Marketing

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Qassia For Links, Links and Links

There's a new web 2.0 site is town and it is clean, lean, and means to gather all the information it can.

So What?

Qassia pays YOU for that information. The more you earn, the better your websites will rank. Plus you get a backlink to your website every time you add - unlimited, quality backlinks are awaiting you.

The Qassia Way To Website Promotion

Once you sign up, you can add any number of your sites.

Then you crank the engine by ... giving them a piece of your mind. Like an article, only way shorter.

Intel is what Qassia is about. The more you add, the more credit you get. Last night I took an old blog article and turned it into 3 posts, earning about 300 dollars in less than a half hour.

One Problem

The money is in Qassia dollars. You can't spend it, but it helps your sites rank better.

But this is HUGE -- for each intel you add, you get a backlink! The search engines are going to eat it up.

What Qualifies To Get That Link?

Practically anything.

Posts are ranked anonymously by peers. But unless it is totally objectionable material, you will get your link for any post that is printed.

Now you can influence your "score," which influences ultimate directory listing.

To lower your score, talk about:

1. your website or product. This is an ad.

2. Poetry, short stories, jokes, or other creative writing.

To raise your score, give:

1. information about things you know more about than most other people.

2. previously unpublished material.

3. un-researched info, like your past and current experiences with the people, places, and companies around you.

4. mundane, factual, even boring information that sooner or later will prove useful to someone.

For Website Owners

Qassia will be your best buddy:

* get unlimited quality backlinks to your websites, with NO reciprocal links

* this will help your websites rank better at search engines

* eventually lots of direct traffic to your site, as Qassia becomes known for its huge content

* it is totally free.

Final Caveat

Qassia is in lockdown right now. That means that the only way you can get in is by invitation.

To get in, click Invitation to Qassia. Ron King is a web developer; visit his website on Authoring Articles.

Copyright 2008 Ron King. This article may be reprinted if the resource box is left intact and the links live.

Tips for Finding the Best SEO Company for You

With so much business today coming from the Google search engine, no professional business can afford to be without the professional consultation when it comes to their search engine optimisation. Take a note of some of the points you should look for when choosing the right SEO company for you.

Beware of Guarantees

If a company claims that it can give you the number one ranking on Google, don't trust it. The Google search engine uses very elaborate formulas to get the results it does, and someone stating that they can guarantee you the top slot, (especially if you are in a competitive field) is not to be trusted.

Don't Link to Your SEO

Don't trust the services of any SEO that states that you need to link to them to get the traffic that you need. More often than not, these are companies that will inflate your numbers with people who have paid pennies to click on your site, no matter what it is.

Look at Accreditation

What certification does your consultant hold? This is where it pays to do your research. There are many firms out there that offer SEO certification and they are most definitely not all created equal. Take a look at where your consultant got his or her certification and ask yourself how thorough it is.

Beware Secretive Consultants

While there are a lot of things to remember, many of the concepts of SEO work can be broken down very quickly for you. Don't trust someone who's secretive about what they are doing.

Watch Out for "Cheaters"

SEO consultants who immediately set out to trick the Google search engine don't last long; watch out for people who claim they can do just that.

Refunds

Remember that if you are not satisfied with the quality of the work that you have received, you should not be forced to pay for it. A good firm will have options for remuneration available to you, with the assumption that you won't need to use it.

Word of Mouth

If you have a friend or a associate who had SEO work done, speak with them. What did they like about the experience? What would they have changed? This is especially relevant if they are in the same field.

Look for a Specialist

If you sell exotic birds, look for an SEO specialist who has some experience working with the sale of animals, exotic and otherwise. If you are in a niche business, it is of vital importance that you find the people who are looking for you. It might take some searching but make sure that your consultant is in a good place to work with you when it comes to your industry.

Professional Behavior

Remember that working with an SEO consultant is no different from working with any other professional. Does he do what he said he would? Does he respond to your questions in a timely manner?

Where Will Your Money Go?

If you are asked to buy advertising space, make sure that you know why. Where is your site showing up and what is the benefit to you? Some SEO companies will work more with pay per click and others work with content, so make sure you've found the right one for you.

Ben Norman is the MD of UK search engine optimisation company Impact Media Ltd, specialists in Search Engine Optimisation. Impact Media work with a wide range of businesses helping them to make more money from utilising the search engines natural & paid search results.

Super Simple Ways To Optimize Your Site For Search Engines

While serious search engine optimization remains a difficult and often daunting task for your average website owner, there are many simple things you can do to optimize your site for the search engines. These simple tasks are relatively easy to perform and can be very beneficial to any search engine optimization campaign.

Page Titles

One of the most important aspects of on page optimization is to optimize all your page titles. Very few homemade websites and even those made by far more costly amateur and even professional web designers forget, or just don't know, that you should place your most important keyword phrase or two in your page title. If your #1 most important keyword is "orange cat figurines", then your page title should look something like this:

Company Name - Orange Cat Figurines

Simple as that! As long as you don't repeat one word more than several times in the title, you can place more than one phrase in the title, like this:

Company Name - Orange Cat Figurines, Feline Figurine Store

Notice we didn't repeat a single word more than once, fit in 2 important keyword phrases and also fit in the official company name? This is a good title. You can also move the company name to the end of the title to place greater importance on your phrases, like this:

Orange Cat Figurines and Feline Figurines at Company Name

All three formats make good page titles for just about any website.

Body Text

Next, we have the body text of the site. So often, you see sites that have very little or no text on their sites at all. Your main page especially, needs to have some good descriptive text that incorporates the purpose of the website and your most important keyword phrases. Flash sites, sites with splash or entrance pages and sites that are graphics heavy, too often miss this important step.

Your text should read naturally and explain what your site offers and can even include a summary of your products, services, direct links to important pages on the site and contact information.

Page File Names

The file names of each page of your site are also important and can be optimized. Here are some examples of appropriate optimization of page file names:

orange-cats.htm
orange-cat-figurine.htm
cat-figurines.htm
blackcatfigurines.htm

It's quite simple, name the pages that you have these products on with the most important keyword phrase for those products. Avoid using too many words here, just 1 short keyword phrase works best. There's still an argument as to whether the hyphenated version or the non hyphenated version is best. You can also use underscores as well. If your site is already built, you may not be able to change the filenames easily, but if you add additional pages, you can certainly use optimized file names like above.

Heading Tag

This is the very simple H1 tag that makes the text look very large on the page. When the heading tag is used in a page, the search engines tend to think that the phrase contained inside it is very important. The heading tag should be used at the top of a page to highlight one important keyword phrase that is describing the content of the page.

Alternate Image Text

While some search engines don't bother to read this text, some major ones still do. You can optimize the alternate image text to describe an image, but don't stuff it with keywords. Here are some examples of good alternate image text that incorporates keywords:

Orange Cat Figurine (to describe an orange cat figurine) Cat Store Logo (for the logo) Cat Figurine Catalog (for button linking to the main catalog page showing cat figurines)

The alternate text names of each image will also show up when you hover your mouse over an image or for people who are on low speed connections and whose images don't load or take a long time to load.

There you are, 5 very simple and easy ways to optimize your site for search engines.

Lydia Quinn writes for SearchTheWebLive!, an up and coming search engine portal. Visit us at: http://www.searchtheweblive.com/

Article Marketing - Quality For Consumers

If you look around the Internet there are several recommended styles of article marketing so how do you decide which is the right way for you? On the one hand there are those who swear by writing several articles a day and submitting them to as many directories as they can. Then there are those who write one article and either use software to spin them into several articles or make small changes like title and first paragraph and submit the similar articles to the same sites. Then there are those who write one quality article daily, weekly or monthly and just submit to a few sites.

All of those ways of article marketing may work, but which works the best? Lets just go through the different ways.

1. Most of us do not have the time to write several articles a day and if they are about the same subject, intending to promote one particular site those articles can become repetitive and lose quality to quantity. Of course some people can write several good articles a day but I do not think that I am one of them.

2. Spinning articles might be a great time saver, but when you look at the results of spinning they can be laughable. The articles often do not make sense to the reader and can be difficult to understand in much the same way as badly translated articles. Many directories do not want those articles; I know that I do not want articles on my site that visitors may have difficulty in understanding.

3. Changing the first paragraph and or the title of an article and submitting it to different sites is great, that means there is not so much of a duplicate content issue. Submitting the altered versions of the same article to the same directories is not on. Last week a joker submitted the same article to my directory with slightly different titles 4 times using 4 different accounts. As if I was not going to notice the similarities when I looked at the list of articles waiting for approval!

4. Then there is quality and submitting to fewer sites. A quality article is a pleasure to approve. I enjoy reading the article, I know that the quality of my site is going to improve and I know that the quality articles are going to bring in more traffic to my site. I also know that a quality article does not need to be submitted to hundreds of sites or spun. A quality article will be picked up on by publishers and replicated pretty darn quick.

You can guess which article marketing style I prefer; its quality all the way. Looking at number 4 I sound like a proper know it all. I do not think that I know everything but I do know what my site stats tell me. The author articles that get the most hits are nearly always the articles that I have regarded as high quality, or have been interesting enough to read all the way through.

I have different ways of defining quality that may make me seem contrary, but I have always looked at things in different ways. A business colleague calls me a lateral thinker, I think he means a pain in the b**t!

Quality that is extremely well written, but on occasion no matter how well an article is written if the content is dry and boring the article is not going to fly for the majority of readers unless it contains specific information. I do not claim to be an extremely good writer, I think that I am an adept writer who can occasionally pull off unexpected great results almost by accident. I have had enough of those accidents to be able to figure out why those articles are hitting the spot and why articles such as this one is unlikely to produce masses of hits.

One of my accidents was an article about where I live. I wrote it as an example because I wanted members of my travel site to write about where they live. It started out as an article about a regular town and without initially intending to I added paragraphs about places of interest and tourist spots within 10 miles. It dawned on me after writing the article that although I live in an industrial town that would not be considered on it's own a tourist centre, like most places there are tourist spots close enough by to include a mention in an article.

That article does better for hits than most articles of my own and those of authors on my sites that have been especially written for article marketing. I asked myself why and came up with 2 reasons. One was that I had added a good variety of keywords and phrases without thinking about it. The other reason I suspect is that the article is unique, very different to any other travel article that I have seen out there. It is also obvious that I know the place well whereas most article marketing travel articles don't give you a sense of the authors knowing the places that they write about and show little personality.

Another accident was an article written a month ago about my bad experience with a spyware fraud. I was so cheesed off that I turned to writing to make myself feel better. I have never known an article get so many hits in such a short time. It has been picked up by a lot of webmasters, bloggers and ezines and I am sure it still has plenty of scope. I have even seen it on some geek sites, now that's something I never thought would happen to an article of mine!

I think that the article is doing well because it is offering information written from obvious personal experience that people want and need and those people have had the common sense to do a search before being scared into parting with their money.

The top 2 articles on my directory every month are my own scam warnings. They are only on a couple of my sites so the hits are not spread between zillions of article directories. Again I am providing information that people want and need. Neither of the articles were written for the purpose of article marketing and a variety of keywords and phrases happened naturally.

So to me a quality article is reasonably well written, packed with information written from experience that people want or need, unique or as different to other articles as possible and showing some personality.

The fatal flaw in my accidents is that I have not used the articles to promote money making ventures, just my sites in general. I will have to get a grip and accidentally make some money from them!

I'll end this far too long article by including a quote from a forum that made me think. 'Thats a major problem I see in article directories -- its so difficult to find good content in them that they are not nearly as useful to article consumers as they could be.'

Patricia Jones loves writing and owns a general subject article directory BB Articles and a travel article directory Articles Abroad
For free digital downloads visit Eprofits Centre