Yearly Archives: 2009

GEO-Targeting SEO

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Several studies that have been conducted shows that web pages that constructed with GEO-targeting in mind are more SEO friendly than those web pages who doesn’t implement GEO-targeting. What is GEO-targeting anyway? GEO-targeting is defined as the distribution of ads specific to the geographic location of the searcher. Geo-targeting permits the advertiser to specify where ads will be or won’t be displayed based on the searcher’s location, this enables more localized and personalized results.

Web searches, in a natural sense, have no boundary. Visitors to a website in Los Angeles can be from anywhere around the world. Visitors around the world not only use different languages, but also have different needs, different tastes for design, navigation and styles. Aside from implementing web design and SEO technique that has been proven to drive traffic to site, GEO-targeting can also help in adding more traffic to your website and will increase the chance of success for online business to promote their products and services across regions of different culture background.

  1. Design the website with GEO-Targeting in mind.
    Websites with GEO-targeting in mind should have a different version of the site. Some of it may be designed in different language and of different layout to cater the need of target visitors in a particular geographical area. For the same version of website, the page may be configured according to the location automatically. Commonly, the IP address of the visitor is the indicator of where is the geographical location of the visitor.

    If you are creating different versions of the site, it is advisable to suit the design of according to culture, language, taste and style of the local user. For instance, if you are making a web site version for US market it is a good idea to hire web design company based in Los Angeles or New York rather than hiring a web design firm from India. Geo-targeting depends on the user’s computer and web browser settings. The website with English content may show different versions according to the visitor’s geographical location, whether in Australia, UK or Canada, because GEO-targeting recognize the visitor’s keyword settings, language and location.


  2. Promoting website with GEO-targeting in mind.

    Optimizing your website with savvy SEO techniques is good, but if you want to implement GEO-targeting you have to be choosy when it comes to link building. All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing give out search result based on the searcher’s query and location. Actually, all the three major search engines have different versions of main search engines for almost every country. A searcher from United States would have different search result from searcher from China, even with same keyword, web browser and search engine.


    Search engines rank the web pages according to what kind of links a site is pointed and where the links are from. If your website gets most of its link from US then the site will rank well in US. If you are not located in the GEO-market you are targeting, it is advisable to work with the SEO firm based on that GEO-location. The Orange County SEO company that have extensive knowledge about US SEO will do a much better job than acquiring links India or other part of the world if you are targeting US market.


  3. GEO-targeting Analysis

    Implementing GEO-targeting SEO method is just the beginning in GEO-targeting. You have to fully understand the visitors’ behavior in each geographic location. Visitors from Houston would have different preferences and behavior than visitors from New York. On this case you may use GEO-targeting software. Web analytic software and IP databases can provide a wide range of locations for specific requirement when a version of a web site or advertisements need to reach only a specific city within the states.

Effective Website Promotion through Forum Posting

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Forums and online communities are great tool in promoting website. Forums can be a great place for interacting with people of the same mindset and same interest. Forum posting one of the effective methods you can employ to support your online marketing campaign. Forums are a good place to advertise a website for free and build quality backlinks.

Well established forums have large number of members. You can get direct referrals and leads from these forums by building good relationship and reputation to the members of the forum. It can also drive traffic from your forum posting through your signature. If you post count is high, it can drive a lot of traffic to your site as well. But, forum moderators and members detest spamming. You can be kick-out or banned in a forum if your post are too spammy. Planning, subtlety, and sincerity are some of the things you need practice when you want to harvest good result from forums.

Here’s three ways on how effectively promote your website through forum posting:

  1. Establish Good Reputation

    Don’t directly sell your product in forum. The fastest way you can be banned and turn people against you in a forum is to post blatant product advertisements. People participate in forums to connect with like-minded people and share relevant information, not to be sold something. You have to be subtle, instead of selling your product establish a good reputation and relationship to fellow members first.
    Browse existing topics and choose ones you are familiar with, and it will be much better if it is related to your target niche. Participate in discussion and wait for good opportunities to share your expert knowledge. This way, you will gain the respect of the community and start to establish yourself as “expert”. If you have established a good reputation and people find you interesting, they are more likely to click the link found on your signature

    2. .

  2. Attach a signature file to all of your posts
    Every time you sign up for any forum, add your URL to the signature field. Avoid using gaudy text and large images for your signature this could annoy a lot of forum members. There are forums who don’t allow you to place electronic signature on your profile unless you meet a certain number of post, this may take a little while but patience is a virtue as they say.
  3. Practice Netiquette
    Practicing proper behavior is important in forum as it is in the physical world. Different forums have different set of rules and of what is acceptable and what is not. Generally, here are the things you should avoid when you are posting in forums.

    • Avoid profanity. Using vulgar word is a no-no, although this might be acceptable in some forums. Always remember that you are establishing reputation, it isn’t professional and you can offend potential customers


    • Don’t write your post in ALL caps. Words that are written in all caps are considered YELLING. It will offend and annoy your readers.


    • Don’t be a “Know-It-All.” Don’t act as if you are better than anybody. Share your opinion and views in discussion in a way that doesn’t make you look arrogant.


    • Never spam! Don’t post the same thing on hundreds of different forums. This is a waste of your valuable time and can also get you into a lot of trouble. Spamming is the easiest way to get you banned in forums.

What is Online Reputation Management and Why It Is Important?

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Reputation is everything in an online business. Your customer cannot physically “see” the product you sell, but they trust you deliver the goods just like what see in your website. The keyword here is trust. It is the ideal foundations of any business by building up the trust factor you are also establishing an exemplary reputation.

But the good reputation that you have been working on for years can be easily crushed by malicious competitor or by unsatisfied customer. Due to the freedom offered by Internet and lack of a regulation system, everyone is free to say anything about anyone. Sometimes, a bad case of business rivalry or some other professional or unprofessional reasons, people start spreading negative feedback and comments about a business entity or an individual. If you are in E-Commerce, this could lead to a big problems, and loss of business or revenue. The colossal effect is, you could see all your efforts put in over the years to build brand brilliance, into the drain. In simpler term, it is bad for the business.

This is where the Online Reputation Management can help you. ORM is exactly what it sounds like. It is the service that helps you manage your reputation. Online Reputation Management is actually the art of making sure that bad news gets buried and the lovely good news rises to the top, pushing the bad listings into the bottom of search engine results page. They help online businesses in overcoming their problems on bad publicity and provide them a neat and clean reputation. These services are of great help for such organizations or individuals looking for instant growth in their professional growth that was stuck due to bad online reputation.

The ultimate goal of ORM is to materialize your brand online and safeguard it from malicious attacks. You will need the service of ORM when you become anxious about some hateful individual or your competitors intentions to distract you. You can also use ORM service as a reactive optimization measure to counter activities bent to destroy your online reputation. ORM service can also be used as a tool in evaluation your company online reputation.

Establishing your presence online is just winning half the battle, the other half is building and then managing your reputation. Reputation is vital in online business, because the reputation of a company, good or bad can make a world of difference, especially in the eyes of the customer.

Traditional Marketing vs. Online Marketing

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For the past few years, the debate of which is better, the Traditional Marketing or Online Advertising is a hot topic. By definition, marketing includes a wide collection of activities and strategies that deal with the pricing, selling, and distributing a product. Developing an effective marketing strategy is important in the success of any kind of business.

With the advancement of Internet and the World Wide Web, the new marketing venues have become available. Marketers in both the business-to-business (B2B) and the business-to-consumer (B2C) sectors are now taking advantage of the Internet for online marketing. Although the traditional method of marketing is still effective as they are in the past 100 years or so, the online marketing offers a new dimension in a larger scope.

Online Marketing or online advertising is very practical, especially to a small and medium sized enterprises (SME) that have tight budget on advertising. If you have limited marketing budget –say less than $1000 – that would not go a long way in traditional marketing. A 15 second TV commercial would cost you a fortune, a radio commercial might be cheaper but radio is getting obsolete these days. A space on crowded newspaper ads is not cheap either, and the readership is limited.

On the other hand, the online marketing boost the capacity of medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to compete with the big player on the market who can afford expensive traditional marketing schemes. It gives opportunity to small and medium businesses to establish their position online, and promoting their products in the global market. Search Engine Marketing or SEM had been utilizing the online marketing or advertising to boost the traffic and sales. Since, the Internet has converted the entire world into a small global village; you have the whole wide world as your market. The online marketing services are much cheaper in comparison to traditional marketing like broadcast and print ads. The concept of email marketing is quiet economical to reach a large target audience.

Tracking the reach of newspaper and television advertisements is difficult, if not impossible. But with online marketing you can easily keep the records of performance by making use of online marketing statistical tools. With it you can keep track if your marketing strategy is doing well or not.

Online marketing is an excellent tool in promoting your business, and the effect would triple if you could augment it with traditional marketing strategy once in a while.

Facebook as Online Marketing Tool

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Social networking websites are becoming more and more popular each day. They are getting traffic like a wildfire in the summer, and the star among the social networking websites is no other than the Facebook. As of December 2 this year, Facebook hit the 350 million users worldwide.

Generally, social networking websites like Facebook is primarily used in connecting people. It serves as social utility in connecting with family, friends, finding lost acquaintances, finding new friends and establishing new relationships. Aside from being a great social networking website, Facebook is also a great as online marketing tool.

You might be asking, why? Because Facebook is so popular. Everyone who knows how to use internet and has internet connection has, one time in their netsurfing life, had used and still using Facebook. According to Nielsen Online users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August this year. That triples the amount of time people spent on Google. From April 2008 to April 2009, total minutes spent on Facebook increased from 1.7 billion minutes to 13.9 billion minutes – an annual growth rate of 700 percent. This number is staggering and it makes online marketers droll.

With over 350 million users and still continuing to grow, Facebook is the place to market. If your online business is targeting the 18 to 25 demographic, social networking sites like Facebook is the best online tool to drive traffic to your website. The website has already a huge numbers in terms of traffic, and it provides tools necessary in marketing your products.

Facebook is also a great SEO tool. It is a good place to begin your SEO campaign. It is free, simple to implement, and it gets your company’s name out to hundreds of people at a time. By simply creating a Facebook account for your company, you obtain a page dedicated to your business for anyone to view. It would be like having a new website, plus you can link back to your site in a legitimate way that won’t get you banned from Google.

A Facebook page is also indexed by the search engines and it’s available to people that are not in Facebook. That is one powerful tool on Facebook to generate traffic. You can also promote your blog in the bulletin board, if you have interesting post in the bulletin board that will direct your readers to continue the reading at your site.
The secret here is to add more friends. The more friends you have, the more people you can share your profile with. The more friends you have, the more people can see the link of your website on your profile this could generate more traffic that will eventually turn to sales. At the moment the maximum friends limit in Facebook is 5,000. If you maximize that limit, it means that you have 5,000 more potential customers.

Another great tool that you can use in Facebook is the ability to let you add applications in your profile page. With it you can add games and other applications in your profile page, which can be great in attracting other people to visit your profile page.

For some, Facebook is a time-waster. But for many Facebook is a stress-relief. It provides a little time to escape reality, which we need from time to time to remain sane in this crazy life. And to online marketers and SEO, Facebook is a powerful tool in promoting online business.

Top Five Ways to Make Your Website More Popular

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Since the birth of World Wide Web in early 80s, it had developed into a jungle. It is now crammed with both good and decent websites as well as with useless and inadequate websites. If you have a Website yourself, you have to compete with millions of other websites to get yours noticed. So, what will you do to get the edge and be noticed?

Is there anything you can do to increase you popularity?

The answer to those questions is a definite YES! There are hundreds of things you can do to make your site noticed and boost its popularity. Here, I will share to you the top five ways to strengthen your site and increase you online visibility.

1. Get your Website Optimized for Search Engine

Optimizing your website for search engine is the best thing you can to get your website noticed. To be successful online, you have to get a high ranking in major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. It is a common knowledge that about 90% of search clicks come from the first page result, less than 10% from the second page and less than 1% goes beyond. This simply implies that if you cannot get a high ranking in search engine in a particular keyword your site is destined fail.

In order to get a high rank in search engines you have to implement Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The subject of SEO is substantial and can be rather daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to see the benefits immediately and will probably wonder why you didn’t get started with it earlier. The proper implementation of SEO can do magic in boosting you website popularity and of course the traffic.

2. Take Advantage of Social Media Optimization

Although SEO can do a lot to increase your ranking and popularity, you should not end there. You will be missing a lot if you ignore the importance of Social Media Optimization or the SMO. Because of the popularity of Social Media nowadays, it become the one of the strongest marketing tool available today.

To optimize your site for Social Media, you have to make your site visible to social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Ning, Flixter and many others. Making use of social media optimization campaign includes a few things. First, you have to make sure that the content on your site is relevant to your niche and not out of date. And second, visit to social media sites and join the discussion in leaving comments on posts/articles.

The most important to remember is to include outbound links to your Website on any social media site you use. Even if your link has a “nofollow” attribute attached to it, it can still attract new visitors and potential customer to your site.

3. Invest in Good Web Design

Get yourself a professional web designer that could make you a visually appealing and user-friendly website. Investing in a good web design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful, professional looking website, you will grow in trust among your visitors. It properly designed website can give the aura of trust and confidence.

An important fact to remember is to avoid overdoing the design the Website. Simplicity and functionality always rules when it comes to web design.

4. Maximize the use RSS and News Feeds

Using RSS and News Feeds is one of the most effective methods of promoting a website. Each time you add something new to your website your subscriber will be notified which ascertains that they will never forget to see the new material that you have come out with. Submit also your website feeds in other websites and link with your website also. The RSS feeds can help the interlinking of your website.

5. Get Your Visitors Involved

Getting your visitors involve is one of the best ways to build loyalty from your visitors. Never ignore the comments that you have got from your visitors, it is advisable that you reply them timely and if you visit their site and reply it there would be much preferable. The more comments you get the more you are on advantage this is because visitors will be anxious to know about the comments your material must have received.

Ask for your visitors’ feedback and try also to write in a personal style, and don’t be afraid to pose an open question. This will most likely get people talking about your site. People always want to voice their opinion and they want their opinion to be heard (or published). Everyone wants to express their own personal ideas and thoughts on topics, and by allowing them doing so, you also increase the chance of visitors returning to see how was their feedback appreciated.

The Black and White of SEO

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Like any other things in the world, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has the good side and the evil side. Just like any other business practices, SEO can be done in accordance to the accepted business ethics and standards or by overstepping the boundaries of business ethics. Generally, there are two major techniques currently in use in SEO. These are black hat and white hat techniques, and everything between them is just the offspring of these two techniques.
When we try to compare SEO to a movie, the white hatters are the hero while the black hatters are the villain.

Here’s the quick rundown on how both technique works:

The Black Hat SEO

Black hat SEO intentionally breaks the guidelines of search engines. Black hatters employ unethical and deceitful means to attract traffic onto their sites and get high ranking. Even though, the high ranking status can be achieved through regular white SEO, making use of black hat tricks can be faster. Your page will increase dramatically in Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rank within a relatively brief amount of time. People are very impatient and cannot wait months before they reach the ranking that they desire usually employ this method.

However, search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and others are frequently updating their algorithms to detect and penalize black hat SEO. Websites that are utilizing black hat techniques are not only marked by the search engines as black hat sites, but they are also penalized and often completely removed from SERPs. When this happens, it takes months or years and sometimes never to regain your ranking.

Most common black hat SEO takes place on the design or programming of the site itself. So, effect is site wide. These tactics include: Keyword Stuffing or Hidden Text, Web Page Cloaking, Duplicating content, Link Farming or Buying Links, Pagejacking, 302 Redirect Hijacking, Doorway pages, Scraping and Spinning, Splogs and the famous Link Spamming or spamdexing.

The White Hat SEO

The white SEO is the good guy and the hero in the SEO movie. It is an SEO technique that conforms to the guidelines set by search engines and does not, intentionally deceive it. The white hat SEO is not only all about conforming to the guidelines, but also about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

Generally, the idea of white hat technique is creating content which are useful to user and then make that content easily accessible to search engines. The primary concern of white hatters is the user friendliness and the accessibility of the site, issues on the search engine algorithms and rankings are just secondary.

What is Online Article Marketing and How Does It Work?

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Today, more and more search engine optimizers are using online article marketing to promote a website. But what is article marketing and how could it help your online business?

Article marketing is a process of posting keyword-focused articles on article sites. It is a type of advertising by writing an article related to your website niche. These articles submitted to article directories are available for syndication. These articles become available for publication and distribution in the online marketplace which could have a significant readership following it.

Most of the article marketing directories allow you to post your article for free. Many of the popular article directories allow you to include a keyword or a key phrase linking back to your website. This is an extremely effective search engine optimization technique that has been employed by top-notch SEO. Online article marketing, when used correctly, can create huge amount of inbound links to your website. This can increase both your traffic and your search engine rankings.
A well-written article can then become “link bait” for promoting other sites. For instance, you are selling natural area rugs and you created an article about tips on how to decorate your home with natural area rug, others who may want to post blog entry about home decorating and area rugs can link to your article. By this, you are getting more exposure and more back links.

Syndicated article directories always love good material. Many of the article submission directories won’t publish poorly written articles and articles with duplicate content. Be sure to proofread your articles and check for duplicity before submitting them. And even if the article site accepts your poorly written article, it would give a bad impression to your website. A well-written article that you submitted in article directories would not only give you back link and traffic but also promotes a professional image to your site.

Article marketing can be a very cost effective meansof website promotion, even if you have to pay for a content writer to write for you. When use effectively, article marketing can be more beneficial and more effective than paying PPC advertising.

Some of the best directories to submit your articles are Ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, goarticles.com, articlesnatch.com and buzzle.com just to name a few. Develop a practice of writing and submitting articles online and you will find that your search engine rankings increase dramatically, as does the quantity and quality of your visitors.

Website design Vs Website Content: Who’s The Boss?

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Which is more important website design or website content? This question has been debated for over decades since the advent of the World Wide Web. Some web designers think the design is more important than content, other says content is the king but others says the two should complement each other. As for me, I agree that the web design and content should go together for a quality website design. Because a good web design should be able to display the content in a user friendly and visually appealing manner.

Website design and website content are the two most important aspects in website development and it is impossible to create a quality website with giving emphasis to both. The main goal in creating a website is to make sure a free flow of traffic and successful conversion of traffic into profit. These goals can only be obtained when you build a website that is both informative and attractive.

Most of the time, when a user first enters a website he looks around to have a feel of the website, an attractive web design can hold his interest for while. Then he will start to look for information, you must have adequate quality content in your site to provide the information he needed to ensure that he stick to your site and stay with your site. More importantly the information you provide should be relevant to the niche of your site. It will not only help in improving you site’s bounce rate, but at the same time, it will also be help in increasing the search engine ranking of your site.

On the conclusion, design and content are equally important. Design and words have to work together. A good website can only be produced by utilizing a good combination of creative and user-friendly design that would showcase the relevant and informative content.

Implementing Quality Assurance in Web Design and Development

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There are lot of factors that needed to be considered in designing and developing a website. On the top of the list should be the implementation of quality assurance to the website. By definition, quality assurance or QA is the process of verifying or determining whether products or services meet or exceed customer expectations. Quality assurance is a process-driven approach with specific steps to help define and attain goals. This process considers design, development, production, and service.

Designing a website can be both expensive and time-consuming, and if you were to choose a web design firm handle the designing for your company always consider the company gives high regards to commitment and quality. A lot of trust is invested in your chosen web designer to fulfill the vision you have for your business website. Your website is an important asset that should work for your business and give you a return on your investment, whether it is a fully-integrated online business or just a simple brochure website. That is the reason why assuring the quality of the website should be on the top priority when designing and developing a website.

A good web designer and developer should be able to implement a quality assurance process to ensure that the website will meet the highest standard possible on all levels and adhere to the strictest industry standards. The quality assurance should not only cover the issues on programming codes and interface design but also on the accessibility and function. Aside from that the website the QA should ensure that the websites adheres to following standards: HTML standards, CSS standards, W3C standards and accessibility standards.

Most of the time people only see the tip of the iceberg when it comes to quality, but every website element, no matter how small, needs to meet the same QA. The most obvious evidence of quality is the layout design and the way the website works, but the same kind of quality must mirror into each and every detail all throughout the website. It is in the proper implementation of QA that defines the website’s quality and ensures you end up with an asset that lasts.

One of the most recommended models in quality assurance is the PDCA model. It stands for:

Plan: Establish objectives and processes required to deliver the desired results.

Do: Implement the process developed.

Check: Monitor and evaluate the implemented process by testing the results against the predetermined objectives

Act: Apply actions necessary for improvement if the results require changes.

The PDCA model is an effective method for implementing quality assurance because it analyzes existing conditions and methods used to provide the product or service customers. The goal is to ensure that excellence is inherent in every component of the process. In addition, if the PDCA cycle is repeated throughout the lifetime of the product or service, it helps improve internal web design company efficiency.