Building Mailing Lists, List Building, Social Media, Niche Marketing

Time and time again I hear webmasters complaining about their sites getting slapped. In fact, if you take a look at Google’s official webmaster forum, you’ll be shocked at the number of new threads where business owners are pleading with the moderators for a reason why their site has dropped 10 pages down the rankings.

It’s soon brought to their attention that the moderators have no control over the listings and 9 times out of 10 there’s nothing they can do to resurrect their sites’ rankings other than playing the waiting game.

How would you feel if you relied on Google for 80% of your traffic and it suddenly dropped in the rankings overnight? And, if you’re sitting there shaking your head thinking that it won’t happen to you because you’re a ‘good guy’ and you follow all the webmaster rules, then you need to seriously re-evaluate your mindset because time and time again I see innocent sites with great content get the “good news”.

Google reportedly updates its algorithm over 200 times a year

This time next week 50% of the backlinks pointing back to your site could be instantly discounted because the latest updates deems them as being too “spammy”. Where does that leave you? 50 places down the rankings and a dismal outlook for next quarter’s financial results.

So, now that I’ve scared the heck out of you, I’m going to give you five ways in which you can safeguard yourself from Google’s right hook and put you in a position far stronger than your competitors. It’ll also help you sleep at night!

1.Take Advantage of Untapped Traffic Sources

I am serious when I say the traffic generating potential online is incredible. By going one step beyond that of your competition you can really get a foot up and get your brand in front of a TON of laser targeted prospects.

Did you know that there are literally hundreds of high traffic web sites out there that will publish your content and let you include a small pitch and link back to your web site? I’m not talking about article directories here! I’m talking about hugely established and well respected sites that get hundreds of thousands of hits per month. So, do you think it’s worth spending a couple of hours writing an article to get your name in front of that hoard of traffic? Of course it is!

Are you skeptical? Don’t think that it works? Well, you’re reading my article aren’t you?

Not only will you get hugely targeted traffíc, but you’ll also get some incredibly powerful back links (to keep the big G happy until it gets trigger happy again), brand recognition and be able to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Here’s a tip, if you’re a new startup and you’re doing something interesting and something that people will want to read about (a USP that nobody else delivers or an alternative way of thinking for example) then head on over to http://www.mashable.com and write them a nice little article. That’ll kick start your new business for sure!

2.Build A List Of Subscribers

Outside of the internet marketing niche and large corporate companies, I rarely see líst building done effectively. Yet building a list tripled my income within the first couple of months and helped me to build a relationship with prospects that over time I converted into buyers, some of whom became repeat buyers. Without a list I simply would not have a way of building up a relationship, trust, authority and my bottom line. So, in basic terms a list makes you more money, but it doesn’t stop there…

It also provides you with a sense of security – you have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that if at any time every single last piece of traffic dried up overnight, you’d still make the payroll and survive until you figured out the underlying problem.

But how do you build a líst of subscribers if you’re not technical? Hosted services such as Aweber have made it so simple to set up your autoresponder service that all you need to know how to do is copy a bit of code into your squeeze page – it’s as simple as that.

3. Start An Affiliate Program

I know some companies that do absolutely nothing to get traffic to their web site. They don’t write articles, they don’t backlink to their site, they literally do nothing and let an army of affiliates do the job for them. And the army produces incredible results!

The great thing about an affiliate program is that there is no risk as a vendor. You do the sums up front, figure out how much you’re prepared to pay someone for making a sale on your behalf and that’s that. How would you like a no-risk, pay on results, unlimited sized sales force at your disposal?

You can really attract a bucket load of affiliates if you’re selling digital products with reasonably high profit margins, high valued products so that you can afford to give quite large payouts per sale or, the gold pot of them all, a service that is billable on a monthly basis so that the affiliate can earn a small monthly retainer per sale.

And don’t be afraid to start an affiliate program – you don’t even need to run it yourself if you don’t want to. There are a number of excellent affiliate brokers out there who will manage the tracking, payments and creatives on your behalf – you just need to find one that suits you and get cracking. Should you choose a managed affiliate program then you’ll usually be expected to pay a small fee up front for setup costs and then a small percentage of earnings thereafter.

In Summary

Please, take my advice and don’t get into the position where your business is relying on Google. In the offline world it’s akin to being in the wholesale business with one contract to a huge retailer. What happens when that retailer doesn’t renew the contract? Bad things happen!

You can choose the three methods I’ve mentioned above, or find other ways of generating laser targeted traffic such as PPC, press releases, e-book creation, video marketing and so on – it doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it!

About The Author
95% of affiliate marketers are doing it wrong. Discover the 5 shortcuts to huge affiiliate cheques: http://www.amshortcuts.com – Paul McCarthy is a full time internet marketer who specializes in traffic generation, SEO, article marketing and consultancy.

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RDFa Could Play an Increasingly Big Role in Search

RDFa, which stands for Resource Description Framework in attributes, is a W3C recommendation, which adds a set of attribute level extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within web documents. While not everyone believes that W3C standards are incredibly necessary to operate a successful site, some see a great deal of potential for search engine optimization in RDFa.

In fact, this is the topic of a current WebProWorld thread, which was started by Dave Lauretti of MoreStar, who asks, “Are you working the RDFa Framework into your SEO campaigns?” He writes, “Now under certain conditions and with certain search strings on both Google and Yahoo we can find instances where the RDFa framework integrated within a website can enhance their listing in the search results.”

Lauretti refers to an article from last summer at A List Apart, by Mark Birbeck who said that Google was beginning to process RDFa and Microformats as it indexes sites, using the parsed data to enhance the display of search results with “rich snippets”. This results in the Google results you see like this:

“It’s a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable — if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through,” Google said upon the launch of rich snippets.

Google says it is experimenting with markup for business and location data, but that it doesn’t currently display this information, unless the business or organization is part of a review (hence the results in the above example). But when review information is marked up in the body of a web page, Google can identify it and may make it available in search results. When review information is shown in search results, this can of course entice users to click through to the page (one of the many reasons to treat customers right and monitor your reputation).

Currently Google uses RDFa for reviews, but this search also displays the date of the review, the star rating, the author and the price range of an iPod, as Lauretti points out.

Best Buy’s lead web development engineer reported that by adding RDFa the company saw improved ranking for respective pages. They saw a 30% increase in traffic, and Yahoo evidently observed a 15% increase in click-through rates.(via Steven Pemberton)

Implications for SEO

I’m not going to get into the technical side of RDFa here (see resources listed later in the article), but I would like to get into some of the implications that Google’s use of RDFa could have on SEO practices. For one, rich snippets can show specific information related to products that are searched for. For example, a result for a movie search could bring up information like:

- Run time
- Release Date
- Rating
- Theaters that are showing it

“The implementation of RDFa not only gives more information about products or services but also increases the visibility of these in the latest generations of search engines, recommender systems and other applications,” Lauretti tells WebProNews. “If accuracy is an issue when it comes to search and search results then pages with RDFa will get better rankings as there would be little to question regarding the page theme.” (Source) He provides the following chart containing examples of the types of data that could potentially be displayed with RDFa:

“It is obvious that search marketers and SEOs will be utilizing this ability for themselves and their clients,” says Lauretti. Take contact information specifically. “Using RDFa in your contact information clarifies to the search engine that the text within your contact block of code is indeed contact information.” He says in this same light, “people information” can be displayed in the search results (usually social networking info). You could potentially show manufacturer information or author information.

RDFa actually has implications beyond just Google’s regular web search.
With respect to Google’s Image search, the owner of images can also use RDFa to provide license information about the images they own. Google currently allows image searchers to have images displayed based on license type, and using RDFa with your images lets the search bots know under which licenses you are making your images available (Via Mark Birbeck). There is also RDFa support for video.

Following are some resources where you can learn more about RDFa and how to implement it:

Google Introduces Rich Snippets
Introduction to RDFa
RDFa Primer
About RDFa (Google Webmaster Central)
RDFa to Provide Image License Info
RDFa Microformat Tagging For Your Website
For Businesses and Organizations
About Review Data (Google Webmaster Central)

Google’s Matt Cutts has said in the past that Google has been kind of “white listing” sites to get rich snippets, as Google feels they are appropriate, but as they grow more confident that such snippets don’t hurt the user experience, then Google will likely roll the ability out more and more broadly. This is one thing to keep an eye on as the year progresses, and is why those in the WebProWorld thread believe RDFa will become a bigger topic of discussion in 2010.

WebProNews would like to thank Dave Lauretti, who contributed some findings to this piece.

Update: As I pieced together this article, Google coincidentally announced support for rich snippets for Events.

Related Articles:

> Get Your Breadcrumbs in Google for More Links in Results
> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From
> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237

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Best Practices for Freehosts

Google has made some recommendations for “best practices” for sites that allow users to create their own sites. They give the examples of their own Google Sites and Blogger. So in other words, if you run some type of site that allows users to make their own pages, you may want to pay attention.

1. Make sure your users can verify their website in website management suites (like Webmaster Tools).
2. Choose a unique directory or hostname for each user.
3. Set useful and descriptive page titles.
4. Allow the addition of tags to a page.
5. Allow your users to use third-party analytics packages
6. Help your users move around
7. Help search engines find the good content from your users.
 

When Google says, “help your users move around,” they mean let your users access their data. This is a concept that Google has become very big on. As you may have read, Google has started a group called the Data Liberation Front to address data portability, and has created a site dedicated to instructing users on how to move their data to and from the company’s various products. Basically, Google is suggesting you follow suit.

When Google talks about helping search engines find you users’ content, they mean help the crawlers. “Help us find users’ content using XML Sitemaps,” says Greg Grothaus, Staff Software Engineer on Google’s Search Quality Team. “Help us to steer clear of duplicate versions of the same content so we can find more of the good stuff your users are creating by creating only one URL for each piece of content when possible, and by specifying your canonical URLs when not.”

These may not seem like issues that a lot of people would have to worry about, but you may be (or maybe not) surprised at how often start-ups come and go, which have sites that allow users to create content. Perhaps following these guidelines would cater to an increased chance for a successful platform. More information on the guidelines can be found here.

 
About the author:
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Twitter: @CCrum237

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