FTP File Transfer Protocol

Many SEOs and clients performing their own SEO ask what they need in order to perform SEO. It is actually quite simple and you really don’t have to be that technical to implement on page and off page SEO.

First you need an FTP program, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard network protocol used to copy a file from one host to another over a TCP/IP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server applications, which solves the problem of different end host configurations (i.e., Operating Systems, file names). FTP is used with user-based password authentication or with anonymous user access. (via wiki-pedia)

I know this sounds complicated but all it does is allow you to transfer files from your computer to your web hosting server where your website is located. It is just as simple if you were copying files from a flash drive and putting them somewhere on your hard drive. The programming aspect of the website should be done by someone with extensive html coding experience, but you can add meta information and the proper html snippets of code to your website via FTP by just using a notepad application or a web developer software.

What Do I Need to Learn SEO

First off if you don’t have a computer and cable/dsl or better don’t bother reading any further, there is no reason for you to learn seo! Now that you have a computer, Internet access and an FTP program you are ready to perform SEO or search engine optimization. Anyone can sign up for a Google Account which then will give you access to all of their internet applications like AdWords, Analytics and AdSense. From their you can get the snippets of code to install into the HTML of your website. From here you will copy the code they give you and paste it into the HTML where they verify the code to give you access to:

Google Analytics– Analytical data compiled real time for you to view statistics of website traffic

Google Webmaster Tools– More analytical data which allows you to track links, set crawl rate, see what keywords are triggering your ads and even what pages aren’t working

Google AdWords– This will allow you advertise on Google search results pages for a CPC (cost-per-click)

Google AdSense– Adding this snippet of code will allow Google to show ads from websites using AdWords to share the CPC with you that the advertiser pays

These are just a few of the Google programs that will allow you to track the success as well as earn income or advertise using the Google Network of advertisers that you can use simply by having FTP access and very little html knowledge.

What about Yahoo! Advertising?

At the end of July 2010, Yahoo! announced the first part of the merger agreement between Yahoo! and Bing which means that starting in the Fall of 2010, Yahoo! search results will now be showing paid advertising from Bing Advertisers. What does this mean for Yahoo! advertising? As the spots fill up on the first page search results how does Yahoo! turn a profit? Last July I wrote an article on the Yahoo Microsoft Merger and in the article was discussed that this would happen, but Yahoo! would receive up to 88% of the profit on the advertising as part of the agreement. This is more then likely hike up the pricing for Bing advertising since the advertisers will now have access to both second and third place search engines via one advertising portal. This is going to improve ROI for both companies and get almost 20% of the search share to the advertisers that still advertise with the companies. In my eyes, Yahoo! just signed up for Microsoft Ad Sense, their new source of revenue! So is this merger a competition of search share, or revenue share. Concentrate on the user and worry about their needs in what they are looking for. Improve the already terrible algorithm to incorporate relevant search results at the top of search results rather then spamming the page with the highest paying advertiser. Thats how people get scammed!

Google’s Take on the Yahoo Bing Merger

Google has over 80% of the search market, which means they get 80% of the customers that are looking for something on the Internet. That is higher chance at success and failure for advertisers with a limited online marketing budget. Regardless, they have 80% which doesn’t really make them scared, they have done this before with the acquisition of Ask.com advertising rights and search results and AOL.

I must get about 10 emails a week from various companies telling me that for a nominal fee they can submit my URL for indexing to Search Engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing along with hundreds of other directories and search engines. What most website owners do not know when they get these emails, is that they can easily submit their URL to these Search Engines free of charge. Another thing is if 75% + of the search share is Google, 8%+ for Yahoo, and pretty much the same for Bing sitting at about 8% what else is there to submit to? Most of the smaller search engines get their search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing anyway.

Free URL Submission to Google

So I watched a video once where Matt Cutts was giving a lecture on proper setup of web pages to be indexed properly in Google. Matt Cutts himself gets these emails to submit his URL to Google for 29.99 or 99.99 for a bunch of other search engines.

A website URL submission is just a faster way to get you listed in Google as if you were to sit back and wait for Google to find it and index it on it’s own. By no means does this mean that immediately after your URL submission to Google you will start appearing at the top of search results, or that you will even be listed in Google at all let alone at the top. It takes some time before your website is approved for submission maybe a day or so, then you may see yourself if you were to type in www.YourDomain.com in the Google search bar depending on the competition for your name or a variation of it.

Free URL Submission to Yahoo VS. Paid Inclusion

So Yahoo has 2 different types of URL submission. The first being the free submission to the search engine waiting your turn to be indexed, or Paid Inclusion which you can pay to be included right away with maybe even some prime real estate on higher search engines results pages. Either way, its a big waste of money, you are only being promoted to less then 10% of the search market share at ridiculous prices. I am not saying that advertising in Yahoo is bad, just paying to have it grace the search engine with it’s presence. I never personally submit my websites to Yahoo or Bing, they just find it on their own usually before I even see myself on Google after I submitted to Google.

So take responsibility and don’t waste your money on something that takes less then a minute.

Submit URL to Google

Submit URL to Yahoo

Submit URL to Bing

SEO or Web Design, You Must Have Both

SEO or Search Engine Optimization can be overlooked in the design of a website. Without proper planning these days, your newly designed website may not be search engine friendly and not provide you with the results you are looking for.

Proper Keyword Targeting

Without keyword research you shouldn’t even be this far in your website creation so at this point you should have the words you are targeting.

Your home page is going to be the most viewed page on your site if you are doing everything right. You want a lot of information (text information) on your home page, revolving around all the main keywords you have for your SEO campaign. This should not be any more then 7 if you want to have an effective SEO campaign. Keep in mind, you are going to need:

• Links
• Header tags
• Page Title
• Page Content
• Images

All supporting the keywords you selected for your SEO campaign in order for those keywords to be effectively ranked.  Once you target your market, use keywords associated with that market, then implement the keywords into the website on the home page and all corresponding pages within the site.

Design with SEO in Mind

Place your main header in the center of the page, give the user or website visitor something to look at, give the search engines a reason to believe you are the best result for the keywords used. If you are using a company or individual to code your website make sure they use text in their websites vs. using images for header tags. Some designers don’t use standard text for header tags only because they say it makes it look more like a document, however it is what the search engines look for in order to rank a web page. People are getting lazier and lazier and don’t like to scroll down, so have your most important information above the fold.

Every business comes to a crossroads where their website isn’t providing the web traffic and sales leads they believe their website is capable of providing. Just like every other aspect of business there are professionals that can provide the services at a much lower cost that of which an actual staffed employee can provide.

Freelance SEO Specialist

Obtaining the services of a freelance SEO has it’s pro’s and con’s and this little list should provide adequate information on what your choices really are.

A freelance SEO may not have all the same qualifications as a reputable Internet Marketing Company or the same work experience with various business industries. With a reputable Internet Marketing Company you may not get the same type of attention you would from a freelance SEO. In this comparison, you could get a lot more bang for your buck by hiring someone that is willing to work for you rather than working for their company. You may hire a big company, but only 1 or 2 people will be doing the work on the website for that company. Hiring a freelance SEO will allow you to get that 1 person to work on your site with no one else to report to allowing you to possibly get some small additions for no additional cost.

Internal SEO Specialist

Instead of hiring a company to take care of all of your internet marketing needs, you may venture into hiring someone with SEO/Internet Marketing experience and bringing them on your staff full time. This just like anything else has it’s pro’s and con’s, bringing on someone full time will ultimately bring more cost to your company. Providing insurance, payments into unemployment and normal full time staff requirements. Hiring may be a pain because you can’t find the right employee for the job, the person with the most experience or possibly even a proven track record of success. Also if you were to hire someone full time to help with your internet marketing they may have no idea what they are doing with SEO and provide you with some bad choices that ultimately hurt your search engine rankings and negatively impact your marketing campaign.

Whether or not you are looking to permanently improve your search engine rankings for your website (most people are looking for permanent) you make your choices carefully just like any other business decision. Remember there isn’t any matriculated programs in schools to teach SEO due to the constant changes in search engine algorithms, so its constantly a moving target.

One of the most widely used forms of paying an SEO or Internet Marketing Specialist, is a small fee for preliminary work being done to the site (mainly to protect the SEO) and a commission for sales on the website is a way to track success and to put value to the work of the SEO.

Magento SMS Messaging Plug-in

The Magento eCommerce CMS platform, is not only open source allowing you to tweak the programming, change the look and feel, get free updates from the forums and get profit building plug-ins from Magento masters.

Magento SMS Plugin Now Offered

Evangelizmo “provides messaging solutions for open source e-commerce platforms. We strive to make messaging simple, so that you can focus on making your business grow.” This enables you to send out text messages to your clients or potential clients at a low cost per text. Instead of sending out fliers in the mail, or phone calls for reminders for an order or for a service call. You can minimize your cost and time by sending out blast messages to multiple people in one single message. Pick what type of customer you want to send to by defining the demographics before sending out the messages by filtering out those you want to exclude.

How Can SMS Messaging Increase Profits?

SMS messaging can increase your profits on a lot of different levels. As any business that runs promotions, the cost for sending out text messages can replace anything besides emails. If you aren’t using anything besides emails, you probably aren’t doing well unless you started out some other way. Multiple marketing can increase your exposure thus increasing the amount of people you show your product or service and increasing your chances for a sale.

A dry cleaner could even ask for an additional dollar per dry cleaning order to alert the customer that the dry cleaning is finished. Get 10 people a day, do the math… An insurance agent can put the cost of the plug-in in the insurance premium to alert the policyholder of a possible lapse in coverage to protect against the “Oh I didn’t receive that notice in the mail, or my phone didn’t have reception.” Real estate agents can alert potential buyers of a new house that has become available or that an offer has been made. If the agent is dealing with multiple buyers for one house, the buyers could receive notification of a new bid or the possible new place with same standards.

The list goes on and on and if you don’t think so, how bout an optician that asks “Sir/Madam, would you like to be notified when your glasses are finished, that way if you are still in the area you don’t have to be just arriving back at your house and listen to your answering machine tell you that your glasses will be done? It is only $1 dollar extra for 2 text alerts.” Now you just got an extra dollar and a way to remind that person to come in for an exam to check up on the prescription.

As a developer that sells services, this would be a great addition to any arsenal of CMS that you may have. Evangelizmo has developer abilities to allow you to resell the service and not have to worry about any of the integration or service issues, that all lays on Evangelizmo.

Should I Use Meta Keywords?

As you play around with more websites and you try new tactics, you start to see different results from different SEO strategies. In recent research, the use of meta keywords in the search engine results algorithm are becoming less and less influential in ranking your website higher on search engine results.

What happens if I don’t use Meta Keywords?

If you choose to leave any pages without meta tags, choose specific product pages. Ones with less importance if you are testing for your own research. You will want meta-keywords for Yahoo and Bing search results, those search engines still show a lot of credit towards search engine rankings. Make sure that your pages are keyword content rich, make sense and link to other relevant pages within the site and other websites.

Can you use too many Keywords in the Meta?

There really isn’t a limit to how many keywords you use in the meta-keywords section of your web page. Really you should use as many keywords as you see fit with the content on the page that you are optimizing. The content is really what produces the keywords for your page. The more text content that you use on the page, the more keywords you could use within context of the content. If your page is all over the place you really don’t have a chance of ranking the page, however if you repeat keywords or stuff keywords on a page your rankings could suffer as well.

Google AdWords Campaigns

When choosing to advertise your website on Google AdWords you need to first start out with a campaign. A campaign is a complete advertising group or advertising campaign full of ad groups, keywords and ads. Each campaign you create on Google AdWords has it’s own settings which can include:

• Geo-targets of countries, states and cities
• Demographics from age, sex, gender, income etc.
• Day-Parting or showing your ads at or within specific times
• Languages the ads appear in
• Max CPC (cost-per-click) across the entire campaign
• Choose which networks

1. Content Network, places you on relevant websites participating in the Google AdSense program
2. Google Search, for Google and their search partners
3. Mobile Devices

• Daily Budget
• Scheduling
• Position Preference
• Ad Rotation
• Ad Frequency

These settings for your campaign can be changed or modified at any time and over time you will probably change these settings multiple times.

Google AdWords Ad Groups

After you create the Google Ad Campaign, you are then prompted to make an Ad Group. The ad group is what consists of the keywords and the ads associated with those keywords. From here you can choose your keywords from a broad sense to an exact sense. The difference between broad match and exact match is simple.

Broad Keyword Match is any keyword search performed containing that particular word or words in the search. If you bid on the keyword “steak” any search performed with that word in it will show your ad as long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards.

Exact Keyword Match is any keyword search performed with only the keyword or keyword phrase in the exact order you selected. If you bid on the keyword “buy steaks” your ad will appear when someone searches “buy steaks” onlyas long as you meet the min. bid requirements and have enough of a budget and have met the Google Advertising Policy standards., if they type “steaks buy” your ad will NOT appear.

Keyword Phrase Match is any keyword search performed with the keywords you selected only in any order.

It is happening again, Microsoft and Yahoo! talk about merging and strike a merger deal that has talks of Anti-Trust emerging. This is not the first time the two major search engines have been under review for Anti-Trust, back in February of 2008 the Microsoft Yahoo! buyout was in question on the ethics side of the buyout.

With Google coming in at about 70% of the search market, I don’t see much of a problem for Google to maintain against the combination of the two companies. Technology would allow them to actually compete with the search engine because of Microsoft’s Applications and Yahoo!’s search technology. Which in turn more competition would drive Google to actually change some of the parts of their search technology that needs to be fixed. Look at that, the same week that Yahoo and Microsoft talk about merging, Google announces its new search engine probably to take the buzz off of Yahoo and Microsofts big announcement. With anti-trust issues popping up maybe the merger will be on hold, or not at all.

After a long time talks and billion dollar buyouts Microsoft and Yahoo have finally come to an agreement. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Balmer came to an agreement today at 5:30 am PST. Carol Bartz, formally the CEO for Autodesk took over in January this year and has already struck a deal with the IT giant.

“Microsoft and Yahoo know there’s so much more that search could be,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer. “This agreement gives us the scale and resources to create the future of search.”  In return for turning over promotions to its search engine to Bing, Yahoo will get to keep 88 percent of the revenue from all ads that run alongside search requests on its site for the first five years of the deal. Yahoo also will have the right to sell ads on some Microsoft sites. The details of this deal have yet to be released but this is going to be changed over the next 24 months until Yahoo’s backend is Microsoft ready. There was hopes for some sort of cash up front payment by the share holders, but it will be all revenue share.

There are still many questions, like what about the Yahoo data center planned for 2011 in Lockport NY? Is it still going to come to Western New York and add 75 jobs in the dying market?

All of this is plans to attack the search market share, which is being ran by Google with 65% search market share.

Alright you have your site, you performed your SEO plan to the best of your ability, how do you track the success?  Reading earlier you may have learned how to use Google Webmaster Tools and installed them on your site.  Now you may want to get more into the meat and potatoes of tracking SEO success.  Google Analytics is the easiest and most affordable way to track your results (its free!).

All you need is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) access and you can install a simple code and let the tracking begin.  Install the code between the <body> and <body/> tags in your site.  If you have no clue what you are doing you may want to contact your hosting provider to give them the code that google analytics provides to you after you sign up your site.  Just send them an email that you want them to add it to all the pages of your active site, 24 hours later you will have some data and going forward you will be able to track each visitor to your site.  You can track, IP, city, network, browser type and more!  You can even track when a searcher lands on your site and proceeds to a checkout or maybe even a contact form.  You can track your month to month results to show where you were last month and where you are today.  See how many visits you got today, yesterday, last week or last month.  Look to see what is your most popular page, what page gets the most hits, or how many pages the avg. site visitor views before leaving the site.

You can use Analytics to really gauge how well your SEO campaign is doing, or your PPC program.  Bounce rate is a very important statistic of your site.  This tells you how effective the web pages in your site are for what they are being found under.  Meaning if someone was to search for blue widgets, and found your green widgets page, chances are they are going to leave the page to find a blue widget, giving you a bounce. More to come with bounce rates and how to use Google Analytics.