Free Credit Report Now = Agressive Adsense
May 2nd, 2007Free Credit Report Now is a good example of aggressive Adsense design.
Is Google The Only Search Engine That Matters?
April 6th, 2007
One of the most common questions that I get from new students & clients is:
“Why should I optimize my website for any sites other than Google?”
The simple answer is that even though other engines might have a small percentage of the market share. That small percentage can still represent millions of potential customers.
Let’s take a look at the percentage of searches each of the major engines receives.
ComScore Media Metrix qSearch is a service that measures search engine traffic on the internet by monitoring the web activities of 1.5 million English-speakers worldwide (1 million in the United States). The following are the results of their July 2006 study:
Share Of Searches:
- Google 43.7%
- Yahoo 28.8%
- MSN 12.8%
- AOL 5.9%
- Ask 5.4%
- Others 3.4%
As you can see by these numbers, engines other than Google represent almost 60% of search traffic. This is of course one of many estimates of search engine traffic. Studies using other metrics show Google controlling as much as 60% of the search traffic. In any case, there is a lot on non-Google traffic out there.
Another thing to keep in mind is that many search engines share their search results with other search engines. In other words, the primary set of search results you see could be from the search engine you are using. However, the secondary results, the paid listings and other results could actually be coming from an entirely different search engine.
Because of mergers and acquisitions, some search engines are owned by the same parent company. In other instances they might reply on other search engine results to supplement their own.
The following chart created by Bruce clay shows the relationships of the various search engines. He has done a fantastic job of creating an updated list of what the engines are doing.
Some other benefits of non-Google engines include less competition, faster inclusion and easier optimization so be sure to include the little guys as part of your overall SEO strategy.
Wishing You Many Top 10 Positions,
Ryan
The Best EMail Campaigns of The Year
March 20th, 2007Marketing Sherpa has released their 2007 Email Award gallery. This will give you some great ideas to improve your email campaigns. Once again they do a fantastic job of uncovering the best in welcome messages, auto-responders, abandoned cart messages and much more. Get all the details at the link below:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29889
All the best,
Ryan Azevedo
Secret MySpace Documents Leaked
March 13th, 2007Rumors about a new MySpace news service were confirmed today after a document was leaked by their parent company Fox Interactive Media. The new service appears to be similar to Digg.com.
Basically the new service will collect news from various sources. MySpace users can then discuss and rate each story. There could be some great grass roots marketing opportunities here once the service is launched.
Read the full article here on Wired
Here are some screen shots of the new service:
Read the whole story here on Wired
Wishing you the best,
Ryan Azevedo
How To Spy On Your Competitors
March 9th, 2007Let me start by saying that I’m not recommending that you hide in your competitors bushes or sift through their garbage. I’m talking about using all of the free online tools that are at your disposal to get a clear picture of what and how your competitors are doing.
GoogSpy
If you haven’t used GoogSpy you have been missing out. GoogSpy is one of the most powerful free tools to determine exactly where your competitors are getting their visitors from.
All you have to do is type in the URL of your competitor’s website. GoogSpy will show you their top 25 competitors along with any top 10 search engine listings the site has. It will even show you the specific Google Adwords that your competitor is targeting.
Webpagestatus.com
After you find where your competitors are getting their traffic from on GoogSpy you will want to get an overview of how your competitor’s site is seen by the major search engines, directories and ranking services. Webpagestatus.com has a free tool that will do all of this for you.
Google’s Page Rank or PR can make a significant impact on the success or failure of a website. Webpageststatus.com will check the Page Rank of your competitor along with their Alexa rating. Alexa measures and rates the most trafficked sites on the Internet and lets you know how your competitors compare.
Besides making sure that your site is listed in the important Open Directory Project (DMOZ) Webpagestatus.com will also see how many websites are linking to your competitor’s website in major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, Alta Vista and All The Web.
BetterWhois.com
If you want to see the information about the owner of a competing domain including where it is hosted you can visit BetterWhois.com to quickly locate the info. Betterwhois.com will also show you when the domain expires along with some contact information.
These tools are enough to get you started on your competitive research. They also give you a good overview of how your website compares. Get out there and start snooping your way to success. 
Ryan Azevedo
Link Building 101: How To Get Links To Your Website
March 2nd, 2007Earlier this week I showed you how to find the sites that link to you and your competitors. I included my new special report below that shows you how to get more links to your web site.
Here it is:
High quality sites that link to your website can give it more credibility, increase traffic and improve your search engine optimization efforts. So, how do you get sites to link to you?
Most people contact the sites they want to link with and ask them for a link. If the Webmaster ever gets back to them they will often decline. This is a slow laborious process at best. Although this manual method does work, there are much faster ways to quickly increase the number of sites linking to you.
None of the strategies I’m about to give you should be used to do anything that violates the search engine’s TOS or Terms of Service. An easy way to stay in the good graces of all of the search engines without having to memorize their mile long TOS is to create high quality sites that are relevant to the keywords you are targeting and don’t do anything deceptive. It’s really that simple.
So, the Goal is to get as many “quality” sites linking to you as possible. So, what makes a “quality” site? Google has a rating system called page rank or PR. It is a scale that measures the “quality” of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being that the worst and 10 being the best.
The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites linking to the particular website. So in other words, it’s better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR link to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR.
Tip:
If you haven’t already, download the Google toolbar. It displays the Page Rank of every site you visit. You can download the toolbar at toolbar.google.com.
So, that leads us to the million dollar question, what is better quantity or quality? The easy answer is both. You want to monitor the quality of links you are targeting but you don’t want to decline a link from someone just because they don’t have a PR 10.
The following are some of the fastest ways to build the number of inbound links to your site.
Articles
Webmasters are always hungry for fresh content for their websites and blogs. You can write articles that are related to your website or industry and post them on article directories. The article should contain a small bio about yourself with a link to your site. Webmasters then place your article on their sites and blogs on the condition that they leave your links in place. The best part is that most article directories are free.
Press Releases
There are online press release distribution services that will distribute your press release to thousands of online news outlets. All you have to do is create a press release that contains your important keywords along with links to your site and then submit it.
Once your press release is distributed, many of the sites who receive the release will appear as sites linking to your site.
Blogs
Be sure to include your link in your blog posts when relevant. Ask other bloggers to link to your site and reverence it. If you don’t have a blog you can get one for free at Blogger.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) & Paid Links
An easy way to get links to your site is to pay for them. You can do this by purchasing a link for a set amount of time (day, week, month, etc.) or you can pay per click. A good resource of paid links is textlinkbrokers.com
Link to Yourself
If you have multiple websites or domain names don’t forget to link the together. This is assuming that they are real sites and not just a bunch of UGS (Useless Gateway Sites) that you threw together.
Affiliate Programs
Affiliate Programs provide Webmasters with codes that they put on their website to track any sales that they refer. When a webmaster puts this code on their website it creates a link to the site they are promoting so as you are building your affiliate business you are also building your inbound links.
The above link building strategies are meant to give you a general overview. If you want to get more detailed instructions you can use the resources on www.MarketingGrade.com. With a little well directed effort consistently applied, you will have an impressive number of sites linking to you in a very short time.
Ryan Azevedo has built 3 multi-million dollar Internet companies that have been featured in Entrepreneur Magazine, The Los Angeles Business Journal, The Wall Street Journal & newspapers & TV shows. His step-by-step strategies to increase your traffic & profit can be found at www.MarketingGrade.com.
Inbound Links 101:How To Find Who is Linking To Your Website
February 27th, 2007
Having the right types of sites linking to you also known as you in-bound links, in-links or back-links is more important than ever when it comes to getting that Top 10 position in the search engine results.
The following is a new article I just wrote for Marketing Grade about this very subject. Feel free to use it on your website, blog or newsletter as long as you leave the ”About” info and links that are at the bottom.
Here it is, enjoy….
Inbound Links 101: How to Find Who is Linking to Your Website
If you want to get more visitors to your website (and who doesn’t) while improving your chances of snagging a Top 10 search engine listing on the top search engines then you really need to pay attention to how many websites are linking to your website. Websites that link to your website are known as inbound links or in-links.
It makes sense that having more websites linking to your site will likely increase traffic to your website. Besides that, major search engines like Google appear to be placing more and more importance on the number of in-links your site has.
This is now part of the formula that determines exactly where your site stands in search engine results. They also are paying more attention to the “quality” of sites linking to your site but we will cover that a bit later.
Determine Your Location Before Your Destination
Before you begin developing a plan to get more sites to link to you, you need to first figure out how many sites are already linking to you.
This is easy enough. All of the major search engines provide this information with a simple, little known command. To find out how many sites are linking to you just go to one of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or AOL and type the following into the search field:
Link: yoursite.com
Be sure to replace “yoursite.com” with the name of your website. For example, to check the sites linking to MarketingGrade.com I would type
link: MarketingGrade.com.
The results you see should all be sites linking to your site. You can also add “www.” In front of your domain name to find out if a different number of sites are linking to www.yoursite.com as opposed to yoursite.com.
Simplify Your Search
A great resource that will save you some time doing all of this is the free link popularity tool on www.MarketLeap.com. Market Leap will check the number of sites linking to your site and give you other sites in your industry along with the number of sites linking to them.
Market Leap will also let you know how your site compares overall to other sites and then gives you a rating like Limited Presence, Above Average Presence or 900 Lb. Gorilla. Once you have searched for your site in Market Leap it will save your results so that you can track your progress over time.
Are Your In-Links High Quality?
Google has a rating system called Page Rank or PR. It is a scale that measures the “quality” of a website between 0 and 10 with zero being the worst and 10 being the best. The exact method of how they do this is a trade secret but it is believed that they base the score off of the number of links to a particular site along with the quality of those sites.
So in other words, it’s better to have 100 sites with a 10 PR linking to your site than 100 sites with a 1 PR. A simple way to see the Page Rank of any site you visit is to download the Google toolbar at toolbar.google.com.
It displays the Page Rank of the site you are visiting at the top of your browser. Now you can get a realistic look at how effective your link building has been. So get out there and start getting some in-links.
Ryan Azevedo is the founder of MarketingGrade.com a leading resource for simple, step-by-step strategies and solutions to help people make more money with their new or existing websites without spending a lot of money. Get Your FREE “How To Market Anything Online” 7 Day E-Course at MarketingGrade.com!
How To Make $10 Gazillion Dollars Without Doing Anything
February 15th, 2007I’m always amazed at the endless flood of crap that fills up my spam filter 24 hours a day at Marketing Grade. The thing that amazes me most is the thought that there are people out there spending their hard earned money on some of this stuff. I mean spam would totally dry up and die if people weren’t making money from it right?
I admit that I get an occasional chuckle from the emails claiming to make me sexier, smarter or more “enhanced.” Then there are the ones that claim to show you how to make $10 gazillion dollars online without doing anything (O.K., so I’m exaggerating a bit).
There is no shortage of these so-called “Guru’s” claiming to have the “Magic Bullet” to build an online empire. Don’t get me wrong; there are legitimate people out there who have some great tools to help you build a business. Unfortunately, there are many so-called experts out there who simply don’t live up to the promises they make.
I created MarketingGrade.com to help people avoid wasting their money trying to find the “magic bullet” for an online business only to end up with a thinner wallet and nothing to show for it.
I don’t just think I can help you. I KNOW that I can help you. I KNOW this because I have been building online businesses since 1994. In the first four years, I had handled the start-up for two companies that went on to be sold for over $25 million dollars.
In 1998 I started my own company doing search engine optimization. Unlike most of the Internet start-ups of the era, our company was profitable by our second month in business. I had the good fortune of selling that company two and a half years later for $2.5 million dollars.
You may have recently seen my last company (which I just sold) in The Wall St Journal, Car & Driver, PC Magazine, Working Mom and newspapers around the U.S. I’ve been featured in Entrepreneur’s “Be Your Own Boss” edition, the Los Angeles Business Journal, the Oakland Tribune, and The San Francisco Chronicle.
I don’t tell you this to try to impress you. I tell you this so that you know that I am someone who has “walked my talk.” During my 13+ years building businesses online I have learned that there is no “magic bullet” that will work for every business every time. There are however, certain systems and strategies that when properly applied will build a successful online business. You can find them here every week and on MarketingGrade.com
So, if you are looking for a way to “Make $10 Gazillion Dollars without Doing Anything,” you are probably going to be disappointed. If you are looking for solid proven ways to build an online business or start a new one, you will find them here every week and also at MarketingGrade.com. Thank you for allowing me to join you along your journey.
RA
