Residual Victory Blog

How to Choose an SEO Provider is a matter of finding a union of comfortable communication, agreeable strategies, financial disclosure, a working relationship, trust, and shared goals.  When you choose a Search Engine Optimization Provider, you choose to put your business and future income in the SEO Provider’s hands.  Your website is important to you, so make sure you are important to your SEO.

Optimizing a website is not an overnight task, it can take months to come to fruition.  The industry is constantly moving forward and new advantages and techniques are always being discovered.  When you choose an SEO, make sure they are current with industry trends.  You could simply ask the SEO if they see any new trends as negative or positive. When you approach an SEO for questioning, have an idea of your budget ahead of time. Make sure pricing for updating is reviewed.  It’s difficult for SEOs to quote a price right away. Some SEOs have developed “packages” so they can give an estimate of the cost, but a true price (from a good SEO) can’t be determined until they evaluate your website.  If an SEO firm tells you they can up your page rank in 24 hours and guarantee you’ll be in first page search engine results by next week, politely say goodbye.

Price structures consist of hourly consulting, which runs $40 an hour for entry-level and up to $1000 for top corporate consultants.  Mid-tier runs about $100-$200 per hour.  Project based pricing is a flat fee which includes time, effort and staff variables. Other less common structures include Contract Services for a specific job, Price per Page, Profit Sharing, Monthly Retainer, Pay for Rankings, and Pay for Traffic. Options include contacting a college to see if  interns are available, or putting the work up for bid on a freelancer web site.
(Further pricing structure and the difficulties of each can be found at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-pricing-costs-what-should-you-charge-how-much-should-you-pay.)

Realize that you might want to make changes to the strategy, and the SEO Provider you choose might come across difficulties that weren’t previously uncovered.  Talk about how changes will be handled in the contract before signing.   The size of your website and the difficulty of the project will be taken into consideration.  Whether it’s an SEO firm or an individual working on their own with low overhead will make a difference in pricing.

In project estimations, SEO Providers may take into consideration client communication, (yes, they may charge you to talk - so plan ahead), communication between team members (you may pay them to talk), baseline reporting (reports prepared for you on where you stand now), competitive analysis (this can be time consuming for some websites), tactical issues such as coding, links, evaluations, keyword research, review of existing pages and creation of new pages, submission to search engines and directories, editing pages, analyzing traffic counts, monthly reports, or any number of other issues.

The Search Engine Optimization Provider will want to look at the structure of your webpage, the URL propagation, design and functionality, code, meta tags, content and linking.  Make sure you spend time (even though it’s costing you it will be worth it in the end) discussing what strategies they intend to apply.  Remember, the goal is to get visitors to your site more than it is to have a high page rank or come up in the top ten search engine results.

Deciding when and How to Choose an SEO provider is an investment.  Do your research well.  Google their name and ask for examples of optimized websites.  Start a blog asking other webmasters you admire for references.  (Expect SEO Provider advertising.)  If it’s in your budget now, then now is a good time.  Communication, trust and shared strategies will indicate a wise investment, and your new visitors will confirm it.  Choose an SEO Provider carefully, and visitors will be your reward.

How to Build a Google Sitemap might appear to be a daunting task, particularly to those of us that aren’t computer gurus.  However, with today’s available generators and online tutorials, support is easily accessible and available to help you accomplish your Sitemap mission.  Google Sitemap Generators are available and the requirements of building and submitting a Google Sitemap is outlined at Google’s Webmaster’s page located at www.google.com/webmasters/.

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask.Com have standardized Sitemaps, and all use XML to facilitate faster crawling by the spiders.  Traditional Sitemaps that use HTML can still be submitted, and Googling an XML Sitemap page next to an HTML Sitemap page should not cause any problems.  However, the major search engines and generators encourage you to build your Sitemap using XML.  Google created www.Sitemaps.org to provide the XML schema for the Sitemap protocol under the Creative Commons License.

As you know, spiders discover pages from links.  Sitemaps are the webcrawler’s assistant.  They help the spiders locate your URLs and provide the spiders with additional information that you have provided.  When building a Google Sitemap you include the date the page was last modified, how often the pages change, and Sitemap index files.  In April of 2007, Google added the ability to place a robots.txt file specifying the location of your Sitemaps.  Just add “Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/Sitemap.xml” in the usual location for the robot.txt file to tell Google and Ask.com to recognize the location of your Sitemaps.

Google provides details about building Sitemaps in the Webmaster Tools Overview and FAQ pages under Sitemap Protocol.  Requirements they list for building Sitemaps include:

*  The format must include XML tags.  (As mentioned above, generators can assist you with submitting or converting the older HTML formats.)

*  Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag; use a <url> entry for each for each URL as a parent XML tag; and a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

* The Sitemap must be UTF-8 encoded.

* You are limited to 50,000 URLs to each Sitemap file, and each one can be no larger than 10MB.  Sitemaps can be compressed using gzip.

* You can submit a site map for just portion of your URLs that are updated frequently.

* URLs must use entity escape codes and follow the RFC-3986 standard for URIs, the RFC-3987 standard for IRIs, and use W3C Datetime encoding for lastmod timestamps.

* Your URLs must be completely specified.  Make sure your http’s and slashes are in, but you can only have one version of URL in your Sitemap.  Frames must include both URLs (frameset and frame contents).  Multiple versions of URLs will effect the crawling, but the position of your URL does not have an impact.

* Remove session Ids in URLs.

* The “priority hint” is only relative to URLs in your own site.

* It is “strongly recommended” that you put your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server.

Building a Sitemap for Google takes time, but it can give you an edge in being included in search page results.  Absorb all the information on Google’s Webmaster page, critically research the generators available, and take a visit to some blogs and forums focusing on XML and building Sitemaps.  The more you learn about Building a Google Sitemap the less daunting the task will feel.  Give it a try.  There’s a lot of sitemap support available and it certainly can’t hurt.  Maybe you’ll turn into a computer guru after all!

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website is a fundamental lesson for anyone seeking to develop or promote their website.  Real-world marketing basics still apply to the virtual world.  The 3Ps (Product, Pricing and Promotion) expand into 4Ps (Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement).  SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) applies to website search engine optimization.
Analyzing a Competitor’s Website is similar to analyzing the business itself.  Learning how to analyze every aspect of your competitor’s business will ensure your advantage in building successful search engine, marketing and sales strategies.

If you are targeting a specific competitor, it’s obvious you go to their website to start.  Research your competitor and their parent company, subsidiaries, legal names, and domain names.  Go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office at www.uspto.gov, World Intellectual Property Organization www.wipo.int, and the US Securities and Exchange webpage at www.sec.gov, and www.hoovers.com.
Now you have information for cross-referencing and their financial status.  If they’ve been losing money, you may be able to take over.  If your competitor has a strong financial background, you should concentrate on finding your niche.  Do a search for “similar pages” to locate other similar competitors.  See if they are involved in cloaking or link farming.  Check out www.copyscape.com to see if they have duplicate pages.

Analyze all of the links on your competitor’s website: reciprocal, inbound and outbound links for each page.  Google “link:nameofwebsite.” This will give you a list of the websites that link into the website.  Evaluate those pages.  Firefox has new SEO tool at http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html which includes tools that will tell you about links to blogs, del.icio.us, Technorati, Google PageRank and age of the domain.

Keywords are at the heart of search engine results.  You can determine the keywords, keyword count and keyword density at  http://www.googlerankings.com/ultimate_seo_tool.php.  Think of tangents.  See if the keywords are used in the links, file names, document titles or body text.  Google allintitle:keywordyouchoose” (finds keyword in the title of webpages) and “allinurl:keywordyouchoose,” (finds keyword in URLs). There are online tools, toolbars and downloads available for analyzing websites.  Do a search for “tools analyze seo” or “free online tools analyze competition.” Check for downloads for marketing competition analysis software at www.Zdnet.com and www.download.com.

Once you know who your competition is, you need to know who the customers are.  That’s traffic.  Make sure your “toolbox” includes tools to analyze the traffic patterns to each page.  Find who’s clicking where, how much, and why.  Content defines your competitor.  What is missing from theirs?  Can you fill a void or compliment each other?  Is there room for expansion or a niche?  What services do they offer?  Can you provide better customer satisfaction?  Are there complaints on the web?  Check blogs and social communities for possible criticisms about the website.

Learning how to analyze a competitor’s website is just the beginning.  Once you collect the information, and evaluate it, you need to use it and develop a strategy to beat it.  Take your competitive analysis seriously, and make your mark in the search engine results.  Analyze your competition today, and you could beat them in their rankings tomorrow.  Learning how to analyze your competition is the first step, now use what you learned!

How Google PageRank Works is a discipline in itself, and is at the forefront of discussions for search engine optimization experts, web developers, information and technology experts, academia and mathematicians.  Amazingly they frequently agree on one thing: Content is King.  To verify this, just look at the rankings of www.CNN.com or http://news.bbc.co.uk/.  Google PageRank is a voting system that uses links to a page as votes to a page.  Popular news websites have many links connecting to them; therefore, they have more “votes” and a higher Google Page Rank.  Global and topical popularity are taken into consideration in ranking pages.  PageRank, also known as “PR,” is one of many factors included in search engine results, which is why so much attention is given to its value.

You must be indexed and have links in order to have a PR value.  (To clarify “Page Rank” or “PageRank”: Toolbar Pagerank is updated infrequently, and is said to be unreliable. Search Engine Page Rank (or Search Engine PageRank) is relative to Placement in search engine results.  PageRank (PR) is a factor Google considers in deciding your placement within search engine results and is evaluated frequently.)  Link schemes led Google to refine their link-weighting algorithms.  Websites participating in “link farming” or link selling “for the purpose of manipulating search engines” are being be weeded out.

Buying and Selling links are useful for advertising, but a violation if used to manipulate Pagerank.  “Black hat” competition can be reported to Google on their form at www.google.com/webmasters/tools/paidlinks.  Google recommends designating links you paid for with a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag, and keeping links related.  Another tactic of search engine manipulation is
“Google Bombing,” discussed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3298443.stm.

In-depth analysis and significant peer-review of mathematical formulas involved in Google’s PageRank algorithms is rampant.  Mathematical deductions and networking analysis can help you decide link arrangement in a hierarchy that can result in heavier page ranking on one page, or average page ranking applied throughout. Nevertheless, you will find contradicting advice. For the purpose of this article, it will suffice it to say, good links going into your webpage help.

White-Hat Link-baiting suggestions such as free tools, lists, industry research, community building, and competitive analysis can be found at www.seomoz.org, together with a wealth of other information relative to web content, search engine optimization, and Google PageRank.  Cross-Linking (Reciprocal Links) are walking on thin ice.  Google maintains that “as long as the links are relevant” they are safe.  However, Google Guidelines state: “Link schemes include Link exchange and reciprocal links schemes.”  Many sites cross-link successfully, however, a large consensus of developers are afraid of getting banned by having too many reciprocal links.  (Yahoo has been touchy with mass cross-links.)  Since Google themselves have accidentally marked some of their pages as spam, this fear isn’t unjustified.  Get listed in a directory to start with a safe one-way link.

Providing killer content will avoid the cloudy guidelines of Google’s PageRanking and maintain a high Google PageRank.  Create and publicize content people want to link to. Keep up with How Google Page Rank works and the latest PageRanking guidelines on Google by subscribing to their related RSS Feeds.  With killer content and updated information, you will be able to make Google PageRank Work in your favor, and see first hand how Google can work for you.

Tips for successful affiliate marketing can be found throughout a network of Affiliate Blogs, Forums and websites.  Banners, Emails and Pop-ups are out:  Blogs, Social Networks and Pay-per-Click ads are in.  Fireflick, (http://index.fireclick.com/), a web analytics benchmark index, reports current conversion rates for affiliates are up 18% in the last week (August 2007).  Forrester Research reported back in 2003 that affiliate marketing drove an annual $14 billion dollars in online sales, and online conversion rates rose 120% between 2001 and 2002.  Spam exploded in affiliate marketing the following years, and became a serious concern, but that didn’t stop the players in the affiliate marketing networks.

Dedicated affiliate managers began to get concerned about their branding efforts, and started weeding out the complacent affiliates from the dedicated affiliates.  Avon shaved off 9,000 affiliates in 2004, and found their results from affiliates improved when focused on a core group of key players.  Big companies now focus on developing relationships with the dedicated few rather than the many stagnant.  Today, the majority of web retailers have less than 250 affiliates, and affiliate sales account for 20% or less of their total sales. 

Being responsible for 20% of sales should not be taken lightly.  According to Internet Retailer (www.internetretailer.com), 65% of affiliate managers offer higher commissions for higher results, and Consumer Brand Electronics pay the highest commissions.  High commissions don’t come without hard work in the affiliate marketing industry.  Affiliate Marketing is for those who are capable of devoting time and investment to become a successful (paid) vehicle for a sales lead.  Here’s some tips to help you succeed in the professional world of Affiliate Marketing.

First, find a quality company to work for.  Your affiliate marketing success will depend on your commitment, and your manager’s.  Believe in the company.  It’s easier to sell something you believe in. Many affiliates realized too late they should have investigated their company, and struggled to be paid.

Second, start with a business plan.  Explore methods of affiliate marketing and the latest fads.  Stay current, but start small to keep losses to a minimum.  Don’t use methods proven not to work.  Everyone experiences a learning curve.  Planning prevents loss.  Learn the lingo, study the web, and do the math.

Third, have plans to expand and diversify.  Affiliate programs die if left unattended.

Fourth, register a separate domain name for your affiliate link.  Have it open in a separate window so the visitor’s surfing is not interrupted.  Let the customer know they are leaving the current site.  Keep their interests in mind.

Fifth, develop quality content in the vehicles of your Affiliate Sales Strategy.  Your content is your reputation.  Add new and relevant information to keep visitors coming.  Include information on consumer protection to brand yourself as trustworthy. Quality and Trust affects revenue.

Starting with these Tips, you’ll be on your way to a meaningful and profitable affiliate marketing sales campaign.  By becoming one of the driven few, you will reap the benefits of your sales, and keep yourself positioned as a key player in the world of Affiliate Marketing.

Streamline your Business and Increase your Profits with Autoresponders’ inexpensive, cost-effective multi-tasking capabilities.  Autoresponders are  powerful e-marketing tools that send automatic emails so you can take care of the more profitable aspect of your business by creating new email strategies. Investing your time in developing e-marketing strategies has a much higher rate of return than spending time manually answering emails.  That’s the first increase in profit with Autoresponders.  The usefulness of Autoresponders is only limited by the amount of marketing and promotional material that you can dream up to send your customers.

Some of the typical uses for Autoresponders are sending email replies for confirmations and subscriptions.  These are useful and cost-saving tools, and many of these services can be found in free online Autoresponder programs.  But Autoresponders’ capabilities are worthy of being used to develop relationships with your customers and facilitate further sales opportunities. Autoresponder can be set to send emails at the same time and same day for a period of time you determine.

Build an email list with Autoresponders, and offer an incentive for visitors to sign up.  Incentives can vary from sending coupons, samples, a quote or picture of the day, to an e-book, newsletter, or an e-course that is emailed one course at a time, or even a list of useful links.  Create fast-breaking news updates - keep in touch with your industry and let your email clients read the latest news from your auto-generated newsletter.  Use RSS Feeds to your advantage and pass on updates to your subscribers. Make sure all incentives are directly related to your website and target market.

You now have an email list with email addresses to send product, pricing and promotional material.  And with every email is an opportunity to upsell. What else might your customer be interested in? If you don’t know, ask them in your auto generated emails and send an auto-response thanking them for their input. 

As an online sales tool, Autoresponder is useful for sending follow-up emails and responses to commonly asked questions.  Make sure your emails sound personal.  Spend time considering the signature line, developing the format, and personalizing the impersonal. Make sure contact information and unsubscribe information is always available. Try to incorporate your branding strategy into your email marketing strategy, and don’t forget your visuals to make a more complete imprint on the customer’s mind.

Plan your e-marketing and Autoresponder strategy.  Find out what options are available in different Autoresponders.  Some are free if you include their advertising, some are online and have monthly charges, and some have a mass of useful features and utilities that you can install on your website.  Begin responding to more customers, and provide them with content they can’t get enough of.  With a well-thought out Autoresponder program your emails will multiply, your customers will multiply, your profits will increase, and you won’t be typing in email addresses all day. So get streamlining, and start Autoresponding.  Your market is waiting for you.

This Search Engine Optimization Glossary is just a glimpse of some of the vocabulary one will come across in search engine optimization research.

By no means is this comprehensive glossary.  If you can’t find the definition you are looking for, try www.seomoz.org where a more indepth glossary is available.
Absolute Link: A link that shows the full URL of the page being linked.

allintitle:  Restricts results of a search to containing the words in a title of the webpage..

allinurl: Restricts results of a search to words located in a URL.

ALT Attribute: Descriptive text that appears if an image fails to load in an HTML element.

Anchor Text: The text part of a link.

AdSense: A Google advertising program.

Affiliate Network: Affiliated websites that partake in a system of commission on sales of products or services. One who participates is an Affiliate.

Algorithm: A mathematical programming system used to determine which web pages are displayed in search results, when referring to search engine algorithms.

Atom Feed: Atom is an XML-based document format similar to RSS.

Autoresponders:  A program that sends replies to email messages. Often used to send confirmations and boilerplate information.

Back Link: Also referred to as Inbound Link. A link on a web site other than your own that links to your web site.

Bait and Switch: Bringing a visitor or link in under a false premise then switching the intent. 

Black Hat: SEO techniques that don’t follow best practices.

Bot:  A program which performs a task autonomously. Search engines use spiderbots, spammers often use bots to plagiarize.
 
Bounce Rate:  The percentage of people who come to your website and leave instantly.

Cache: The snapshot of a webpage when it is crawled by the search engine’s spider.

Cloaking: Hiding page content or putting up artifical content to keep content from people or robots.

Click Thru Rate: The amount of clicks a visitor makes from search engine results to find the results they sought. Used to track keywords.

Conversion Rate: A rate that defines how many visitors are converted into money or how many viewed a page.

CPC:  Cost Per Click

CPM: Cost Per Thousand impressions. Quantifies the average value/cost of Pay-per-Click advertisements. (M stands for the Roman numeral one thousand).

Crawl: An robot follows links to visit web sites on behalf of search engines or directories then processes and indexes the code and content to store in the search engine’s database.

Cross Linking: Linking within one website.

DC:  Data Center

Data Centers: Different IP addresses.
 
Deep Linking: Linking to content buried “deep” in a website.

Duplicate Content: Content on two or more webpages that is the same or almost the same.  A negative attribute for SEO.

EPV:  Earnings Per Visitor.

EPC:  Earnings Per Click.

Flog:  Fake Blog.

Hijacking: Stealing pages from another site and making it appear that the pages are coming from the hijacker’s site.

Host: Either entire domains or sub-domains.

Hub: A trusted page with high quality content that links out to related pages.

Image Link: A hyperlink that uses a clickable image, as opposed to a clickable text hyperlink.

Inbound Link: Also known as backlink. A link on a web site other than your own that points to your web site.

Index: A search engine’s database of websites that search engines use for queries.

Indexing:  The process of adding Web content to a search engine’s Index (database).

Indexer:   A program that search engines use to update their databases

Internal Links:  Links within your site that point to other pages in your website

Keyword density: The number of times a keyword or keyword phrase is used in a document compared to the total words in the document. You can take the total number of words in the document and multiply it by the percent required to find out how many keywords you need.  Or you can take the number of keywords or keyword phrases you have and divide by the total number of words.

Keyword Stuffing: Spamming, or stuffing, a document by repeating a word or phrase.

Keyword Phrase: A phrase a searcher uses when searching using a search engine.

Keyword: A word used when querying a search engine.

Landing Page:   The page a website visitor lands on after clicking a link, usually in a advertisement and usually contains a sales pitch.

Link Popularity: The measurement of quantity or quality of websites that link to your website.

Linking Strategy: The process of researching, analyzing and developing a strategy to include links on your website and others that will result in maximum visibility and are optimized for search engine results.

Linkage: The number of links pointing to a website. Search engines often consider linkage in their algorithms.

Link Baiting: Content created to attract links from other websites.

Link Building:   Working to generate incoming links to a site.

Link Partner:   Two sites that link to each other.  Also known as link exchange or reciprocal linking.  Not valued in search engine algorithims.

Link Popularity:  The value of a site based upon the number and quality of sites that link to it.

Link Farm: Webpages with several links to each other for the sheer purpose of raising search results.  Looked upon negatively and considered spam. Typically, links may not even be relevant to the website and are often computer generated.

Long Tail:  A specific query as opposed to a broad category query.
Meta Search Engine: A search engine that grabs results from other search engines and directories. Examples: Dogpile, Metacrawler
Meta Tag:  Tags typically found in the header of the HTML document. Some examples of Meta Tags are “description,” “keyword” and “robot.”

NOFOLLOW: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders the link is not  ‘trusted’ and to exclude from Page Rank.  When used in a robots meta tag, it tells search engines to ignore links on a page.

NOINDEX: An attribute in a hyperlink that tells spiders to not put contents in the public index. Used in the robots meta tag.

Non-Reciprocal Link: A one way link. Given more value by search engines.

Organic Results: Search engine results based on relevance and popularity and are not paid for.

Outbound Link: A link from one website that leads to another website.

Ranking:  The place a website shows up in search engine results. Being on the first page is a strong ranking. Not to be confused with Page Rank and Toolbar Rank.

Page Rank: Page Rank ranks every page on the internet based on the number, quality and popularity of inbound links pointing to the page.  Inbound links are considered “votes” towards a page. Page Rank is used by Google as one of the factors in search results.  Not to be confused with Toolbar Rank or Ranking in Search Results.

PR:  Page Rank

Parser:    A  program used by search engines to break down HTML pages into sections for indexing and send it to other indexers.

Pay-per-Click: Also referred to as PPC.  An advertising program where advertisers pay a pre-determined amount for each click made by their ad link. 
AdWords is a popular Pay-per-Click advertising program.

Ping: Used by Bloggers to post blogs on multiple stites. It also means “to bring attention to.”  And example of a ping program is available at ww.pingomatic.com.  Wordpress has a built in “Ping” Function. Technically, Ping is a program that sends a message to another computer and waits for acknowledgment, often used to check if another computer on a network is reachable.

PPC: Pay Per Click. An advertising program where you agree to pay a certain amount every time your link is clicked on.

Quality Links:  Links that are not Spam and are related to website content.

Recipricol Link: Links from two different websites that are linked to each other. A link exchange.

Robot.txt: A file named robots.txt in the root level of a web site used in programming to direct spiders to ignore directories.
ROI: Return On Investment. Often refers to sales per lead. Analytics software can analyze the cost/benefit value of different scenarios.

RSS Feed: Really Simple Syndication. Puts frequently updated information into XML format and makes it readable through an RSS Feeder. User can click on the RSS Feed link and automatically be updated of the Feed he has subscribed to.

Script: A written command interpreter of an operating system

SE:  Search Engine

SEM: Search Engine Marketing.  Drawing visitors through search engines and other means.

SEMPO:  Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (an international group).

SEO: Search Engine Optimization. Making a website favorable to search engines.

SERP: Search Engine Results Page. The page that shows the results of the search.

Site Links:  A link or links under the main link.  They are only shown for the top listing in  popular query results.

Sitemap: A page on your website that links to all other pages. Also one of Google’s Webmaster tools that enable a webmaster to inform Google of changes in content.

Social Bookmarking: A way for users to keep their bookmarks online. Bookmarks are typically given public access to provide a mode for gathering information other than search engines. A form of social media.

Spider: Programs that search the internet to process and index code and content of a web page to be stored in the search engine’s database. Googlebot, MSNbot and Yahoo Slurp are popular spiders. Some spiders are used for leaks in server configurations and disallowed web content.

Spiderbot: See Spider.

Tag: A word determined by a person to identify specific content.

Text Link: An HTML link that does not involve graphic or special code.

Title HTML Tag: The title of a page. Necessary to have a valid document, and must be placed in the head element.

Trackback: Enables blogs to link back to comments on a blog.  A cross-reference system between blogs. Both blogs being used must use blogging software that supports Trackback protocoal

Toolbar Pagerank: A webpages importance determined by Google’s algorithm and assigned a value between 0 and 10.  Not the same as Page Rank. Toolbar Rank is only updated a few times a year.

Viral Marketing: A marketing program where members promote the service for you.

White Hat: SEO techniques that play by the rules to acquire search engine results.

CRT:  Crawl to Ranking Time

Supplemental Index: Pages in Google’s index that are not part of the main index. Spidered less often.

XML: Markup language which incorporates features of HTML but is designed to overcome some of HTML’s limitations.

The Ten (10) High Impact Viral Marketing Strategies that you implement into your marketing campaign must first and foremost engage the audience.  High Impact Marketing Strategies succeed because they are active, and not passive.  In order for them to continue succeeding, they must retain their integrity.  The 2006 Viral Marketing Industry Report sponsored by Kontraband, a parent company of the viral marketers, The Seventh Chamber, that advertises for Sony, Coca-Cola and Hewlett-Packard (http://viral-marketing.kontraband.com/index.htm), reported that 73% of consumers are aware of viral emails, and only 38% forward those emails.  64% of the 3500 consumers surveyed said they would not forward a viral with an explicit branding or product message.  This report is available at http://viral-marketing.kontraband.com/pdf/VIRAL%20REPORT.pdf and includes other viral marketing statistics.  People are aware of viral marketing.  If viral marketing is going to thrive, it must not only engage the audience, it must be implemented intelligently and creatively.

Online Viral Marketing has branched into thousands of strategies.  Since the popular humorous email content started flourishing, it has grown into videos, reprint permissions, movie clips, freebies, bonuses, free web pages, graphics, or discussion boards, forum relationships, sales-filled ebook giveaways, “advergaming,” and the mobile phone realm.  The one factor that affects every single one of these strategies is content.  The reader will not engage in the viral marketing proposition if there is not content meaningful to him.  As the cliché goes, Content is King.

Your marketing strategy must engage the audience with meaningful content.  The 2006 Viral Marketing Report states people are aware of commercial viral marketing, however they will still forward the marketing vehicle “as long as the primary objective - that of being good content - is fulfilled.” Since the majority of people will not forward explicit branding or product messages, your marketing strategy should whisper your message to prospective forwarders.  Advergaming is a prime example of successful viral marketing.  The logo may be in the game but it’s quiet.  The game itself is the content king and the attention-getter, the receiver is engaged in the activity, and if he doesn’t fear “spamming” his friends, he will most likely forward it on.

Trust must be implemented in a viral marketing strategy to ensure forwarding in the highest degrees.  After all, if someone sends spam it effects their reputation as well as yours.  The explosion of social networking, bookmarking, and community websites, which hold user-generated content, has great potential to garner trust in a viral marketing campaign.  In user-generated content filled communities, peers and friends can brand you as trusted, and thereby facilitate your growth. What has proved successful is the “humor and edginess of viral” marketing; and trust, built with emotions that the consumers want to be tied to, is going to be a necessary strategy for anyone developing a reputable viral campaign.

There is also potential for trust-building strategies in the aggressive blogging worlds, however another high-impact strategy that should be considered is “Don’t Forget the Obvious,” or perhaps “Don’t Forget the Links.”  Prominent links and brand presence should be included everywhere they can, but in a subtle manner (whisper).

Trust also comes into play with data collection.  New methodology for Data Capture should be included in the top ten strategies.  The 2006 Viral Marketing Report stated 73% of consumers are very concerned about giving away information online.  Marketers need to look at new, unobtrusive methods for data collection if their brand name is going to keep the trust of consumers.

Along with your strategy of collecting data, you must also have a “seeding and placing” strategy.  Viral marketing should be targeted towards people-to-people and website-to-website.  Finding the perfect “point-of-origin” with high traffic rates for your campaign should be included in your top ten strategies for High Impact Viral Marketing.  

The Viral Marketing Research is significant to your High Impact Viral Marketing Campaign.  From these results, we can gather the Top Ten High Impact Viral Marketing Strategies:
 
1)  Engage the Audience.
2)  Be Active, Not Passive.
3)  Content is King.
4)  Be Creative.
5)  Use Intelligent Marketing, the Consumers are Sophisticated.
6)  When it comes to brand and product names, whisper, don’t shout.
7)  Trust, built with emotions consumers want to be tied to.
8)  Don’t forget the obvious - The Links!
9)  Create new methodology for Data Collection.
10) Develop a “Seed and Place” strategy.

Start strategizing your High Impact Viral Marketing Campaign for top results.  By following these top ten High Impact Viral Marketing Strategies, your viral campaign will spread with a smile.  And it’s hard not to smile when someone else is smiling.  Nobody has to know that you’re smiling at the campaign’s success!

What a Tag is, in its most basic form, is a word.  What is Tagging?  Entering words applicable to specific web content such as a blog, article, or image.  A tag is usually a descriptive word about the particular content you are viewing or tagging.  The Tag word can be a word that is meaningful to you and nobody else, or it can be a logical description of the content.  Some people use Tags to create wish lists (tagging it mywishlist) and others to share articles with friends (tagging it with names of friends).  Most people, however, do give logical descriptions to content.  But since you can add many tags, the ability is there to give both logical and personal descriptions to content.  A birthday cake could have a tag of mywishlist, Beth, Birthday, Cake.  (Except without the commas, because Tag words must be separated with spaces and not commas.)

The tag words become links.  In the above example, you would probably click on the “mywishlist” link, your friend Beth would click on the “Beth” link, someone having a party might click on “Birthday,” and a pastry chef might click on “Cake.”  One item of web content that was tagged is now shown through a kaleidoscope of perspectives. When clicking on these links, you will also see other links related to the specific tag word you clicked on.  For instance, when you click the link “birthday” you will see not only your link, but thousands of other links that other people have tagged “birthday.”  That’s where relevancy comes in.  Tagging is a benefit to social bookmarking sites.  If you have logical descriptive tags in your content, everyone benefits from finding related and unique information. 

Tags have a social value.  It provides people with information that they might not otherwise be able to access by search engines.  It also gives people the abilities to track tags, keep up with a favorite person’s tag, or tags about their profession.  There are also tags for trends, tags for social groups and social causes.  Using Tags as links, you can easily browse and find interesting cross-reference terms you might not have thought of before.  Most basic social bookmarking sites that use Tagging also allow users to subscribe to a RSS Feed for their tag, so updates are readily available.

Learning the Basics of Tagging is useful for web development. You can “Tag and Ping,” which means you create something with Tags, then forward it to popular websites to have your tags included with their tags.  When the tag is clicked on from anywhere, your content will show in the results.  Tagging is a very popular tool in promoting visibility through blogging and social bookmarking websites. You are free to apply more than one meaning to your content without being limited to one specific keyword or keyword phrase.  Learning what a Tag is and the Basics of Tagging is useful to reach the people without waiting for search engine algorithms to hand you over to them.  So tag and be tagged.  Let the people decide their perspective, and their perspective might just link to you.

Tagging and the Power of Technorati are recognized as one of the hottest blogging tools in the realm of professional blogging.  The Judges agree, and awarded Technorati and it’s Tagging properties with the Technical Achievement Award and Best of the Show Award in the 9th Annual Web Awards.  However, awards don’t necessarily bring Power, people do.  And the 75 million inbound links, almost 3 million monthly Compete visitors, and Technorati’s Alexa Ranking of 234 and their Google Ranking of 8 (as reported in July 2007 by eBizMBA), are indications that the people and the search engines agree that Technorati is the social bookmarking site of choice for bloggers.  It would be self-destructive for someone to ignore the Power of Technorati and it’s capabilities to promote their website.  The Technorati website claims they are “currently tracking 96.1 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.”  Those 250 million pieces of Tagged social media are labeled according to users, not Google.  You can focus your visibility campaign on what the people really want.

With Technorati, you can get daily RSS Feeds on any tag and even put them on your aggregator.  Technorati is useful to search blogs for ideas, see what others are saying, vote on blogs, see who’s voting on what, create a “watchlist” on any tag, add backlinks, and easily ping Technorati right from their website.  Many Technorati’s add Technorati to their desktop with a widget, plugin, or on their mobile phone to stay updated on trends.

Technorati (www.Technorati.com) is focused on the present, which gives you real-time interests of prospective visitors, so you can tailor your blog accordingly.  Technorati tracks links between blogs, and updates “tens of thousands” of links and blogs for indexing every hour.  According to Technorati data, there are over 175,000 new blogs every day and bloggers update about 1.6 million blogs per day, which end up being (according to Technorati) over 18 updates a second.  (Wouldn’t it be nice if you could update your blogs that fast?) That’s where the art of “Ping” comes in.

“Ping” tells numerous websites that you have new information to be submitted.  Technorati’s hot spot is it’s “WTF” premise, which stands for “Where’s the Fire.”  New entries go to the top of WTF.  How long you stay there depends on how “hot” your blog is.  People skim the WTF site rapidly.  It’s up to the blog poster to write enticing material to engage the WTF readers, gain votes, encourage conversation and get recognized.  Adding links will add interest.

Technorati announced on their website in April 2007 that they acquired Personal Bee (www.personalbee.com), a news and publishing company.  This can only mean more power.  Anyone wanting to promote their website to gain visibility should implement daily operations to focus on Tagging and the Power of Technorati to reach their audience.  It’s free, and it’s powerful.  Tag what’s “hot” and fuel the Technorati WTF fire to promote your website.  If you don’t, your competition is going to stomp you out of the game.