Web Sites
Adventive
www.adventive.com/
This is one of the best marketing resources on the web. Adventive contains moderated discussion groups on sales, public relations, search engine marketing, online promotion, wireless communications, and effective web site design. The popular I-Search Discussion Group is located here.
High Rankings Advisor
www.highrankings.com/archives.htm
The High Rankings Advisor is an informative and witty, free weekly email newsletter written by search engine expert Jill Whalen. Jill keeps no secrets when it comes to optimizing sites for search engine visibility. It also contains excellent interviews with timely, accurate information.
Microsoft bCentral Daily Digest
http://digest.bcentral.com/
This is a free, moderated discussion list focused on web site design and marketing. Topics frequently covered include search engine marketing, graphic design, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) coding, and more. Over 135,000 members make this list a great place to learn. It is published five days a week.
Microsoft bCentral Submit It!
http://submitit.bcentral.com/
This is a time-saving site submission and optimization service for small businesses. It offers an optimization check to ensure that your pages are ready for submission, a keyword selection tool, and rank checking and Inktomi inclusion features.
PositionPro
www.positionpro.com/
PositionPro is a web-based service that crawls a web site much like a search engine. PositionPro analyzes the web site's content and provides valuable insight into how the search engines will view it. Included in the service are tools to help you optimize your content, ranking reports, and easy access into Inktomi and FAST paid inclusion programs.
Position Technologies, Inc.
www.positiontech.com/
Position Technologies is the leading provider of search traffic solutions. Through its partnerships with the leading search engines and value-added services, Position Technologies provides a unique platform for businesses to manage their search engine visibility and traffic.
Search Engine Forums
www.searchengineforums.com/
This is an online forum for discussions about current topics relating to search engine marketing. Top search engine experts moderate and contribute to forum discussions. Representatives from the major search engines and directories sometimes contribute to discussions.
Search Engine Optimization Tips
www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm
This gives tips on search engine–friendly design, keyword phrase selection, copywriting, and meta-tag optimization. It also includes search engine lead times for submitting a web site.
Search Engine Watch
www.searchenginewatch.com/
If you bookmark only one web site about search engine marketing, this is the one. It is the most reputable source of information on the search engines. Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Reports are a "must -have" for all web site designers and online marketers.
SearchDay
www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/
SearchDay is a free newsletter from Search Engine Watch, featuring web search news, reviews, tools, tips, and search engine headlines from across the web. Beyond breaking news, SearchDay also features tips and techniques for sharpening your web searching skills, reviews of specialized search sites and tools, interviews with important people in the world of search, and a variety of additional search-related content.
SEO Consultants Directory
www.seoconsultants.com/
Directory of professional, ethical search engine marketers who follow all the guidelines set forth by the search engines and directories. It is a great resource for finding search engine marketers who do not spam the search engines.
Ten Steps to Building Links to Your Site
ww.bcentral.com/articles/marketing/134.asp
Inbound links and "link popularity" are a very important part of any online marketing campaign. This article describes the tools required to build links and includes step-by-step instructions for organizing your campaign and locating the best links for your site.
Traffick.com
www.traffick.com/
This is a search engine marketing site that provides feature articles from top search engine experts and search engine news. The Traffick Directory provides links related to portals, search engines, vertical portals, web browsers, and web tools.
Webmaster World
www.webmasterworld.com/
This is an online forum for discussions about current topics relating to site design and search engine marketing. Representatives from the major search engines and directories sometimes contribute to discussions.
Books
Designing Web Usability: The Practice of SimplicityJakob NielsenNew Riders Publishingwww.useit.com/jakob/Webusability/Search engines, directory editors, and end users prefer sites that are simple and easy to use. Though not all advice presented in this book is search engine friendly, the information will help web site owners create sites that enhance the end-user experience and increase sales conversions.
Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web UsabilitySteve KrugNew Riders
Publishingwww.sensible.com/If I had to select only one book that would be required reading in a web site design class, this one would be it. Even though Don't Make Me Think is classified as a usability book, it is a must-read for all web site designers who plan on creating a user-friendly web site. It also provides usability reviews and site design problem-solving tips.
Homepage Usability: 50 Websites DeconstructedJakob Nielsen and Marie TahirNew Riders
Publishingwww.useit.com/homepageusabilityUsability gurus Jakob Nielson and Marie Tahir present 113 guidelines for a user-friendly home page and analyze the home pages of popular web sites such as About.com and Microsoft. This is a great book for determining the effectiveness of your home page.
The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources the Search Engines Can't SeeChris Sherman and Gary PriceCyberAge Books
www.invisible-Web.net/Enormous expanses of the Internet are unreachable with standard web search engines. This book provides the key to finding these hidden resources by identifying how to uncover and use invisible web resources. Mapping the invisible web, when and how to use it, assessing the validity of the information, and the future of web searching are topics covered in detail.
Net Words—Creating High-Impact Online CopyNick Usborne McGraw-Hill
www.nickusborne.com/Nick Usborne speaks, writes, and consults on strategic copy issues for business online. For web sites, emails, and newsletters, he crafts messages that drive results. This book is a guide to creating copy that connects with customers and increases sales conversions. This is one of the best web copywriting books available.
Web Redesign Workflow That WorksKelly Goto and Emily CotlerNew Riders Publishingwww.web-redesign.com/Planning is one of the most cost-effective things a web site owner can do, especially when it comes to creating search engine–friendly designs. Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler provide a framework for a cohesive web workflow plan that saves web site owners time, money, and headaches. Read this book before designing your web site.
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Wednesday, December 24, 2008
What Exactly Is Spam?
As much as we all would like the search engines to give us clear guidelines on what does and does not constitute spam, we have to accept that it is an unrealistic expectation. Whenever a search engine presents a clear-cut spam guideline, unethical search engine marketers try to implement exceptions to the guideline. Then the search engines must update the guideline to include the new exceptions to the guideline, and so on, and so on. It's a never-ending process. Thus, the search engines present general rather than specific guidelines as to what constitutes spam.
Search engine spam is more about how and to what extent a marketing technique is used rather than if a technique is used. Thus, the search engine Spam Police do not automatically penalize a site for using a design technique if that design technique is used in an appropriate manner. For example, a site that uses invisible DHTML layers for drop-down menus, such as the Position Technologies site are not penalized because the invisible layers serve a navigation purpose. However, if a design or writing technique is used to deliberately trick a search engine into offering inappropriate, irrelevant, redundant, or poor-quality search results, a site can be penalized for spamming.
To determine whether a search engine marketing strategy is spam, ask yourself the following questions:
· Does your web site's actual content benefit your target audience and end users?
· Would you perform a search engine marketing strategy if the search engines did not exist?
· Are you building pages primarily for search engine positioning?
If you answered "yes" to the first and second questions and "no" to the third question, then in all likelihood, the search engine Spam Police will not consider the use of your design or writing strategies to be spam.
Conclusion
Utilizing spam techniques does not guarantee that your web pages get top search engine positions. Even if spam techniques work, the search engine positions are short-lived. After the search engines or competitors discover the spam, the site(s) utilizing spam are either penalized or permanently banned from the search engines. Then the spammers have to build another web site, another set of web pages, and begin the whole search engine marketing process all over again. This cat-and-mouse game can become very time consuming and expensive.Web pages with quality content and an acceptable search engine– friendly design consistently perform better on the search engines than spam pages. Because the pages contain quality content and the search engines have access to that quality content, there is no cat-and-mouse game. Sites that are optimized from the very beginning of the design and redesign process need little tweaking after the foundation is in place. Building a site for your target audience and following search engine best practices is one of the most cost-effective components of a search engine marketing campaign.
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Search engine spam is more about how and to what extent a marketing technique is used rather than if a technique is used. Thus, the search engine Spam Police do not automatically penalize a site for using a design technique if that design technique is used in an appropriate manner. For example, a site that uses invisible DHTML layers for drop-down menus, such as the Position Technologies site are not penalized because the invisible layers serve a navigation purpose. However, if a design or writing technique is used to deliberately trick a search engine into offering inappropriate, irrelevant, redundant, or poor-quality search results, a site can be penalized for spamming.
To determine whether a search engine marketing strategy is spam, ask yourself the following questions:
· Does your web site's actual content benefit your target audience and end users?
· Would you perform a search engine marketing strategy if the search engines did not exist?
· Are you building pages primarily for search engine positioning?
If you answered "yes" to the first and second questions and "no" to the third question, then in all likelihood, the search engine Spam Police will not consider the use of your design or writing strategies to be spam.
Conclusion
Utilizing spam techniques does not guarantee that your web pages get top search engine positions. Even if spam techniques work, the search engine positions are short-lived. After the search engines or competitors discover the spam, the site(s) utilizing spam are either penalized or permanently banned from the search engines. Then the spammers have to build another web site, another set of web pages, and begin the whole search engine marketing process all over again. This cat-and-mouse game can become very time consuming and expensive.Web pages with quality content and an acceptable search engine– friendly design consistently perform better on the search engines than spam pages. Because the pages contain quality content and the search engines have access to that quality content, there is no cat-and-mouse game. Sites that are optimized from the very beginning of the design and redesign process need little tweaking after the foundation is in place. Building a site for your target audience and following search engine best practices is one of the most cost-effective components of a search engine marketing campaign.
Visit our site:
http://imtadsensetips.t35.com
http://articlesfree.t35.com/
http://imtiaztips.t35.com/
http://webdesigntips.t35.com
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