page rank

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in the result pages for searches made by internauts. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (way back when), SEM methods include:

• search engine optimization (or SEO)
• paid advertisement
• paid inclusion.

These days Search engine marketing includes creating HubPages, squidoo lens, uploading files to scribd, article submission with links back to your primary sales site, blog entries, audio and video submissions and so many more.

Paid search advertising has many controversies about it, especially since sites like Baidu and Yandex (both with more daily searches than MSN) like to include paid links and natural links in the same results. By some standards this is not an appropriate practice, but one country can not force its standards on the world, so this is going to stay. Rumor on the street says that Google will be including a mix of SERP’s with a mix of primarily natural results with advertised sites added in and not marked as such.

Search engine marketing is a topic that can be studied for months and still be a total waste of time. By the time you learn the tricks that are working - they no longer work. Each person should make the effort to find what works for them and use that method until it stops working.

It is easy to get a web site in the top 10 listing on Google, or at least I have done it for my clients over the last 6 months. Time for my method to stop working, so I am out trying new things - knowing that day will come.

You have finally decided to make the plunge and make the web design changes necessary to go after international sales. Your important web pages are ready to be created in the local language, you have looked at the aspects of the culture that are different from your own, and you need to cover the last little items.

Here are 4 web design ideas that you should follow:

1. Get your domain name in the target country

There are a lot of people that remain with the .com site, and this is respected in many countries. It is worthwhile to have the local domain when you consider the cost involved of getting a domain name and having you site hosted. You can have you country website designed so that it displays what is on your primary site if you are not ready to have 2 running site. Consider having your foreign website designed as a sales blog, pointing to you primary sales blog.

2. Make subscription options in the target language available and obvious.

RSS icons are pretty much standard in appearance, so use one. If you are not ready to have your feeds in the foreign language you can at least put the comment lines in the local language inviting people to sign up for the “English Language Feeds”. Making the offer in the local language will help you see to what point translating will be useful.

Make your subscriptions obvious, and ask for them. You should put the sign up option on each post and on the front page of your site.

3. Write articles for your niche in the local language

Knowing what your client wants and knowing your niche is the key to success on the web. Starting sales in the foreign market is a niche in itself, and you need to provide quality and useful information to that niche. If possible, deliver content in the local language. If you are writing blog entries it is entirely possibly to have them translated. You can use one of the many freelance sites on the internet to translate for you - often for as little as $2.00 per post. If you don’t want to pay for the translation, consider bringing on a person that speaks the local language as an intern or use one of the online translation tools. If you use a translation tool, include the original language after the translation and begin each post with a comment “Translated online by…”

4. Start a series of posts

The wonderful thing about having series of related posts is that it makes the reader want to come back for more. This can help get subscribers who don’t miss out on the next in the series. After you are done with the series, let it rest for a while, then email the series as part of your newsletter. Convert the series into one article that you can post online and advertise your foreign sales in the ‘author resources’ section.

Once a site is in a search engine, the search engine’s spider will revisit it and rebuild their index with the changed parts of the site. Some like to think that the spider will hit every page, but choose a very active site and look at the cached pages in the search engines and the cache dates will not be the same. A good way to encourage the search engines to hit every page it to make your site map be obvious on the site and if you can, use the sitemap that is generated by your search engine of preference. Given the choice between hoping the spider finds your cool little trick and staying with something that works - well I advise you stick with things that work.

Search engines were developed by people that know the changing (there, it just changed), so the search engines are always doing there thing with web pages. You will see a page move up, down and sometimes unexplainably vanish for different lengths of time. Although I have not experienced it personally, I have read of 2 people on different side of the US that searched a site and found it on 2 different positions of the search engine results page. This is because there is not just one server with page rank information and while one is updated right now, another will be updated in 30 minutes (Hey, there it goes again, the internet just changed).

In days of old, people were told to submit their domain to the search engines, but the search engines move so fast that a site just needs to be entered on any social media site and it will be spidered right away. I keep one video that is watched between 2000 and 4000 times a day just so I can plug in a domain name that I want spidered. So not only will every engine probably find your site on its own the first time, it will keep visiting it on its own - as long as you keep the site fresh. Update you site or the spider will stop coming to visit.

The major search engines appear to visit most pages in its database at least once a month. If a site I am working on is not spidered weekly, there is something wrong. Some pages get visited every day and a good objective for your site is to have enough content coming in that the search engines have reason to visit daily. Sites with a higher PageRank do get spidered more often than sites with a low PR. And sites which update more frequently get spidered more often than sites which does not have updates - and there is nothing wrong with an archive site that never updates.

If you have a Wordpress blog there is a tool built in that notifies the major search engines each time you make an update, it is called a PING tool. You can try to get spidered more often by updating your pages often. Minor changes are still changes, you don’t have to rewrite the site every day. There are disadvantages to changing your site daily - the first being you run the risk of human error. Make a mistake because you are making a change and you can take your site down, not a good idea.

Reprint of a letter published in the International Herald Tribune six years ago, and it still hold true. I have added a bit, but the idea stays the same.

Hackers take great joy in bypassing passwords, I’ve done it myself.

- Your job is to make passwords unpredictable.

It is wrong to tell people that passwords can be broken without explaining the proper way to choose one that will be more difficult to break.

- Given enough time every password can be broken.

You should choose a password that is seven or more characters long. Don’t use a word that is found in a dictionary - a program can be written to use every word in a dictionary.

Once you use a password that you consider good, don’t use a sequence of that password (Tolkien1, Tolkien2, Tolkien3)

Try making up an acronym - JDwfLTismf (”Jack Daniels whiskey from Lynchburg, Tennessee is my favorite”). Unless you know me well enough to know that I like Jack there would be no reason to consider that phrase. If you did know my like for Jack there is still no reason to consider this as a possible password.

Try and misspell a word using one or more special characters in the center of the word, like Disné#Land.

Since many passwords are case sensitive, use upper and lower case.

When it comes time to change passwords, I take the local newspaper and choose a word. The word for today is Doonesbury, which I modify to be D00n3sb_r. Or take the word lightbulb and spell it 1igh+b_1B. It is actually very simple, once you get the hang of it.

Take the word “automated” and on a US keyboard type one character to the right “siyp,syrf” and doing this means that you can use your family name if you want to.

For sites that do not have any money related information I use one password. I take an unnatural word combination, like an adverb and a noun (an adverb, broadly defined, is a word which modifies any word other than a nouns), combine them the make a word that does not exist in the dictionary. SlowlyTruck is a combined word that does not appear when searched on the internet. Slightly change the spelling and you really have a wonderful password - how about Sl0w1yTruck

I only use one password for sites like blogs. For sites that have money related things I use the ideas referenced above, but since I have a good memory I really screw the text up. I have also taken a text file and just typed a dozen or so characters, and whatever came out was a password.

Change your password at work every two months and personal passwords as often as you feel necessary.

Change your password now. Don’t wait for the prompt.

Internet user demographics are ever changing. More users are coming on the internet from more countries. Everyone needs to keep their website visible to as many internet users as possible if you are interested in new clients. It may be time to change some of your practices. When registering your company with online directories, it seems like most of the world relies solely on being referenced by Google.

Let’s take a closer look below at how well Google searches fare in two of the world’s largest markets. Remember if Google is not penetrating well into a foreign market, then your website will not be found in that market.

In China, Google has a 27% market share; but the local language search engine Baidu has a full 55%. Similarly, in Russia, Google is in a distant third place, with Yandex the leader and another Russian player - Rambler - holding second. Google holds only a 17% market share in Russia - behind two Russian Language sites that control nearly 75% of that market. In addition to the 140 million Russians, there are an additional 145 million people that speak Russian worldwide.More than 50% of growth in internet users from 2007-2010 is likely to come from China, Russia and India which are behind western Europe and North America - please note that these countries have more than 40% of the worlds population. It is probably time to find out how to get your site listed on these search engines.

Chinese and Russian Population & Internet Numbers

215 million Americans have internet access at present. There are 162 million from China and 60 million from India. The total Chinese and Indian users added together equals the number of users in the US. But this does not take the total populations of these countries into account. There are more than 2 billion other Chinese and Indians that are not yet on the internet.

China is the world’s most populated country, nearly 1.4 Billion people. Russia has the largest population in Europe, larger than Germany and France combined. Russia and China each have one of the world’s fastest growing economies.

Internet penetration in Russia currently stands at about 20% - half the European average and less than a third of the 69.9% in the United States.

In China, penetration is just 12.5% (so there are a BILLION future clients that are not on the internet yet). When China reaches the worldwide average for internet penetration of 20% they will have passed the number of American internet users.

The penetration levels in Western Europe and North America appear to have stabilized and look unlikely to grow significantly in the future. As an example, Internet penetration is 55% and 65% of the French and German populations.

The majority of new world-wide internet users is expected to come from China and India. Their present internet user penetration is only 12.5% and 5% respectively. The bulk of new European users is expected to be from Russia, the Ukraine and Turkey.

It is estimated that in less then 2 years China will pass the United States as the biggest internet community online.

Is Google up to the Challenge

It is time for an interesting question. Have Google and Microsoft reached their search engine plateau? Are they about to begin the decline in worldwide search engine dominance? Most of the estimations place Google at more than 70% of the present market share world-wide.

What will be their global market share in five years time? Even if Google’s market share grows in Russia and China their overall world share may fall because of the increase in foreign script searches and the increased value of local language search engines.

Yahoo! is not mentioned here as word on the street says Microsoft wants to acquire them. Yahoo! has been on a decline for the last several years.

Get Better Ranks In Russia

And Here are a few pointers if you want to go beyond Google to get better search engine rankings for your website in Russia and China.

The current Russian search engine leader is Yandex. Yandex does not accept site submissions from sites hosted outside of Russia. This does not mean, however, that domain names have to be from the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan). They do have to be hosted with an IP address from a Russian speaking country OR with pages in Russian. By chance, Yandex offers free hosting services, so starting a Russian language site is not as hard as it may see.

Sites are indexed quicker if it is significantly linked to by sites hosted in Russia and Russian language sites, similar to the Google algorithm that gives greater value to a link to your site if the linker is in your field. You will need to read Russian to find out how to upload a site on Yandex

In China the leader is Baidu. Unlike Google, Baidu has merged all of their search results together - organic and paid. Even if this site is in Chinese you can still easily figure it out how to submit your site if you would like to give it a try; just mouse over links until you find one that has a link to submit.

Probably the best way to be a top 10 player in the Baidu SERP’s is to pay. Capitalism is alive and well in China, and with a billion future clients it may be worth your while. They do advertise Pay for Performance (P4P) and they tailor advertising solutions.

To be honest, the best way to be on the Google or Yahoo Front page is also by advertising. To improve user experience, Baidu has introduced “phonetic” or “pin-yin” search which allows users to type in Chinese keywords using English alphabets.

To rank well organically, you must first realize that the Chinese search audience is very Chinese oriented. Your landing page must be fully in Chinese and presented in the Chinese style. Similar issues arise in other countries; a Japanese website written and designed by a Texan will not be accepted in Japan.

So, plan on hiring a Chinese team to include a native marketing professional or copywriter - not a translator - and a graphic artist. These folks should be born and raised in mainland China, not American of Chinese origins. The Baidu site states that the Simplified Chinese language is their language of choice so do not be concerned (yet) about the multiple languages available for your Chinese website.

Like all search engines, Baidu does not guarantee your site will be crawled. Like all search engines, once listed on Baidu, you can improve your position by providing high quality content that you regularly keep up to date. Your Chinese site must have inbound links from other Chinese websites.

On a side note, the literal translation of the word Baidu is “hundreds of times” and represents persistent search for the ideal. Yandex is explained as “Yet Another iNDEXer”.

Get Your Website Submitted To The Leading Search Engines In Every Country

Should you be concerned about where your website is listed?

Online companies need to follow their internet user markets. They need to ensure their website is submitted and listed in all of the leading search engine directories in each of the appropriate countries.

By keeping track of your international visitors you will be able to prioritize countries. But internet user demographics is expected to change rapidly and you should look at prioritizing countries based these results.

Start a search engine submission strategy to get your website listed in all of the leading directories in each country.

Things That Help Page Rank:

These factors will probably change over time, once someone figures how to “beat the system”. Some these variables are more important than others:

• Keywords in the title tag
• Keywords in the description tag
• Keywords in the keywords tag
• Changing and increasing content
• Keywords in your headlines
• Keywords in your content
• Keywords in the top 25% of the page
• Keywords in the bottom 25% of the page
• Using HTML emphasis on Keywords (Bold, Italics, Underline et cetera)
• Incoming link popularity - if sites that point to you have a high PR it is a good thing
• Keywords in the names of linked pages Cover Hypnosis Expert Kevin Hogan is better than Kevin Hogan and the actual site name has the lowest value (but better than nothing)
• Keywords in alt tags and as names of images
• Getting listings in Pay-Per-Click search engines like Google Adwords or in Overture
• Listings in directories

Things That Hurt Page Rank:

• Spamming by using the same word or phrase several times in your title, meta tags, or text. Buy you new shoes from our shoe site by visiting our shoe forum and choosing from our shoe gallery! The sentence might be readable, but it is spam.
• Keyword density over 5% which may be considered keyword spamming.
• Spamming by putting words or phrases into your meta tags or title that have nothing to do with the actual content people see on your web page.
• Too many outbound links, even if they are to sites related to your topic. If you want to have hundreds of links, make a link page.
• Using text the same color as the background. Years ago, I could not figure why I landed on a site that had nothing to do with my search.
• Using tiny text (font size “-1″ or smaller) as a way to cram keywords into a page
• Linking out to link farms or free-for-all (FFA) link pages.
• Links coming in from link farms or FFA link pages
• Linking out to sites that have nothing to do with the focus or niche of your site (For a class Kevin Hogan gave in 2006 he linked from KevinHogan.com to everyone that attended his class, causing his PR to drop one point.)
• Unknown. Since we don’t know the actual algorithm used there may be things that we don’t know that hurt your page rank. If you think something may hurt your site, don’t do it.

Follow these basic rules and you will be on your way to getting your page ranked properly.

KeyWords and KeyWord Phrases are words that people will type into a search engine that YOU or YOUR PRODUCT is the answer to. When people type “Body Language”, Kevin Hogan wants to be the answer, but his site only appears at the bottom of a 100 entry list. There are over 2.1 million entries for “Body Language” (and 1.5 billion for ‘internet’). When someone enters SEO Copywriting, there are hundreds of people that want to be in the top 10, but there are only 10 sites listed.

In the beginning, keywords were not visible to the reader; they were only in the HTML script. Then people realized that in the algorithm the quantity of keywords counted. Because of this you would have pages with white text on a white background, the same word added as a comment in the HTML text (so only the spider could see it) or the same word written 300 times at the bottom of the page. These words were for the search engine spiders.

Today the tricks listed above not only don’t work; in fact the opposite - they would get your site banned from the search engines because the algorithm has changed. Today the search engines want your keywords to be used logically and where they fit. Each page should have a title (you would be surprised how many sites have all of their pages untitled). Since you are able to use a title, and each page has a KeyWord, use that KeyWord as the page title.

The “Body Language” page from Kevin Hogans’s site has this title string - . Not only does he use “Body Language” twice, he uses other words people may use to search for this topic; “Reading Body Language”, “Decoding Body Language” and “Body Language Analysis”.

After a user searches on a set of keywords on her search engine of choice, she is presented with a page called the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) which has sponsored links (at the top of the page and to the right) and a main section of the page with the listing that are found based on the algorithm used. This set of listing is called the organic or natural listings. Organic search engine optimization (this training) is about increasing the number of times the search engines spider your site, moving your site higher on the SERP, both of which should help increase the amount of visitors that your site gets.

This is achieved by getting more documents indexed on the search engine and by attaining a higher position in the organic results. The problem for many marketers and traditional advertising agencies lies in the technical nature of search engines and the difficulty in understanding the underlying algorithms that produce the rankings for particular keyword searches.

The most popular search engine is Google which accounts for the greatest number of search requests. This is not to say that other search engines are not important nor anything about the different algorithm’s being used. Google’s success has ensured that many search engines are moving in the same direction and since Google has filed their search patent we do not have to rely on as much guesswork.

Importantly, Google ensures that there is a level of feedback from users through the Google toolbar that enables Google to refine their search results over time. Also, a significant part of Google’s algorithm is to protect its search engine against search SPAM which is the use of techniques to improve a site’s rankings normally through the artificial creation of links, so we have outlined the main areas to watch out for. Since keywords are so important in SEO it is heavily recommended you get a keyword tool such as Keyword Expert or SEO Elite. This will save time and guess work, and will increase your SEO results.

Since 1995 or so websites have become one of the most popular means for companies and people to reach their customers and share information.

A language known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is used to make web sites. HTML is a set of instructions to the web browser that are inside these guys, < > and you seldom get to see them. When you’re done with an instruction, you end it with < / >. Inside those brackets, you need a command, like HR - to make a horizontal rule (also known as a line across the page).

When I go to begin a web page, I type commands like these WITHOUT the spaces.

< HTML >
< HEAD >
< TITLE >Ya Gotta have a title < /TITLE >
< /HEAD>
< BODY>

You can also control the size of your text ( < font >), underlined words, bolding and italics (even all 3 together). There are headline and a buncha sub-headlines. There are different ways to end a paragraph. Since the time that Tim Berners-Lee invented web sites, more ways have been developed to make website development faster and easier. What separates one website from another is design.

< CENTER> oh, yeah, you can center things. < /CENTER>

When designing a website consider the following key elements: the purpose of the site, the possible audience, content structure, and the design compatibility. Is this site needed at all?

Anyone about to create a web site should take the time to right a statement that says what the site is used for and what visitors can get from it. This will help the designer to plan a proper outline of how the website can be broken down and modified over time should (when) the need arises - having a long-term objective is a pretty good idea.

Who will be visiting your site? Women 16 - 26 from France and Belgium? Japanese men? In terms of audience, what is the target market. When you are doing this you should be able to narrow it down to one person who is your sample visitor. Killian Chad will be our sample person. He has an age, sex, marital status, he has (or doesn’t have) pets and so many other details that you can point out.

Sure, there is only one Killian, but you have to have a target in mind and saying Killian is easier than “Women 16 - 26 from France and Belgium”. Site visitors will be viewing the site for different reasons, a designer should know what those reasons are so she can try to make the site hit that customers ideas, and if the designer is good enough you may get return visits.

Content is the most important aspect of a web site. It is also the most time-consuming section of the website. Try to guess how long it took me to write this 850-word article. A good site needs hundreds (thousands?) of pages to be worthwhile and to give customers reason to return. If they don’t come back, they don’t spend money. Very important note here so I will < EM> emphasize < /EM> it. Your average visitor will not spend money. Your return visitors are those that have the greatest chance of forking over money for you.

A lot of planning is required because this will be the most dynamic part of the site. This means that the information will keep changing every now and then. This is especially true if the website deals with articles changing every day like newspaper websites. Content may also mean the way a product is advertised or presented to the user. The more attractive the graphics are and the catchier the copy is, the more it will help get more customers to a website. Copy is the text content that is included on the website.

Another tricky part about web design is making it compatible for all kinds of web browsers. A web browser is what a person will use to access the website, and probably how you are reading this. Some browsers change a web site’s look. The designer has to keep in mind that programming is still essential in page layout.

It is tricky but not very difficult since not only a lot of tweaking of measurements will be made to adjust the website dimensions. Only test on Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox (75% MS and 13% FF) - the other browsers only count about 5% of all users Online statistic I found at TheCounter http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/October/browser.php

The Web has changed the way businesses are run. People (like me) actually think to buy online before going to a store. I went 2 years without going into a bookstore. To get people to part from their hard-earned cash and buy items online (at your online store) is reason enough to have a good-looking site with interesting and accurate content. A professional looking site may help you generate more transactions and lead to more sales and higher more moo-lah in your pocket.

I am about to end this article< /BODY>
< /HTML> There, it’s all over.

What is a Search Engine?

A search engines is the tool of Internet users for finding whatever it is that they want or need on the web. Search engines are that special thing that allows people to search the world for what makes them happy. There are both limitations on search engines that are built by design and by web sites owners’ choice - I can choose to have my site remain invisible to the rest of the world.

A search engine sends a ’spider’ out to gather information on the websites of the world. This is the tool that is the base for our being able to search the internet.

There are two to get your site spidered:

1. The spider will automatically find your site from a link on someone else’s site
2. You submit your URL so that the spider will come out and find it (I do both)

How Does a Search Engine Index Web Pages?

There are four main things know about a search engine for optimization:

1. The spider is a program that goes out and gathers up web pages (the process is referred to as being spidered (I was spidered last week)
2. The database is where the spider will store the pages that it finds
3. The search engine website (http://www. google.com is my choice) is where you and I go to find information from the database
4. The algorithms are programs that determine which sites will come up when you and I type our search request