SEO for your videos, you should seriously consider adding a video transcript. Transcripts generate data which are read by search engines. Search engines cannot watch your video directly. The transcript generated for your video is an excellent way for additional use your target keywords.

One of the key facets of SEO is to get other sites in the internet linking to your video. These are called back links. Back Links from relevant and popular sites, targeting keywords while referring to your video are most beneficial for video SEO.

Blog comments and forum postings by adding the URL to your video are also popular and easy ways to create back links.

However, you should keep in mind that the link to your video must not be out of place for the readers of the blog or forum as in that case your comment or post can be treated as spam and will eventually be removed or will be ignored for being not interesting.

In order to improve video SEO you should bookmark your video in social bookmarking sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Delicious etc. When you bookmark your video on all these sites and use your target keywords while doing it inbound links to your video is created which increases the chance of more people viewing it. Put buttons next to your video so that viewers who like it can easily add a link to your video to one or more social bookmarking sites of their choice.

Recently, I came across an article about promoting a website using blog advertising. I was too influenced by the article that I wanted to share it with my friends and readers.

It is a well written article stating about how blog advertising has become an important source of traffic to any website. Nowadays, blogs are maintained by even companies for the sole purpose of advertising. It improves the amount of traffic to their company website.

It talks about the difference a well maintained blog can make to an upcoming business. People use blogs to demonstrate how their products works. It is also used as a portal for providing their reviews on the items. In case of electronic goods, customers can be provided with specifications and advantages of their products over other competing products. This can in turn help out their business in a very useful way. Larger number of reviews about any products increases its overall credibility. This will also be seen in the number of goods being sold.

The article also compares different styles of advertising that a company adopts to promote their website. The strategies are compared as well. As a reader, I hate reading plainly written ads about a product. This view is well known to the writers and the companies as well. Through their blogs, they usually advertise themselves in a way rather than their products. They talk about their accomplishments in the field and their upcoming events. They also share the testimonials by their customers. This technique is of better influence as the credibility of a company as such increases rather than any single product. The articles even says that readers like to know more about the company as such rather than their products to ensure the quality and credibility of the product.

The article goes on describe about paid blog advertising. Companies turn blogs with great traffic to their advantage. They hire writers of these blogs to write about the companies in their blogs. The companies turn these blogs into source of traffic to them. They know the shortcuts. Don't they?

The article also talks about self promotion for blogs. Ad revenue is one of the major sources of money for blog writers and to increase the revenue,the blogger needs more traffic and for that one has to promote his own blog. Articles about business niche and even articles bought from other writers can indeed work in your favor for getting more readers. Backlinks are an important part of search engine rankings and your posts are placed higher if you have more backlinks than others. Blogger should write posts in such a manner that it invites a discussion and also a special mention in other blogs whom you discuss with.

Blog advertising not only improves the traffic of whom the advertisement is of. It also improves traffic to your website as the discussion on business niche always invites many readers that you may have never thought of even opening your website.