Archive for June, 2008
« Previous EntriesThe Dangers of Link Farms.
Monday, June 30th, 2008So you want to get ahead of the competition on the search engines, and you decide to use a link farm. Stop! There’s danger in link farms as with all SEO methods that seem to good to be true.
Your website shouldn’t link to, or be linked from, websites with any of the characteristics of link farms. Link farms are web sites that have been set up for no reason other than to contain masses of links, exploiting search engines’ link popularity algorithms. They serve no real purpose, other than getting everyone who joins to link to and from them and boosting the rankings of everyone involved. This is a big problem, as most people consider it to be nothing more than search engine ‘spam’.
Do not get link farms confused with directories which are excellent places to get your site listed. The difference here is that a directory attempts to provide its users with a nice organized way to get to the information that they want while a link farm simply posts a ton of links (generally at cost to the linkee) and serves no purpose to anybody on the web.
Avoid all link farms and similar sites! If you try to use one then the end result could be a ranking penalty, or your website might even be banned from the search engine altogether. Being banned from a search engine is a terrible loss for your site and will generally lead you to creating a brand new site out of sheer necessity.
Remember: the number of links to your site isn’t as important as the quality of those links. You’re trying to get people with real, quality sites to link to you. There are even rumors (which are being validated daily) that Google is implementing a quality control algorithm for links which includes the amount of time that a link has existed between two sites as well as the reputations of the two sites based on how many links they send out. For example, if you have a link from a site that only links to three sites all together and this link has stood strong for months, Google will consider it a valuable link. On the other hand, if you get linked to by a site with a massive number of links, Google could care less. Remember, Google is the Santa Claus of the internet, it’s always watching.
Free for All (FFA).
An FFA is a links page where anyone can add a link – quite similar to a link farm. Don’t be fooled into listing your site on these or linking to them. Many programs will submit your link automatically, to hundreds of FFAs all over the web. Don’t use these programs! The search engines will steer clear of your site for a long time if you do.
Who Should I Link To, and How?
Be very selective about your outbound links and your requests for inbound links, and avoid any site that’s anything like a link farm. Look for websites that have similar subjects to yours, good rankings and good traffic. Depending on the topic, they might be hard to find – but then you should find it easier to rank highly in these topics.
Once you’ve found a few good sites, the next step is to email them and request a link. You should, of course, offer one in return. You will run into some opposition with this method and you will sometimes be ignored completely, but you should have a reasonable amount of success. We can’t stress enough, though, that you should be careful about which sites you link to, and check your links regularly.
The Bottom Line.
Link farms are dangerous to your website and a complete waste of time. They can bring your business crashing down by getting you banned from the search engines. You should be concentrating on real marketing methods – even though they’re not a ‘quick fix’, they can work if you give them some time.
There are many real ways to get traffic to your website, and using professional methods can give you a big increase in traffic. Using link farms and FFAs is a good way to get yourself nowhere fast.
The Basic SEO Rules for All Websites.
Saturday, June 28th, 2008Search engine optimization isn’t rocket science, but it can feel complicated at times. There’s no need to worry about the jargon when you’re just starting out, though, and part of the point of SEO is to make everything simpler and cleaner, the way search engines like it.
Everything a search engine does has a pattern and a reason. Even if the algorithms are too complex for you to understand, there are patterns that can be found if you look hard enough. All you have to do in order to find the patterns is be willing to look for them which basically just consists of keeping your eyes and your mind open.
Being good at SEO requires some effort, but is – for the most part – very basic. To have a successful campaign, just follow these simple rules – they apply to all websites.
Search engines always try to give users whatever they can find that is relevant to their search. You have to realize that most search engines don’t work by moving the good stuff towards the top: instead, they try to push the bad stuff towards the bottom, and hope that what’s good will ‘float up’. Content is King and it can get you good search engine rankings easily if it’s written properly and sprinkled with the appropriate keywords. This not only brings visitors to your site but also feeds search engine spiders and crawlers. I can’t stress enough that good content is the key to good SEO.
A fast way to develop good content is to generate a series of articles or an ebook regarding your topic. These items are very powerful in the world of SEO because they provide your visitors with something to read and they allow you to conquer some key words that you normally wouldn’t be able to touch. If you are managing a website for pets, an article about dog food is more likely to generate a high position in the search results for “dog food” than your home page. Therefore, if you write articles pertaining to your subject but slightly more in depth than you can put on your home page, you will benefit drastically.
To try to get to number one in an index, you must first find out where your site is now. That means checking each search engine to see your position, and coming up with a strategy for each one – who knows, maybe you’re already number one on one of the smaller search engines! You can’t just assume, however, that because your site is listed in one search engine that it will be listed in all of them. That’s not how search engines work.
Look at the sites that currently rank high on the search engines and you will see that have simple designs with graphics that use minimal bandwidth, and they’re easy to navigate. Simple, clean designs are what both search engine crawlers and search engine users like, as it lets them get the content they want without any fuss. This is what you should be aiming for.
Some sites are considered good enough to be ranked highly in search engines, even though their designs make them difficult to look at. This goes to show that the looks of a site have nothing to do with where a search engines places it in the rankings – all search engines care about is text. If the content of a site is relevant to what people are searching for then that’s all that matters to a search engine.
Let’s take a look at meta tags, keywords, descriptions, and titles. They’re all important elements, even if they’re not what will make or break your site – they’re just one part of your strategy. These elements need to be compelling and sprinkled with your keywords, as this will entice users to click through from the search results page to your website. It’s best to start off slowly, gradually adding things in as you learn.
If you have any questions and you don’t know where to go, then check out some of the forums on the subject – just do a search for ‘seo forum’. These people are usually more than willing to post answers to your questions, or direct you to someone who can answer your question if they can’t. Remember to be patient with yourself: learning something new takes time and effort, and SEO is no different.
SEO ‘Tools of the Trade’.
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Before you start optimizing your site for search engines, there are some tools that you should arm yourself with. These tools can become your best friends when it comes to SEO, especially when you’re just starting out. The first and most important step in any search engine position campaign is recognizing which keywords you should optimize your site for, and there are several pieces of software that are useful for this, including Wordtracker, Optilink, Zeus, and Agent Web Ranking.
WordTracker's keyword research service is the only one on the Internet that provides a comprehensive database of the most popular keywords in a particular industry. It can help you recognize associated keywords that you may have never thought of. One of the differences between WordTracker and other tools is that it can spot subtle differences, for example singular and plural keywords, or often-misspelled ones, and tell you which versions are more popular.
Optilink has become very popular in a short period of time because of the power it gives you over search engines. Every site that links to you boosts your ranking, especially if its content is relevant to yours. Optilink helps you to come up with strategies to improve your link structure and get a better ranking. Here are some of the things it does:
1. Analyzes the link structures of your top-ranking competitors.
2. Tells you why your competitors rank well, so you can try to copy what they’re doing.
3. Tells you what kind of rankings you can expect if you adopt similar linking strategies.
4. Helps to monitor sites you’ve exchanged links with, to ensure that they’re still linking to you.
Zeus has an excellent way of increasing the link popularity of your site – by exchanging with other sites that are related to yours, giving you a head start on your SEO. Zeus does the work for you, identifying sites that it thinks you should try to exchange links with. If you look for the sites yourself you’ll often find it’s not worth the time, but an SEO tool like Zeus lets you do it instantly. Once you’ve got links, you can manage and maintain them automatically.
Agent Web Ranking helps you to check your sites rankings – this is good to see how your SEO efforts are working. Many people just optimize and submit, thinking the work is done, but they’re wrong. You need to continuously check your site's rankings, and Agent Web Ranking is a reliable and quick tool for doing this.
The only real problem you might have with any of this software is that search engines can change the way they display their results, breaking the tools until their authors update them. This means that most position reporting software gets outdated very quickly. It’s not that much of an issue, though, as most software is provided on a subscription basis with updates included, rather than bought only once.
If you really want to stay ahead in the SEO industry, you should try as many different tools as you can. By paying attention to what tools others are using and learning how they work, you will have the edge in the SEO market. So get out there, and download these SEO tools of the trade!
What You Need to Operate a Niche Marketing Site
Thursday, June 26th, 2008Before you can sit back and reap the rewards from operating your own niche marketing site, there are a few vital components necessary to create a successful and profitable website:
1) A Product or Service to Sell.
Not just any old product, you need to do a little research and find a hungry market. The secret to making money is to find out what problems people are facing and offer them unique solutions.
Don't try to sell what every body else is, be unique. You need to stand out from the crowd by offering a better solution. Offering a cheaper solution doesn't always work. Any product or service will have a perceived value to it; try to sell cheaper than that and people will wonder what's wrong with it.
2) A Domain Name
Despite what people may think, a well worded catchy .com domain name will enhance your sales. It adds to the perceived value of your product or service.
There are many places to buy domain names and a simple search on any search engine will lead you to many of them. Many hosting packages will include a domain name for no extra cost.
3) Hosting
Before setting up the website on your domain you will need to join a hosting service. There are thousands of hosting services to choose from, and not all of them are reliable. Don't be misled by price, there are many cheap reliable hosting services.
There are two basic types of hosting:
i) Shared Hosting – This is the cheapest hosting but your domain will be hosted with many others on the same server. When your website traffic is low, it makes sense to share the server resources and cost with other people.
ii) Dedicated Hosting – This is more expensive, but your domain is the only one hosted. When your website traffic increases beyond a certain point you will have to consider dedicated hosting.
When choosing a host, take note of their "uptime" which is often shown as a percentage. This is the proportion of time the host's servers are working properly (i.e. your website will be online). Any host who claims to have a 99.99% uptime is lying to you.
4) Website or Blog
The type of website you decide to use will greatly affect your sales. The most important point is don't confuse your visitors. If you want to sell a product, don't offer them anything else, just the product.
A website with a single sales page will nearly always outsell a content website with many pages. The reason… a single sales page offers your visitor two choices, buy or leave. A multi-page website offers your visitor many options and confuses them; they will click to a few different pages and then leave without buying.
5) Good Sales Copy
This is the make or break of your niche marketing site. A sales page with poor copy will not sell very well.
Sales copy, what's that?
Sales copy is the wording you use on your sales page. It encompasses:
- What types of words you use.
- The way you use the words.
- The layout of your page.
- How you present your product.
- Above all else, it explains how you customer will benefit from owning your product.
Writing good sales copy is a skill which most people do not possess. It is the area of a niche marketing site which will take up most of your time, and if you're not prepared to study copy writing, is best contracted out to a professional.
6) Sales Processor
The one thing you don't want to do with your niche marketing site is process sales manually. The internet doesn't shut up shop for the night; it keeps going 24/7. If you process sales manually, you'll be doing it at all sorts of odd hours.
To get around this you need to use an automated sales processor. This is simply a system that will automatically process credit cards on your behalf. Your customer simply enters their credit card details into a form and after these are successfully verified, they are sent to a webpage explaining how their order will be delivered.
7) Autoresponder
This is the only optional part of a niche marketing site. You don't have to use autoresponders, but once a customer has purchased something from you they will be inclined to buy more from you. If you capture their contact details you will be able to tell them about future product launches, or fantastic special offers you have put together.
There are many autoresponder services available and even scripts you can purchase to install on your website. Before committing yourself to any particular provider, do a little research. Forums are a great place to learn who are the best or cheapest.
SEO Tips for Yahoo.
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008With the improvements that have taken place at Yahoo over the last few months, the site is starting to become important again. Many say that their new search tool provides more relevant search results than Google does now – great for Yahoo, since they were the top dog before Google came along.
Even for a few years after Google’s conception, Yahoo! was the high and mighty search engine. It is still the popular choice for those who are seeking popular culture solutions and should be the target search engine for such pages. Yahoo! will put up a fight here for the king pin of search engines again before too long so make sure that you have quality results here as well as Google.
In general, Yahoo's spiders work the same way as Google's, following every link they find on the web and putting that information in a database. As always, you can also submit your site to the index manually. These manual submissions will speed up the process slightly but probably won’t give you instantaneous results. There are no real ways to incorporate highly
Yahoo places some weight on your incoming links, but not as much as Google does – it’s more interested in your content, which could explain why Yahoo’s results seem to be more relevant. To get a strong ranking at Yahoo, you should pay more attention to your keyword density than you do to your link popularity. Yahoo is also less likely to index a huge number of pages than other search engines are. Normally forums and posts are not touched by Yahoo as it will deem them unnecessary.
There are times when this may seem like a good idea to many searchers, but there are also times when these types of results are missed. Basically, keep in mind that you will not get as many pages indexed by Yahoo! as you will by Google, MSN, and other search engines. You may, however, get a higher number of hits out of each page that you get listed in Yahoo! depending on the type of site that you provide.
At a Glance.
1. Use keyword-rich titles, about 20 words long and unique for each page of your site.
2. Use the meta description tag on each page too, with a description that fits your site well. These titles are the first things that Yahoo! sees and are the single most important aspect of your site regardless of which search engine you are optimizing for. Yahoo! still uses meta tags for its descriptive purposes but not necessarily word for word. Make sure that you have a quality description so that you don’t run into situations where you don’t get listed because of lack thereof. Basically, your description tag is an evasive action rather than an attempt at attaining a high number of hits or a higher rating.
3. A meta keywords tag should be included on every page of your website, and it should list words and phrases related to the site. Make sure that the key words describe the specific page rather than the site itself except for the index page. You don’t want a bunch of people to be going to the wrong front page. They may see the page, not find their answer and leave. If they find your home page, they’ll probably see that it’s a home page, look for a relevant link, and find the answer or material that they are looking for.
4. Well-written, keyword-rich content will help you a lot with Yahoo. Well-written content is important regardless of search engines. This content is the entire reason for your site’s existence. Make sure that the content that you deliver is something that you want your name on. Something that you can stand behind.
5. Easy-to-follow internal links in plain text will help Yahoo’s spider – the bottom of the page is a good place for them.
The key to getting a high ranking at Yahoo is to keep adding keyword-rich, relevant content to your website on a regular basis. Continual updates let Yahoo’s spiders know that you are maintaining the site and keeping your information updated – they’ll come back regularly to check out these changes.
Yahoo’s improvements are sure to help them in the market, and the number of users flocking to Yahoo is starting to show optimizers that there are more search engines out there than just Google.
Top Research Ideas for Your Niche Product
Monday, June 23rd, 2008The fundamental mistake made by many niche marketers is they create products based on what they think people want to buy. The correct way of deciding what niche product to create, is to find out what people are actually buying at the moment.
Here are five ways of discovering ideas for niche products which you can sell to make money:
1) Use Forums
With the rapid expansion of the internet, forums (or discussion groups or bulletin boards as they are also called) have proliferated. There are forums hosted all over the internet based on practically every theme imaginable.
Forums are websites where like minded people gather to discuss all sorts of issues pertaining to the theme of the forum. Some of the well moderated forums are extremely active and a good place to conduct research.
When it comes to finding ideas for niche products, you need to use the search engines to locate a number of forums on the theme you are interested in. For example, if you're interested in needlepoint, you could enter needlepoint+bulletin board into the search engine.
Visit each forum and find out what questions people are asking. In addition, find out how many times similar questions are asked. The more frequently a question is asked across a number of forums, the more likely you have found a topic for your next niche product or website.
2) Visit Your Local Book Store
If you are completely stumped for ideas, a visit to your local book or magazine store is in order. People who are keen on a hobby almost always subscribe to related magazines, and if they buy magazines there's a good chance they will buy niche products.
Your task is to discover what magazines are being sold and how quickly they move. It is best to visit a number of stores and compare the common magazines sold in all of them. Try to find out from the sales assistants how many copies they sell of the popular magazines you have identified.
A magazine sold in great number by each store, month after month, is a sure sign of a profitable niche.
3) Investigate eBay
eBay is one of the biggest, if not the biggest single market place on the planet. Millions of people buy a gigantic range of products month after month.
Go to eBay.com and scroll down the left hand menu, click on "All Categories" and scroll down to the bottom of the page that opens in your browser until you get to the section titled "Other Ways to Browse". Included in that section are four sub-sections, each being ways to conduct your research:
i) eBay Keywords (popular terms being searched for)
ii) Common Searches
iii) eBay Pulse (a daily snapshot of current trends)
iv) Popular Products
From these four you will be able to spot a multitude of popular ideas for your next niche product.
4) Survey Your Website Visitors
If you have an existing website which receives a fair bit of traffic, you can survey that traffic using a popup. In order to entice people into taking the survey you will have to offer some kind of reward. You could even offer extra rewards for people who refer others to your survey.
Normally any web survey you conduct would have to be of a similar theme to your website, but it is possible to conduct a survey to find out your visitor's interests and whether they would be prepared to spend any money on their interest.
They key is to ask simple questions in a manner that won't lead your respondents to any particular answer. When designing your survey, keep in mind you will have to analyze the data and draw conclusions from it. This means keeping your questions "on topic".
The simplest surveys to analyze are those constructed with multiple choice questions. The disadvantage of this is you don't know for sure that the answers are absolute or close (i.e. "second best").
5) Survey Your eMail List
If you have your own email list, you could survey them to find out what problems they are currently facing, or what interests they have. People on your email list will tend to answer more truthfully because there is a degree of trust between you and them.
This degree of trust not withstanding, you will still have to offer an incentive for your subscribers to take the survey. Design your survey the same as you would for a popup on your website.
SEO Tips for Overture.
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008Although Overture (now owned by Yahoo) can be used by itself, it’s often better to use it together with another PPC engine, to get the best chance of being seen. Overture is the largest of the PPC engines so it is a great place to start if you’re going to try making money by spending money, but make sure that you don’t try to provide your visitor with too much too quickly. It is very easy to over diversify your online advertisement portfolio and, in effect, pull yourself out of the game with a strained wallet.
Overture does nothing to hide the prices of its advertising from you – they’re straightforward from the beginning. This is a great advantage for users of Overture, as you can never spend more than you want to. You know exactly where your ads will show up, and you can change them as often as you want. The ideology behind Overtures open display of its prices is that an informed customer is the best kind of customer. You never run into customers who complain about what they got because you tell them what they get. This is the kind of attitude that more online utilities and web sites should adapt. It gives web users a fair shake at optimizing the return on their financial investments.
You can include prices and other details in your listing so that people are better informed before they click – this saves you money on people who click and turn out not to be interested. After all, you don’t drop the big bucks just to watch your hits climb. You pay for quality hits that will result in sales or whatever else you are trying to deliver via your web page. Make sure to only pay for key words that are going to deliver quality traffic with sales potential. You should write a different ad for every keyword you’re targeting, taking the time to do it correctly. Use the keyword in the ad, as Yahoo will put it in bold to make it stand out, and more people will click on your ad.
Remember that one of the biggest reasons that you are probably using Overture is that it is so outspoken with its prices. If you are selling something, why not put the price right out there in the advertisement? This is a quick way to avoid getting hits from those users that are seeking free versions of whatever you are selling. Believe me, no matter what you are selling, somebody is trying to get it for free.
Since using Overture gives you more flexibility and room when it comes to writing ads, you’ll be able to do more with them. Other sites you typically give you a standard 3-line ad area and no more, which doesn’t leave much room for creativity. In the case of Overture you can generate spectacular ads that really give you a chance at displaying your product as something that the user would want to buy before they even click on the link.
One thing to remember when you create an advertisement is to state the most important things first, in case some of the ad gets cut off or the reader gets bored before they finish.
When you’re one of the top 5 bidders for a keyword at Overture, you get a little bonus. Yahoo will list you twice when you have one of the top five positions – once at the side of the page, and once at the bottom. If you’re not in the top 5, you’re missing out on this free exposure – so it’s much better to pay a little extra to become #5 than to stay as #6.
Check your advertisements at least weekly, making sure you’re still where you want to be relative to your competitors. Change the ads every time you launch a new product or service, and don’t be afraid to try out new keywords you think of.
Be creative, and create short-term Overture ads for special offers – if you’re offering free shipping or free gifts for a limited time, say so! Use your ads to promote, advertise, and sell. After all, sales are what you’re paying for, right? Many people are unaware that Overture lets you do this, so it’s a chance to stand out.
SEO Tips for MSN.
Friday, June 20th, 2008MSN may be the most complete search engine out there. It seems to me that every web site that I look at in order to find the number of pages that it has listed has the following fallout: MSN has the most results, Google comes in second, Yahoo! comes last. Other search engines will generally fall somewhere between Google and Yahoo! This is a result of some very extensive work by the team and MSN. The beautiful thing about MSN is that you can find results for just about everything. If you can’t find it at Google, can’t find it at Yahoo! head on over to MSN and you’ll find something even if it is nothing more than a forum posting.
It’s still quite easy to figure out what you need to do to your site to rank highly at MSN. MSN generally indexes every page that it can find anyway and is a pretty handy search engine in that it is the third most popular out there and it is also a nice one to foreshadow what may be happening to your listings at Google in the not too distant future. They’ve recently changed their algorithm, though, and everyone wants to know how it works. Well, here are some answers.
MSN’s ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of the sites that link to your pages, and the site content, and keyword relevance. Keep in mind that there are lots of differences between MSN and Yahoo and Google. All search engine algorithms are similar, but little differences can have big effects when it comes to SEO. The nice thing about MSN is that its algorithm isn’t as strict as those of Yahoo! and Google and is therefore a very powerful SEO tool in and of itself.
Relevant themes and topics are very important to MSN optimization, and you should also consider keyword density – remember, no keyword stuffing, as MSN explicitly says this is against their rules. The general rule is that you should make sure that there are key words in your title and then follow the basic platform for key words. Put a few in a header at the top of your page; scatter a few throughout the page including several in the first and last paragraphs; finally, put a couple of links that contain key words towards the bottom of your page. These steps are common for all search engine optimizations and should be a set process for every page that you attempt to optimize. Complete this work before attempting any other SEO procedures as this is the basis of SEO.
Links are important, and maintaining good incoming links with your keywords will get you good rankings. It’s very important to get as many natural links as possible – providing interesting and useful content can make this happen for you with no extra work at all! You’ll seem completely natural to MSN’s spider. These natural links are the basis of link SEO.
If you are trying to attain links you should first attempt to attain these links from pages that would naturally link to you but may not have heard of your site yet. After you have done this you should go to directories and other sources of links that may not be as obvious. First things first, don’t mess up your search engine listings because of a bunch of bogus links from unsuitable, questionable, or malicious locations. These links can and will get you banned.
MSN doesn’t allow you to pay to boost your site’s ranking, but they do offer advertising. This advertising will allow you to pay a certain amount for links in their “sponsored links” boxes on the top and sides of each results page. The value of these links depends on the demand for them. At any particular time a sponsored link could become very expensive by somebody bidding an outrageous amount for a link, or by a large number of people trying to overwhelm a niche market.
MSN doesn’t update often, but when it does it often removes links it believes to be out of date, so make sure you change your site occasionally.
One thing that MSN likes a lot is well-formed HTML code, with closed, valid tags. Watch out for broken links, and make sure you have static URLs that don’t move around, and contain your keywords.
Tips for Finding Wholesale Sources of Niche Products
Friday, June 20th, 2008If you want to sell niche products from your own website, physical store or even on eBay, you need to be able to compete with your local retailers. This means finding a wholesaler willing to trade with you at prices which give you enough leeway to make a profit.
The first place to look is locally, why pay shipping charges for goods sent from a supplier across country when you could take a drive in your own car to a local supplier for small goods or hire a van for bigger stuff? Some local wholesalers might even provide a cheap or even free delivery service.
Wholesalers as a rule don't advertise in the mass media such as TV or newspapers and so they are often difficult to find. To get you started, here are a few ideas for locating wholesale sources of niche products for you to sell:
1) One of the first places to look is in your local trade directory, many wholesalers place advertisements in local trade directories and even in the Yellow Pages for the products they carry.
2) Another place to conduct your research is on the internet, and there are search engines which are wholesale specific such as www.wholesalecentral.com and www.wholesalequest.com. These wholesale specific search engines allow you to search for wholesale sources by browsing categories or by entering keywords (related to the products you want to sell) into a search bar.
You can find other wholesale specific search engines or directories by typing "wholesale search engine" or "wholesale directory" or "wholesale directories" or even "wholesalers" into the search engine of your choice.
3) Nearly all wholesalers will belong to a trade association and these trade associations will often host trade shows all over the world. It stands to reason that an excellent place to discover new wholesale sources is to visit as many trade shows as you can. Here are two ways of finding suitable tradeshows:
i) Join a trade association related to the goods you wish to sell and subscribe to their periodicals or newsletters as these always carry details of local, regional and international trade shows.
ii) Conduct research on the internet by visiting websites such as Trade Show News Network (www.tsnn.com). You could also search for others by entering "trade show directory" or add a keyword related to your products to the search phrase – for example, "jewelry trade shows".
4) Look for the items you wish to sell in a local store, when you find the item look carefully at the packaging as many suppliers provide their contact details and often include their website URL. You can either contact them directly or visit their website to discover how to either purchase from them directly (which is often cheaper than buying from a wholesaler), or if that is not possible ask them who your local wholesaler is and if they can give you the wholesaler's contact details.
Once you have a list of possible wholesale sources for your niche products you need to do some due diligence on each wholesaler. You need to find out if they are legitimate businesses and are approved by the manufacturers. They last thing you want to get involved in is a copyright lawsuit because you are inadvertently selling illegal copies of the original product.
From a purely business point of view you need to find out their payment terms, return policies, shipping charges and methods. If you can, you need to get references from other customers; are they happy with the wholesalers service or not?
Once you have decided on a wholesale source, there's one thing you need to be aware of… When you purchase from a wholesaler you have to buy in bulk, you cannot buy individual items. If you're just starting out you're probably going to find this quite expensive, but there is a way to reduce this cost. If you can, find another established customer who buys the same products as you, you can approach them with a joint venture whereby they sell you products for a set profit, say 20% on each item you buy. Your end of the joint venture will be that you agree to buy a set number of items each month and that don't compete with them directly.
SEO Tips for Google.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008Google is still the most popular search engine out there, and they’re not showing any signs of slowing down. It’s important to know how to get on the right track with your SEO for Google. It is also important, however, to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there and that Yahoo! is also a highly rated search engine which actually has more pop culture usage.
Before you can truly understand Google you must understand a little bit of the history behind Google. In the beginning, Google was considered by many to be the “Geek’s Search Engine.” This changed as Google started delivering better and better results. Google slowly evolved into the most trusted search engine around, but Yahoo!’s advertising strength and popular usage has still claimed a large number of users. It wasn’t all that long ago when Yahoo! was the most popular search engine by far.
Google’s search engine is based on PageRank, a complex algorithm that was revolutionary when it was invented. This page rank is the primary reason that Google is so popular. The Page Ranking technology that Google has created and the evolutionary steps that Google has taken to increase the strength of its algorithm has made it a search engine giant which actually sets out to protect internet users from fraudulent web sites.
Google has come to be a search engine that cannot really be tricked. It’s kind of the integrity police f the world wide web. Basically, Google checks the number of links to each site in its database, and treats them as ‘votes’. Here are some tips on getting ranked high on Google:
1.The more incoming links you have, the better your chances are. Good links are ones that are relevant to your own page and link with text that makes it obvious that they intended to link to your site. Google has also recently integrated a new piece into its algorithm which makes old links better than new links. In Google’s opinion, if a link withstands the test of time it is has to be relevant or else both parties would have removed the link after not seeing any positive action by Google. Basically, this is another one of Google’s “keeper of integrity” options that have become so famous among SEOs.
2. Links from ‘authority’ sites, such as directories or non-profit organizations, tend to produce better results than links from commercial sites. Google likes to decide what sites are important. A site has some huge credential for being a spectacular source for quality information will be appreciated more than sites that don’t have such strong affiliations with quality work and content. This will result in stronger, more heavily weighted links to and from this site.
3. Site elements to consider for Google are the title (including the strongest keyword phrase), the meta description (Google displays this to its users) and the body text (it needs to be highly-focused and use keywords well), as well as your onsite navigation.
4. Make sure that Google can spider the whole site easily. You’ll probably want to have plain links to every page on your site at the bottom of each of your pages.
Don’t forget, though, that Google is strict about ‘cheaters’ who use unethical SEO techniques. Here are some things that Google hates:
1. Getting lots of ‘shadow domains’ that all point to one site.
2. Using doorway pages.
3. Using falsified WHOIS information.
4. Sites that are "fake" search engines or spyware.
Google Facts and Fiction.
Google has an article on its site called ‘Google Facts and Fiction’. For example:
Fiction: Advertising on Google affects my rankings in the search results.
Fact: Advertising with Google neither helps (nor hurts!) a site's rankings on Google.
Fiction: Sites that are not HTML are not included in Google's index
Fact: Google is and does index as many file formats as possible, however there are some that it cannot index. File types Google is able index include: pdf, asp, jsp, hdml, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf.
Everyone who wants to optimize for Google should make sure they read this article, to avoid common mistakes.