We are pleased to be able to offer an article by guest author, Manish Pandey of SEO MegaCorp, answering the common question of which tools SEO professionals should be using.
Expect to see more articles from him here soon!
There would be many SEO professionals who may already be using these tools. But I thought to cover them as they are a must for every SEO.
SEO Quake: Seoquake is a powerful tool for Mozilla Firefox and for Internet Explorer, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.
SEO for Firefox: SEO for Firefox pulls in many useful marketing data points to make it easy get a holistic view of the competitive landscape of a market directly in the search results.
Rank Checker: The Firefox Rank Checker extension allows you to easily check your website rankings in Google (US and international), Yahoo, and Microsoft Live search.
Link Analysis by Joost: Link data in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Portal is pretty static, they give you the pages a site has links on, and let you do all the analysis with other tools. That sucks if you want to do a quick analysis of a site, or want to get a quick overview of inbound anchor texts for a site.
Link Diagnosis: This tool is the best at representing information offering the wide variety of sorting options based on link type (nofollow, missing, good), link anchor text, PageRank, page internal+external links.
Google Adwords Keyword Tool: This tool not only shows the keywords and it’s count that month, it also shows it’s trend, estimated ad position in per click, average cpc, competition, and the month it’s highest volume occurred.
C-Class Checker: This free Class C Checker tool allows you to check if some sites are hosted on the same Class C IP Range.
Domain Backlinks Checker: The tool offers the information in a very convenient way linking to each page from the certain domain where the backlink was found.
Hub Finder: Hub Finder is web based software which looks for hub pages using the Yahoo! API. It allows you to find sites which link to common resources that you manually enter, or resources that rank well in Yahoo! for a specific term.
When the economy struggles, we tend to see two different types of people (1) those who spend their days explaining to anyone who will listen why they are not making enough money (2) those who choose to take action and find more ways to monetize their websites and blogs.
Which type are you?
Are you serious about wanting to find more ways to make some extra money, but just don’t know where to start? Then you might want to take a look at a reputable affiliate program such as T3Leads to see if they might be a good fit for you.
I noticed several positive points.
It’s one of the best paying referral programs in the industry.
T3Leads is a pay per lead program. This means that every time one of your visitors clicks your link or banner and fills out a lead form you earn money based on the current offer of that advertisement. Payments are made by your choice of WebMoney, Fethard, ePassporte, wire transfer, check, PayPal, or E-Gold.
They offer a ton of support and incentives for their affiliates.
Affiliate support is available to help you get started, even if you are brand-new to affiliate marketing, including website and banner development, technical advise as needed, and an affiliate forum. Top affiliates have received incentives including, iPods, camcorders, cameras, and more!
Easily manage your account 24/7 to see where you stand.
You can access your account anytime of day to check your current and past earnings, lead reports, referral stats, etc. through their lifetime tracking system
T3Leads advertisers basically fall within business and financial niches, (debt settlement, auto loans, payday loans, home improvement, insurance, etc.) so this could easily be applicable to a wide range of niches that you are already writing about daily! Or, you may even want to create a brand-new website!
Give us a peek into your world, showing us something you come in contact with on a daily basis. Of course, this is open to your own creative interpretation. If you spend a lot of time feeding birds in your back yard, submitting a picture of your bird feeders may be your way of showing us your world. A computer programmer might show us a shot of his computer system. Get the idea?
We want the photos to be shots that you took specifically for this contest. You can submit up to 3 photographs, but you can only win once. This contest begins immediately and will run until 9:00 pm CST on March 23, 2009.
The contest is being graciously sponsored by Uprinting.com
1st Place - 1,000 postcards*
2nd Place - 18×28 canvas print*
*Please note that prizes can only shipped for free to the United States and Canada. Winners from outside that area would need to make arrangements concerning shipping charges with Uprinting.com
How Do You Enter? Just go to our V7N digital photography contest thread and enter your submissions to the contest within the thread! Good Luck!
Get your cameras ready, and make sure you invite all your photography buddies to join us at the V7N. We will be announcing an exciting new digital photography contest very soon. You don’t need to be a professional, you just need to love shooting pictures!
One of the hottest topics right now involves ways to use professional networking to help increase your business contacts. While discussing this very topic with Chris Kenworthy, marketing manager for Escalate Media, I asked (okay, I may have begged a little) if he would consider putting together an article for the V7 Network members. He was kind enough to do it! Thanks Chris!
Freelancing In a Recession
With the United States in a recession, being a freelancer is becoming harder and harder. You’re probably already seeing a drop in clients and an increase in late payments. You’re going to have to work even harder to find new clients, but there are a few things you can do to make things easier on yourself.
Focus on building your professional network. If you don’t already have a professional network of friends and acquaintances, stop everything you’re doing and go setup a profile at LinkedIn right now! Take the time to fill out your entire LinkedIn profile with all your skills and jobs you’ve done. Think of it as your online resume. When you’re done filling out your profile, import all of your contacts from over the years and add them as connections. Now start talking to those people you haven’t talked to in ages and start rebuilding those relationships. Let people know you’re available for freelance projects.
After you’ve reconnected with all your old friends and business acquaintances, start joining some professional groups. Start with the V7 Network LinkedIn group to leverage the existing community and relationships here! Then find other groups that match your skillset. Participate in those groups by asking questions and offering advice. Everytime you participate in a group, your name will be broadcast to all the group members furthering your exposure and your professional network.
You’ll soon see the power of LinkedIn as you meet new people and find people contacting you for jobs they need done.
Don’t stop with LinkedIn though. Other social networking sites like Twitter (follow V7 Network on Twitter) and Facebook can help you gain exposure and build your professional network. If you’re looking for local contacts, go to search.twitter.com and follow people in your area. Then reply to them and build a professional relationship with those who can help send business your way.
Think of LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook like personal branding. They are completely free (except for your time) and the marketing power is incredible. Stop doing things the hard way and let your friends and acquaintances work for you.
There is absolutely no doubt that the benefits of blogging are virtually unlimited, but we all have days when we ask ourselves why we do it. This is likely to happen during moments when we have trouble coming up with blog topics. Sometimes we just need to be reminded that there really is a purpose to it all.
So tell me, why do you blog?
V7N Member Kev says . . . My blog is a portal to my forum. It acts as a gateway collecting keywords, Google results pages and traffic. Its also the 5th highest source of traffic to my forum, referring several thousand people every month. It also provides me with an outlet for my post besides on my forum. When I make a post on my forum, it might get buried with the other thousands of post. But a post on my blog is more visible to people and to search engines.
V7N Member Journey says . . . Blogging is part of my job. But I think if ever I will change my career, I’ll still do it because it’s already part of my special interest which I truly enjoy. And what’s more? It’s also my good way of earning extra income through AdSense.
V7N Member Dana Says . . . I’m a hopelessly addicted blogoholic. I have more than a dozen blogs of my own and do ghostblogging for clients as well. It’s a great way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert which can make you money through affiliate marketing, there’s AdSense and link income and I also get freelance writing jobs as a result of some of my blogging efforts. It’s amazingly powerful for SEO! Plus I think it’s fun. I have made some great online friends in the blogosphere.
6 More Reasons To Blog!
You can help drive traffic to your website by writing article of interest to your target audience.
As your blog grows in popularity, there are multiple ways in which you can monetize it, bringing in extra money.
It gives you a chance to interact more with your target audience, especially if your blog is written in such a way as to encourage comments and questions.
It can help you improve your writing skills.
It allows you to deep link to areas of your site that need more visibility.
Join the gym! No matter how you look at it, sitting at your desk 12+ hours a day is going to mess with your level of fitness, to say nothing of how quickly it can lead to packing on the pounds. Some people prefer to buy exercise equipment for their home, but I’m not crazy about this option because when you work from home, it’s way too easy to become a hermit. At the very least, get out of the house for a nice long walk every single day!
Don’t eat at your desk! Not only do those nasty crumbs have a way of finding their way into every possible crevice on your keyboard, when we eat at our desks, we tend to eat more junk. Get up and fix a real meal, and eat it at the table. You will be far less likely to snack throughout the day, and you won’t have to spend quite as much time at the gym.
Organize your workspace! The better you optimize your home office, the more productive you will become in your business.
Limit personal phone calls! Sometimes friends and family have a habit of forgetting that we really do work, when we do so from home. Because of this, they may expect you to be able to spend hours chatting on the phone, or think you can run errands for them constantly. It can get out of hand rapidly, so you may need to sit down and have an honest talk with them about how important your work is to you.
Use good posture! I cannot stress this enough. Buy the best ergonomically designed chair that you can afford, and then make sure you understand (and use) proper posture while working at your desk.
Don’t drink coffee at your desk! Stop and take a real coffee break. It will give you the chance to get up and move around a bit. Okay, reality says that most of us serious coffee drinkers aren’t gonna be able to follow this tip, so be prepared to invest in a really good spill proof mug, or plan on buying new keyboards on a regular basis. I have gone through so many keyboards (average of 4 per year) that it may be time for me to consider a really nice waterproof one.
Balance you time! It is sooooo easy to forget the very reasons you decided to work from home to begin with, and end up all wrapped up in your business. You have to find that delicate balance between work and loved ones. Taking an extra hour to spend more time with your child won’t make much difference to your business one way or another, but it can make a tremendous difference in your child’s life.
Whether ’tis PR worthy of the affiliate program to suffer the hijacked threads or to take up arms against a web of link-maskers…
So, you’re a registered forum user and you want people to visit your site… Great! We all do. Well, we don’t all want people to visit –your- site, but rather… Well, you get the point.
No matter how long your site has been active for its not so much a matter of getting people to click in as much as it’s about giving them a reason too. Sure, some folks resort to ye-old affiliate link-masking in the hopes that a user will ‘go for it’. Others may just spam it over dozen of posts thinking the more of it there is, the more likely they are of getting one click and others will bump old threads with their link using the ‘helpful reply’ tactic. Honestly though, they all fall under the SPAM category so none of those will get you very far in a forum. In fact, all that will do is bring attention to yourself and get you banned. At least it does at V7N. (:
No, what you want and what you need to do are so closely related to proper etiquette and good posting form that it might be hard for the average spammer to grasp.
First, just stop the bumping old threads with links and images to some great opportunity or program or service. Nobody takes the content of a 1-post-noob seriously. Ever. All that’s going to do is alert the moderators to you and get your post canned. then, you’re screwed. You’re on the radar and no amount of duplicate accounts and re-spamming is going to help.
Second, stop the set-up spam. You know, when a 1-post-noob asks a question and shortly there after another 1-post-noob posts a spammy reply. We all know its the same person. And now, again, that spam and those users are on the radar. Canned and banned.
Third, profile spamming. That’s when a user signs up and uses their site’s url in every field they can find… Name: Their site, Sex: Their site… Etc etc… But then never post. While this might seem like a quick and simple method of getting indexed and getting that all important PR, it does nothing for visits and, again, will get the account banned. After, of course, all those links had been edited out.
So here’s the thing. We get it. You want PR, you want visits, CT, CPP and so on… And it mainly takes one thing to do that. A link. And on the other hand, more importantly, a visitor.
First you need to start posting. Yes, I know. “But I don’t have time for that!!” I know you don’t. You’re too busy trying to screw the system that you’ve forgot how easy it is to just play by the rules.
Becoming a valued member of a web community is a sure-fire way to get some juice and also some, -gasp- business!! Yes, it’s true. Stick around, post quality posts, help others, show off some of your flare and it will come back to you. Forums are always on the look out for quality poster and through that, you gain respect. Nurture that respect.
Second, use signatures! Coupled with that, start quality threads. Replies are one thing, but if you start quality threads it brings more attention to you and your signature.
Third, for the love of all that is holy, do not link to anything that will be perceived as spam. Link to a quality website or a quality blog and name it accordingly. Then use that website or blog as a spring-board for your crap. At least in this case, people will be more inclined to click through to a link “Johnny’s SEO Review Blog” and land on Johnny’s SEO Review Blog as opposed to “100% Free SEO EBOOKS & SCRIPTS” and land on a single 800 line scroller.
Yes, to Spam or Not to Spam. If you choose the former, may all your sins remember’d.
When starting a website one can easily become overwhelmed with all the options available for it’s creation, promoting it and improving sales. Concentrating on (or obsessing about) just one aspect of the website or website promotion can lead to you losing sight of the big picture of how all the pieces fit together.
As you start researching what is required for successful marketing on the Internet you are confronted with all kinds of ideas of what to do. Search engine optimization, web design elements, marketing sales copy, getting listed quickly in the search engines, email marketing, there’s so many the list could go on forever. With all the excitement around each idea, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype and lose sight of the big picture, to create a successful website using different techniques that work for your targeted audience.
The website is an investment both in time and money. To get a good return on investment (ROI) you need to carefully consider which ideas you come across will work for your target audience. It’s not just about having a ton of hits on the website, it’s about drawing in buying customers. Investing time and money wisely on ideas which truly give a better return on investment is the way to go. Sometimes, this does require stretching the budget for the right investment.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one area where there is all kinds advice available on the Net. Whether you do your own SEO or hire it out, analyzing the advice you find and calculating the true ROI (look beyond the hype of the advice) would be something to do.
Website design is another area where you can invest a lot of time (if you are a DIY website owner) or money (if you hire someone). Carefully considering what website theme and features suit your targeted website visitors is best. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of a fancy website theme but in the end, it just won’t give you the ROI expected if it is not tailored to suit your website visitors needs and be optimized for the search engines.
The list could go on as to all the aspects of a website that are important and that’s the point, there’s so many ideas of how to build and promote your website, you loose sight of the big picture of how everything needs to work together.
Start with a plan (or go back to this step if you have an existing website that isn’t performing). Make a list of all the ideas you have collected. Check how the ideas work with what you are marketing and who you are marketing to. Discard the ones that won’t work for your targeted audience. Prioritize. Work on the items that will fit together the best, give the best ROI and ultimately will make the website successful. Get everything in order for your website visitors before spending any time or money on advertising. A website requires ongoing maintenance and updating, so it is never really finished, but get the major components done that your targeted visitors will be looking for before launching the website. If you have done your planning homework you will have part of your search engine optimization program started.
Some don’t give an idea a chance. You have worked on your website and search engine optimization but no immediate increase in sales. Things take time to work. Hopping from one website promotion idea to another without giving the previous one a chance it’s going to help. If you have given the promotion idea a fair chance, then maybe you need to review your website content and your search engine optimization. When a promotion idea has worked and then it doesn’t seem to be working, keep in mind your competition is keeping their eye on their site too. If you start beating them, they will tweak their site to try and get back above you in the search engine results. Search engine optimization is an endless task. You have to continually tweak, as your competition will do.
Sorting all those ideas you have for marketing your business with ROI in mind will help stop you from losing sight of the big picture, to have a successful online business. Seriously look at each idea, it’s pros and it’s cons, and only try those which work for your business. Don’t let quick and cheap solutions prevail. In the end, a well thought out plan, with a reasonable investment of time and/or money could be the right long term solution, even if it stretches the budget.
With the recent new releases by Google and Yahoo concerning advances in crawling flash, we are very pleased to share this timely and very informative article by V7N SEO Blog guest author
S. Emerson of Accrete Web Solutions.
The web design and search engine optimization communities are a buzz in the last few days with an announcement that hit the news that it will now be possible to create search engine friendly flash files.
Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files
“Adobe announced Tuesday that Google and Yahoo are adding search capabilities that will enable users to look inside the content of files encoded in Adobe’s Flash file format SWF….”
Optimized Flash Player makes SWF Flash file format searchable by Google, Yahoo engines
“Adobe Systems Inc. today announced that an optimized Adobe Flash Player will be added to the search engines of Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. under agreements with the two Internet firms. The tool will help the search engines better index dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIA) that include the Flash file format, or Shockwave Flash (SWF)….”
“…As a result of the partnership between the three firms, pre-existing Flash-based RIAs, including content that loads at runtime, will be searchable without alteration by companies or developers, Adobe said. Google has added the optimized Flash Player to its site already, and its search engine will be able to access SWF files as of today. Yahoo plans to add the technology to a future update of Yahoo Search. A schedule for adding the technology to Yahoo wasn’t disclosed…”
Google has a post on their Webmaster Central blog about this news also, Google learns to crawl Flash, . They have also started answering questions in another post, Improved Flash Indexing. Pay particular attention to the question regarding current technical limitations before you get too excited about this new feature.
So how does this effect web design houses and website owners?
In the past, it was difficult to get a website built using Flash® indexed in the search engines. If you do a Google search on the topic, you will find ways to attempt to get a flash based website indexed. Now it appears these methods will no longer be required in the future.
With this partnership, now websites using Flash® will be indexed better almost immediately according to the post at Google and in the future with Yahoo, per the quote above from Computerworld.
What does this mean to website owners?
Your website, if it uses Flash®, will be indexed easier in Google and Yahoo. Note that this partnership is with only 2 of the millions of search engines and directories available on the Net. Yes, these two feed information to other search engines and directories, but what about those who are not in partnership with or are fed by these search indexes?
This news only tackles one of the problems of using Flash® in a website. There are still the issues of the download speed, usability and accessibility of Flash® that need to be addressed when you hire a designer who wants to build your website using Flash®. A qualified designer can tackle all of these issues, but, will your return on investment justify the expense of hiring such a designer?
