- All article URL’s need to contain at least 3 digits and must look static.
- It is considered better if the article name is H1/H2-tagged and the name should always be the same as the title page.
- It is recommended to publish your articles at least 3 times every day.

If possible you should have more than one site author and list these authors on a separate page. Each article for a news release should have your company information completed and contact details included and signed by the author. With articles it is very beneficial to include some images and video as this increases the richness of content and quality of your article, especially in post Panda update days.  Once you are happy with what you have and ready to display it to the world, submit your article to the Google News Team for review.

Some other suggestions to keep in mind are the factors of your own site where your article is hosted and how it relates to On-Page SEO and your domain strength. Much like general search ranking, this will influence your news rankings and display. It helps to update and publish article son your site site more than 3 times each day. It is most important to have original, unique article titles and content as Google News filters out any duplicate articles (we should know this by now right?). Being first or amongst the first to publish your news will get you more links and get you noticed by Google News.

Ensure that your articles are at least 300-500 words long.  Articles that are too short tend to be filtered out. If you are reporting on any local news, be sure to include the city and zip code as this could get you noticed in Google Local News. If possible, add images next to your listings.  When using images, ensure they all have captions, of medium size on page with no hyperlinks or link through.  Just display them close the the title of your article and you will be set to explore the world of news publication.

Hope this short article helped, stay tuned for our next update which will be a step by step guide in creating a news worthy article.

SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO GOOGLE NEWS HERE

With this kind of power and authority behind them, it is not surprising that their posts manage to get into the top ranks on Google without any effort.

Below are a couple of strategies to try out if you have a Rip Off Report that is affecting your company rankings.

How to Beat Ripoff Report

To start with, do not make the mistake of posting rebuttal comments to the site.  Adding threads to the post will only make the link stronger and cause the post to rise in the search engine ranks.

The next step is to create blogs, web 2.0 and other sites.  These sites then need to be optimized for the keywords that show the Rip Off Reports in the search engines. You need to get your new sites listed and these should then push the negative listing off the page and onto the next.

Following this, register with as many social media sites as possible and optimize the profile pages.  Included in these social media sites are Facebook, Digg, Myspace, Twitter and YouTube.  You might find that to be effective you will need to create 100’s of these profile pages.

Another successful strategy is to start creating some link building campaigns.  Find some high authority sites that appear below the negative listing and start building links to these sites.  Once again you need to promote these sites and push them up in the ranks at the same time as pushing the negative down and off the page totally.  Use this same strategy to build links to your blog and web 2.0 sites.  This will ensure that your clients see less of the negative listings in the search engine rankings.

Lastly, write new articles and submit them to top article directories.  In your content, utilize your keywords and focus on positive and correct information about your business.

Battling these Rip Off Reports is a hard task and discouraging task as the posts often get pushed down and then manage to pop back up again and it seems like you have to start from the beginning.

Do not be discouraged, as with many other SEO strategies, it is consistency and determination that will give you the desired results in the end.

Some points on the Google Panda Algorithm update:

• Largest update and algorithm chances in over 8 years.
• Affected mostly Article, Content Syndication, Price comparison and some Web 2.0 sites.

Google Negatives

• Excessive Advertising on a site e.g. banner ads, text ads and AdSense.
• Excessive outbound links on your site pointing to other domains.
• Individual pages can bring down an entire site. Website’s need spring cleaning and watch out for:
• Old dated content
• Poorly written content
• Dead URL’s
• Duplicate content on your site. This is a site killer and more so now than ever. Duplicate content in syndication is not so much, but on the same domain, it is!
• Single source back-links from a limited number of domains. Link/Domain diversity is more important now than ever.

Google Positives

• Unique content for your site, no plagiarizing or poaching content. (site killer warning)
• Video content for your site is a must.
• Social media for your website is more important than ever. Synchronize your social media pages to your website.
• Including a blog on your site is very important helping visibility through fresh new content on a regular basis.
• Increase content and article length to 300+ words, no less.
• Register domains 3+ years

Small businesses must be competitive online and embrace the new media challenges that many traditional businesses face. The good thing is that it’s not too late, small businesses are still traditionalists and acting swiftly will go a very long way in dominating the local market space.

Here are some tips for leaping ahead of your competition:

1) Google Places

a) Make sure you have created or claimed your Google local business listing online by going here: http://www.google.com/local/add (if you don’t have a Gmail account, create one and you’re set by going to http://mail.google.com – it’s free)

b) Visit us for some Google Places optimization tips on internet marketing for small business and if nothing else is done other than creating your business listing for free, make sure to use a syndication service like Universal Business Listing to skyrocket your rankings to the top of Google Maps.

2) Website Keyword Optimization

a) Make sure if you have a website, to do basic keyword optimization on the content of the website, also known as On Page Search Engine Optimization.

b) A good resource is an article I wrote on Meta tags, this will be a great start to getting the edge over your competition, ready my guide on How to Use Meta Tags.

3) Blogs

a) If you don’t have a website, then creating a WordPress blog should be very easy (http://wordpress.org) , or we can help you set it up in a flash. You could also register a free blog (http://blogger.com) to start sharing your knowledge and content, remember to link back to your main website.

5) Video

a) Create a simple video about your business and submit this to http://youtube.com. This could be a webcam video of you introducing yourself to your market, sharing some slides of text or before and after pictures of your work. This will help you with credibility and trust and increase repeat traffic to your website.

6) One Last Golden Tip

a) Internet marketing for small business is easy when you do the above.

b) Again, make sure to use the keyphrase you want to strengthen in your content title and in your text body.

This is only a start and should already give you 10x the exposure you are currently experiencing online, and if you don’t get any traffic to your website, then this will ensure that you will definitely start building a loyal customer base that will find you online.

Remember, the internet is not going away, and internet marketing for small business will become more complicated and more competitive in the months to come, you have a chance to dominate your market starting now.

Profitworx is an online mentoring program to help you market yourself online, join our newsletter for more tips and advice. We will be sharing knowledge and how to videos online and hope to see you visit us regularly. Ensure you dominate your market locally for years to come.

For those who are new to Search Engine Marketing and needing a quick explanation of the Google Page layout, here are a few minutes explaining how the page layout works and what to pay attention to.

Here are several methods that will help you get started in building a strong SEO plan for your website to get you a greater ROI:

Organic Optimization

Pay-for-placement strategies like PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising alone cannot guarantee optimum results for your advertising campaign. For one, the cost of this kind of method is becoming increasingly expensive. Also, PPC you can become a victim of PPC click fraud. PPC does not have residual benefits and once you turn off the ads from Google or Overture, the traffic stops coming. The answer to this problem would be to diversify. Organic SEO and PPC can be combined to successfully garner more visits from online users. Websites that are visible both organically and in paid placements have five times more chances of receiving clicks from online users. Diversifying your tactics buffers the expense benefit derived from the paid placement as well as increases clicks to up to 500%. The ads+search combination is a strategy that will definitely work for you.

Naturally listed sites, thanks to true SEO organic solutions and good content, offer higher possibilities of amassing greater ROI. The following facts support true SEO as the best method among organic solutions:

• Studies on user attitudes show that the greater number of Internet users like natural search results the most since the resulting listings were more relevant to their searches.
• Six out of every seven Internet user clicks are due to organic listings versus PPC listings.
• Good SEO gives you regularly updated, unique and relevant content as well as generates targeted traffic, which means that the people who will most likely click through to your site do so because your site’s content is relevant to their search query. The more relevant your content, the more chances you have of attracting search engine spiders that will get you higher page rankings.
• 60% of all top-ranking search engine listings are made up of organic listings.
• An SEO optimized and maintained website receives continuous traffic from key search engines for free. ROI is increased thanks to that traffic which has great potential of turning into clients.

Adding Relevant Links

Links are only valuable to your website when they are relevant. No matter how many reciprocal links your website may possess, major search engines still will not take any notice of your site unless those links have a substantial degree of relevancy to your website’s theme or content. This is simply because major engines have an aversion to links that are totally unrelated to a particular website’s topic. Relevant back and outbound links have the most weight when it comes to search engines. The more valuable links you have, the better the odds are for you of ranking higher on search indexes, thus giving you substantial ROI.

Measuring Web Traffic

Monitoring one’s web traffic is an essential part of measuring your marketing campaign’s degree of performance. It would be foolish to gamble away your money by having nothing to measure the effectiveness of your marketing methods by. A prudent marketer will always be watchful of his website’s traffic, since it would help him determine whether or not his chosen marketing tactics are worth the money he is investing in them.

If you know

• how consumers locate your website,
• where consumers come from,
• what specific keywords/phrases were used to arrive at your website,
• which search engines were used to get to your website,

then you will be armed with the right information to help you streamline your marketing campaign for maximum performance. You will be able to have power over your online company and your ROI.

Outsourcing Your SEO

Companies will perpetually seek ways to cut down costs at all working levels and that includes the arena of SEO Services and marketing for their online site. It takes a big budget to invest in maintaining in-house functions not to mention paying for the specialized skills and resources that have to go with them. Besides, corporations have other important things to spend on such as maintaining customer service levels and market shares. If a company wants to do its own SEO for its business website, then it is looking for a whole lot of responsibilities and expenses to attend to. To save time, effort, and money, outsourcing your company’s SEO is your best alternative. The short-term and long-term benefits (which include amping up your ROI) that you stand to gain from outsourcing SEO are just too cost-effective and convenient to pass up.

Methods of search engine optimization or SEO can basically be divided into three major groups, according to whether search engines find them acceptable or otherwise. Search engines base their indexes on logic which is why certain SEO techniques work well with search engine logarithms while others do not. That is why you need to differentiate which techniques are considered legitimate from those which will get you penalized or even banned. The three major groups are known as the White-Hat SEO methods, Grey-Hat SEO methods, and Black-Hat SEO methods.

1. White-Hat SEO Techniques

White-hat SEO techniques are those which are recognized by SEO’s and all major search engines as legitimate methods of optimization. Aside from the fact that using these SEO methods will never get you banned, white-hat SEO techniques maintain your website’s integrity as well as increase your search engine page ranking in the long run.

a. Content Creation

With content creation, we are referring to creating the kind of content that your site visitors will consider as well-written, original, relevant, and appealing. Basically speaking, the more your website’s content is regularly updated and rich in information, the more valuable your website will appear to search engines, thus increasing your chances of moving forward in the search listings. Aside from that, webmasters who are looking for websites to link to need to see that your content is actually worth linking to in the first place. Also, the extra pages that you get can target the additional keywords that are relevant to the page topic. Quality content requires much time and effort, but the long-term results are supremely worth all the trouble.

Another twist to this method is writing content for other people’s websites. Write interesting, relevant forum posts, articles, etc. that can make other readers want to post them on their sites. This helps build better links to your website, without having to give a reciprocal link back.

b. Reciprocal Linking and Internal Linking

With reciprocal linking, you have to remember that exchanging links must be done intelligently and with websites who have good reputations and have content that is related to your site’s own topics. Avoid linking to penalized websites and industries and instead, focus on websites that contain your target keywords. Strengthening your site’s relevancy through association will help your website succeed in the search indexes.

Internal linking, on the other hand, is all about adding text links to at least your homepage, near its bottom. These links should enable the site visitor to click through to each of your main internal webpages, together with a sitemap that can show your internal pages.

c. Site Optimization

Everything about your site must work hand in hand to maximize your website’s chances of exposure on search engines on the web. Think about creating a website that does not hinder conveying your message to your readers or hamper your content’s search engine efficacy. Maintaining the salability and message effectiveness of your website is key in site optimization.

2. Grey-Hat SEO Techniques

Techniques that belong to the grey-hat category are legitimate when properly utilized. However, these are often abused by unscrupulous SEO’s and webmasters. Although your website will not likely get banned from using grey-hat tactics, caution must still be exercised when using them. Abuse of these techniques will have you penalized by search engines, especially if your vigilant competitors report your activity to them, thus removing you from the competitive scene.

a. Cloaking

There are two arguably legitimate uses of cloaking. One is by reserving information for visitors while presenting different content to the search engines since you have a “Members Only” section. The second case is when an image-based website uses text to represent each of its webpages. As long as the text is an exact description of the images and the page, then it is considered as legitimate. It is best to ask permission first from each search engine in order to fully explain your reasons when planning to use any of these forms of cloaking.

b. Paid Links

Purchase links for your website only if your intention is to purely advertise your site’s products or services. Purchasing links to gain higher link-popularity will get your website penalized or your links discounted for abuse.

c. Duplicate Content

Search engines now have filtering mechanisms which locate pages that have content that are duplicated or extremely similar with each other. Once found, the duplicated content is eliminated. Competitors will also report their rival sites for duplicating content. In both instances, the erring website’s rankings will be penalized as result. Only resource websites are immune to this sanction since search engines allow them to have duplicate content since they serve as article indexes.

3. Black-Hat SEO Techniques

Under no circumstances must you be tempted to use black-hat techniques. Large scale abuse of these methods has caused major search engines to instantly ban and/or penalize users of these shady SEO tactics. Although black-hat techniques will increase your ranking quickly, your website will eventually be at the losing end since you will sooner or later be severely penalized or worse, permanently banned.

a. Keyword Stuffing

This is when an SEO or webmaster repeatedly puts a targeted key phrase on a page in an attempt to fool search engines into thinking that the words are relevant. The text is often in very tiny font size and placed at the bottom part of a webpage.

b. Hidden Text

Similar to keyword stuffing, this technique only differs in the fact that the text’s font color is exactly or almost the same as the webpage’s background (which can also be an image file).

c. Cloaking

This method of presenting information to search engines that is different from the actual information that human visitors get to see comes in many forms and is abused by many unethical webmasters and SEO’s. Again, this is risky since even if the search engines fail to detect your illegitimate methods, your competitors will surely report you as soon as they figure out your scheme.

d. Doorway Pages

Frequently generated by software and automatically added to a website, doorway pages are created for the exclusive purpose of targeting a certain keyword phrase/s to lure visitors and search engines and yet have little or no relevancy at all to any helpful topic. Usually the page only exists to contain the phrase, hoping that the visitor will click through to the homepage.

e. Redirects

Redirects are used to automatically transport visitors to a webpage, whether or not the webpage has something relevant or informative to offer them. Redirecting is used in complementing doorway pages.

f. Duplicate Sites

Created as a way to throwback search engines, webmasters using this method duplicate a site that they were promoting and put it online. They think that doing so will make the duplicate site outrank their original website and take their sales.

g. Interlinking

Linking together multiple websites created by a single owner to build overall link popularity is a black-hat technique. It was devised as incoming links became vital in boosting search engine page rank. Difficult for search engines to detect, users can only detect this technique if multiple websites end up having the top places on the search engine indexes.

Profitworx is a White-Hat SEO Company helping thousands of clients world wide increase their Organic Search Engine rankings through professional SEO Services and skilled SEO Consultants.

This article inspired by Beanstalk.

I’ve been following the launch on the Local Business Money Machine by Kevin Wilke which seems to be endorsed by Frank Kern. I am going to give you my gut feel and opinion on this after listening to the webinar held and what was said in the dialog and pitch.

Now remember the views expressed here are my opinion alone and is based on my first hand experience selling internet marketing and SEO solutions in the local market for a number of years. Most of you know me as an expert SEO Consultant and innovative internet marketer helping many small businesses market themselves online.

So here goes:

One thing I really detest is the way most internet marketers do idiotic math, and make things sound so easy. Do some math and suddenly you have more money than leaves in a forest? Most of this is all speculation with no consideration of real world practices.

The real world practice makes a difference:

1)      You DO need knowledge and know-how when marketing to local businesses. It’s NOT as easy as just selling it, let some other outsource team do the work and keep the huge profits. That is a pipe dream for any hopeful or get rich quick subscriber.

• You need to be knowledgeable and an expert at “doing”, not “saying”. Walk the walk. Don’t buy promises, make a difference and start educating yourself.

• You don’t want 2 dummies in the room, the local business owner and yourself, not being able to answer any questions on what to expect, really expect!

2)      It’s not just about selling, if we all did the math on selling, I would be a billionaire in under a month. The real hard work when it comes to local businesses is service. Account Management is the biggest investment of time and money. If you are unable to account manage, you will need to hire sales people or representatives who know what they are talking about. Without account management you will not have any recurring revenue … trust me.

• Account management

• Training your staff

• Project management and execution strategies

• Resource management, even when outsourcing

3)      The nature of this business is such that the smaller the client the more hand holding they need and the tighter they will hold onto their hard earned cash. Pareto’s law applies and you need to be clever when targeting the market. There are only a limited number of hours in a day to pursue new clients and service existing business.

• Weekly face time with clients are a must

• Weekly reporting

• Project  management and progress reporting

4)      There is the ridiculous assumption that  your market and selling proposition is based on keyword analysis numbers. Once “top positions” are achieved the client is so grateful and makes so much money that they keep you on forever, or for months on end but unfortunately my friends this is simply not reality.  The average length of engagement you can expect is 3-6 months. There is only so much you can do. Sure there are some that will take you on full time in an outsourcing capacity, but that needs some special selling to set the correct expectations and those clients are far and few between.

I’m going to stop there not to risk too lengthy a post.

Sure they want you to fork over $2000, oh I’m sorry, special price of $995 to start marketing locally. The majority will fail as it is much harder to do than what  is implied by Frank his sidekick. You need to be a business owner and entrepreneur by heart to make this succeed. Kevin and Frank know it is hard to manage offline business sales and account management. That is why it is easier for them to sell the knowledge and make a killing. Truth be known, any entrepreneur out there can put this together over a beer, with no internet marketing experience required.

C’mon Frank Kern, I am disappointed in your approach here. It doesn’t seem like you know much about the offline world and setting that expectation with your subscribers. And who is this joker you are endorsing? Are you sure you are not supporting money hungry charlatans that would feed their grandma to the wolves. I’m sorry Frank but I have lost some respect, you’ve gone over to the dark side.

This Local Business Money Machine is a money machine alright, for Frank and his sidekick. What a shame!

[box icon="warning"]The opinions expressed in this post is not intended to harm or devalue the products of Frank Kern or Kevin Wilke. The opinion expressed is purely one derived from my experience and the best of luck to Frank and Kevin for commanding the price point they do. Frank is known for high value, well priced products and I wish them the best of luck.[/box]

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is not Website Design, but programatical enhancements to your website. It is a necessary element of any successful website. There are On Page factors that need to be optimized as well as Off Page factors. On Page refers to all website pages. Off Page refers to external factors influencing your website.

Without Search Engine Optimization, there is no way that internet users or customers can find your website, unless you advertise offline using radio, tv or print media. But even with offline advertising, you are hitting a broad audience not specifically targeted to your products or services, besides which, not all of them use the internet or are even looking for your services.

The most effective way to get long lasting success is to ensure your website appears on the first page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for specific keywords and phrases that you want to appear for. This is how you endsure that a Targeted Internet User finds your website and becomes a potential custormer or user of your service.

You don’t get a more qualified targeted visitor than that. You will be surprised how many people look for your Products or Services every day, call us, and we will let you know.

Why do you need SEO?

• Optimize your website pages to ensure compliance with major search engines, especially Google
• Be correctly indexed by the major search engines
• Prevent your site from being banned by Google
• Rank on the major search engines for your targeted keywords
• Rank higher on search engines than your competition
• Build natural traffic and visitors to your website, exposing your website to millions of searchers
• Get your website on the first page of Google for your key phrase
• Ensure the survival of your business for the next 5 years

Benefits of SEO

• Rank Higher in Search Engines
• Get Targeted Visitors to your Website
• Beat Your Competition
• Make More Money
• Grow Your Business Nationally or Globally

Do you want Guaranteed Results?

The frustration of any website owner is having “no traffic” or “visitors” to their website. The honeymoon phase is over, your website looks great, but you have no visitors. The problem most likely is that no-one told you about Search Engine Optimization Services or put you in touch with an SEO Consultant. Talking to an SEO Company is one of those well hidden and less spoken about secrets of any successful website online. To have a chance at real visitors and traffic to your business online, the expertise of a professional SEO Consultant is needed and the proper SEO Services implemented to make your online business a reality. A good SEO Company will follow a process similar to ours depicted below.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are worlds apart, yet SEO can improve your SEM costs and results!

SEO

An SEO Company is concerned with optimizing your website to receive higher positioning in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) and increase your Search Engine Rankings. Search Engine Optimization is geared to improve your Search Engine Rankings on the major search engines for organic search engine ranking, i.e. free ranking on the major search engines. The more time and resources you pour into Search Engine Optimization, the greater your expected results will be in making the first page of major search engines. Organic Search Engine Optimization is focused on optimial Search Engine Rankings in order to receive Free search traffic and visitors.

SEM

An SEM Company is concerned with marketing your website on the major search engines. Search Engine Marketing is exactly that, marketing your website according to a budget you may have. A typical SEM strategy is Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising where you pay for each click on your advertisement that drives a visitor to your website. The cost per click is dependent on the competitiveness of your market and the keyword being bid on through e.g. Google Adwords.

Despite the fact that the use of meta tags does not play a major role as a factor for search engines to consider when ranking sites, nevertheless, these tags should not be neglected when creating a webpage. A meta tag can be described as an HTML code that is a very brief and clearly concise summary of your webpage’s content. It can also be spoken of as a summary list of the most significant and central words that appear on a particular webpage of your site. A meta tag commonly looks like this:

Devised long ago with the purpose of making the web easier to use for everybody, the use of meta tags has almost always been popular. It is therefore most unfortunate that a time came when webmasters abused the use and proliferation of meta tags, to the extent that all major search engine creators decided to de-emphasize the importance of meta tags in the algorithms that they used for their search engines.

Meta tags in relation to SEO serve as helpers in making webpages win on search engines and come in various kinds. The following are just a few of the most used and better known types of meta tags.

The Meta Title Tag. This particular metal title tag’s main purpose is to declare the title of the webpage. Its format usually looks something like this:

In SEO, it is suggested that this kind of tag be used with caution. Based on studies that were made, MSN and Yahoo! do index the meta title tag. However, its impact on the algorithm is vague and shows up as having inconsistent test results.

The best use of the Title Tag for SEO purposes would be to Ensure that it is keyword rich, contains no more than 3 of your targeted keywords per page. Google is particularly receptive to the use of Keywords in your Title Tag which could give you the edge when competing on SERP (Search Engine Results Pages).

The Meta Description Tag. Its task is to concisely describe the contents of the document in 20-25 words or less using plain language. In SEO, search engines supportive of this type of tag publish this short description on their search results page and generally appears in this format:

It is highly recommended that the meta description tag be always present in your pages since it could spell the difference between better ranking in the results pages and being left out of them.

The Meta Keywords Tag. Its main purpose is to serve as a list of keywords that identify or classify your website’s content. Search engines use it to properly index your website in terms of SEO. It takes on a form such as this:

The Meta Author Tag. As its name suggests, this tag displays the name of the author of the document. It gives a reference to the name of the individual who came up with the HTML/XML document being read. A meta author tag can look like this:

Although not indexed by MSN, Yahoo!, or Google, in SEO it is acknowledged as a component of the “Meta Tag Standard.”

The Meta Robots Tag. It controls the robots that search engines send on a per-page basis. Use it to influence robots to navigate the webpage, but not index that particular page. Follow this format when making a meta robots tag:

Use of meta tags gives your webpages added visibility when search engines go looking for relevant content. Make use of them wisely and they will help make your website more visible in the vastness of the worldwide web. Meta tag usage and tweaking will give you the edge in competing for SERP and will definitely pay off when everything else is equal.

If you have any trouble implementing the correct usage of meta tags on your website, contact an SEO Consultant or SEO Services to assist you in that.