Search Engine Optimization, Website Promotion and Web Design

By Donald Nelson

One of the best ways to get free advertising and links back to your site is to write good articles and publish them on blogs and websites around the Internet with a link back to your site.  Doing this in a systematic way is usually called “article marketing.” I have done it for years and believe me it works!  However, my enthusiasm for article marketing is started to wane due to an avalanche of poorly written articles which do not provide end users with useful information.

In the same way that reciprocal linking was destroyed by misguided users trying to “game” the search engines, article marketing stands in a precarious position today. I publish three article directories and I can assure you that most of the articles submitted should be consigned to the recycle bin because they go against the basic idea of providing good useful information in an easy-to-read fashion. In case you are writing articles, or about to have some articles written for you, here are three important tips for doing it properly.

1. Provide Information and Not a Sales Pitch

It is futile to write directly about your product and explain how great it is. If this is what you want to do, it is better to write a press release and explain the newsworthy features of your work.  An article for publication on another website should be related to your area of expertise, but should not be bragging about you or your product.

For example, if you operate a garden supply business, then write “how-to” articles helping people to solve some of the gardening and landscaping problems that they might be facing. You don’t have to say how great your garden supply business is. If you write well and provide useful tips, then the readers will be impressed and they will want to click through on your link and find out more about you and your business

People who visit your website after reading a good article are high quality visitors, because they have been “pre-sold” on you. They already regard you as an “expert” and will be more inclined to buy your products or subscribe to your newsletters than someone who clicks through on just any old link.

2. Write the article properly or get the article written by someone who can write!

If you were to submit an article to your English teacher in high school or college, would you want to hand in something with obvious grammatical mistakes even in the title itself?  Of course you wouldn’t but that doesn’t stop people from hiring unqualified ghostwriters to write tons of sub-standard articles for them at $5 per article.

Try writing an intelligent 500 word article. Can you do it in ten minutes or even twenty minutes? Probably not. Take the time to write your article well and if you are hiring someone then you should opt for a native English speaker who will give it a reasonable amount of time. You may have to pay more for it, but you will gain in the end.

How will you gain? Well written and informative articles get reprinted at a much greater frequency than the junk or filler articles.  You will gain with more links and most importantly you will get more credibility as an expert in your field.

3. Format Your Articles Properly

One of the keys to effectiveness is the readability of your article.  Do you like looking at a long block of printed words without any paragraph breaks? Take the time to divide your articles into short paragraphs punctuated by sub-heads.  It will give your readers a chance to assimilate your message more easily.

The reason why I am particular on this point is that many people use automated article submission systems which push all the paragraphs together. Editors have no time to make these corrections for you and may delete the articles.  Alternatively, your article may be published, but in a way that turns off the reader, rather than inspiring her to read the whole article. Submit your articles in a proper format and make sure that your submission system sends a well formatted version to the publishers.

If you follow these three tips then you will be “adding value” to the Internet rather than clogging it with useless filler. You will be doing a service to the public, and in the end it will work to your benefit too.

Donald Nelson is a search engine optimization and article marketing specialist. You can read more of his articles at his website http://www.a1-optimization.com

It used to be accepted wisdom in the search engine marketing community that you should avoid using web designs based on flash if you want to get good search engine ranking.  All of that may change now, because Adobe, the maker of flash, has announced that it is allowing Google and Yahoo access to the software code that underlies flash technology. What this means is that the content of the flash files will now be indexed and available to web surfers.

Search engines use robotic programs to gather information about websites. These programs are text oriented and previously could gather very little information from a web page that was based entirely or mainly on flash. According to the announcement of Adobe, which you can read about in Business Week, this is going to change now.

So, if you are designing a new website, then don’t discard flash because of search engine optimization concerns. For certain websites, such as artists or musician’s websites, flash is a great asset and now it seems that it can be used without fear of the site being “unfindable” in searches on Google and Yahoo.

by Donald Nelson

A domain name is a valuable property of any business or any individual who would like to establish a presence online. It is extremely important to register your domain name carefully and with the right registrar. I would like to share my experience with you and hopefully you can use it to pick a domain registrar that will treat you fairly.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Donald Nelson

I am usually a positive person, and like to give constructive suggestions, but it has been said that “bad news” travels faster than good news. So, I will test this theory out, with my top ten list of common, but costly, search engine optimization mistakes that people make when they build their websites. This list is not in any order of importance as all the points should be taken seriously if you want your site to do well in the search engine queries for your main keywords. Read the rest of this entry »

A1- Web Promotion Tips

A newsletter from A1-Optimization
(www.a1-optimization.com)
October 2007, consecutive issue no 39

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Contents

1. Five Important Article Marketing Tips
2. Our Services
5. SEO Brings Good ROI

Welcome to the October 2007 issue.

Once again, it’s been a while since the last newsletter. The main article in this issue is about article marketing. I have been promoting my own business and the businesses of numerous clients over the years through the distribution of articles, and I believe it is one of the best ways to get noticed on the net. The article in this issue gives some tips that will help you to write articles that will get published and bring the results that you want.
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Five important article marketing tips
By Donald Nelson, Copyright, 2007

One of the most cost-effective means of Internet promotion is article marketing. Article marketing is the writing and distribution of short articles that are related to the subject matter of your website.

These articles are typically picked up by hundreds of article directories, blogs and other websites and when they are published they contain a link back to your website. If you do it correctly you can reap a huge amount of back links, additional traffic and credibility, but often times these articles are plagued with mistakes that defeat the whole purpose of this kind of promotion. If you follow the tips below you will be able to avoid the most common mistakes made by inexperienced article marketers.

1. Provide solid “how to” information in your article

The main idea of article marketing is to give useful information to your reader. The article should not be something which directly promotes your business. If you are in the landscaping business, don’t write an article saying that your company, XYZ landscaping, is the best landscaping company in the entire USA. Rather write an article with tips on how a homeowner can care for her lawn or plants or how she can save money by following certain guidelines, etc.

If you provide good information, then your reader will understand that you are an expert in this field and when they see your link at the bottom of the article they will click through and see what more you have to offer. The object of the article is to “pre-sell” rather than to try to get a quick sale. So, information comes first, your direct selling can come later.

2. Format your article properly

Your articles should be written with short paragraphs, so that they can easily be read on- line. If you are submitting your article to article directories or distribution lists, make sure that you actually have paragraph returns, and use the preview functions that these publishing sites usually offer. If your formatting is wrong, then editors usually do not have time to correct it for you and your article will be rejected outright.

3. Check your spelling and grammar before distributing your article

Use your built-in spelling and grammar checking tools, and if you have colleagues working with you, then get one of them to go over your article. If you make spelling or grammatical mistakes, especially in the titles and opening paragraphs, your article will probably be rejected. Even if a badly written article is published, it will not impress the readers and they will not click through to your site, so take care about the fine points of language.

4. Don’t try to stuff your article with clickable links

Of course one of the objects of article marketing is to get links to your website. And, it is well known that the most valuable links are those which have “anchor text” (clickable portion of the link) with keywords related to your site. Based on this it would seem like a good idea to pepper your article with choice keyword-links that go back to your main page and some of your inner pages. However, many article directories and distribution services frown on this kind of link-keyword stuffing and your article will again be rejected for violating the publishing guidelines of these sites.

If you are doing careful site-by-site distribution then you can study each site and see what is acceptable and put links within the body text of your article, however even where it is permitted, if you overdo it your reader may see it as excessive self-promotion and you will not achieve your purposes.

5. Write an effective resource box

I have counseled you against self-promotion within the main part of the article and against stuffing the article with links to your site, so how can you get any value out of this activity? The answer is in the “resource box” which is the two or three lines of text that you are allowed to include following the article.

Write two or three sentences telling who you are and what you have to offer. You can have a normal link back to your site, and in most directories you are also allowed to use a keyword link back to your site.

If you have written an informative article and it is well formatted then it will get published. And if your resource box is enticing, then you will get targeted traffic back to your site.

So follow these five tips and you will reap the considerable rewards that article marketing has to offer.

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Our Services:

If you need help with your website promotion we offer the following:

• Three search engine optimization packages: http://www.a1-optimization.com
• Article Writing and Distribution: http://www.a1-optimization.com/article-writing-service.htm (We now have three seasoned copywriters each with 20 years or more experience in journalism, editing, and writing)
• Website Copywriting: http://www.a1-optimization.com/copywriting/website-copywriting.htm

I am not sure if you are aware that the dollar is continuously falling in value against the other currencies of the world. Every time this happens my income falls because I earn dollars but live in Europe! This is one of the reasons I am going to raise the prices of the optimization packages soon. However, you, the readers of the newsletter have prior knowledge of this and can take advantage of the old prices in the next ten days. So if you have been thinking of ordering an optimization package, now is the time to do it!

Ebook of the Month!

For some time I have been thinking about writing an ebook that could help people get into article writing and distribution. While I have been thinking about it, someone else has done it! Andrew Hansen’s “Article Speed Writing “ebook offers a very simple, but systematic method showing how to write informative articles in as little as 30 minutes. The good news is that you don’t have to be Shakespeare to do it; if you can write a business letter or an email to a client, you can also write an article. If you are interested in learning more about this method, then visit this link: http://tinyurl.com/28wr8k

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SEO Brings Good ROI!

by Donald Nelson, Copyright, 2007

Whenever I buy any Internet tool or service that is connected with my online businesses I always ask myself, will this particular good or service bring me enough additional revenue to pay for itself? In the language of marketing this is known as “return on investment” or ROI.

So what about search engine optimization (SEO)? Will I get a good return on my investment in these services? Before you can answer this question you have to look at your business model. How much do you earn if you get one or two extra sales that you would have not otherwise gotten?

The answer varies from business to business. If you are selling low priced items then it might take a lot of extra business to pay for the fees of search engine optimization. But in some industries, one or two extra orders will more than pay for the fees (at least the fees on our site, I can’t talk about other sites).

If your site is properly optimized you have a fighting chance of being found in the organic, free search engine rankings. A well optimized site will pick up hundreds of extra visitors or if multiplied by several months and even years it can run into the thousands. Suppose just a fraction, say one per cent of these people, buy something from you then, depending on your business, you should easily be able to afford the cost of having the site optimized by a specialist.

The good part of SEO is that it lasts for quite a while. If you are advertising in a pay per click program like Adwords, then as soon as you stop paying, your traffic stops. Optimized sites, that have achieved high rankings, usually stay in prominent positions for many months, and in some cases many years.

It is true that algorithm changes of search engines sometimes result in a website losing its position in the search engine rankings, but this can usually be corrected with tweaking of of the site. Just as you have to service your car or other equipment, from time to time your web pages have to be serviced and tweaked.

If your website is an important part of your business plan, then you should take a look at your website’s visitor statistics, take a look at your competition and do whatever you can to improve your website so that it achieves higher rankings in search engine queries for your most important keywords and keyword phrases. If this is going to cost you some money to do, then don’t worry about it, you will get that money back from the new customers who will find you when your site is more visible in the search engines.

That is all for now. If you have any questions or comments about the contents of this newsletter, send me an email. I will be happy to hear from you.

Sincerely,
Donald Nelson
www.a1-optimization.com
support@a1-optimization.com
tel: +355 4226825, +355 692443368,

Please forward this to friends who may be interested. If you wish to publish material from this newsletter please send us an email first.

You have received this newsletter because you have either: 1. signed up for it 2. purchased a product from A1-Optimization or 3.have made an inquiry to us. If you do not wish to receive further issues, reply to this email with a message asking to be dropped from the mailing list.

Donald Nelson
PO Box 1706
Tirana, Albania

By Donald Nelson

Unless you are already at the top of all the major search engines for all your major keywords and keyword phrases, you should see what you can do to boost your website’s ranking. The best way to boost your website ranking is to use website promotion techniques which improve the on-page and off-page factors that search engines use when prioritizing websites. Read the rest of this entry »

By Donald Nelson

There is no silver bullet or magic formula to increase traffic to your website! Rather, the best way to increase traffic is to start from the beginning with well-designed, search engine friendly web pages. Here are some search engine ranking tips that will help you to increase traffic by building clear, easy to read web pages. Read the rest of this entry »

By Donald Nelson

Keyword density is the ratio of your keywords to the other text on your webpage. Keyword density is one of the things that search engines look for when evaluating a website. If you get your keyword density just right, then it is a big help in your search engine optimization. Read the rest of this entry »

The Open Directory Project, www.dmoz.org, or DMOZ is back in business. DMOZ has been one of the most important directories on the Internet during the past 8 years. A listing in DMOZ is very important in search engine ranking, as Google places great value on the judgement of DMOZ editors. The problem is that the editors of late, did not add sites to the directory in a timely manner, and recently the whole editing program stopped completely. It was even rumored that DMOZ was near  death, especially when the server hosting the directory crashed at the end of 2006.

There are signs that DMOZ has been revived: it is now possible to submit a site for consideration. Maybe the editors will be working faster in an attempt to really convince everyone that DMOZ is back in action. So, submit your sites but take care to do it properly. I wrote an article about the submission process some time ago, much of it is still valid so check it out.

Myspace is primarily used by young people and by music lovers for social networking and making friends, but it can also be used for marketing purposes, and I have written about this in a previous posting. However, in the article below David Riewe offers tips on how to use myspace, purely for the fun of it.

Myspace Just For Fun

By David Riewe

There are many who take advantage of the MySpace community for business purposes such as advertising, self promotion or networking. While MySpace is certainly useful for all of these purposes, there are others who belong to MySpace simply for fun. They are not seeking to gain anything from their involvement with MySpace other than an opportunity to meet friends and have a good time. For these individuals the joy of using MySpace includes the opportunity to make friends around the world, the ability to listen to new types of music and the chance to participate in the age old practice of flirting. Read the rest of this entry »