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Monday, February 27, 2006

Seo Article :"Getting Started" Business Plan for Successful Internet Marketing

By: Tun Keng Boo

You've just had a spark. A great idea came to you. Its a brilliant idea for a profitable online business. Maybe it is an original idea that has not been marketed online before. Maybe you have come up with a new spin on the ordinary. Whatever it is that has influenced you to start your online business, be sure that you have a plan before you begin. This is not the time to "pick it up as you go". These are some basic things that should be included in your business plan.

The business summary should give a brief description of the entire business and is an integral part of the overall business plan. After you have completed the business summary you should begin to list the objectives or the goalsthat you want to accomplish through the business. Next and perhaps most importantly, you should develop your marketingplan. The marketingplan will address all the specifics of the business. When developing the marketing strategy you should consider the following:

The target market. The target market is the customers that you expect to see visiting your site. For example will your product be more appealing to college students or those who are in retirement?

Consider the competition for your product when determining the marketingstrategy. Choose a product that will be seen as unique and useful. Visit sites that are offering the same or similar products. Find out the cost, and how they are marketing their product. Finds out the pros and cons of their business and try to improve your product based on their flaws.

Research the various methods for advertisingonline. You should become educated about search engines and how they work since each one is different. Also be sure that you know how to submit your site to search engines. You should be prepared to spend a small amount of money on advertising, but the profits that you will gain from the advertisements will prove to be money well spent.

Think about pricing. Again, look at the competition and see what similar products are selling for. Pricing can play a big role in the success of your product since selling a product well below the average price may lead customer to think that there is a problem with the product or that it is not of the best quality. However, pricing items too high could also detour customers.

Determine the shipping method. Be sure that you know how products will be shipped so that you can have shipping details clearly posted on your site. If you are shipping things of great value, you should consider providing shipping insurance. Also think about shipping outside the country that you live in.

Think about the different methods of payment that you will accept. If your business does not accept credit cards, you should be ready to give up half if not more of your sales. If you decide to accept credit cards will you use a merchant account or will you use a third party credit card processing center? Both will help you get started and the third party processing center will handle all of the business so you don't have to. You should decide which you will use and also if you will accept checks or money orders. It is essential to have a secure server when taking credit cards.

Developing a business plan and summary, identifying the target market, researching and developing a marketing strategy are all key points to a successful internet business. These few things will help your online businessto become a great success and also provide you with peace of mind knowing that you have thoroughly thought about and planned for the opening of your online business.

Article Source: http://www.articles-galore.com

Friday, February 24, 2006

Seo India: Website Content Say About Your Business?

Q: I started my business about a year ago and everything is going fine. We're growing and making a profit, but the stress of running the business is really starting to get to me. I spend more time worrying than working. Sometimes the pressure is almost more than I can take. I'm starting to think that I'm not cut out to run my own business. Do you have any advice that might help me decide what to do?
-- Steven S.

A: I'm full of advice, Steven, and it's totally free. Just remember, you get what you pay for and I can't be held legally or morally responsible if my advice somehow lands you behind the counter at McDonalds. I'm not Dr. Phil, for petesake. I'm shorter and have more hair and less money.

Seriously, the first thing you need to do is take a few deep breaths and take comfort in the fact that you are not the first entrepreneur to feel the weight of the business world on your shoulders. Every business person, including yours truly, has felt the way you do at one time or another. For some, it's a feeling that occurs daily, especially when things aren't going as well as we'd like them to. And don't think the stress will magically disappear if your business takes off. I know people who run multimillion dollar corporations and they will tell you that the stress level goes up in proportion to the size of the business. These same people will also tell you they love what they do and would never consider doing anything else.

The difference between these entrepreneurs and you, Steven, is that they have been in business longer and have learned to not only handle stress, but to take stress and transform it into a driving force. They feed off the stress. It fuels their creativity and innovation. Stress challenges them, it makes them think, makes them better entrepreneurs.

I think the real question isn't whether or not you have what it takes to run a business. The real question is do you have what it takes to handle the stress of running a business. These are two very different questions and the answers depend totally on you.

Even on the best of days running a business can be incredibly stressful, not to mention overwhelming and exhausting. It's only natural that there will be times when you wonder if it's really worth it. Asking yourself the "should I just get a real job" question simply means that your human side is showing. And as a human you have a limited tolerance for things you can not control. And that's really where the stress of being an entrepreneur comes from. We worry about things we can't control. Things like finding new customers, paying the bills, making payroll, and a thousand other things. Sure, we can put forth our best efforts to make these things turn out in our favor, but we really can't control the outcome.

So we worry. And worry breeds stress and stress breeds doubt and doubt breeds the feeling that an 800 pound gorilla is using your chest for a lawn chair. It's only natural that you being to wonder, "Is this what I really want to do? Do I have what it takes to run my own business?"

I remember once complaining about the stress of running my business to an elder entrepreneur. He waved at me like he was swatting a fly and said, "Son, if it was easy, everybody would do it. Now suck it up and move on."

Suck it up and move on… probably the best business advice I've ever gotten. No fortune cookie was ever so on the money.

My mentor's eloquent point was this: running a business is never easy and always stressful, but that's what makes it so dang exciting. Running a business is like walking a tight rope… backward… with your eyes shut… and your pants on fire… Man, sure beats working for a living, huh.

Steven, it sounds to me like you're having what I call a "garbage truck moment." That's when the pressure of running your business starts getting to you and you begin to question whether the entrepreneurial life is right for you. The debts are mounting, your staff is shrinking (or growing), you get that nauseous feeling in the pit of your stomach and you find yourself longing for the apparent simplicity of driving a garbage truck.

Note to garbage truck drivers: save your hate mail, boys. I know you work very hard and I respect what you do. Without you the world would be a very different, very smelly place, indeed.

What's happening to you, Steven, has happened to us all. The stress is causing you to doubt not only your decision to start your own business, but your ability to run it, as well. There's no magic bullet for dealing with stress and you certainly can't eliminate it totally, so you must learn to handle it.

I believe the key to handling stress is to first identify the source of the stress, then formulate a plan to deal with it.

Here's what I do. Take a pencil and paper and list all the things that are causing you stress. For each item listed ask yourself: Is there anything I can do about this? Is there anything I can do to change this from being a point of stress to a point of accomplishment? In other words, is this something I have control over?

Stressing over things you can't control is a total waste of time. Tell yourself that you're burning brain cells in vain and mark that item off your list. Some people don't have this ability. Some people are just natural born worriers who are not happy unless they have something to worry about. They revel in worry. They work in worry like a great artist works in paint. Even when things are going great they worry that the sky is about to fall. If you are a natural born worrier, Steven, nothing I say will help you handle stress.

Great, now you have something else to worry about.

Next , determine if each point of stress is something that has happened in the past, is currently happening, or has not yet - or may never - happen. If the stress point is the past, there's not much you can do but attempt to rectify the situation causing the stress. If it's a current problem, formulate a plan to deal with the problem and eliminate the stress it's causing. And if you're stressing over things that may never happen, remember what Mark Twain said: "I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

Finally, Steven, it's important to remember that working for someone else can be just as stressful as working for yourself. Sure, you don't have the stress (and responsibility) associated with running a business, but you will have other stresses that can be far worse; like impossible work deadlines, sales quotas you can't meet, a boss that learned his management skills on a chain gang, coworkers who don't pull their own weight, possible layoffs, etc.

Very few things in life are without stress. Just ask any garbage truck driver.

Here's to your success!

Friday, February 17, 2006

SEO India: Link Populariy & Submission

All Links Matter

Many times when webmaster embark on a link campaign, they obsess on the vaunted Google PageRank that the linking page has.

What a waste of time.

Today's site with a PageRank of 0 could have a PageRank of 6 tomorrow. I've seen this myself on 2 separate sites - as they come out of the gate, they are graced with a PageRank of 6. Now, prior to that, any webmaster who was obsessed with PageRank would never link to that site.

While the above mentioned scenario is probably not very common, the point is that while a site may be ranking low today, unless you know the webmaster personally, you don't know what other efforts that person is putting in to get that site ranked.

Furthermore, a site may have little or no PageRank but still receive tons of traffic. So, would you pass up a page that was getting 11k visitors a day just because it has a Google PageRank of 0?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

Another key element in consideration is that every unique link you get from a site counts. Whether it's from Joe's Pizza shop, or Pizza hut directly, to the search engine, they still count as two "votes" for your site.

Now, each link would carry different levels of weight in regards to relevancy, but if you can't get a link from Pizza Hut, you could get about 1,200 links from the various Joe's Pizza Shops located on the web to make up for it.

There is a current backlash of directory bashing. True, there are many directories that exist for the sole purpose of making money off of Google AdSense, and those directories should be punished accordingly.

But, there are many directory owners who are dedicated to having highly targeted and specific category related listings to provide for their visitors. These directories are a great resource for search engines as they help categorize the Internet - that's why directories will always be important on the Web.

So, always get a link from any relevant site whenever you can - regardless of Google PageRank or any other factor. Even Google was an unknown when they first appeared on the Internet.

Paul Bliss
www.SEOforGoogle.com

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

How To Ensure The Search Engines Find Your Website

One of the most fundamental aspects of search engine optimisation (SEO) is ensuring that the pages within your website are as accessible as possible to the search engines. It's not only the homepage of a website that can be indexed, but also the internal pages within a site's structure. The internal pages of a site often contain important content such as products, services or general information, and therefore can be uniquely optimised for related terms. As a result, easy access to these pages is vital.

There are many do's and don'ts involved in ensuring all of your pages can be found by search engines. However, it is important to first establish how the search engines find and index web pages.

Search engines use "robots" (also known as "bots" or "spiders") to find content on the web for inclusion in their index. A robot is a computer programme that can follow the hyperlinks on a web page, which is known as "crawling". When a robot finds a document it includes the contents within the search engine's index, then follows the next links it can find and continues the process of crawling and indexing. With this in mind, it becomes apparent that the navigational structure of a website is important in getting as many pages as possible indexed.

When considering the navigational structure of your site, the hierarchy of content should be considered. Search engines judge what they feel to be the most important pages of a site when considering rankings and a page's position in the site structure can influence this. The homepage is generally considered the most important page of a site - it is the top level document and usually attracts the most inbound links. From here, search engine robots can normally reach pages that are within three clicks of the homepage. Therefore, your most important pages should be one click away, the next important two clicks away and so forth.

The next thing to consider is how to link the pages together. Search engine robots can only follow generic HTML href links, meaning Flash links, JavaScript links, dropdown menus and submit buttons will all be inaccessible to robots. Links with query strings that have two or more parameters are also typically ignored, so be aware of this if you run a dynamically generated website.

The best links to use from an SEO perspective are generic HTML text links, as not only can they be followed by robots but the text contained in the anchor can also be used to describe the destination page - an optimisation plus point. Image links are also acceptable but the ability to describe the destination page is diminished, as the alt attribute is not given as much ranking weight as anchor text.

The most natural way to organise content on a website is to categorise it. Break down your products, services or information into related categories and then structure this so that the most important aspects are linked to from the homepage. If you have a vast amount of information for each category then again you will want to narrow your content down further. This could involve having articles on a similar topic, different types of product for sale, or content that can be broken down geographically. Categorisation is natural optimisation - the further you break down your information the more content you can provide and the more niche key phrases there are that can be targeted.

If you are still concerned that your important pages may not get indexed, then you can consider adding a sitemap to your website. A sitemap can be best described as an index page - it is a list of links to all of the pages within a site contained on one page. If you link to a sitemap from your homepage then it gives a robot easy access to all of the pages within your site. Just remember - robots typically can't follow more than 100 links from one page, so if your site is larger than this you may want to consider spreading your sitemap across several pages.

There are many considerations to make when optimising your site for search engines, and making your pages accessible to search engine robots should be the first step of your optimisation process. Following the advice above will help you make your entire site accessible and aid you in gaining multiple rankings and extra traffic.

Friday, February 10, 2006

SEO Advice: For Your Website Content

The web pages actually at the top of Google have only one thing clearly in common: good writing. Don't get so caught up in the usual SEO sacred cows and bugbears, such as PageRank, frames, and JavaScrïpt, that you forget your site's content.

I was recently struck by the fact that the top-ranking web pages on Google are consistently much better written than the vast majority of what one reads on the web.

Of course, that shouldn't be a surprise, considering how often officials at Google proclaim the importance of good content. Yet traditional SEO wisdom has little to say about good writing



Does Google, the world's wealthiest media company, really ignore traditional standards of quality in the publishing world? Does Google, like so many website owners, really get so caught up in the process of the algorithm that it misses the whole point?

Apparently not.

Most Common On-the-Page Website Content Success Features

Whatever the technical mechanism, Google is doing a pretty good job of identifying websites with good content and rewarding them with high rankings.

I looked at Google's top five pages for the five most searched-on keywords, as identified by WordTracker on June 27, 2005. Typically, the top five pages receive an overwhelming majority of the traffïc delivered by Google.

The web pages that contained written content (a small but significant portion were image galleries) all shared the following features:

Updating : frequent updating of content, at least once every few weeks, and more often, once a week or more.

Spelling and grammar : few or no errors. No page had more than three misspelled words or four grammatical errors. Note : spelling and grammar errors were identified by using Microsoft Word's chëck feature, and then ruling out words marked as misspellings that are either proper names or new words that are simply not in the dictionary. Does Google use SpellCheck? I can already hear the scoffing on the other side of this computer screen. Before you dismiss the idea completely, keep in mind that no one really does know what the 100 factors in Google's algorithm are. But whether the mechanism is SpellCheck or a better shot at link popularity thanks to great credibility, or something else entirely, the results remain the same.

Paragraphs : primarily brief (1-4 sentences). Few or no long blocks of text.

Lists : both bulleted and numbered, form a large part of the text.

Sentence length : mostly brief (10 words or fewer). Medium-length and long sentences are sprinkled throughout the text rather than clumped together.

Contextual relevance : text contains numerous terms related to the keyword, as well as stem variations of the keyword.

SEO Bugbears and Sacred Cows

A hard look at the results shows that, practically speaking, a number of SEO bugbears and sacred cows may matter less to ranking than good content.

PageRank . The median PageRank was 4. One page had a PageRank of 0. Of course, this might simply be yet another demonstration that the little PageRank number you get in your browser window is not what Google's algo is using. But if you're one of those people who attaches an overriding value to that little number, this is food for thought.

Frames . The top two web pages listed for the most searched-on keyword employ frames. Frames may still be a bad web design idea from a usability standpoint, and they may ruin your search engine rankings if your site's linking system depends on them. But there are worse ways you could shoot yourself in the foot.

JavaScript-formatted internal links . Most of the websites use JavaScrïpt for their internal page links. Again, that's not the best web design practice, but there are worse things you could do.

Links : Most of the web pages contained ten or more links; many contained over 30, in defiance of the SEO bugbears about "link popularity bleeding." Moreover, nearly all the pages contained a significant number of non-relevant links. On many pages, non-relevant links outnumbered relevant ones. Of course, it's not clear what benefit the website owners hope to get from placing irrelevant links on pages. It has been a proven way of lowering conversion rates and losing visitors. But Google doesn't seem to care if your website makes monëy.

Originality : a significant number of pages contained content copied from other websites. In all cases, the content was professionally written content apparently distributed on a free-reprint basis. Note: the reprint content did not consist of content feeds. However, no website consisted solely of free-reprint content. There was always at least a significant portion of original content, usually the majority of the page.

Recommendations

•• Make sure a professional writer, or at least someone who can tell good writing from bad, is creating your site's content, particularly in the case of a search-engine optimization campaign. If you are an SEO, make sure you get a pro to do the content. A shocking number of SEOs write incredibly badly. I've even had clients whose websites got fewer conversions or page views after their SEOs got through with them, even when they got a sharp uptick in unique visitors. Most visitors simply hit the "back" button when confronted with the unpalatable text, so the increased traffïc is just wasted bandwidth.

• • If you write your own content, make sure that it passes through the hands of a skilled copyeditor or writer before going online.

• • Update your content often. It's important both to add new pages and update existing pages. If you can't afford original content, use free-reprint content.

• • Distribute your content to other websites on a free-reprint basis. This will help your website get links in exchange for the right to publish the content. It will also help spread your message and enhance your visibility. Fears of a "duplicate content penalty" for free-reprint content (as opposed to duplication of content within a single website) are unjustified.

In short, if you have a mature website that is already indexed and getting traffïc, you should consider making sure the bulk of your investmënt in your website is devoted to its content, rather than graphic design, old-school search-engine optimization, or linking campaigns.