When trying to find information on the internet, you typically go to a search engine. When using the most popular search engine, Google, a user enters a query, Google’s machines search their index for matching pages and return the results that are the most relevant to the user. Google determines relevancy by over 200 factors, one of critical factors is the PageRank (PR) for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In more detail, PR can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web, i.e., that sums up all backlinks and their associated ranking weight. We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations)[1]. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this article.

In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other [black-hat] practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. It is not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of backlinks that help you rank better in Search Engines. Having backlinks from unrelated or “bad” sites can actually penalize your ranking. Also a 1,000 poor quality backlinks may have less weight than 1 high quality backlink. Quality is very important in creating your backlinks.

How to determine a quality backlink?

A quality backlink will have these characteristics:

1. The theme of the backlinking website is similar to your website or web page
2. The backlink’s anchor text has the keyword or keyphrase that you are optimizing for
3. The backlinking webpage has a Google PageRank (important for Google SEO) of 1 or higher (the higher the better)
4. The backlinking webpage has few outgoing links, the fewer the better (see above equation as to why)

In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. WebPaws.com uses Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and white-hat techniques using some of the best practices that can help your website avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.

[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA

PageRank: How to Rank Well with Google is a post from: WebPaws.com

To achieve a top listing with a search engine’s result page for a specific keyword or phrase for a specific web page or website, you need to analyze the structure of that page. The term “content is king” applies to some extent, but how the content is built, the structure of the XHTML is really important in making the content index to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Consider the behavior of a person reading a newspaper. Not all pages will be looked at in any detail, scanning headlines, key areas that stand out on a page or keywords of interest is what the reader will hone into. A web page is no different. Not only do you have to have good, original, relevant to the topic (key words), but you must "type-set" that content into a logical format that is easy to understand quickly. Once the reader is "hooked", more details within the article, info should be available either in finer print, links, images, or other relevant media for a web page to pull and keep the reader active.

This is where semantic structure of the page and content is very important. With the advent of mobile technology, page structure is even more important for a wider range of users to access your information. One tool by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has this semantic extraction tool to help you analyze your page’s semantic structure. Firefox has several add-ons that allow you to view a web pages semantic structure, usually based on the XHTML header tags <h1></h1>...<h6></h6>, <p></p> and other structural elements.

SEO best practices start at the foundation of a page and the semantic structure plays an important role along with good content, properly placed keywords, meta data, links, relevant media, XHTML element placement, usage and fine-tuning with their corresponding attributes.

SEO semantics: The foundation for top SERPs is a post from: WebPaws.com

SEO Lesson 5 – Social Media is a post from: WebPaws.com

Top Social Media Websites

The below list represents the top 25 Social Media Websites in the world sorted by Alexa ranking which roughly represents the popularity of website for the last quarter of 2009. Google PageRank is also listed for weighting of popularity.

Top 25 Social Media Websites is a post from: WebPaws.com

Selling your products on the internet requires many factors to produce desired results:  such as great products, a good business model, supporting customer service, etc, but the key at the page level is providing very good communication about the  product.  Product descriptions should  inform, persuade and lead your customers to a sales transaction, which make them very powerful selling tools.  Listed below are several suggestions to increasing the time on page and time on site via well crafted product descriptions.

1. Educate: Educating your customers about your products provides additional value while you are teaching them how this product can improve their life, work, etc.  RadioShack does a good job of this with their Research library.
2. Use Persuasive Emotional Imagery: Let your customers see, hear, taste, touch, and smell your products through descriptions that create powerful images in their mind.  Understanding some basic psychology will help you in crafting your copy to show/describe what is important to the user (your targeted audience) to aid in persuading them to choose your product over your competitors products or even the same product but described differently.
3. Include a Call-to-Action: Don’t forget to add a call-to-action in your product description copy.  It is one thing to talk about your product, show great images, talk about its practicality, usage, benefits, etc. but if there is no way for the visitor (potential customer) to go the next step, you have failed in your endeavors to sell your product.  Put an action button such as “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” near the image or main product title.  You can also include a “Send me More Information” or “Call for More Information” link to
4. Focus on benefits, not just features: It is frustrating to listen to a salesperson rattling off useless specifications and features that you either don’t care about or don’t understand.  Focus on the unique benefits of your product. Instead of saying “This radio has over 100 presets” you can show the benefit that this radio can hold All of your favorite channels in memory. Another example, instead of saying “This handheld has blue tooth technology”, say that this handheld allows wireless updates, syncing and hands free usage.  Features are important, but should not be the focus, putting them in a table at the bottom of the page or in a separate page linked in the main product page can be a good idea.  Also allowing potential customers to compare features of similar items is a useful tool to helping the customer make a good choice.
5. Proofread Thoroughly: There’s nothing more embarrassing than being told by a customer that your product description is erroneous or contains typos. Make sure your descriptions are proof read by someone other than the original copywriter.
6. Use Customer Reviews: Allow your customers to describe or review your products. The information they provide will be very valuable to customers considering a purchase. Visitors may trust a user generated review even more than your own product descriptions.
7. Brevity is Good: Don’t overwhelm your customers at the outset with a huge, novel size product description.  Using a JavaScript enabled “Read more” link to hide or show additional product information will lighten the page, keeping focus on the crafted message of images key text and other key product describers.
8. Interactive Visual: Adding a product video or flash presentation will add a new dimension to the users experience, if done well, may enhance the customer’s understanding and interest of the product to help encourage a positive choice for purchase.  The video should show the product in use by a user highlighting it’s unique benefits, enticing the viewer to want this product because of its uniqueness in functions/benefits/features/productivity/time savings/etc.

Using most or all of these techniques will help to retain the customer on your product page a little longer.  This not only increases the Time on Page statistic but also the amount of information the customer is taking in on the product page which increases the likelihood of a sale, our ultimate goal.

Increase Time on Page & Site for Product Descriptions is a post from: WebPaws.com

Anchor Text: the meat of links, the nervous system of the Web

Anchor text is the visible text that is anchored to a hyperlink (web link on a web page).  This is important because the internets primary purpose is to display pages and link them to other pages of relevant content to enhance your browsing experience.  There are many kinds of links, but the primary static text/image linked links are the most common and found on most every web page on the internet.  Further examination of links in XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) of a hyperlink code may look like this:

CODE:
<a href="http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/">WebPaws.com&rsquo;s Internet Marketing Services</a>

HOW YOUR BROSWERS DISPLAYS IT:
WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services

We will now review the XHTML code including the meat of the link, the anchor text.  An “a” tag means the anchor or start of a link, where we start the hyperlink code.  The “href” is the hyperlink reference or the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that tell your computer’s browser where to go for the specific information (linked page) and download and pull it up in your browser.  The anchor text is text sandwiched between the opening <a> tag and the closing </a> tag.  In this example, the anchor text is “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and is the text that is associated with the link “http://web.marketing.webpaws.com/”.

This is an important key factor in increasing your search engine rankings because the search engines use this (anchor) text to aid in determining the relevance of the linked page to the anchor text used as incoming keywords.  The use of this particular anchor text will help the domain, web.marketing.webpaws.com, perform better in search engine results for the keyword “WebPaws.com’s Internet Marketing Services” and similar keyword phrases too (e.g., “Internet Marketing”, “Marketing Services”, WebPaws.com, etc.)

Anchor Text: The meat of the link is a post from: WebPaws.com

Which Search Engine do you use the more frequently?

Click the link below to open the poll and submit your response!

Check on the poll’s results over the next few weeks.

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/34832/rtuyg

Which Search Engine do you use the more frequently? – Poll is a post from: WebPaws.com

Vote and or view this poll on what is most important to a visitor to an information website.

• http://polls.linkedin.com/p/29011/dumec

Thank you for your interest and support.

Informational Website Poll is a post from: WebPaws.com

Below is an informative collection of definitions and information about viral marketing.  WebPaws.com has been developing new online viral marketing services to enhance your current Internet marketing efforts.

Viral Web Marketing
A self-spreading or propagating marketing approach that is created when visitors to your site also promote your site. Promotional methods include software trading, word of mouth and “pass-along” content (URLs or emails).  For example, most administrators of free web based email accounts attach an advertisement at the end of each message each time a user sends an email.

Viral Online Marketing
Viral online marketing has been one of the hottest topics since 2005 and the lack of practical how-to information on viral online marketing is mind blowing.  Viral ads are online marketing campaigns that are intended to spread “like a virus.”  One minute nobody’s heard of it, next minute, it’s everywhere.  The term viral online marketing has existed for almost a decade now, and it has only been until recently that viral online marketing has become mainstream and the topics of all internet entrepreneurs.  Still the majority of internet marketers are increasingly confused about what viral online marketing is, how viral online marketing works, what viral online marketing should cost, and how to measure the results from a viral online marketing campaign.  First off viral online marketing isn’t focused on the brand itself.  A viral online marketing product may raise sales or otherwise help your brand as a byproduct.  The main focus of viral online marketing is on the creative so people feel compelled to spread the word.  The heart of a viral online marketing campaign is the content.  People don’t spread the viral online marketing content because they love your brand, they spread it because they can’t help but spread the word of your viral online marketing content.  The most appealing aspect to viral online marketers is how many people your campaign will reach.  Each campaign has the ability to reach millions of potential customers which can make a no-name marketer to marketer of fame in the blink of an eye.  So the basic and most important function is to create a viral online marketing campaign that is either creative, enlightening, humorous or informative enough that people wish to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.  To find out more on how to successfully market your idea as a viral online marketing campaign contact WebPaws.com

Viral Marketing
Viral marketing or viral advertising is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message promoting information or products that other customers are compelled to give to other friends, colleagues and family.  By definition viral marketing is a way to promote a service or product exponentially.  When effectively done one person will give it to several people who in turn will promote it to several other people.  This is what makes viral marketing so effective. For instance, if I wrote and e book, and then I forwarded that e-book to 10 people, who in turn forwarded that e-book to 10 people. One hundred people have read that e-book.  Now if it is forwarded that same way just four more times ONE MILLION PEOPLE have now read that same e-book.  By definition viral marketing gives the consumer something that they can use for free with the intent of gaining that customer to market other products and to create a brand name awareness.  A great example of an effective viral marketing campaign is Google’s gmail.  It is a free email service that can only be signed up for by invitation only. The only way you can receive an invitation is by another user.  Another great example for the definition of viral marketing is by creating an e-book or an e-zine.  When an ebook or an ezine is effectively written the consumer will want to share it with others who in turn will share it with others as well.  To find out more on how you can create an effective viral marketing campaign for a product or a service click  WebPaws.com.

Viral marketing uses both non-traditional and unconventional ways to spread a marketing message about what is new and exciting.  Viral marketing takes a marketing concept directly or indirectly related to a product, service or company and passes it on to the public.  People then distribute the viral marketing message exponentially.  This attention-getting viral marketing concept is growing in popularity.  The easiest forum for viral marketing is the Internet using e-mail, websites or blogs.  Aside from consulting or development fees, some of the most successful viral marketing campaigns are low to no cost.  Viral marketing can be broken down into two basic concepts: incentive based and attention getting. The simplest incentive based viral marketing is making a referral to a friend; if they purchase or join, you get a premium of either money, product or a discount.  Attention getting viral marketing gives away a free product or service then markets other services.  Before launching a viral campaign, decide if you can develop the campaign in-house or need to outsource for outside expertise.  Viral marketing is trackable and ever evolving.  New styles and methods of delivery are constantly being developed.  If you put together an offer that is exciting, fresh and appealing, your campaign will more likely be a success!  If you decide to outsource or would need assistance in a viral marketing campaign click WebPaws.com to find out how.

Viral marketing Information
Viral marketing depends on a high pass-along rate from person to person.  If a large percentage of recipients forward something to a large number of friends, the overall growth snowballs very quickly.  If the pass-along numbers get too low, the overall growth quickly fizzles.

At the height of B2C it seemed as if every start-up had a viral component to its strategy, or at least claimed to have one. However, relatively few marketing viruses achieve success on a scale similar to Hotmail, widely cited as the first example of viral marketing.

Below is an excellent article written by Frank Fiore, 6-25-99

Viral marketing: Spread a cold, catch a customer

They call it “viral marketing.” Having someone else spread the word to drive more visitors to your site.

Let’s face it. The best kind of marketing is the kind you don’t have to do yourself. Especially if you’re a small business on the web with a limited advertising budget. Viral marketing is like it sounds. Call it word-of-mouth, spawning, self-propagation — organic.

Great new idea, right? Nope. Viral marketing has been around forever. Spreading the word through word-of-mouth was the world’s first form of marketing. But the Internet has taken this organic from of marketing to new heights by making communications better and communities of people tighter — thus making word-of-mouth even more effective.

When you use viral marketing as a tool, you’re using the Net the way it was meant to used. Viral marketing on the Net has a long history. The first use was by Netscape. The small “Designed for NETSCAPE” icon was first used as a status symbol by webmasters to show that their site was the latest in web-page design. It didn’t take Mr. Gates very long to see the power of viral marketing and soon “Designed for MS Internet Explorer” icons quickly spawned next to Netscape’s.

A couple of years later, the creative marketers at Amazon took viral marketing beyond this simple link. When Amazon created the first affiliate program on the Net, they spawned a whole new generation of viral partners eager to promote Amazon’s book site to their web-site visitors.

Today, they have more than 100,000 affiliates promoting Amazon and gaining a small commission on each sale directed to them.

Affiliate or associate programs are now one of the hottest viral marketing programs on the web. There are hundreds of small, medium and large companies offering their programs to any web site that wants to earn a few extra bucks.

But you don’t have to have a costly or complex affiliate program to use viral marketing in your business. There are other ways to motivate your customers and visitors to do the marketing for you.

Here are just a few.

• Pass this on, will ya: The granddaddy of the new viral marketing has to be HotMail which soon was copied by Yahoo! and anyone else who had a free e-mail service. It was simple. Attach your URL to every e-mail that your users send out. Before they knew it, HotMail had more e-mail users than the largest ISP. You can do the same. Make sure that every e-mail sent out from your company has your URL on it.

• Tell ‘em Sam sent you: Reward your steady visitors for bringing new visitors to your site. Create a special “referrer program” that your steady visitors can sign up for. Have them invite their friends to visit and if they do, have them mention the referee’s e-mail address and the referee earns something free from your site.

• I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine: Your site sells cigars. Their site sells humidors. A relationship made in web heaven! Look for sites that sell complementary products or services to your own. Then contact them and offer a reciprocal linking arrangement. You can go even one step further and offer their visitors a discount if they join your referee program.

• Got any good jokes lately?: I don’t know how many times I’ve forwarded jokes or scam and virus alerts I received in my e-mail to friends and associates. So, create a funny newsletter or an e-mail alert that someone would pass on to friends.

• Take my site, please!: This is similar to “Got any good jokes lately” but in this case you give away your best assets. Don’t just send out a notice about new content on your site — send out summaries by e-mail and ask people to forward it on (with copyright and URL attached, of course). A variation on this is to let other sites reprint your content on their site, with appropriate credits and links to yours.

• And the winner is: Create an award for the best sites in your category or subject area. Then send them an e-mail informing them they won the award and where to acquire the award icon to place on their site. I do this with my Mining Co. Online Shopping site.

I award a “Best of the Net” to certain worthy sites and ask them to place the “best of” icon on their site — which is then linked back to my site.

The one downside to viral marketing is that you’re letting others do your marketing for you. Though this will save you money, your message and your brand are in the hands of someone else. There’s a fine line here of spreading the word and diluting your brand.

The challenge is to exercise some control of how your message is delivered and how others perceive it. But when you master this technique, your message and your site can spread as quickly as the common cold.

Finally, don’t expect a viral marketing program to pay off immediately. Like a real virus, viruses don’t become epidemics until they reach critical mass. Your virus must propagate through the host population until it reaches a certain threshold of visibility and scale.

Think of it this way. Suppose a real-world virus doubles every year. In the first few years it’s scarcely detectable. But within a few years after that it suddenly becomes an epidemic. You should understand that you’re playing the same game. Viral marketing takes time. So be patient, be fruitful — and go out and multiply.

Viral Marketing – definitions and information is a post from: WebPaws.com

A key factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the understanding of keywords, where they should be placed on a web page and how they may be weighted with relative value in a given web page for a SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

From a design standpoint, let us first work backwards with a keyword. Ultimately, when a person types a keyword or keyword phrase into a search engine query, they expect their query to lead them to a list of highly qualified website links. These links, once clicked and browsed into, will lead them to the answer, image, or result they are anticipating based the the keyword phrase they initially typed into the search engine query.

A search engine query may have the following three purposes: navigational, informational, or transactional and the purpose is also tied to the query (the question or selection of keywords to search on).  The search engine algorithm will take the keywords and decide, based on the relationship of each word to each other in placement, verb tense, names, and overall meaning to decide what the most likely results should be.  Each major search engine has it’s own algorithm and SERP based on the keywords or search phrase which is called a query.

The content of a webpage is reviewed by a search engine robot (bots/spiders) that searches the internet (web) for relevant content to index and store the results for various keyword groupings, again based on the specific search engine algorithm.

The bots that visit your website will try to follow as many relevant and working internal links, keep track of content relevance and score various key words based on the placement, use and relevance in content within the XHTML tags and properties, the semantic structure, the page’s title, meta data, and other elements of the web page.

There are several keyword tools to help analyze the popularity or effectiveness of the use of a keyword.  These tools were designed to help SEM marketers evaluate keywords for use in search engine marketing campaigns.  They also indicate the monetary value of a keyword phrase that may be used in an SEM or PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing campaign.

One example of a Keyword Tool is the Google AdWords tool found in the below link:

Keywords Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Use the Keyword Tool to get new keyword ideas based on an inputed keyword or phrase and whether you are looking for descriptive words or phrases or for website content.  The tools results are tailored to the primary language and the geographical area selected for what terms people are actually searching for.

Keywords can easily be identified by the web page’s content, counting the reoccurence of various words and giving them some weight such as SEOBook’s Keyword Density Analyzer Tool, http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/, SEO Chat’s Keyword density tool, http://www.seochat.com/, and WebConf skeyword desnsity tool, http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php.

Keyword Density is the percentage of occurrence of your keywords in the copy (text content) of your webpage.  It is important for your main keywords to not only have the proper keyword density, but also placement and use in the XHTML tags and properties to rank well in Search Engines.

Example Page

<head>
<title>SEO and Keyword best practices</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 title="SEO and Keyword practices for giving more weight to specific keywords">SEO and Keyword practices</h1>
<p><em>Keywords</em> are the primary source for search engines...</p>
<blockquote>Keywords are Key to a successful marketing campaign employing SEO...</blockquote>
<p>More content about SEO and...</p>
<p>In conclusion, keywords should be artfully placed and...</p>
</body>

In the example page above, notice how the primary keyword is “keyword” and how and where it is used within the web page.  The primary placement is in the <title> tag within the head, followed by the main content in the <h1> tag and property of the h1 tag, then one of the first words in the first <p> tag, followed by a blockquote and then within the last <p> tag.   Most search engines give the greatest weight to this type of placement schema.

Make sure that your keyword targets are achievable. If you select the wrong keywords it can significantly impact your entire optimization experience. Choose keywords that are highly relevant to the content, affordable to your budget, but yet still offer a reasonable search frequency for your industry. Multiple keywords or your phrase selection should also be designed and targeted to bring qualified traffic to your webpage.

Search engines give greater weight to a keyword if the content also includes various synonyms for your keywords within your body text on your webpage.  Google uses these synonyms to tie in the overall relevance of the page to your main target keywords, which in turn can help improve your placement within a SERP.

Other places to use keywords include the domain, page specific URLs, link anchor text, image alt text, inline links and site navigation.

The top SEs are: Google, Ikntomi, FAST, AltaVista and Teoma

Yahoo, who aquired Ikntomi, appears to give more weight to text matching when compared to Google, which seems to give more weight to concept matching.

This blog will be finished shortly, I must go to bed…

SEO – Keywords, Lesson 3 is a post from: WebPaws.com