Scuba Diving Top 100 Readers' Choice Awards

For all the Scuba Operators and Resorts out there, there is no excuse for not sending all your past divers to the Scuba Diving Magazine Reader's Ratings page here:

http://www.scubadiving.com/readerratings

Reader's Ratings all go towards their annual Top 100 Readers' Choice Awards.

Scuba Diving is the magazine divers trust for objective gear reviews, cutting-edge scuba training articles, underwater photography and video tips and unbiased dive travel information. In addition, Scuba Diving features Diver To Diver, our online scuba board and dive forum featuring discussions on topics from Cozumel dive resorts to the latest regulators and dive computers. Whether you are a sport diver, an old pro, or a new diver looking for lessons, Scuba Diving has something for you.

How to Succeed as a Small Business Owner ... and Still Have a Life

I'm an avid reader/researcher and now and entrepreneur so I have read LOTS of books on small business. This is the first book that I really felt "got it!" The writer clearly knows what it is like for a small business and has realistic tips and ideas for growing your business the right way and ending up where you want it to be.

The title initally appealed to me since running your own business can be so draining. This book was approachable, easy to read, and had actionable ideas from the beginning. I also like that it "got" the realities of being a small business owner and didn't take up your time with worthless "exercises" or visions of what your business plan should be like. After reading this book I was so inspired to create my own business plan and start working on business improvements laid out in the plan. The book helped me find the clarity I had really be lacking and it made me feel like it wouldn't be too difficult or onerous to do.

This book is a MUST for every small business owner who wants to see their business grow in a sustainable way!!! I can't recommend it highly enough.

How to get your site reincluded if banned...

All the major search engines have procedures whereby a webmaster who has determined that his site has been censored, has somehow determined which was the offending feature, removed the offending feature, and is suitably repentant, can apply for reinstatement:

Google: You can go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en

You will have to sign up for Google's Webmaster's Tools Service first, which if you have been reading any of my blog, then you would have .

Google only solicits reinclusion requests from sites that admit and stipulate that they violated Google's guidelines or inherited a domain name that they suspect violated Google's guidelines.

"By submitting this form, I acknowledge that: I believe this site has violated Google's quality guidelines in the past. This site no longer violates Google's quality guidelines. I have read and agree to abide by Google's quality guidelines."

You can include a note pleading your case, explaining all the corrective actions you have taken, and promising on your genuine Batman ring never to do it again. Google might eventually reinstate your site. There are persistent reports that Google has “punishment periods” that vary depending on the “offense”. If your site has been banned for editorial or competitive reasons you are out of luck.

Google people, looking down on lowly webmasters from their lofty positions as industry leaders and employees of a $100 billion company, tend to be unusually condescending. Google treats webmasters like children with “punishment” and “penalization”:

“Tommy, you’ve been bad. Go to your room.”

“Why Mommy? Why?”

“I’m not going to tell you why. I’m the parent and you’re the child. I don’t have to tell you why.”

“How long do I have to stay in my room Mommy?”

“I’m not going to tell you that either. I’ll let you out when I feel like letting you out.”

Yahoo: You can request a “re-review” at: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview

In Yahoo parlance, the “original” review was the one they did when they decided to ban your site. Your message should include all the changes you made in order to be in compliance with Yahoo guidelines.

MSN Search: You can go to: http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=search&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts and fill out an MSN Search problem report form “Search, Problem, Finding a Web Site” stating that your site has been deleted.

You will get an immediate web reply with a ticket number promising a support person will be in touch. Soon, you will get an email from a support person directing you to help pages, guidelines, etc. You reply to this email with your plea, including that you have indeed confirmed that your site has been intentionally de-listed by MSN Search. You will then eventually get a reply that the support person has forwarded your plea to the MSN Search Product Specialist Team. Eventually, your site might be reinstated.

A very curious note: The reply email from Microsoft Support contains a number of features usually associated with email spam and therefore was tagged as spam by our Spamassassin anti-spam software. The items flagged by the filter included: "HTML obfuscation", "Envelope sender in postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org ", "Message-Id has pattern used in spam", and "Reply-To is empty". Be careful or you might miss the reply message.

Alternately, you can try to follow this note on MSN's site: "We may remove a website from the index if the website was reported as spam. If you suspect that your website was incorrectly identified as spam, please send an e-mail message to webspam@microsoft.com."

Microsoft is a huge company and MSN is a large division but MSN Search is a relatively small group. Although MSN has an extensive, responsive, and well managed support department, it is our impression that the “team” responsible for MSN Search is still very new, relatively small, and feeling its way. Despite all the hype by Microsoft that they are going to “bury” Google, Microsoft does not appear to be expending all that much effort on search. Just about everything about MSN Search is pretty primitive when compared to Google and Yahoo Search. Once your request has been sent to the “MSN Search Product Specialist Team” you may be in for a very long wait before you get any response. The “reinclusion” department at MSN Search may well be essentially non-existent.

Handling reinclusion requests at search engines is not a priority and reinstatement can reportedly take months or even years. Search engines often do not advise sites if they are going to be reinstated so site owners spend a lot of time waiting and wondering.

How to know if your site is banned from SE's

You can find out if a search engine has singled out your site for exclusion by doing a search for “site:www.domainname.com” in any of the them. The SE will report the number of your pages it has indexed. If it says zero or one, your site has been censored. If your site has been de-listed, “link:www.domainname.com” may also report zero even though other search engines report that you have incoming links

Yahoo! Search is using a second link-only banning method in which the site's pages are not indexed by the search engine but links to the site that have been found on other sites are still included and can theoretically be found in a search. The pages have not been indexed so text on the pages cannot be found in a search. The pages are not cached. No descriptive text is provided in the unlikely event that such a listing is included in a search result, so a user is unlikely to be able to determine what the site is about. The title text provided in the search results is the "link text" provided by the site linking to you. These "supplemental results" are essentially useless for search users and are apparently included so Yahoo Search can claim to have a larger index than its competitors. If the site: search reports many pages, check to see if the listings consist entirely of "link-only" entries. Your site is banned if the search engine is not indexing your text. The link-only entries result from indexing other people's sites. Link-only banning adds insult to injury. Yahoo Search is claiming your pages as included in their index while actually refusing to index them!

Another test method is to search for some unique phrase that appears only on your pages. Some webmasters include a phrase such as “Vmxzwh S34pp” on their pages for this purpose. This search will avoid listing “link-only” entries and will also disclose some of the other sites (not banned by the search engine) that have stolen your content, if any.

The “ultimate misfortune” is to find that your site has been banned but that many sites that have stolen your content have not been banned by the same search engine!

We would expect that spiders would stop visiting a censored site. They do visit much less frequently. However, they usually continue to access some pages and to check /robots.txt apparently to monitor that the site still exists. Yahoo’s robot “Slurp” checks /robots.txt up to several hundred times per day. One reason for doing this might be to determine if a domain name is sold to another owner by detecting a substantial "down" period.

Building Quality Links Outside of Link Exchanges

There are more ways to generate links to your pages than just exchanging them. Create quality links by doing the following:

1. Get your site listed on large directories like Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo! Directory. Google uses Open Directory Project listings in these directories to formulate its own directory and listings in either or both directories can help boost your "importance" or PageRank on Google.

Listings in the Open Directory Project are free. Just be sensible, honest and careful into which categories you try and get listed. Don;t choose the first one that looks 'likely'...

You will have to pay to be considered for inclusion to Yahoo! It's a whopping US$299 just to be considered with absolutely no guarantee of listing. Given the Yahoo's search results are currently provided by Google, I don't believe it's necessary. If you still want to proceed, click here for tips on getting listed on Yahoo.

You cannot request a listing in Google's Directory. You need to submit your site for free submission at the Open Directory Project.

2. Write a press release about your website. Submit it to online newswires like PRWeb or Click2NewSites.com. You can also submit to newspapers that run their stories on their websites. Click here for tips on writing a press release.

3. Join associations related to your business or field of specialty. Many of these associations will link to their members.

4. Have your articles with your byline published on other websites. Submit your articles to sites that host free content. Consult our list of free content sites to get started.

5. Get links from other big, "important sites". Do you have an eBay About Me Page, a Ryze Page or even a Yahoo Groups page? Did you know these have link popularity? It makes business sense to link to these pages and then have them link back to you.

6. Link the various pages of your website together. Your most important links should be on all your pages for easy navigation and to increase your link popularity. You should also link to relevant information on your other pages when appropriate.

7. Create a few websites with similar themes and create a few links between them. For example, if you sell children's books on one site, you can also make a site on children's literacy and so forth. One is your sales site and the other is purely informational, but be careful of cross-linking to heavily...as this can be penalized by search engines.

8. Purchase ads on various directories that have a relevant theme to yours. If you are a wedding planner, get your site listed in Wedding-related directories.

9. Create an informative and useful site. If your website is good, people will WANT to link to you. You won't need to ask them.

10. Offer testimonials for products and services related to the tourism industry. Many websites will give links in return for testimonials. For example, if you are a dive operator, provide testimonials for various dive equipment and software.

11. If someone asks you for an interview for their website or to contribute to an article, do it. They should (and you should insist they do) give you links back to your site in return.

Is your scuba diving SEO clear and simple?

By Gabriel Machuret

When I started working with SEO I spent a lot of time on the phone with prospects and clients. I was always amazed by misconceptions given to so many people about how to get a top listing in a search engine. Often times, I felt as though dive centers managers and dive professionals, were educating themselves with literature written in the early nineties.

Unfortunately, the penalty for some of these techniques is not just a bad ranking but rather permanent delisting or banning. Nobody wants to be banned! I have organized a list of concepts that people confuse or as I like to call them “Frequently Confused Concepts”.

The most frequently confused concept of search engine optimization is the value of meta tags. Way back before search engines were sophisticated enough to scan and save the content of your diving web site, they would simply review your meta tags. A meta tag gives the title of your diving site, a description of what you do, and a list of five to ten keyword and keyphrases that are relevant to your web site. The problem with relying on these tags is that many people caught on to the unfortunate truth that pornographic keywords would generate more traffic than the terms related to their web site. Now, this is not traffic you want since the person looking for his favorite centerfold does not want what you have to offer. Also, this makes the search engines quality of results very poor for the searching public.

All the major (and most minor) search engines index your entire site and use the meta tag as a minimally valuable map of what your web site has to offer. You content is the most important. If you have “scuba diving, bikini, surfing, free tickets” in your keywords list in your meta tag and your web site pertains to “diving holidays” then you are spamming with your meta tags and they will not be positively received by the search engines robots. At the same time, piling a whole encyclopedia of keywords and keyphrases into your meta tag and not mentioning these words in your general wordage of your site will also not help you. Your meta tags should have descriptive, relevant, descriptions and keywords pertaining to your sites content.

This brings me to the second frequently confused concept of search engine optimization which is keyword lists. You have all of your literature and content in tacked on your web site. Then at the bottom of your web site, you put a long list of keywords such as:

• Diving
• Scuba Diving
• Divers
• diving Products
• Dive gear
• Liveaboard
• Dive Courses

Since these words are not in anyway (other than a list) part of your wordage, the search engines will disregard this as low quality content. You do NOT want to have low quality content as it is high quality content the search engines are looking for. After all, you will be in much better shape if you are holding hands with Google and Yahoo as apposed to thumb wrestling them. So avoid long lists of keywords and use that time to include your keywords and keyphrases frequently in your wordage. For example:

“Aquatech Diving Centre, Manchester's premier school, was established in 1993 and has grown from strength to strength in that time. The school offers Internationally recognized qualifications from the main SCUBA training organisations BSAC and PADI. We are also a RYA recognised Centre and run the GMDSS radiotelephony course and first aid courses for BSAC, PADI, RYA and more recently the full range of HSE first aid at work qualifications. ”

The above paragraph will be welcomed as quality content whereas a list of unused words will simply look like garbage.

I have had the unfortunate task of waving warning flags at prospects that come to us after working with a black hat search engine optimization specialist or misguided web designer about hidden keywords. This is my next frequent confused concept. Hidden keywords are lists of keywords in the header or footer that are the same color as the background. This makes them only viewable to search engine spiders. Do not do this! This is an offense that is punishable by black listings, banning, and overall delisting of your web site. Once again, use this time to creatively mention your keywords in your wordage.

Now that you have a quality diving web site, you need a few relevant diving web sites to link to you. Not all links are created equal. A much used (and still very popular though useless) technique is submitting to free for all link pages. These are pages that accept links to everyone’s web site.

The search engines hate these as they are just lists of links. Aside from that, these sites are NOT relevant to your web site so the link you wasting your time posting will not benefit you. The best way to add your link to other web sites is by searching for relevant directories and web sites then offering link exchanges. Our friends at XYX diving organization could add their link to dive centers directories, forums, and blogs. Another valuable technique is simply writing informational scuba diving articles and include your link in the footer of the article. Then submit these articles to places like Scubabible.com , scubapedia.com or ScubaHerald.com who will post your article for others to use. They use your article with the understanding that your link and footer stay in their original context.

Last but not least in my list of frequently confused concepts of search engine optimization is “hocus pocus”. Yes, we still get calls from people that believe the key to optimization is by the use of magic tags and invisible mojo. The truth is, search engine optimization is based on the three pillars of Relevant Content, Fresh Content (update your information frequently), and Relevant Link Population. If all of your techniques are centered on ethically doing those three things, you will have a better ranking and sleep better knowing that the search engines will not.

Ready to improve your positioning?

Start adding your website to places like:

www.scubaboard.com - section dive business directory.
www.scuuuba.com - directory
www.divegoogle.com - search engine
www.3routes.com - scuba diving directory
www.topdivecenters.com - dive center map
www.scubabible.com
www.topdivecenters.com

More info? google the term "scuba directory" and start improving your web positioning.

What tools do I need before putting together an Internet marketing plan?

Simple answer is fewer than you think!

If you want to have an online presence, you only need several basic technology tools at your disposal to guarantee that you will be successful with your Internet marketing plan for your tourism product. Without the following in place, it will be difficult to successfully market your business on the Web:

Web site:

You must have a Web site to successfully market your company on the Web. And you need a domain name that reflects your company's identity and brand. Using your company name as a domain name is a good place to start, although keywords and phrases are also another way to also do some SEO along the way.

Check out your competition:

You will find that Web sites have varying degrees of sophistication. Make sure that yours reflects your industry. If you are a Spa, for instance, you cannot get away with a low-tech text-heavy Web site, you'll need a softer feel.

Reliable ISP or Web host:

The inadequacies of your service provider will come across to customers as inadequacies of your company. Make sure you do your homework first and research potential Web hosts. The key factors in choosing a provider are connection speed, site uptime, spam policies and support. In addition, watch for hidden costs.

Also, make sure that certain technologies are available to you should you need them. For example, you may want to run server-side scripts to extract information from your database to include on your site. Many basic Web hosting programs do not include such functionality.

Email:

Customers and guests need to be able to contact you by email. All staff in reservations and sales should have an email address. Train your staff to use email for guest service. And make sure your email address is easy to find on your Web site and your marketing material.

Email newsletter:

An email newsletter can be a key component of successful online marketing. Its success hinges on the number of customer email addresses you successfully collect, so it is helpful to have a strategy and set up your Web site with that in mind.

Internet Marketing Terms for Beginners

How many hoteliers or dive centre operators have a handle on all these new acronyms and terms used for online marketing?

Answer: very few.

it really can be difficult to work through all of these Internet marketing terms. To help clarify them, here are some definitions of common terms below.

Ad impression: An ad impression, or ad view, occurs when a user pulls up a Web page through a browser and sees an ad that is served on that page. Many Web sites sell advertising space by ad impressions (see CPM, below). Each showing counts as one impression. If someone visits twice, that counts as 2.

Click Through rate (CTR): The percentage of people clicking on a link compared with the total number seeing that same link. Very important ratio to know and follow.

Conversion rate: The percentage of site visitors who respond to the desired goal of an ad campaign compared with the total number of people who see the ad campaign. The goal may be, for example, convincing readers to become subscribers, encouraging customers to buy something, or enticing prospective customers from another site with an ad. This is the prime indicator of success.

Cost per click (CPC): The amount of money an advertiser will pay to a site each time a user clicks on an ad or link.

Cost per thousand impressions (CPM): The amount of money an advertiser will pay for 1,000 ad impressions or views (M refers to the Roman numeral for 1,000).

Keyword: A word or phrase that a user types into a search engine when looking for specific information.

Meta tags: Hidden HTML directions for Web browsers or search engines. They include important information such as the title of each page, relevant keywords describing site content, and the description of the site that shows up when a search engine returns a search. Although they are less important nowadays (Google and Yahoo! don't put much, i f any, weight to them now), they woudl still be foolish to just overlook.

Page view: A common metric for measuring how many times a complete page is visited.

Search engine marketing (SEM): Promoting a Web site through a search engine. This most often refers to targeting prospective customers by buying or optimising for relevant keywords or keyword phrases.

Search engine optimization (SEO): Making a Web site more friendly to search engines, resulting in a higher page rank for specific keyords or keyword phrases.

How to avoid Click Fraud

Click fraud is a type of internet crime that occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad's link. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud.

Click fraud occurs in a number of ways:

1. A rival decides to have fun clicking your links in order to drive your costs up

2. a Web site that does context ads for one of the search engines, and who therefore gets paid when a visitor to their site clicks on your ad, generates fake clicks to earn a few bucks extra.

Google and other SE's perform ongoing analysis in order to catch it, and when they find patterns of click fraud, they automatically deduct the wrong charges from your account. In addition, if you think you have found evidence of click fraud in your reports, you can complain and they'll check for you.

Click fraud is an annoyance, but for most tourism advertisers it's a fairly minor one. You can find out more by searching the Web for articles on click fraud, there are thousands. You'll also find numerous vendors ready to sell you services to analyze your log files if you feel you are being victimized by click fraud.

More useful to most beginning advertisers is this warning:

Resist another kind of fraud altogether: people who claim they can "get your site into the top 10!" of search-engine results, or conjure any other dramatic results for you, for a fee. You might get this in the form of phone calls from salespeople. Hang up on them. Nobody can really sell you position on the main search engine results pages.

There is no real short cut!

Keywords Strategy : The Keyword Auction

Most advertising is charged according to rate cards, based on the audience that sees the ads.

Print magazines and newspapers charge from $5 to $100 (USD) per thousand subscribers depending on the readership — general consumer pubs are at the bottom end while specialty pubs that appeal to wealthy and select audiences such as business owners, gourmet food enthusiasts, or Porsche buyers get to charge more.

Radio and television charge a lot less per thousand, but reach a much broader audience — national television programs in the U.S. can cost a dollar or less per thousand viewers — which can add up to a large dollar amount, but your "reach" or the size of the audience seeing your message can be greater than in any other medium: A hugely popular U.S. TV program can attract 20 million viewers at once.

Web sites are like a mirror of the rest of the publishing world: There are specialized sites, such as AllBusiness.com, which are able to charge a high advertising rate per thousand pageviews, while broader sites like the main page of Yahoo!, which charges a lot less for a less targeted but much larger audience.

A lot of negotiation goes on in ad contracts, but they start from a fixed pricing sheet. This has a disadvantage for search engine results pages, which can't be managed the same way as relatively fixed editorial site pages. Google originally tried charging a flat rate for ads on its results pages — they got way too many advertisers trying to get onto certain highly desirable pages, and nobody on millions of other pages.

Then some genius came up with the ad auction that is now the norm in search keyword marketing. Instead of picking from a fixed price list, you bid in competition with everyone else and pay based on demand for that keyword and its value to you.

So some people are paying a nickel a click on a keyword that's not in much demand, while others are willing to pay fifty bucks a click. So almost every keyword has a price — and a value. It's a great way to sell as much of your inventory as possible at the best price. Clever!