Owning a Tourism Business is awesome

27 Apr 2008

Link Building 101


Two of the three big search engines (Google and Yahoo) place a large importance on one way links to determine rankings. Each link to your site is like a vote and the more votes you have, the higher you will rank.

In this article I will be sharing with you some important info on link building and some strategies to help your one way link building.

Before we get started, it's important to understand the fundamentals...

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of navigating from one webpage to another. To have a link within the same website is called an 'internal link'. An 'external link' takes you from a webpage in one website to a webpage in another website. The meaning of 'backlink' is that your site is being linked to from another website.

What Are the 4 Types of Links?


There are 4 different types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

* Text Links (aka static links) - This is the most common type of link (when you click on a word or phrase and it is a link)

* Image Links - An image link is simply an image that you click on to navigate to another webpage.

* Dynamic Links - These types of links are in another programming language called Javascript and while they also take you from one webpage to another, they have 'extra codes' to perform special functions.

(these types of links can appear in many different forms)

11 Apr 2008

Optimize your Blog Post for Google - Tips that you might not have heard

Cool article about optimising blog posts, certainly worth a read

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"Hey, what’s more exciting than getting huge organic traffic from Google and other search engines to your blog? Every other day, you write posts. Not every post gets noticed. Not every post is picked up by Google. Not every post gets the fame it deserves.

Here are some tips to optimize your blog post a bit for search engines if you’re looking for driving some traffic from Google and other crawlers. Try these, some day one of your posts will drive tens of hundreds of visitors via organic searches.

Though I’m not an expert in SEO, I can give you a few tips based on what I’ve learnt in the last year of blogging. Here we go!"

Optimize your Blog Post for Google - Tips that you might not have heard:

9 Apr 2008

Link Building Tips

Some great advice from KingPin's blog....

Stuart

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KingPin’s SEO Blog » Organic SEO Blog, Advanced SEO Tips and SEO news

All of the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Live) place a strong importance on one way back links to determine you’re websites ranking. Think of link building like running for an election (I think KingPin should be the next Prime Minister btw ;)) the more votes you get, the higher in the polls you are right?

For this article I’ll sharing some important “must know” information on link building and strategies to help you improve you’re one way link building.

I’m not trying to teach you to suck eggs but I’m starting with the basics because many people forget the fundamentals and that is the main cause of not getting the link or doing it all wrong.

Beginning with the very basics, a link is a way of getting from website A to website B. An ‘internal link’ is a link within the same site. An ‘external link’ is from you’re site to someone else’s site. The meaning of ‘back link’ is that your site is being linked to from another website.

Understand? Good, now the next part..

There are four different types of linking….

1) Web address (URL) Link - This is simply a website url that is a link.

2) Static Link (Textual Link) - This is the most common link type (a word or phrase that is clickable)

3) Image Links - An image link is an image that you click on to get taken to another webpage.

4) Dynamic Links - These types of links are Javascript usually and while they also take you from one site to another, they have other bits of code in them to perform special functions.

Read full article here:
KingPin’s SEO Blog » Organic SEO Blog, Advanced SEO Tips and SEO news

8 Apr 2008

Help in Avoiding JUNK MAIL : HOW TO FORWARD EMAIL APPROPRIATELY

THIS IS VERY GOOD ADVICE, IT MAY HELP YOU !!!!!!!!!

IMPORTANT!! HOW TO FORWARD EMAIL APPROPRIATELY

It is an excellent message that ABSOLUTELY applies to ALL of us who send e-mails.

Please read the short letter below, even if you're sure you already follow proper procedures.

Do you really know how to forward e-mails? 50% do; 50% DO NOT.

Do you wonder why you get viruses or junk mail? Do you hate it?

Every time you forward an e-mail there is information left over from the people who got the message before you, namely their e-mail addresses & names. As the messages get forwarded along, the list of addresses builds, and builds, and builds, and all it takes is for some poor sap to get a virus, and his or her computer can send that virus to every e-mail address that has come across his computer.

Or, someone can take all of those addresses and sell them or send junk mail to them in the hopes that you will go to the site and he will make tuppence for each hit. That's right, all of that inconvenience over tuppence.

How do you stop it? Well, there are several easy steps:
  1. When you forward an e-mail, DELETE all of the other addresses that appear in the body of the message (at the top). That's right, DELETE them. Highlight them and delete them, backspace them, cut them, whatever it is you know how to do. It only takes a second. You MUST click the 'Forward' button first and then you will have full editing capabilities against the body and headers of the message. If you don't click on 'Forward' first, you won't be able to edit the message at all.
  2. Whenever you send an e-mail to more than one person, do NOT use the To: or Cc: fields for adding e-mail addresses. Always use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This is the way the people you send to will only see their own e-mail address. If you don't see your BCC: option click on where it says To: and your address list will appear. Highlight the address and choose BCC: and that's it, it's that easy. When you send to BCC: your message will automatically say 'Undisclosed Recipients' in the 'TO:' field of the people who receive it.
  3. Remove any 'FW :' in the subject line. You can re-name the subject if you wish or even fix spelling.
  4. ALWAYS hit your Forward button from the actual e-mail you are reading. Ever get those e-mails that you have to open 10 pages to read the one page with the information on it? By Forwarding from the actual page you wish someone to view, you stop them from having to open many e-mails just to see what you sent.
  5. Have you ever gotten an email that is a petition? It states a position and asks you to add your name and address and to forward it to 10 or 15 people or your entire address book. The email can be forwarded on and on and can collect thousands of names and email addresses. A FACT: The completed petition is actually worth a couple of bucks to a professional spammer because of the wealth of valid names and email addresses contained therein. If you want to support the petition, send it as your own personal letter to the intended recipient. Your position may carry more weight as a personal letter than a laundry list of names and email address on a petition. (Actually, if you think about it, who's supposed to send the petition in to whatever cause it supports? And don't believe the ones that say that the email is being traced, it just ain't so!)
  6. One of the main ones I hate is the ones that say that something like, 'Send this email to 10 people and you'll see something great run across your screen.' Or, sometimes they'll just tease you by saying something really cute will happen. IT AINT GONNA HAPPEN!!!!! (Trust me, I'm still seeing some of the same ones that I waited on 10 years ago!) I don't let the bad luck ones scare me either, they get trashed. (Could be why I haven't won the lottery??)
  7. Before you forward an Amber Alert, or a Virus Alert, or some of the other ones floating around nowadays, check them out before you forward them. Most of them are junk mail that's been circling the net for YEARS! Just about everything you receive in an email that is in question can be checked out at Snopes. Just go to http://www.snopes.com/
    Its really easy to find out if it's real or not. If it's not, please don't pass it on.
So please, in the future, let's stop the junk mail and the viruses.

PLEASE DON’T FORGET TO DELETE THE FOOTERS THAT TELL YOU ABOUT VIRUS CHECKS, COMPANY PRIVACY WARNINGS & EMOTICONS ETC!!

4 Apr 2008

Search Engine Optimization - SEO Best Practices

By Jamie Olson April 2006

Search Engine Optimization is by no means a simple practice. It is made up of a number of complicated in-depth processes and requires an ample amount of time to comprehend its core facets. Moreover, because SEO is an ever changing industry, keeping up with the latest SEO trends can be difficult. For these reasons we have compiled a list of some of the most important SEO practices to be aware of. This is by no means complete, but should serve as a general guideline.

Change is necessary
One of the misconceptions about SEO is that it will automatically improve a site's ranking within the search engines without necessitating changes to that site. Unfortunately this is not the case. An SEO firm that claims it can mysteriously make a site perform better in the search engines without modifications is not practicing ethical standards.

In order to index websites, search engines send out spiders, or bots, to visit a site's pages. The spider learns what the site is about by 'reading' the site's content, so it can place the site into the appropriate context. Spiders analyze the main body content, as well as content located within the Meta tags. One of the perks to this process is that the more relevant the site's content, the better the rating it receives. Therefore, sites laden with pertinent, text rich content are favored above sites that do not incorporate such strategies.

At the basic level, a true SEO service needs to analyze then apply changes to a site's content, optimizing Meta data and the main body with relevant keywords and phrases popular within that site's vertical. For this reason, site's built predominantly with Flash are simply not as effective in the search engines, because the spiders have nothing to read. If you have a Flash entry page, make sure there is an HTML version available as well.

Read full article here:
SEO Articles - Search Engine Optimization - SEO Best Practices

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Add yourself to Wikipedia Business Pages

Something you will notice if you search for the big corporate brands in Google is that Wikipedia pages for those businesses show up in the top 10 results very often. Most businesses do not know that you can create a Wikipedia page for your own business.

However, these business entries do get deleted sometimes, so try to make yours fairly informative and complete, not just profit driven!

If it offers real information or you're a fairly well known business then it's less likely that one of the other editors will delete the page you've created. Deletions still can happen, but if you can get it to stick it's almost guaranteed to rank on page one in Google for your business's name. Some Wikipedia pages for businesses include:

AboutUs.org is similar to Wikipedia, except that its entire focus is for businesses to insert their listings. Creating a page for your business on this site will also tend to rank very well for your business name. And your chances of getting deleted are much lower.