It’s Monday evening here in Australia and I’ll be flying out in the morning to head home. I was in Melbourne for the weekend to attend Ed Dale’s Coming Home Seminar.

The flight is more than 24 hours each way, so I brought some of my new gadgets with me on the trip. My Macbook Pro (which was very popular here for some reason ), my new Droid, and the Aiptek ActionHD handheld video camera. I figured a week with my devices would give me a chance to become good and familiar with them.

The event was absolutely incredible, both in content and in connections. As always, Ed Dale was a fabulous (and entertaining) host.

Sessions included talks on outsourcing, content development, search engine marketing, business structure, blogging, monetization strategies, offline marketing and much more. One of my personal favorites was the Hot Seat sessions where a hand-picked panel did live site reviews on the spot…

I joined the panel for the blogging and social media session alongside Darren Rowse, Yaro Starak, James Schramko and Ed Dale. We discussed the concept behind and the need for a “Third Tribe” as well as our thoughts on the history and evolution of Social Media.

I also joined the 3 Hot Seat sessions to participate in the site reviews, which I thought was super-productive and full of brilliant insights. It was a real pleasure to work alongside some of the top brains in the industry.

Speaking of brains, Leslie Rohde also made the trip over for this event.

Leslie spoke on Saturday and in addition to his Free Traffic strategies, he talked about mindset and processes. Later that evening we had a chance to talk, and he walked me through some very simple solutions to issues I’ve been struggling with in my business for awhile now.

The timing couldn’t have been better. I spent the better part of my 24 hour trip over working on those very issues, and mapping out potential solutions. I made excellent progress on it, but still didn’t have those few missing pieces to make it all work like it should. Ironically, it took my own advice coming from someone else (Leslie) to pull it all together.

All said and done, the weekend was a huge success. That one (major) breakthrough will undoubtedly lead me into the best and biggest turning point in my life and business yet. I already have things in motion, and will be flying home with a major sense of accomplishment – and relief.

Of course, there was more to the event than work. I also got to hang out with Jen (@PPCmom) and Leigh (@HireMyMum), both Elite Members at SSWT. We all stayed in the beautiful Crown Tower & Casino in Melbourne, and had a fabulous time!

It’s nice to have friends all over the world. Even better when you get to sit down and have a few meals together.

Definitely a highlight of my trip!

Ed devoted an entire session at the Coming Home Seminar to video editing with iMovie. I was especially interested in this session as that’s the reason I bought a Macbook Pro recently – for mobile video editing.

I have a way to go to get to Ed’s expert level on iMovie. I have just finally figured out how to copy & paste on the Mac! -lol But I did find a great magazine in one of the local shops: The Ultimate Mac Guide (left). It’s only available in Australia & New Zealand so that was a super lucky find before I headed home! It’s chock full of very detailed tutorials. I’ll give you a video walk-through of it when I get home.

Until then, keep working towards your goals and stay focused! I have lots to share when I return, and also look forward to getting back to our usual topics and Q&A sessions!

Best,

p.s. I have more pictures and video to share. I still have to download them and see what I ended up with. I’ll probably add them to Facebook to make it easy.

Find events in your area! Go to www.GeekTrax.com

Every month thousands of people are searching online to ask: How Can I Promote My Website For Free?

More often than not these people have an ecommerce type website, or a company replicated website they were given by an online business they signed up with.

Some are advised to buy expensive online advertising spots such as banner ads or pop-up ads, place free online classified ads, or pay big bucks to a search engine marketing company. None of these options are going to get you anywhere fast…

(That’s actually very 90’s advice!)

Earlier this week I received a similar question in my Inbox:

Hi Lynn,

I just joined an online business and wanted your advice on what would be my best choices for advertising it. It is an online store that has all brand name groceries and products that saves us all money, time and gas, 30% to over 50% on all of these products over Wal-mart prices. The website is http://www.myharvestamerica.com/arizona

Thanks,
Jim Rusk

My response to Jim:
“The best thing to do is create a blog or website that appeals to your target market, and then use your store link as the call-to-action within the content. That will allow you to get search engine rankings and traffic free, instead of paying for ads.”

When you have a company replicated website like this it is usually through a “business opportunity”, or a network marketing (MLM) company. Each website is identical, and is actually very similar to an affiliate link.

These types of links do not get indexed in the major search engines.

Example:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=+site%3Amyharvestamerica.com+arizona

How Can I Promote My Website For Free?

The absolute best way to promote your website for free online is to get good rankings in the major search engines. Since that is not possible with this type of website (or link), you’ll need to consider other options.

As I mentioned in my reply to Jim, you can set up your own blog or website and bypass that issue. Your first objective is to consider your target market (your ideal visitor) and brainstorm what kind of content would appeal to that market.

On that blog or website you create, you’ll write what is called SEO Content. This will make it easy for your buyers to find you online through the major search engines (like Google), and then you’ll have the opportunity to tell them about your website and whatever deals you offer there.

Jim’s website sells retail products at discounted prices, including brand name groceries, with free shipping directly to your front door. So Jim’s first step would be keyword research, to determine how is target market is searching for this type of service online.

I use http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

A quick search shows that nobody is really searching for individual products, like say – windex. The closest you can get is “windex coupons” which gets around 31 searches a day – but Jim doesn’t offer product coupons.

Instead, he should start with the base keyword “shopping” and target keywords like: online shopping, walmart online shopping, online grocery shopping, online discount shopping, online outlet shopping, buy groceries online, etc.

The goal is to create an extensive keyword list of all the things people are searching for you in your market, and then write content that specifically appeals to them. Optimize your pages or blog posts to rank well in the major search engines, and end your piece by showing them your website as the solution.

This is the absolute best way to promote a website or link for free online. Some people think that “SEO” (search engine optimization or search engine marketing) is difficult – but it’s not. It’s a simple matter of researching keywords, writing content that is optimized for those keywords, and getting links to that content. That’s it.

It’s a lot more effective than any type of free online advertising, such as classified ads, or even expensive banner ads or other online advertising options. And it’s free.

The short answer: Jim should create a blog all about online shopping. The benefits, the resources, reviews and comparisons, etc. This will allow him to reach his target market, engage in discussions with them through the comments, and become an authority in the niche.

The same would be true for a Tupperware or Avon rep, or any other merchant representative with a company website. The Avon rep might focus on anti-aging articles and solutions, the Tupperware rep on simple cooking tips or potluck parties.

The goal is to figure out what your target market is most interested in, and deliver exactly that – along with the solutions or resources they’ll need.

Best,

p.s. If you’re worried about the cost of creating your own blog or website, don’t be! You can set one up for less than $10. You’ll need a domain name and a hosting account. I use HostGator for web hosting, and if you use the coupon code “wordpress” you’ll get the first month for only a penny.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below

This weekend, my mother-in-law asked me to enter a life of crime.

Not in the real world, of course – she’d like the father of her grandkids to remain jail-free. No, instead she invited me to play that Mafia game that’s so popular on Facebook.

Not interested in the game, I politely declined. But when my mother-in-law, who has just joined Facebook, becomes part of an online trend, that’s a sure sign that it’s hitting critical mass in the population at large.

Facebook is quickly becoming the immovable object that will soon butt heads with Google’s irresistible force.

Strength In Overwhelming Numbers

Facebook claims that its subscriber base over age 35 doubled in size between February and April of 2009 – just sixty days. That’s not only impressive for a site as huge as Facebook already is, but it means that your mother-in-law is likely on Facebook just like mine, and one of them is probably about to order a Mafia hit on the other.

That growing audience means traffic to any website that gets a link on Facebook. How much traffic? The analysts at Hitwise claim that celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton now gets more traffic from Facebook than from Google – more than 7 million pageviews from Facebook alone. If that trend increases, then the current wisdom about web traffic is about to get turned on its ear.

How Facebook Kills SEO

Traditional search engine marketing seeks to draw the attention of people searching for particular terms in Google, Yahoo, or other search engines. And that’s going to continue to be useful for a long time.

But the rise of Facebook creates a growing segment of the web that’s completely invisible to search engines – most of which, Facebook blocks – and can be seen only by logged-in Facebook users. So as Facebook becomes ever larger, and keeps more users inside its walled garden, your web site will need to appear in Facebook’s feeds and searches or you will miss out on an important source of web traffic.

What’s the best way to keep your links in front of Facebook users? The ever-more-important linkbait strategy.

How Linkbait Gains Us the Favor of Our New Facebook Overlords

Regular readers of this and related sites are already familiar with the linkbait strategy, which is this: create content that multiple outside sources will link to because it’s funny, controversial, interesting, or otherwise compelling.

In other words, generate great content.

Now, once you’ve got your compelling content posted – or ideally, even before you do – you should have some way of injecting that content into the Facebook sphere. Perhaps you’ve built up a large network already, for yourself or your site. Perhaps you’ve got a widget on your page that allows readers to post your link directly on Facebook. Or maybe you just ask a few friends to post the links on their own, and hope it takes off from there. Your tactics may evolve over time, but the most important part is that you’ve got to write something people want to link to – the essence of the linkbait strategy.

The Hits Just Keep on Coming (We Hope)

So… as linkbait becomes more important for Facebook (and, let’s not kid ourselves, Twitter, too), what does this mean for future traffic trends?

It means that, more than ever, you’re going to have to continue to generate timely, quality, compelling content that attracts Facebook links as well as non-Facebook links. And once Facebook users get to your page, you’d better have a plan for how you’re going to keep them on your site, and keep them coming back later.

Why is that? In part, because Facebook links are invisible to Google – and therefore don’t contribute to your PageRank. Facebook links make no lasting direct contribution to your site’s SEO, and as Facebook drives an ever-larger percentage of traffic to your site, that means quality content will overshadow all other SEO techniques.

Facebook wants to be the Google killer… don’t let it kill your site, too! Start planning today to get Facebook users to your site and keep them coming back for more.

About the Author: Michael Alex Wasylik is a Florida lawyer with the firm of Ricardo, Wasylik & Kaniuk PL. He blogs at the Florida Foreclosure Fraud Weblog.

Google Adwords is still the undisputed leader in pay-per-click advertising and traffic generation systems on the Internet today. Use it well and you can get a lot of highly targeted traffic to your websites and blogs. Knowing the basic mechanics of how Google Adwords operate is not enough. You also need to know proven strategies and tactics for a successful PPC campaign such as writing compelling ad copies, developing ad groups and biding for the right keywords.

No matter what niche you’re in or what type of audience you are trying to attract, there are some specific guidelines to follow when using Google AdWords. Here are some important tips for creating a Google Adwords campaign that gets results:

1. Set-up your account with the Adword’s Wizard. A beginner will find it easy to set-up a google adwords account using the wizard. The wizard will show you the basics of all your account management tools.

2. Produce effective ads. Each component of your ad must follow a particular formula for it to be effective: A keyword or keyphrase must be used in the headline. State a benefit by the second line. Mention special promotions or product features in the third line. Finally, the fourth line must contain a URL link back to your landing page or website. This proven formula is taught by best-selling adWords strategy books; such as Perry Marshall’s “The Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords” and Peter Kent’s “Pay per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies”.

3. Use keywords appropriate for your niche. The Google Keyword Selection tool gives users the power to create lists of keywords and keyphrases that are relevant to your niche. This is a very powerful research tool. I highly recommend that you use this in all of your campaigns.

4. Find out how to do keyword matching. You can conduct broad matches, phrase matches and exact matches inside Google’s keyword selection tool for your collection of keywords. This allows you to get additional relevant keywords for your campaigns. There is also a feature tied with Adwords called negative match. Negative match allows you to specify words that when entered by someone searching google, will not result in your ad running in the person’s web browser.

5. Establish your budget. Google allows adwords users to limit their spending by specifying their budget. Google will automatically deduct balance from your account up to your specified daily budget. Work with a small budget initially and increase it as you gather more data about your campaign. You need to find out which keywords actually lead to a sale and the exact cost you incur for each lead. Once you have enough data, you can then confidently increase your budget.

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Questions are frequently asked with regards to how social media and search engine rankings can be used together. In fact, I wrote an article on this subject a while back, in which I asked a few search engine marketing experts their thoughts about where social media fits into the SEO equation.

The general consensus seemed to be that social media is a good channel for people to discover your content and link to it on their blogs and sites. But what about just getting your Twitter page ranked on Google? Some think that social media profiles could take the place of corporate websites. If this is the case, you would certainly want your profile to rank well.

An article from Source Square looks specifically at SEO for the Twitter page. The author of this article details the five steps outlined here:

1. Use search engine-friendly keywords in your Twitter name.

2. Use reader-friendly keywords in your Twitter name.

3. Use keywords in your "more info" URL

4. Flood your one line bio with keywords (while maintaining natural readability)

5. Tweet quality contents, and build lots of links

In a recent interview with WebProNews, Dana Todd of Newsforce, who is a board member of SEMPO (the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), talked about how social media frequently accounts for up to half of the top ten search results on Google for any given query. Perhaps more attention should be paid to the optimization of social media profiles.

More WebProNews Videos

It stands to reason that similar tactics to those listed above could be applied to Facebook pages as well (or other social networks). It’s all basically just good old fashioned SEO practice. Keywords, quality content, and links. You probably think about this for your website, but it is often overlooked on social media profiles.

Google’s search options were designed to allow users to refine their searches. That means users will use these to weed out irrelevant results and better find what they’re looking for.

It also means that there is a whole new set of guidelines that search engine marketers will need to think about…or does it? Perhaps it’s just the same guidelines, only emphasized to the user more now, thereby making it more important than ever for marketers and web site owners to consider them. How do you intend to handle your SEO efforts with the new changes? Tell us about it.

I asked a few search engine marketing experts if they think the options will affect SEO. Here are a few responses I got:

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea says: "Web Options have the potential to impact SEO by offering a much wider range of ways to find information. Whether or not they will may have to do with whether or not searchers will take the time to click on the ’show options’ link, and explore the many new ways that they can find what they may be looking for."

Lee Odden of Top Rank Online Marketing says: "Yes! But it doesn’t change the SEO advice we give: fresh content, digital asset SEO…"

"From what I am seeing, the ’search engine optimization’ industry is actually turning back around to what it used to be: good old fashioned website marketing," says WebProNews Blog Partner Bill Hartzer, commenting on an SEOmoz post.

"It’s not only ‘optimizing a website’ and ‘getting links.’ SEO is involving more nowadays: you have to get your site in front of real people and real traffic," he continues. "It’s also about using social media marketing techniques, as well. If you’re successful in social media you’ll be successful in search. If you can get lots of real people to a site then you’ll be successful in SEO."

In other words, it’s all about optimizing for people. That’s all the search engines have ever wanted, and that’s all the searchers have ever wanted out of content – to be able to find what they’re looking for. It’s easier said than done, but all you have to do is help them find you.

So considering that, why not take a few moments to examine just what these new search options are that are available to users. Let’s think about what it would take to have your site show up for each option.

Videos

Obviously, ranking for searchers using the video option is going to require the use of video. Though online video adoption has certainly grown substantially in the last year or two, many are still quick to doubt its importance despite the search engine ranking implications that have been discussed in the past. To me, it looks like it just got even more important, given that sorting by videos is the top option in Google’s new search options (just below "all results" – the default option).

Based on several test queries, it looks like it’s going to comedown to relevant keyword use with videos. Whether that be with videos on your own site, YouTube, or other locations. Doing video interviews with other content providers will likely work in your favor here as well.

Within the Videos option, you have the sub-option to see videos of all durations, short ones, medium-length ones, or long ones. This tells me you will probably do well to produce videos with a variety of different lengths.

Forums

The next option is to sort by forums, and this appears to be another obvious one. Participate in forums. It just so happens that I

discussed online forum participation about a week ago. To me, it’s just part of the overall social media marketing package. Forums might as well be social networks, whether they are called so or not. Now that users can easily search Google by forum results, it makes more sense than ever to participate and gives you a better chance of promotion.

Just like any other form of online marketing, ethics should always be considered. It’s not going to make you look good if you just go into a forum and spam it. It’s about participation. Discussing topics related to your business should provide the natural flow of keywords, and potentially help you rank well in this section.

Reviews

In my test searches, "Reviews" results seem to come from pages that indicate that they are just that – reviews. This leads me to believe that you want to get your product reviewed as often as possible, or conduct reviews of other products on your site in order to show up in these results. It also tells me that you want reviews to be clearly marked as such. This tells Google that they are in fact reviews. On a sidenote, this might be a very important option to monitor from the online reputation management standpoint. If people are out there reviewing your product, this is a good place to see those reviews.

Sort them by date, and you will be able to see them from the most current, which will help you keep up with new ones. Just hope that whoever is reviewing your product is clearly marking their reviews as reviews. Pages in these results tend to say the word "review" on the page or in the title tag.

Sorting Options

Google gives users the option to see results from the past 24 hours, the past week or the past year, in addition to anytime. They also give you the option to sort by relevance or by date – a long overdue option if you ask me, and one that has been available on Google News for quite some time.

I would say that these sorting options indicate that frequent content and updates are in order if you want your content to appear here. How else are you going to rank for time-sensitive results?

Images from the Page

Users have the option to have their results show images from the page right on the SERP. This option (at least in some cases) brings up different results than if the option is not enabled. I’m going to have to make an educated guess and say that providing plenty of relevant and optimized images will help your cause when optimizing for this search option.

More Text

Under the "Images from the Page" option is the "More Text" option, which basically just provides the same results as a regular search, but includes longer snippets. I think this is just going to comedown to classic use of keywords and just good-old-fashioned good content, because just like any other snippets, keywords are bolded.

If there are more keywords within a longer snippet, that means there will be more bolded words, which could make the result stand out, but if that good-old-fashioned content isn’t surrounding those keywords, they will be worthless because now the user will have more to read before they click through to your site. If it’s not relevant to what they’re looking for, they have a better means of realizing it before the click.

Standard Results

 

More Text

Related Searches

As with the sort-by options, I’d say frequent content again is key again here. Optimize for items that are related to other topics you rank for. Basically just optimize for a broad spectrum of topics related to what you do while staying relevant (btw, being deceptive will hurt you in the long run, ranking or no ranking).

Wonder Wheel

Similar to the related searches option, the Wonder Wheel gives the user a way to navigate through related searches in a more visual way. It’s a graphical representation of related search terms, though they are not always the same as the ones found in "related searches." From an optimization standpoint though, I would say the same tactics would apply here.

Timeline

The Timeline groups results by dates referred to on actual pages. What this says to me is: include dates in your content when relevant. Another good thing about this is that it gives you the opportunity to get older content viewed, and in its right context. If users are using the timeline and select older dates, they’re most likely looking for content from that period.

This reflects better on your site than if your older content was showing up in a regular web search, where a user might be confused into thinking the content is more current than it really is, which could ultimately have a negative impact on your reputation depending on how time sensitive the data is.

Wrapping Up

To be clear, these are just theories. To the best of my knowledge, there is no concrete answer for how to get ranked in any of these sections. We are after all talking about ranking on Google. I feel like these strategies will only increase your chances of getting found with each option though. It comes down to providing what people are looking for. Search options from Google should be applauded and embraced, because as a content provider and/or a business, you also have more options with regards to which Google results your content will be found in.

Also, keep in mind that paid listings still appear in the results for these options. The same paid listings appear regardless of which option is selected however. And don’t forget that users have the ability to use multiple options at the same time. For example, reviews can be listed from most recent to oldest.

Do you feel that search options will help or hurt your chances of potential customers finding your listings? Do you like the features or do they irritate you? Let us know either way.

Appelounge is the best SEO Consultancy ,website development and design company in India providing service worldwide clients with a wide range of internet marketing services like Search engine optimization (SEO), website optimization, Search engine marketing, email marketing, SEO content writing, SEO blog writing and PPC campaign services.

The current strategies of internet is quite different and it varying company to company type. For such actions, search engine optimization plays a major role. SEO is not more  but it is  practice of obtaining search engine ranking by performing keyword research, editing the HTML, ASP, PHP codes to project such keywords and building relationship with other websites to promote your business, it increase your website ranking.

In the process of search engine optimization mostly marketing steps and strategies invoke rather than programming, we try to maximum optimize business. Our SEO deeply analysis business strategies market review and fluctuations.The algorithms of search engines are updated time to time along with Google, Yahoo and MSN movements of crawlers or spiders.

By keeping these techniques in mind, I think in Applelounge there  are   some professionals to just observe the changes in search engine trends. I think Applelounge well know about of search engines and work accordingly. For every business organization the online visibility is vital. I think, website design by  Applelounge is  excellent with respect to SEO efforts, this result  to boost up the site website visibility but also increase website traffic.

Social Media Optimization make proper use of social media or media through which people communicate and exchange as means of promoting business products and here the reason why such communication means are used is basically popularity and the ability of such means through their inherent features to build a direct rapport with customer. Clients can send feedback which can be incorporated into the business chain for improvisations ad enhancements on exiting product and service offerings.

Internet is the tool through social media marketing works. In other words it uses various other   social media available in the internet as promotional tools. It involves methods such as Search Engine Marketing and Viral Marketing.
Search engine Marketing focus on promotion business by receiving popularity through high search engine rankings, through keyword\ keyphrases rich content, link popularity and submission to web directories, while viral marketing seeks to gain high traffic or attention from internet users through media such as Blogs, Website Content, press releases, Forum posting and etc.

The goal of both methods is to use the power of the internet to gain more customers to a business. Offering them with unique content through various means and ensuring that a siteturns up in relevant searches is what they seek to do to achieve their objective of building a customer base.