Marketing strategies and the best business practices always go hand in hand. Companies come up with the best strategies in order to attract more clients to the services or products they offer. The internet is the best marketing tool that is offered to businesses and Google is the number one search engine out there today.  More than 65% of all web traffic goes through yahoo, msn and Google search engines.  The importance of this information is that the average person only spends 2-3 minutes in a search when they want information fast. Usually while conducting a search, only the top 3 links of that search result are ever visited.

Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO is the way to get the search engines to do the work for you. These tips will allow you to utilize SEO techniques to help your company get higher rankings on the search engines within a month.  Many techniques are free of charge, but we will go over some that have a minimal charge to boost your traffic to your site.

The SEO breakdown:  We will use the example of a shoe store. You sell all types, orthopedic, designer and mass production shoes. Your goal is to be at the top of all of the search engine lists that we have mentioned above.

1. Do the search – First perform a search on what it is you do. Check out the competition. Look through their page and see if they really offer what it claims. Some sites are only on the internet for advertising dollars.
2. Fill your domain name, Title Page, Meta tags, and content with the keywords that are pertinent to you and what you have to offer. These are the keywords that someone will use to find you on the internet. The keywords are searched for, and the search engines like Google will crawl for these words and find your site.
3. Designing your own page – Make sure the home page of your site is all about the shoes, create a cascading effect for each item such as orthopedic, designer etc. this way you are allowing yourself the room on the new page to add more detail about orthopedic shoes that you offer, this way you will create another set of keyword rich text for each item.
4. Repetition- repeat your keywords throughout the text, normally a 2% density should suffice here. Try to use your keywords in different phrases such as “cheap orthopedic shoes” or “the best orthopedic shoes” and remember to use these phrases in title tags and Meta tags for the best results. The crawlers will be able to then see what the content of your site is.
5. Submit your domain – You should submit your domain to all of the popular search engines as soon as possible, these search engines can take a couple weeks to register you so timing is the key. Get it submitted as soon as possible.
6. Make your website use friendly as soon as you can. Make sure you have your links up and your back links up, it takes time to do this and regular updates are necessary. Make it functional and useable for your clients to enjoy right away.

Many people with blogging websites actually have no clue as to how they can promote their site properly. In many cases they do not even write the proper content or “on site” promotions in their blogs. If an error is made in the very beginning there is not even a reason to continue because it will be a waste of your time. When writing your blog it is important to use the keywords that will properly attract the audience you’re looking for. This is accomplished by using free tools that are used to perform keyword research for you.

There are rules to keep in mind when trying to optimize your content and here are a few you will want to keep in the back of your mind.

1. Don’t overuse your keywords – The density of your article should range between only 2 and 3 percent. People running the search engines can spot the over usage very easily, the site with the most keywords is not always the winner. Your articles must make sense at the same time.
2. Use your keyword in the beginning - keep your keyword close to the beginning of your article, at least one time in the first paragraph. If your title is Purebred dogs, make sure your using those exact words in the beginning of your articles.
3. Don’t ruin your post with keywords – It is easy to want to fill your whole article with the same keywords over and over but this will make it undesirable to read and you will lose the quality of your post. Make sure you are placing keywords in a manner that is pleasing to the eye and simple to read.
4. Stay focused – Keep the content information rich and use your keyword selectively. This is important and you should always make sure that your post is not keyword overflow, just keyword rich. If you want to be placed high in the search engines you can not forget this rule, a high rank is important and keyword usage is the make or break tool.

A fellow named John Markoff wrote a piece for the “New York Times” in 2006 that stirred up quite a heated discussion, one that continues to this day. He proposed, early in the scheme of things but certainly not for the first time, that the term “Web 3.0″ be used to describe the Internet’s next evolutionary step, which he predicted would be marked by an outpouring of “intelligent applications.” Not to sound like a 10-year-old on a road trip, but, “Are we there yet?”

No, we’re not, but don’t get hung up on the number scheme — if you did, you’d have to peg the forward progress at about Web 2.6 or so — because the fact is that evolution, of any kind, is not that precise or predictable. Evolution is gradual for the most part, but “punctuated,” as paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould famously observed, by occasional periods of rapid change. In the case at hand, there was a flurry of advances that have now leveled off somewhat, but one key “enabling technology” is the still-emerging Semantic Web.

What’s in a name (or number)?

Clearly, the Web is moving into a new era, one featuring more of those “intelligent apps” that will be empowered and advanced by the addition of more semantics to the raw data. Does this evolutionary advance, still in the works, really qualify the Web to ratchet itself up to 3.0? In fact, what does “Web 2.0″ even mean? Why did no one call the first iteration of information superhighway “version 1″? As straightforwardly as possible, here is a reasonable description of what version numbers appended to “Web” really stand for:

Web 1.0: In the beginning (sounds like the start of another famous tale) there was AOL, Geocities and Hotmail. The early days were all about read-only content, static HTML websites and navigating around from “link listers” like Yahoo.

Web 2.0: As technologies matured — and people did, too — user-generated content and “read-write” interactivity arrived on the scene. No longer were people mere consumers. Ordinary (non-IT-industry) folks began contributing their energy, information and ideas via blogs and such sites as Flickr, YouTube, Digg and the “social networking space.” The line between consumers and content publishers grew increasingly blurred as Web 2.0 inched its way toward the next revision number.

Web 3.0: If implemented in a way consistent with the most publicized dreams and visions (“plans and strategies,” if you prefer), Web 3.0 will be the Semantic Web. Clarity and usefulness would result from attaching meaning to data, leading to personalization à la iGoogle, intelligent search as never before imagined and “behavioral advertising” that is tailored to individual consumers.

Same data, different lens

Certainly, the term “Web 2.0,” which never achieved any sort of critical mass outside the tech-savvy demographic, has at least come to have, over time, a stable definition. We can safely call it a focus on interactivity and interoperability, between and among applications as well as people, using custom Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), widgets, and even such social actions as tagging. When “Web 2.0″ was first entering the “digital lexicon,” many people thought it was meaningless and, in fact, ranted and railed against its use.

Today, “Web 2.0″ is an industry standard term, if not a popularly understood one, and its history suggests that “Web 3.0″ at least has a good shot at adoption — as a word, anyway. As a technology, environment, tool or doorway to “virtual reality,” Web 3.0 will thrive to the extent that our technology and content get smarter and smarter, individually and jointly. Adding meaning to data with the Semantic Web and microformats, and adding smarts to applications, means better help for people by way of natural language searches, semantic searches, “recommendation agents,” decision-making wizards and so on.

It’s a journey, not a destination

Except for the fact that people like to label things, we probably wouldn’t be bothering with version numbers on what is essentially a graphical layer of the Internet. It’s always going to be evolving, but if we have to call it something at least “Web 3.0″ is less confusing (and intimidating) than “Semantic Web” to most folks. Whatever it’s called, there will be people that know a lot about how it works and where it’s going, and others that range from knowing a little to knowing nothing at all. ‘Twas ever thus, as they say.

Web 2.0 (2.6?) and the first moves toward the Semantic Web are steering the World Wide Web toward a more collaborative way of sharing knowledge, with the current case of Gouldian “punctuated equilibrium” being the Web’s new social aspect. Social networking has had broad social impacts far beyond the monitors, keyboards and browsers. The Semantic Web may lead the Web closer to its ultimate destination of machine-human “understanding,” and enhanced interaction. Web evolution continues without any central organizing authority, plan or deadline, which is a good thing. At whatever point we stop and say, “We’re at 3.0 now,” it will still be just a milestone along the way, since Web evolution, punctuated or not, will forever be a journey, not a destination.

It never ceases to amaze me, how people fall for the cheap advertising offered in forums and on various spammy-domains, so what I am going to write is based not only on mine, but also on experience of my friends and partners. The common misconception is that paying $5 for 10,000 will result in great sales, your $5 will pay out thanks to Adsense clicks, CJ sales and other conversions. However, this type of traffic will never convert and this is why:

*** PTC advertising (Paid to Click, or paid to surf). This is often advertised as the “best” traffic solution since there will be real people surfing your website and viewing your content.  These guys and girls are paid to visit your website and stay there for a minimum of 30 seconds. The pay off depend of the network dealing with this type of traffic accumulation but the average payout is 0.01 USD. So we do a little math, with 0.01 USD per 30 seconds, we are paid 1,2 USD in an hour.  Assuming we won’t be able to do the surfing non-stop and we have pauses checking the emails, loading the website, and so on — we come down to an average rate of 1$ per hour. That’s like 7-10 times LESS than a regular low paying job of any type, even serving cheeseburgers in MacDonnald’s will bring you 8 times more green.

So we obviously deal with people who are more likely to be poor, than rich. Or they are more likely to be from less-developed countries, where $1 per hour would be a high payout. Either way, now think: would this type of traffic actually BUY your product? They are paid $1 per hour, they need to sit by the computer the entire working day just to make $7-$8, will they really spend $50, buying your anti-virus program, ordering your T-Shirts or subscribing to your premium, over-priced email marketing solution? Of course they never will. The only thing PTC traffic can do is click on Adsense ads, and yet again in only one condition, if the ads happen to be related to “Make money online” opportunities, but here comes a surprise, PTC traffic is against Adsense Policies and whoever tells you otherwise, simply leads you astray or didn’t do his homework.

Advertising your site in PTC program  is against Google Adsense Terms. Period.

If you came up with this groundbreaking idea of paying a few bucks that will convert to hundreds of dollars — you are at high risk of losing your account. So many people tried it before, the clock didn’t tick long.

*** Traffic from Expired Domains. While this is somewhat better than all the other sources, and apparently is Adsense safe, people close the window before the page even had a chance to load, this is what happens when you looked for a particular domain, realized you landed on the wrong page and you close the window. Not all expired domain traffic are of a high quality though, some simply redirect traffic from PTC, which bypasses the Adsense barrier, but results in less than 0.0001% response rate. Buying traffic from expired domains will be much more expensive, but often has no guarantees or desired effect.

*** Pop ups and Pop unders. Buying the cheapest type of traffic, that is popups, popunders, and the likes is a bad idea either. You can’t have adsense inside a newly generated window — so this type of traffic won’t be useful for monetizing PPC programs. Most people close the popup window, or a popunder, as soon as they notice it, without even looking inside because they KNOW it’s an annoying advert. The only thing this type of traffic can do it bring your Alexa down, but once again, it takes years of steady traffic to achieve the desired Alexa effect so you will need to purchase so many thousands of hits every month to keep the Alexa bar happy and the question is — won’t you find a better use for your hard cash?

*** iFrame Traffic method. This is the least legitimate, black-hat method used by people who want to sell advertising space, of the domain itself, based on traffic rate. Unlike the other methods listed above, in the iFrame case, the person never gets to see the site, they browse something else and small, 1 pixel frame is loaded with your website URl, making your server think that someone paid a visit. If you are buying a domain with high traffic or paying for advertising on a site with millions of hits, always ask to see the full stats and get a general idea of visit length, traffic source and how steady was this traffic over the time.

*** Bot traffic. Similar to iFrame traffic, no human eyes get to see your website, bots are directed to visit your website which gets you nothing beside Awstats hits, and it\s up to you how maliciously you are going to use these stats further.

Needless to add that the 2 last methods mentioned here can result in penalties from Search Engines, not to mention PPC advertising agencies such as Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, Bidvertiser, and others. This post was not meant to crash anyone’s business and many businessmen who run traffic-generating websites may object and say I was wrong. I don’t think I am nor I say that buying traffic is bad, it just doesn’t lead you anywhere.

SEO is a powerful tool to increase brand visibility and presence on the web. As the Internet is now a primary source of information and goods, it only makes sense to be as visible as possible in order to attract and meet the needs of your customers. There are many ways to approach SEO efforts, and it can be difficult for businesses just starting out. Luckily, there are many resources available to assist in SEO efforts, especially for small businesses. In this week’s top five we’re providing some tips for effective SEO marketing.

1. Set a Goal

Search engine optimization efforts will not go far without a specific goal in mind. Before you dive head-first into these efforts, make a plan for what you want to accomplish. Whether it’s to increase the number of views each week, increase your page rank, expand your customer base or have a story picked up by a certain number of outlets, having a goal will help you plan better, and also provide something to compare and measure your results with.

2. Add a Blog

Research has shown that a static Web site will get you nowhere. A blog is a way to change that. Having a blog as your main SEO priority can help drive traffic to your site. A blog also adds credibility to your company, shows customers that you’re Web savvy, and can help your company stay on top of current trends. Make sure the blog has a purpose and is providing content that will attract readers from the beginning. This will add to the credibility of your company’s site. It’s also important that the blog is relevant to your business, and that it can continue long-term. Blogging is a commitment, but is also a worthwhile investment.

3. Produce Valuable Content

There is an increasing trend for companies to form with the intention of making money simply through advertising and second-rate content. While these companies do provide keyword-rich content, they do it for all of the wrong reasons. Search engines respond to the number of times a term is repeated on a site, as well as the number of other sites that are linking back to it. Inbound links from these sites are what really drives up page rankings, and what many SEO link builders focus on the most. Providing interesting and valuable content that will stand out from the fake sites is surprisingly easy to do. Google offers this insight for webmasters:

“The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it. Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors? “

4. Use Free Resources

The Internet provides a number of resources and tools for analytics and web marketing, and many of them are free. Installing tools such as Google’s Analytics can help you track traffic, and also give reports of where visitors are coming from, how often they visit, and keyword searches that bring them there. Additionally, Twitter has long been a tool for Web marketing and SEO efforts, because of the number of people one can reach at just the click of a button. You can get a sense of your current status by typing “link:yourwebaddresshere” into Google; the results will show what sites are currently linking to your site, and you may discover some sites and users you were previously unaware of. Analyzing the results can help to target certain audiences and build a base for developing future tactics and content.

5. Establish Relationships

Through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others, you can create relationships with similar companies in your field, influential journalists and public relations professionals, and people who are interested in your company. Using these relationships, you can gain a community of people who are willing to distribute links to your site or even link back to your site from their site. Participating in discussions and linking to others’ content as well is another way to showcase your content without violating the so-called “rules” for SEO marketing. This way, you’ll have links from credible, influential Web sites that will add valuable traffic to your site.

If you try to think for a moment, how many blogs are out there, you probably won’t be able to ever count them all. There are countless millions, and new ones are popping out every day. Existing static sites switch to Wordpress platform, and turn wordpress to a powerful CMS, but… if we count out all the ultra popular magazines and the designers portfolios, we will have an enormous amount of blogs that are “just” blogs. People write about what they like, what they are passionate about and what is in the news, how come we never get to hear about these blogs and beside the 20-50 most popular ones we never got to hear about the rest?

The answer is simple, vast majority of bloggers – FAIL. They fail as a blogger, as an online marketer, as a not branded person and as a writer. You don’t need to have a degree to be a good blogger, nor you need not to be an experienced blogger to get started. Just make sure you avoid the basic mistakes.

1. Not Writing for Audience

One of the biggest problems with writing is that people  are bad writers (nothing to blog about, poor grammar or spelling, etc). Always remember that you are not writing  a diary, you are making a speech for readers. You teach, you enlighten, you post your opinion, you point out at important points, you recommend, you encourage / discourage… You don’t just ramble about everything you see only because you have no one else to share it with, so you share all your frustration with your blog.

Always ask yourself, if your readers had to pay to read your blog, would it be worth their while? You are familiar with the situation when people go to a movie theater, and leave disappointed, because the movie was so well advertised and turned out to be a total crap, so leaving frustrated everybody are cursing the film and regret wasting $10 and 2 hours. You definitely don’t want this to be your case!

2. Writing for Search Engines / Google Adsense

Another mistake unfortunately most bloggers do. While once again, you should first and foremost write for audience and avoid being boring, you should also avoid entertaining the Search engines by flooding your post with the “right” keywords. Worst of all, we often see bloggers filling in their categories with free articles,. It could be nice for a start — you copy and paste a few free articles, place a few Google Adsense slots — there you go, we have a money making blog. You will be making some pennies from clicks, but you will never gain readers. Free articles, are often intentionally written for SE (that’s the point!), and are often very boring to read. They are never enlightening, they never really give a reader a reason to come back. Write from the heart, write yourself or outsource authors, maximum you can avail of the articles creation software, but don’t be afraid that the main keyword is not repeated enough times in the context!

3.  Poor Visual Appeal

When talking about visual appeal, I mean the overall experience of the reader, which is:

• Design of the blog – wordpress theme you use, colors, structure.
• Illustrations in the post.
• Icons, easy navigation, thumbnails.
• Format of the post, readability of the font, minimal use of interactive features.

If your wordpress theme is hard to use, (especially if it’s a free one with bugs and poor coding / graphics), if the colors are offending the eye and structure is not convenient, readers won’t stay to read, regardless how interesting your content may be. Same apples to using unreadable fonts, lack of any graphics of illustrations, and excess of interactive features, from overly excited use of Ajax and Flash, to excess of blinking advertisements. make sure that READING experience is overall pleasant and entertaining. If you can’t find a good free wp theme, go with a premium wordpress themes, you can find designs at pretty low prices and they give a very good value in the long run.

4. No Promotion, No Traffic.

Cliche, but true. A lot of blogs with all of the above features still fail to gain readers only because they don’t promote, or don’t know HOW to promote. I guess today — in the era of social bookmarking websites, promotion is made easy. Digg your own posts (not a front page), Stumble them, Tweet them,  submit to delicious,  and even all the small ones, they may eventually generate a few readers for you. Also, add FeedBurner to your site, encourage subscription, offer the facility to “email this post to a friend” and join social sites like facebook and FriendsFinder to maximize exposure among friends and family. Don’t be afraid to enroll your friends and family and ask them to digg, stumble and promote your popular posts, just make sure you don’t spam too much and get banned. If your host allows it, use multi lingual support — quite a few plugins convert your content automatically to many languages, maximizing exposure in Google, to readers who speak any other language, other than English. Shared hosts tend to get overheated by the load, so either use cache plugin as well or (if your funds allow it), upgrade to VPS like we did.

5. No Interaction with Readers

Another reason for a failure could be lack of interaction with already existing readers. Especially if your readers ask questions, and expect some sort of support, answer, or help. If they see that author updates his blog but never finds time to reply to comments, they will stop commenting and most likely stop visiting. That means you can also lose a subscribed reader and that would be a shame! Replying to comments doesn’t take all that much, since you will anyway need to read the comment before approving. Readers hate to be ignored and always take it very personally.

Were these tips helpful? I hope they were, if you just started your blog and wonder why no one drops by for a short visit. Good Luck!

Are you tired of searching the web for the best wordpress plugins for your blog? If so then today is your lucky day because what I have you here is what I think to be the best plugins every blogger should be using for there blog or blogs period. I’m sure once you go through the list I have put together below and read through what each of these plugins can do for your blog you’ll soon agree that these are the best wordpress plugins you’ve been searching for.

I’ve spent countless hours searching the web for the best plugins for my blogs because with them they can simplify a lot of tedious work giving you more time to do what you need to do with your blogs. My suggestion to you is if you want to reduce the time involved with searching the web for the best wordpress plugins then make a plan now to read through the rest of this article.

Below is the list I have put together with some brief descriptions and hyperlinks to where you can download these wordpress plugins.

1. Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blogs “Comments” admin screen.

2. All In One SEO

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

3. Broken Link Checker

This plugin is will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

4. Wordpress Database Back Up

WP-DB-Backup allows you easily to backup your core WordPress database, you may also backup other tables in the same database.

5. Exec-Php

The Exec-PHP plugin executes PHP code in posts, pages and text widgets.

6. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

7. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

8. MaxBlogPress Favicon

Help create brand awareness by displaying a little favourite icon (favicon) in the title of our blog next to the URL.

9. WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an extremely efficient WordPress page caching system to make you site much faster and responsive.

10. Auto Hyperlink URLs

Auto-hyperlink text URLs in post content and comment text to the URL they reference.

11. No Ping Wait

The purpose of the No Ping Wait plugin is to prevent Wordpress authors from having to wait for all of the update services to respond to new post pings.

12. FD Feedburner Plugin

Redirects the main feed and optionally the comments feed to Feedburner.com.

13. WordPress.com Stats

Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks.

14. What Would Seth Godin Do

Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and much more.

15. Popularity Contest

This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity

That’s quite the list isn’t it? But they each serve a purpose as you’ll see when you look into each further. If you wish to search for more wordpress plugins you can at – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins, also, check out the Best Wordpress Plugins by Cory Threlfall.