You may or may not be surprised by this, but even top marketers don’t get their best conversions right out of the blocks when they launch a new product.

The best improvements come after making a product offer public and with optimization of your selling system.

Small improvements over time can make a massive difference in your profit.

Of course, testing and optimizing sales letters and other ‘offer’ pages is important, but it is also important to be able to improve each step in your selling process.

Your sales system (the system that moves prospects along the buying pathway) is, far and away, the most important component of your online selling efforts. It is the series of web pages that put money in your pocket! So, it only makes sense to constantly look for ways to improve your results.

In order to effectively improve your results you need to know three things

1) What are your major goals?

2) What is the action that you want your prospects to take at each step of your selling process? and

3) How well is your system working now to help you attain your goals and to get your prospects to take the actions you want them to take?

Let’s take them one at a time:

1) What are your major goals?

In online selling, there really are just two categories of goals: “opt-ins” and “sales”. If your sales process is a list building campaign, then the major goal of your system is an “opt-in.” If your sales process is focused on selling a product, then the major goal is a “sale.” Or, of course you can have both an opt-in and a sales goal for a selling system.

This is a pretty fundamental element, but if you are not clear about your major goal, then you have no chance of being able to improve your results.

2) What is the action that you want your prospects to take at each step of your selling process?

Each step in your selling process should have one, very specific action you want your prospect to take, and that action should be very clear to both you and your prospect. I call these “mini goals” MDAs (Most Desired Action).

For an list-building campaign, for instance, the process might look like this:

Page 1: Free Offer -> Page 2: Thank You Page -> Page 3: Email Confirmation Page + Tell-A-Friend Form

For Page 1: the MDA is to opt-in to receive a free offer.

For Page 2: the MDA is for the prospect to confirm their email address

For Page 3: The MDA is to recommend the offer to a few friends

3) How well is the system working now?

Now that you know what you want to accomplish — both overall with your major goals and with each MDA along the way — now it is time to measure your results.

Integrate a tracking and analytics tool into your sales system so that you can see what is happening at every step.

This takes a bit of work, but it is absolutely critical that you can measure the effectiveness of your system so that you can start so see where prospects are dropping out of the process (or “funnel”) and test different approaches to see what can be improved.

Using the free analytics tool that comes with your hosting will give you the basic information you need. You can also try Google Analytics.

In either case, you will need to get good at extracting the most relevant statistics so that you can maximize your profits.

I am in the process of beta testing and refining a tracking and analytics tool that is designed specifically for these kinds of applications. If you want to be one of the first to know when the tool becomes publicly available, please follow click on my name at the top of this post.

This post was submitted by Doug Hudiburg.

Credit: http://tungblog.atikomtrirat.com/2009/01/if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-improve.html

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?” There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

Webmasters often ask us at conferences or in the Webmaster Help Group, “What are some simple ways that I can improve my website’s performance in Google?” There are lots of possible answers to this question, and a wealth of search engine optimization information on the web, so much that it can be intimidating for newer webmasters or those unfamiliar with the topic. We thought it’d be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing.

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

Written by Brandon Falls, Search Quality Team

Chatting with webmasters often reveals widespread beliefs that might have been accurate in the past, but are not necessarily up-to-date any more. This was the case when we recently talked to a couple of friends about the structure of a URL. One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs. First, let’s clarify what we’re talking about:

What is a static URL?
A static URL is one that does not change, so it typically does not contain any url parameters. It can look like this: http://www.example.com/archive/january.htm. You can search for static URLs on Google by typing filetype:htm in the search field. Updating these kinds of pages can be time consuming, especially if the amount of information grows quickly, since every single page has to be hard-coded. This is why webmasters who deal with large, frequently updated sites like online shops, forum communities, blogs or content management systems may use dynamic URLs.

What is a dynamic URL?
If the content of a site is stored in a database and pulled for display on pages on demand, dynamic URLs maybe used. In that case the site serves basically as a template for the content. Usually, a dynamic URL would look something like this: http://code.google.com/p/google-chec…s/detail?id=31. You can spot dynamic URLs by looking for characters like: ? = &. Dynamic URLs have the disadvantage that different URLs can have the same content. So different users might link to URLs with different parameters which have the same content. That’s one reason why webmasters sometimes want to rewrite their URLs to static ones.

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?
Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It’s quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It’s much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
We’ve come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

Let’s now look at some of the widespread beliefs concerning dynamic URLs and correct some of the assumptions which spook webmasters.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled.”
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It’s always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Myth: “Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters.”
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren’t essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we’d advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won’t be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Following are some questions we thought you might have at this point.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you’re using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

Can you give me an example?
If you have a dynamic URL which is in the standard format like foo?key1=value&key2=value2 we recommend that you leave the url unchanged, and Google will determine which parameters can be removed; or you could remove uncessary parameters for your users. Be careful that you only remove parameters which do not matter. Here’s an example of a URL with a couple of parameters:

http://www.example.com/article/bin/a…8906&query=URL

language=en – indicates the language of the article
answer=3 – the article has the number 3
sid=8971298178906 – the session ID number is 8971298178906
query=URL – the query with which the article was found is [url]

Not all of these parameters offer additional information. So rewriting the URL to www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3 probably would not cause any problems as all irrelevant parameters are removed.

The following are some examples of static-looking URLs which may cause more crawling problems than serving the dynamic URL without rewriting:

www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3/98971298178906/URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language=en/answer=3/
sid=98971298178906/query=URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/language/en/answer/3/
sid/98971298178906/query/URL
www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en,3,98971298178906,URL

Rewriting your dynamic URL to one of these examples could cause us to crawl the same piece of content needlessly via many different URLs with varying values for session IDs (sid) and query. These forms make it difficult for us to understand that URL and 98971298178906 have nothing to do with the actual content which is returned via this URL. However, here’s an example of a rewrite where all irrelevant parameters have been removed:

www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo/en/3

Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL. Failure to do this would again result in a static looking URL which is hiding parameters. So the best solution is often to keep your dynamic URLs as they are. Or, if you remove irrelevant parameters, bear in mind to leave the URL dynamic as the above example of a rewritten URL shows:

www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3

We hope this article is helpful to you and our friends to shed some light on the various assumptions around dynamic URLs. Please feel free to join our discussion group if you have any further questions.

Source: Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs
Written by Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski,
Google Search Quality Team
Monday, September 22, 2008

To get top result in search engine, there is no shortcut. We need to do hard work, especially for the content of the site. Even if our site is technically perfect for search engine robots, it won’t be effective if we don’t fill the site with interesting contents. Good content can bring return visitors. And we need to add new content regularly, which can give visitors a reason to come back. And we should take care of our keywords to be spelled with standard spelling. And we need to make our page titles are descriptive and relevant. That will be easier for search engines to know what each page is about, and people using search engines can quickly determine whether the document contains what they find. And we should not use graphics for headings because search engines don’t pay too much attention to them. Some search engine robots have diffculties with dynamatically generated URLs. So, we need to use search engine friendly URLs. We need to generate static pages from the dynamic data and store them in the file system, linking to them using simple URLs. And we need to try to get incoming links as much as possible to get top ranking. And we should use valid, semantic, lean, and accessible markup. It’ll make our site faster and more attractive to search engines. And we should to submit our website to some well-known directories and search engines carefully. Don’t use cloaking, link farms, keyword stuffing, or other dubious methods. Otherwise, there is a risk being penalised or even banned from search engines. And we should avoid using frames. Frames will cause problems for the people who find the site via search engines. Some search engines use the contents of the meta description element to describe the site in their search result listings, so we need to make its contents unique and descriptive for every document.

These are just basic tips for search engine optimization. To increase a website’s ranking in search engines,there are many other things we can do. The advices mentioned above are just for a good start.

Oringinal Source
Basics of search engine optimisation

Related News
Top Search Engine Optimization Firm Changes Its Name
Search Engine Marketing: Promote your Products Like Never Before
What’s Search engine optimization aims

SEM [Search Engine Marketing] & PPC [Pay Per Click] Advertising

It is truth for the phone directory publishers might not tell you that the phone book is dead now and we can’t remember the last time we used a phone book for anything other than call for a fire or electricity to come and fix the electricity. So if consumer recall for traditional advertising, they no longer call or visit the business. Today consumer prefers to go online for anything like searching information, play game, play e-mail, or even chatting with other people and so on. And if traditional media such as phone books aren’t working so one of the most important and cost effective ways is through Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

SEM is a set of marketing methods to increase the visibility of a Web site in search engine results pages (SERPs). Or we can say that it’s all the stuff you do to get to the top of search engines where people will see you. SEM was not easy to conquer; it’s a complex process that has lots of complexities; however, conquering two main categories (or paying a professional to handle it) will get you started:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a type of Search Engine Marketing related to tweaking web pages and the links into the site, in order to boost the rankings on organic (unpaid) search results. Much of this is done as the Web site is being built in copy, page titles and meta tags.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising is a method to quickly drive targeted visitors to a website. It involves purchasing keywords and phrases that people use when searching online for your product or service so that you come up at the top and to the right of unpaid search listings. The important things is which keyword or keyphrases
are going to get you the best results for the money you’re willing to spend.

So next time you’re preparing your yearly marketing budget, ask yourself whether you’re taking advantage of this crucial new medium that’s helping customers find exactly what they’re seeking. If not, perhaps you should consider dumping some of those print ads and phone book listings and writing SEM into your plan. Get on the bus now, before your competitors beat you to it.

Resource : http://www.thecyphersagency.com/pdfs/tca_on_search_engine_marketing.pdf

Tips To Succeed Using Google Adwords
http://www.seoseonews.com/articles/8404/1/Tips-To-Succeed-Using-Google-Adwords/Tips-To-Succeed- Using-Google-Adwords.html

Words To The Wise: Creative Methods for Adding Text Content to Your Website
http://www.seonews.net/articles/article41.php

Introduction to adCenter reporting
http://www.adcentercommunity.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2008/07/16/Intro-to-adCenter- reporting.aspx

When we want our website to get a top ranking in Search Engines, we need to add the “meta tags” to web pages although Meta tags is not a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines.

Meta tags is not Title tag. Meta tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages and is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Meta tags are used to communicate information with the bot of search engines. Two common types of meta tags is Meta Keyword & Meta Description . It place between the “opening” and “closing” HTML HEAG tags.

For Search Engine, the title tag & meta tag are crucial because they use this tag as one of the most important factors of search engine’s algorithm. In addition, all major crawlers will use the text of title tag as the title for listing of the website. As the above sentence, meta tags is not a guaranteed way to gain a top raking because it is not every search engine crawl the meta tags. Google is the one of the three Major search engine in the world and Google ignores the meta keyword & meta description tag and instead will automatically generate its own description for web page.

You may have the question about “Still want to use the meta tag?”. I can answer that we still need to use the meta tag because another search engine like Yahoo, MSN, and etc are still crawl the meta tag. It is the strategy to get more traffic with diffuse the link to gain better ranking in search engine include Google.

Resource : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931

News:
Google will remove all search queries after 18 to 24 months
http://www.ifergan.org/world-seo-news/google-will-remove-all-search-queries-after-18-to-24- months.html

Next Generation SEO Tactics
http://www.ifergan.org/world-seo-news/next-generation-seo-tactics.html

Joomla & Mambo Adsense module
http://www.ifergan.org/joomla-mambo-adsense-module-2.html

You need to take the time to register on each website and submit your website and if used correctly you can have verry good results. This is a really good start if you are listed on each directory.

www.digg.com PR8
www.technorati.com PR8 TIP: Blogger and Blog Addict LOVES Technorati!
www.stumbleupon.com PR8
www.squidoo.com PR7 TIP: Google LOVES Squidoo!
www.propeller.com PR7
www.articlesfactory.com PR7
www.ezinearticles.com PR6
www.goarticles.com PR6
www.articlecity.com PR6
www.articledashboard.com PR6
www.searchwarp.com PR5
www.articlealley.com PR5
www.a1articles.com PR5
www.content-articles.com PR4
www.article-hut.com PR4
www.articleconnection.com PR3
www.usfreeads.com PR5

Have fun! A++

Pay per Click Certifications

Google Advertising Professionals Exam – Exam cost 50 dollars – grade – 75%
Certificate Validity is for 2 years

What are the requirements for becoming a Qualified Individual?

• To become a Qualified Individual in the Google Advertising Professionals program, you’ll need to accomplish the following:
• Manage at least one AdWords account (yours or someone else’s) in My Client Center for 90 days.
• Build and maintain at least US$1,000 (or your local currency equivalent) total spend for your or your team’s My Client Center account during the 90-day period.
• We suggest that you take the exam after you meet the above requirements.

Applicants that fail the examination may retake the test with additional fees of $50.

Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador Program – Exam cost 50 dollars

What are the requirements for becoming a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador?

Ambassadors should be search engine marketers, web professionals and individuals who currently manage or want to manage multiple Sponsored Search accounts on behalf of clients. Please see the program terms and conditions for more information.

Applicants that fail the examination may retake the test one more time without additional fees.

Microdoft adExcellence Exam – Exam cost 50 dollars – Passing grade – 75%
Certificate Validity is for 1 year

What are the requirements for being an adExcellence Member?

In order to achieve adExcellence Member status, you must be an active adCenter customer and have passed the Microsoft adExcellence accreditation exam. This program is currently available only in the United States.
Applicants that fail the examination may retake the test with additional fees of $50.

Internet Marketing Certifications

Professional CeM Certification – $190 Exam Fees + $175/yearly Membership fees

To certify an individual as competent and capable of performing e-marketing
functions utilizing current technological processes and established Internet marketing techniques

What is CeM Certification All About?
The certification designation demonstrates that you are a professional. Certification announces your professional competency to your employer, clients or customers-and to your peers in the eMarketing profession
Applicants that fail the examination may retake the test one more time without additional fees.

If you have an online business and do not know what a robots.txt, or robots exclusion standard file is then I am here to help you understand why you need one.

Having a robots.txt file can be beneficial to your web site in a variety of ways

1. Saving Bandwidth:

Search engine spider robots and web robots will not visit certain areas of your web site that you can choose to restrict access to such as your cgi bin or certain images you store on your server for personal use.

2. Cleans Up Your Logs:

If you’ve submitted your web site to the search engines than the spider robots will be searching for your robots.txt file. If they do not find one the robot generates a ‘404 File Not Found’ error everytime. These robots might be searching for that file several times a day. Adding the file to your root directory will help eliminate these errors and boost your rankings.

3. Online Protection:

The search engine robots, unless instructed otherwise by your robots.txt file, will attempt to index as much of your web site as possible. This means that if you have confidential documents or files on your server your competition might be able to find them online.

4. Avoid Unwanted Indexing:

Sometimes as a webmaster we might be developing ‘test’ or ‘development’ versions of our web site which are not ready for public viewing. You can use a robots.txt file to prevent this content from being indexed and therefore avoid any potential problems.
�
5. Robots Are For Professionals:

If you are a professional web designer / web programmer than you need a robots.txt file. Only amateurs in the game of web design do not use one. To learn how to create a robots.txt file in a variety of ways visit our other online marketing blog post “Robots.txt File Generator”