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Hub You - Get Indexed by Google's Googlebot Right Away, the Right Way
USA Small Business Start up Success n, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms.1. U.S. Small Business Association http://www.sba.gov Maintain and strengthen the nation's economy by aiding, counseling, assisting and protecting the interests of small businesses and by helping families and businesses recover from national disasters.2. SOHO America http://www.soho.org/ Find Out How SOHO Online can help you manage the challenges of working in a small office/home office environment. SOHO is for SME, small business, home office, small office, business events, conferences, networking, seminars, presentations, keynotes, event planning, and membership.3. Internet Retailer http://www.internetretailer.com/ Site complete with Internet Retail news, resources, experts and upcoming events in several areas and industries.A second important area is marketing and PR. A few good online resources follow:Logoworks Quality logos give your business an immediate air of professionalism. Even if your business is new or less established, a customer will often give the benefit of doubt to a company that looks professional. Every business eventually competes with others. A unique and professional logo will help your customers distinguish your products and services and help them remember who you are.Publicity Hound Joan Stewart, publicity resource expert for small business and people that need advice with publicity design and background with seminars in U.S.A. available.Meetup Expanding your network. There are opportunities now to expand you current local business network to include partnerships in other cities or gain access to similar experts in your field without having to go there.Google Adwords Online Marketing. Numerous online marketing programs such as video, radio, banner and one of the best, pay per click. Pay per click 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit i What is Marketing All About? Everyone in the online world knows extremely well that the most sought after traffic to one's site comes from a Google search. Folks, 80% of searches on the internet are done in Google.Many self-proclaimed nit whit marketing consultants who write marketing books, give speeches, sell tapes and pretend to be superstars of their field say things like; No Matter What Marketing Will Make Your Goals a Reality. They say that marketing is all about choosing your target customers and then putting out the correct communication.Well indeed, some of this sounds really special but it is utter hokum and horse dung really. You see most of these marketing specialists and self-proclaimed wannabe, textbook grabbing, gurus of advertising and marketing, used car salesmen types proclaim the answers of what marketing is by baffling business owners with BS. Why? Well simple they want to sell you their tapes and books. Some are decent and worthy, most are a waste of money and nearly all of them are a dime a dozen and say the same things.These consultant types will say that marketing; “Creates Awareness” of your business offerings to your potential customers? Well creating awareness sure sounds special indeed. But do you really want to create awareness or do you want to sell your products and services?Indeed awareness is good, but realize that you want to be the discussion at the dinner tables of your clientele and then you want them to come and buy from you. Now then, where in creating awareness does that mean more sales? I am very aware of how Viagra works, but unlike these self-proclaimed marketing authors, book writers and nit wits; I do not have a problem getting it up or moving our products into the shopping bags of our target customers. Be careful of those who say marketing is all about; Creating Awareness. That is a very small part of what marketing is and it is often irrelevant. In theory, it is simple - if you have something interesting to someone else, if you build a website with the honest to goodness goal to provide something useful for someone else, that someone else will find you. That is also how the creators of Google describe their main goal, to more or less have a great repository of information, and help people of our planet find useful stuff. In practice, it is not that simple. It is not that simple because there are thousands, possibly even millions of sites like yours, because you might be running a very honest online business, selling some very useful product, but do not have unheard of, exceptionally grand 'content'. If your site is listed on page 265 of a search results set, be sure you will never get any visitors that way. Unlike Yahoo and others, who rely on human involvement, Google does everything through automation. Websites are indexed (or crawled, or spidered - all terms refer to the same process) by their indexing software called Googlebot. Googlebot looks at websites daily, and rules programmed into the software decide which of your pages make it into the main Google index and which don't. After your site was indexed, whether it was submitted for indexing by a human or the robot just stumbled upon it, your pages are ranked, so Google knows on which page of a search to put your site on, and on what search phrases should your site even be part of the result search. The Googlebot is very smart and works really well. Keep in mind however, that is just a piece of software, a very sophisticated one, but it's just a computer program. Consequently, it has a set of algorithms (rules) it uses to index web site content (information), a set of capabilities (as I said before, Googlebot is really intelligent) and a set of limitations. As such, there is an impressive number of ways in which one can trip up the Googlebot and make it impossible for it to index your content. Alternately, the Googlebot can index your site well, and then people will find it when searching for words it contains. This article will try to teach you all the basics necessary to achieve consistency and persistency in Google, starting with the very basic step: getting indexed by Googlebot, Google's indexing robot. 1. Read Google's own Webmaster Guidelines The people behind Google seem to have two main things down to a science: One, most of their algorithms (rules) are so secret, that all us non-Google employees do is speculate. Two, their guidelines are very simple, direct and precise. Following their guidelines will never hurt your site's ranking. Disregarding their guidelines can and probably will hurt you in the long run. So go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html and read what Google has to say about itself. 2. Have text links. Make every single page on your site accessible via a text-based link, as opposed to Javascript, Flash, DHTML (Dynamic HTML), etc. Googlebot's native language is text. Google says: "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." This is probably the number one key to your site's existence in Google. Googlebot is actually a robotic, browser-like software, based on the venerable Lynx browser. The reasoning behind this approach is that the creators are trying to get as close as possible to emulating human browsing, making sure your website is actually human friendly. Consequently, by downloading Lynx on your computer and looking at your site through Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org), you will see more or less exactly the information Googlebot can read and index and the links Googlebot can follow. You will also see HTML errors on your pages and places where a robot would be stuck and could not reach the rest of your site. I know it is very unfair to those of us who understand and love the potential of websites built completely in Flash, or other engines. However, until the nice folks who run Google figure out a good way to crawl inside a Flash file and extract the appropriate information, we are stuck with standard HTML. This is not to say that you cannot make your site really pretty and fill it with Java Script and Flash eye candy. But you must have regular text and standard text links. Usually you can achieve the desired effect by having extra navigation menus based on standard text links. 3. Avoid frames. Avoid frames at all cost. If you must use them (for example to make someone else's page look like it's part of your site), do not use them on your front page. Frames are like the plague, they sneak up on you. It is incredibly easy to lose Googlebot's tracks inside a badly formatted frameset. You might hear that some of the robots, including Google's Googlebot and Yahoo's Slurp are quickly gaining capabilities to go inside frames properly. My philosophy is, until a feature becomes ubiquitous, if you're uncertain, leave it in the closet. 4. Keep the number of links on a given page less than 100. This comes straight from Google's Webmaster Guidelines: "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." This looks more like a suggestion and I am not 100% sure if you get penalized in any way or if Googlebot just stops reading your links after 100. I can however tell you from personal experience that I tried a page with 700 links and it seemed fine. Then one day I tried to view the page from my Blackberry PDA and I got this strange error message saying my page is illegally formatted. After I split the page into several ones with 80 links each, the pages worked on the PDA also. Who cares about the Blackberry? Well, if you're reading this and your goal is to get visitors, then your main concern should be not to alienate anyone. Remember, today more than ever, people use different devices and different software to access the web. Every visitor is a potential customer. Every employee at a major US lawfirm and many other corporate people use a Blackberry. Lastly, why would you need that many links on one page anyway? Let's say, for example, that you specialize in promotional products - corporate branded gifts, such as pens, caps, mints and other products (called sometimes 'premiums') imprinted with one's logo. Your name is John Doe, and you decided to name your company JDPromos (not very imaginative, but will do for our examples). You would want to have every item in your catalog as a text link, so every item gets indexed as a link and as a keyword. Also, those who run forums, ezines, blogs, might want to have standard links to their articles, as the software they use might create dynamic links, invisible to certain robots. 5. Give every page a meaningful title. Give every single page on the site a complete and meaningful title. This is also directly from Google's Webmaster Guidelines. See Rule #1. Incidentally, for those who are fascinated by the debates on the death of the Meta Tags, the The "title" tag is supported by every web creation tool out there, and goes in the header of a web page (between the "head" and the "/head" tags). Google offers the 'allintitle' syntax, which lets users search only text that appears in a page title. A lot of people who integrate a Google bar into their websites allow users to get results only by title. There are over 29 million results returned for Untitled Document. Most of us - myself included - copy and paste template pages, out of the convenience of not having to recreate all design elements from scratch. If you do so, do not forget to change the title. Make sure your title is not just a list of keywords and that it is related to the actual content of the page. Google can and will check that, before deciding on your page's 'relevance'. 6. Do not place important text inside images. Google says: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images." It is very tempting to create images with text inside them, for the very simple reason that as designers, we are not limited to the very few font (type) options that basic HTML allows. Also, different browsers tend to display things differently nowadays, so it is much easier to create a text image, which will be shown consistently and not worry about styles, operating systems, etc. 7. Use descriptive "ALT" tags. The "ALT" tag is used as a text alternative (hence the name) for images and image links and was designed so that text browsers (such as Lynx) do not just display a generic 'Image' for every picture link you might have. If all your links say 'Image', how would a potential visitor know what they are? Make sure that the text description is meaningful and accurate. Take our promotional items company as an example. Let's say they have a picture of a tradeshow display, as an example of a service they provide outside the ordinary imprinted mint boxes, calculators and keychains. If the "ALT" tag only says "display", that is what Googlebot will see and index. If the tag says something like "example of a tradeshow display design", that is certainly more useful and more Googlebot friendly. Please note that although the "ALT" tag does count and Google seems to put a high price on this tag, it ranks lower than plain text. 8. Use meaningful descriptions for links With the risk of sounding like a scratched CD, I'll have to say this again: Whether you use picture links or text links, please use meaningful text inside your tags so that Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. In other words, let's pretend again that we are designing that website for that imaginary promotional items company we called JDPromos. If you intend to put a link to a set of sample coffee mugs promos, say something like "link to JDPromos samples of branded coffee mugs", not just "coffee mugs", or even worse, "click here for pictures". Never use link text like "read more" or "go here" or "download it", "click here", "don't click here", you get the picture - I hope. Don't try to fool the Googlebot with hidden links or duplicate content or irrelevant pages of words like "sex" and "hot girls." The Googlebot doesn't like being played and you will be penalized, one way or another, in the long run. 9. Use a "description" tag for every page Include a tag in your page header to summarize your site. Use a meaningful one or two sentence description, do not keyword spam. Even better, include descriptive text on the site's front page where users can actually read it. This text will appear as the description for your site in Google results. Place more important content higher in the page than less important content in a page, Google does categorize text on a page based on it's position, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms. 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit it Going Public - IPO's and Going Public are Now Avaliable to Small Business sregarding their guidelines can and probably will hurt you in the long run. So go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html and read what Google has to say about itself.Welcome News for Small BusinessesPublicly traded companies typically receive clearly established benefits that include the ability to:* raise capital quickly and more easily;* use stock to acquire other businesses and assets (mergers and acquisitions);* provide employee stock options, as an incentive and/or compensation;* create wealth and liquidity for investors;* obtain loans from financial institutions using their stock as collateral;* gain prestige and respect;* reduce the need for expensive venture capital and bank financing; and* formalize estate planning.In addition, companies that go public typically see higher valuations, meaning that the market value of a public company is, on average, substantially higher than the same private company. This increases the investors’ wealth, allowing one to use stock for acquisitions. It can also increase the company’s value if one in considering selling the business.Some consider a public company the ultimate status symbol. For companies that may want to be public for the many advantages it has, such as the increased market value of the stock to acquire other companies, the ease of raising capital, the ability to attract key personnel and to provide an exit strategy for investors—the fact that any company that wants to go public can go public, is very empowering.More significantly, the company gains prestige and respect, because a public company is more often perceived as stable and competitive. This perception can lead to expanded business relationships and added confidence for the consumer. Prestige can assist in recruiting key employees, marketing products and services, gaining additional exposure and enhancing the company’s overall reputation. Often, suppliers and consumers become sharehol 2. Have text links. Make every single page on your site accessible via a text-based link, as opposed to Javascript, Flash, DHTML (Dynamic HTML), etc. Googlebot's native language is text. Google says: "Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link." This is probably the number one key to your site's existence in Google. Googlebot is actually a robotic, browser-like software, based on the venerable Lynx browser. The reasoning behind this approach is that the creators are trying to get as close as possible to emulating human browsing, making sure your website is actually human friendly. Consequently, by downloading Lynx on your computer and looking at your site through Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org), you will see more or less exactly the information Googlebot can read and index and the links Googlebot can follow. You will also see HTML errors on your pages and places where a robot would be stuck and could not reach the rest of your site. I know it is very unfair to those of us who understand and love the potential of websites built completely in Flash, or other engines. However, until the nice folks who run Google figure out a good way to crawl inside a Flash file and extract the appropriate information, we are stuck with standard HTML. This is not to say that you cannot make your site really pretty and fill it with Java Script and Flash eye candy. But you must have regular text and standard text links. Usually you can achieve the desired effect by having extra navigation menus based on standard text links. 3. Avoid frames. Avoid frames at all cost. If you must use them (for example to make someone else's page look like it's part of your site), do not use them on your front page. Frames are like the plague, they sneak up on you. It is incredibly easy to lose Googlebot's tracks inside a badly formatted frameset. You might hear that some of the robots, including Google's Googlebot and Yahoo's Slurp are quickly gaining capabilities to go inside frames properly. My philosophy is, until a feature becomes ubiquitous, if you're uncertain, leave it in the closet. 4. Keep the number of links on a given page less than 100. This comes straight from Google's Webmaster Guidelines: "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." This looks more like a suggestion and I am not 100% sure if you get penalized in any way or if Googlebot just stops reading your links after 100. I can however tell you from personal experience that I tried a page with 700 links and it seemed fine. Then one day I tried to view the page from my Blackberry PDA and I got this strange error message saying my page is illegally formatted. After I split the page into several ones with 80 links each, the pages worked on the PDA also. Who cares about the Blackberry? Well, if you're reading this and your goal is to get visitors, then your main concern should be not to alienate anyone. Remember, today more than ever, people use different devices and different software to access the web. Every visitor is a potential customer. Every employee at a major US lawfirm and many other corporate people use a Blackberry. Lastly, why would you need that many links on one page anyway? Let's say, for example, that you specialize in promotional products - corporate branded gifts, such as pens, caps, mints and other products (called sometimes 'premiums') imprinted with one's logo. Your name is John Doe, and you decided to name your company JDPromos (not very imaginative, but will do for our examples). You would want to have every item in your catalog as a text link, so every item gets indexed as a link and as a keyword. Also, those who run forums, ezines, blogs, might want to have standard links to their articles, as the software they use might create dynamic links, invisible to certain robots. 5. Give every page a meaningful title. Give every single page on the site a complete and meaningful title. This is also directly from Google's Webmaster Guidelines. See Rule #1. Incidentally, for those who are fascinated by the debates on the death of the Meta Tags, the The "title" tag is supported by every web creation tool out there, and goes in the header of a web page (between the "head" and the "/head" tags). Google offers the 'allintitle' syntax, which lets users search only text that appears in a page title. A lot of people who integrate a Google bar into their websites allow users to get results only by title. There are over 29 million results returned for Untitled Document. Most of us - myself included - copy and paste template pages, out of the convenience of not having to recreate all design elements from scratch. If you do so, do not forget to change the title. Make sure your title is not just a list of keywords and that it is related to the actual content of the page. Google can and will check that, before deciding on your page's 'relevance'. 6. Do not place important text inside images. Google says: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images." It is very tempting to create images with text inside them, for the very simple reason that as designers, we are not limited to the very few font (type) options that basic HTML allows. Also, different browsers tend to display things differently nowadays, so it is much easier to create a text image, which will be shown consistently and not worry about styles, operating systems, etc. 7. Use descriptive "ALT" tags. The "ALT" tag is used as a text alternative (hence the name) for images and image links and was designed so that text browsers (such as Lynx) do not just display a generic 'Image' for every picture link you might have. If all your links say 'Image', how would a potential visitor know what they are? Make sure that the text description is meaningful and accurate. Take our promotional items company as an example. Let's say they have a picture of a tradeshow display, as an example of a service they provide outside the ordinary imprinted mint boxes, calculators and keychains. If the "ALT" tag only says "display", that is what Googlebot will see and index. If the tag says something like "example of a tradeshow display design", that is certainly more useful and more Googlebot friendly. Please note that although the "ALT" tag does count and Google seems to put a high price on this tag, it ranks lower than plain text. 8. Use meaningful descriptions for links With the risk of sounding like a scratched CD, I'll have to say this again: Whether you use picture links or text links, please use meaningful text inside your tags so that Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. In other words, let's pretend again that we are designing that website for that imaginary promotional items company we called JDPromos. If you intend to put a link to a set of sample coffee mugs promos, say something like "link to JDPromos samples of branded coffee mugs", not just "coffee mugs", or even worse, "click here for pictures". Never use link text like "read more" or "go here" or "download it", "click here", "don't click here", you get the picture - I hope. Don't try to fool the Googlebot with hidden links or duplicate content or irrelevant pages of words like "sex" and "hot girls." The Googlebot doesn't like being played and you will be penalized, one way or another, in the long run. 9. Use a "description" tag for every page Include a tag in your page header to summarize your site. Use a meaningful one or two sentence description, do not keyword spam. Even better, include descriptive text on the site's front page where users can actually read it. This text will appear as the description for your site in Google results. Place more important content higher in the page than less important content in a page, Google does categorize text on a page based on it's position, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms. 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit i Affiliate Marketing - A Guide For Beginners d fine. Then one day I tried to view the page from my Blackberry PDA and I got this strange error message saying my page is illegally formatted. After I split the page into several ones with 80 links each, the pages worked on the PDA also.One of the most outstanding creations of the Internet, is Affiliate Marketing. Only on the Internet, and with Affiliate Marketing, can you get away with selling products which aren't yours, not stressing yourself to deliver the said products, ignoring all the details concerning billing and cash matters, not having a care where after-sales service is concerned - and in spite of all of this, you still collect commissions worth thousands AND yet remain free to roam the streets! Tell me: Where else can these happen?Needless to mention; I know this sound GREAT! Right? Well, let us see what the real picture is where affiliate marketing is concerned...Affiliate Marketing entails income sharing by the owner/creator of a product and you - the affiliate (or product promoter). This partnership creates an enabling environment for the merchant where he only pays for that advertisement/marketing, which produces a sale(s). On the other hand, the affiliate gains in percentage commissions on sales made through traffic that he sends the way of the merchant and on which he doesn't have to bother with afterwards.** How Will You Be Paid? This is particularly dependent upon the type of affiliate program and how it is set up. This comes in two basic types: That which is operated independently by a merchant and that which the merchant employs the services of a third-party service provide to manage.Either way, a software handles all the affiliate's commission tracking. This is achieved by issuing each affiliate with a special unique URL, which he uses to send visitors/traffic to the merchant's sales page. This software program then keeps perfect track of the sales which results through the affiliate link of each and every affiliate marketer and pays the commission accrued on a period-by-period basis through pay Who cares about the Blackberry? Well, if you're reading this and your goal is to get visitors, then your main concern should be not to alienate anyone. Remember, today more than ever, people use different devices and different software to access the web. Every visitor is a potential customer. Every employee at a major US lawfirm and many other corporate people use a Blackberry. Lastly, why would you need that many links on one page anyway? Let's say, for example, that you specialize in promotional products - corporate branded gifts, such as pens, caps, mints and other products (called sometimes 'premiums') imprinted with one's logo. Your name is John Doe, and you decided to name your company JDPromos (not very imaginative, but will do for our examples). You would want to have every item in your catalog as a text link, so every item gets indexed as a link and as a keyword. Also, those who run forums, ezines, blogs, might want to have standard links to their articles, as the software they use might create dynamic links, invisible to certain robots. 5. Give every page a meaningful title. Give every single page on the site a complete and meaningful title. This is also directly from Google's Webmaster Guidelines. See Rule #1. Incidentally, for those who are fascinated by the debates on the death of the Meta Tags, the The "title" tag is supported by every web creation tool out there, and goes in the header of a web page (between the "head" and the "/head" tags). Google offers the 'allintitle' syntax, which lets users search only text that appears in a page title. A lot of people who integrate a Google bar into their websites allow users to get results only by title. There are over 29 million results returned for Untitled Document. Most of us - myself included - copy and paste template pages, out of the convenience of not having to recreate all design elements from scratch. If you do so, do not forget to change the title. Make sure your title is not just a list of keywords and that it is related to the actual content of the page. Google can and will check that, before deciding on your page's 'relevance'. 6. Do not place important text inside images. Google says: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images." It is very tempting to create images with text inside them, for the very simple reason that as designers, we are not limited to the very few font (type) options that basic HTML allows. Also, different browsers tend to display things differently nowadays, so it is much easier to create a text image, which will be shown consistently and not worry about styles, operating systems, etc. 7. Use descriptive "ALT" tags. The "ALT" tag is used as a text alternative (hence the name) for images and image links and was designed so that text browsers (such as Lynx) do not just display a generic 'Image' for every picture link you might have. If all your links say 'Image', how would a potential visitor know what they are? Make sure that the text description is meaningful and accurate. Take our promotional items company as an example. Let's say they have a picture of a tradeshow display, as an example of a service they provide outside the ordinary imprinted mint boxes, calculators and keychains. If the "ALT" tag only says "display", that is what Googlebot will see and index. If the tag says something like "example of a tradeshow display design", that is certainly more useful and more Googlebot friendly. Please note that although the "ALT" tag does count and Google seems to put a high price on this tag, it ranks lower than plain text. 8. Use meaningful descriptions for links With the risk of sounding like a scratched CD, I'll have to say this again: Whether you use picture links or text links, please use meaningful text inside your tags so that Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. In other words, let's pretend again that we are designing that website for that imaginary promotional items company we called JDPromos. If you intend to put a link to a set of sample coffee mugs promos, say something like "link to JDPromos samples of branded coffee mugs", not just "coffee mugs", or even worse, "click here for pictures". Never use link text like "read more" or "go here" or "download it", "click here", "don't click here", you get the picture - I hope. Don't try to fool the Googlebot with hidden links or duplicate content or irrelevant pages of words like "sex" and "hot girls." The Googlebot doesn't like being played and you will be penalized, one way or another, in the long run. 9. Use a "description" tag for every page Include a tag in your page header to summarize your site. Use a meaningful one or two sentence description, do not keyword spam. Even better, include descriptive text on the site's front page where users can actually read it. This text will appear as the description for your site in Google results. Place more important content higher in the page than less important content in a page, Google does categorize text on a page based on it's position, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms. 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit i Photo ID Cards-Who Needs Them Anyway? e not limited to the very few font (type) options that basic HTML allows. Also, different browsers tend to display things differently nowadays, so it is much easier to create a text image, which will be shown consistently and not worry about styles, operating systems, etc.It may shock you to find out how many companies and even government agencies outsource their identification card needs. Is it only due to the price tag of the equipment and software needed to allow an organization to produce ID cards internally? ID cards are dictated by law in some cases and in others they bring an instant appearance of credibility to the carrier. In any case, many organizations are no longer purchasing expensive software and hardware to meet their requirements or wishes.Personally, since I’ve been in the identification and tracking industry for over 10 years, I have worked with many different types of organizations in helping them develop solutions for their registration or simply photo identification needs. One thing that has become clear is the providers of these services have either chosen the high road or the low road. Many of these service providers have become self governing to ensure only individuals that should carry identification proving the person is really a police officer, EMT, or whatever the case may be. While others have chosen a more profitable route of selling ID cards to anyone who is willing to pay the price. You can search the internet for “Fake ID Cards” and you will find a plethora of companies that will provide you a card that will cost as much as $30. When searching for a legitimate solution the range is commonly in the $4 to $8 range. Because of the high level of profit, it’s easy to understand why some would choose that more lucrative path.If you accuse the organizations that have chosen to sell fraudulent identification cards of breaking the law, you have to look at the fine print in their advertisements. Many offer “novelty” identification to anyone willing to pay the price. Or you will find that some may not be based in the same country that their goods are 7. Use descriptive "ALT" tags. The "ALT" tag is used as a text alternative (hence the name) for images and image links and was designed so that text browsers (such as Lynx) do not just display a generic 'Image' for every picture link you might have. If all your links say 'Image', how would a potential visitor know what they are? Make sure that the text description is meaningful and accurate. Take our promotional items company as an example. Let's say they have a picture of a tradeshow display, as an example of a service they provide outside the ordinary imprinted mint boxes, calculators and keychains. If the "ALT" tag only says "display", that is what Googlebot will see and index. If the tag says something like "example of a tradeshow display design", that is certainly more useful and more Googlebot friendly. Please note that although the "ALT" tag does count and Google seems to put a high price on this tag, it ranks lower than plain text. 8. Use meaningful descriptions for links With the risk of sounding like a scratched CD, I'll have to say this again: Whether you use picture links or text links, please use meaningful text inside your tags so that Googlebot can associate that text with that href link. In other words, let's pretend again that we are designing that website for that imaginary promotional items company we called JDPromos. If you intend to put a link to a set of sample coffee mugs promos, say something like "link to JDPromos samples of branded coffee mugs", not just "coffee mugs", or even worse, "click here for pictures". Never use link text like "read more" or "go here" or "download it", "click here", "don't click here", you get the picture - I hope. Don't try to fool the Googlebot with hidden links or duplicate content or irrelevant pages of words like "sex" and "hot girls." The Googlebot doesn't like being played and you will be penalized, one way or another, in the long run. 9. Use a "description" tag for every page Include a tag in your page header to summarize your site. Use a meaningful one or two sentence description, do not keyword spam. Even better, include descriptive text on the site's front page where users can actually read it. This text will appear as the description for your site in Google results. Place more important content higher in the page than less important content in a page, Google does categorize text on a page based on it's position, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms. 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit i Always Sell Consequences n, text at the bottom of a page is considered less important, or 'relevant', to use one of Google's own terms.Customers would rather not lose something than save something. If offered the choice to not lose $100, or to save $100, the customer will choose the not lose option. This is an important marketing understanding. Always communicate the consequences to the customer of going without your product. The fear of loss is a much stronger buying motive than the potential to save.For example, take the storm window manufacturer who claims its double-paned windows "Will save you $2.00 a day in reduced energy consumption." It is more effective, more memorable, and more compelling to say, "You are losing $720 a year with your old single-pane windows. Try ABC Double-panes." The gauge and controls company that says, "New Spillex Controller prevents overfilling, saving you hundreds of dollars in cleanup costs," would generate more inquiries and more sales using, "Overspilling spills your dollar bills on the ground. New Spillex Controller stops your loss."Every benefit for every product can be dollarized. Every benefit for every product can be expressed in the dollars and cents and delivers to the customer. Every benefit can be calculated to show the economic value to the customer. The benefit can be presented as a saving for the customer, or as the cost of going without the solution.It is always more effective to influence the customer by showing the cost of going without, along with any other consequences of not buying your product. Few customers knowingly ignore consequences and then deliberately buy an alternatative product just for a lower price.The super marketer dollarizes the product benefits and then shows the customer what it is costing him per year, per week, per hour to go without the product.Fewer than 5 percent of all marketers ground their product claims on benefits to the customer. Fewer 10. Use short query strings Use URLs with query strings sparingly, if at all possible. Query strings are also called dynamic pages. You can usually recognize dynamic pages by the presence of the "?" character. Keep in mind that the shorter the list of query string parameters, the better. Be aware that not every search engine robot can crawl dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few. 11. Never use the "&id=" parameter If you must use query strings, or dynamic pages, never use the "&id=" parameter as part of the string. I know this might sound ridiculous, as it might be hard or impossible for you not to use the "&id=" parameter, but if you are a programmer and you can change the variable's name, replace "id" with something else. Otherwise, Googlebot will just skip that page. Google says: "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index." 12. Use robots.txt Use robots.txt to show the Googlebot around your site. This ancient and very standard mechanism for directing well-behaved robots like the Googlebot will allow you to specify places where the robot is not welcome, whether for privacy reasons, or for reasons of avoiding Google penalties. You might want to keep the robot away from your cgi-bin directory and other places you maybe don't want available to the entire searching population of the globe. Remember this is a guideline, not a barrier, robots that are not programmed to comply, will disregard. Bottom line, use the robots.txt to guide Googlebot, but not to enforce strict security. Google says: "Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled." 13. Make a sitemap A site map is just a page on your website where you guide your users through the structure of your site. The most basic form of sitemap is a page that lists all of your pages, with a brief description and a link - all text, of course. When you make the sitemap, follow all the rules above and don't forget that the purpose of the sitemap is to guide your human visitor. Google says: "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages." 14. Use the Google Sitemaps project At the time of this writing, the fastest, best and most accurate way to make sure your site is properly crawled and indexed by Googlebot is to participate in the Google Sitemaps project. In a nutshell, you make a sitemap as an XML page and submit it directly to Google. Google then sends Googlebot to index your site. Besides the speedy free submission, you also get a good amount of statistics and the opportunity to fix potential errors in your site. Please note that the XML sitemap needed for the Google Sitemap project is intended specifically for Googlebot, and is different from the sitemap described in the previous Rule, which is intended solely for human users. Also, do not be afraid of XML, Google's sitemap is a very simple text file and they give you all the necessary information and directions at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps Good luck!
HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
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