Improve your Site Ranking in Google - Use June's E-marketing Tips and Tricks (My Blog is listed on Page 1 of Google Organic Search Results)

Great news! By utilizing the techniques mentioned in my blog here, June's E-Marketing Blog (yeah, my blog) is listed on Page 1 of Google Organic Search Results for many keywords, including popular keywords like "e-marketing blog". This proves my tricks and tips do actually work! It works to rank my blog high in Google!

In the example below, my blog is the first 2 Organic Search Results listed in Google!



I will surely work harder to have my blog listed on Page 1 of Google Organic Search Results for more keywords! Come back here often for more tips and tricks to help rank your site high in Search Engines! (Note: It might take a few weeks to a month for your work to take effect!)

One quick tip if you are now starting a new site: Name your site with your main keyword! If you cannot name your site with a keyword (e.g. must be your company name), register a new domain with your main keyword, create a landing page to link to your company site (or simply direct the address to your company website).

My site is listed in page 1 of Google organic search result under (not limited to) the following keywords :

• e-marketing tips and tricks

• e-marketing blog

• emarketing blog

• emarketing trick
  

• emarketing tricks
  
• e-marketing trick
  
• e-marketing tricks
• blogging tips and tricks for site ranking
• popular screen resolution
• popular display resolution
• third generation search engine marketing
• third generation of search engine marketing
• third generation internet marketing

Update: OnSite Videos - Usage Statistics Available - How to use these to improve your OnSite Videos?

Finally, more detailed usage statistics are available in the OnSite Videos' usage report. Now you can track how well OnSite Videos is working for you.

Below are the information available:



By looking at your click through rate, you can see how effective is your video in driving visitors to the promotion page. If the click through rate is low, you should do one of the followings:

1. Double check if the visitors of the page where the video is resided are the right audience for your promotion message. For instance, you should not promote cosmetics in a male apparel page.
2. If the audience group is correct, you might need to redesign your message, making sure it is addressing to the needs of the target audiences. For example, to use the right terms, talk about how the product you are trying to promote can benefit the visitor. Use simple terms and avoid product model number. Product model number means nothing to the audience (only to you), but the uses and applications are more meaningful to them.
3. In your message, avoid talking about features but the benefits of the product to the specific group. This is a must for all marketing effort. BENEFITS SELL.

You can also look at the % play in full, to see how many people did actually finish watching the whole video. Also the average play time, to see if your visitors close the video in the beginning of the video or let it play for a longer time.

Add a live person on your website?

Recently, I have added a live person in my company's homepage. We are trying to generate awareness and product interest in a product not many people are familiar with.

The supplier I used was OnSite Videos. Not like its competitors, it is also feasible for smaller site/ small company to use as their pricing is very reasonable and flexible. Check out their website and detailed pricing at http://www.onsitevideos.com/page/pricing. You pay by the number of impression you need. However, if your site has very very high traffic, some other companies might be able to provide the same service at a cheaper price.

Want to see how a live person will look in your website? Go to http://www.onsitevideos.com/
and type in your site address to see a sample live person on your website. You will be amazed. :)

Want to see how different companies utilize live person video, you can click here to see more examples. (My company's website is being showcased here too!)
Anyhow, the result created by the live person is very encouraging. Many visitors have went to the product page to find out more about the target product after seeing live person in the homepage.

It is also very easy to implement. You can implement the video by yourself without knowing any web programming. Don't think it will take a long time and lots of effort to have a live person ready online and advertising for your products. All you need to do is to choose the actor, prepare the script and the video supplier will prepare everything for you. In my case, 2-3 weeks after I have submitted my script, I already have the finished video ready to be launched on my company's website. Moreover, you can change the position of the video to anywhere and anytime.

You can check the impression of your video anytime online in the report section. Onsite Videos is currently adding the feature to track the click-thru-rate which they claim will be available in a few weeks from now.

I am going to make more videos to support a few upcoming product launches and will surely share my experience and success with all of you after.

Popular screen resolution

See the chart below for the popular display resolution people are using. Note that around 1/5 of internet population are still using 800x600 and more and more people are using 1024x768. However, webmaster should understand his/her target audiences to decide a right resolution to use for the his/her website.

For example, if your audiences are people with low technical background in developing countries, you might want to target for 800x600. However, if your target is the design guru or technology pioneer, you should adjust your site for a higher resolution. Use the web statistics available for your site to know your audiences.

I have obtained the information from the following site: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Browser Statistics: Firefox is getting more popular

When you design a webpage, you should not only optimize it for Internet Explorer. Although it is still the most popular web browser, Firefox is getting more and more popular, especially in Europe, and amongst the techie and Macintosh users.

Check out the statistics below, which I obtained from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, you can see the total market share of Internet Explorer has decreased while the market share of Firefox has increased. The share of Internet Explorer has dropped from 85% in 2002 to below 60% in 2006.

Actually, when looking at the browser used to surf my blog (see chart below, results are in %, up to Nov 2006), it shows a similar trend. You might find an even higher percentage of people using Firefox here as many of my visitors (like you) are techie or e-marketers which are the population more likely to use Firefox.

FireFox has tabbed browsers, advanced bookmark manager system, live bookmarks, and higher security. It is small, fast and easy to use. Moreover, Firefox blocks pop-up and is not Active-X friendly, so spyware and adware will not be installed automatically when you visited certain website. These might lead to its growing popularity while IE is more vulnerable to various security concerns.

Click the download icon on the right panel to download FireFox with Google Toolbar. You will love Firefox once you tried it! It is a much better browser than IE. Try it for a week and be sure to share your experience with me!

Using Google Toolbar with FireFox gives you the following advantages:

1) Enhanced search box - give you suggestions, spelling correction and search history as your type
2) Safe Browsing - Give you warning for webpage that might be unsafe to browse

3) SpellCheck - Check your spelling whenever you type in web forms

4) Autofill - Automatically fill out forms for faster online shopping

5) Subscribe RSS feed with just one click

6) PageRank Display - tell you how Google's algorithms assess the importance of the page you're viewing. I would say this is a very useful feature for e-marketers. You should always check the Pagerank for your site.

Many more features for you to discover. A tool should not be missed. I personally love it! If you are not using it now, try it out today!

Where to report spam violation (link techniques to fool search engines)?

If you spot unethical spam techniques on website (whether it is your competitor or not), you can report to search engines directly using the following email address/website:

Search Engine Contact:
ask.com reportviolations@askjeeves.com
Open directory staff@dmoz.org
Google www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
MSN support.msn.com/feedbacksearch.aspx
Yahoo! add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_reportsearchspam

Be sure to include the followings in your spam report:

1. The search term and the inappropriate URL associated with it
2. The suspected spam technique used being used back up with the evidence to support your belief
3. State why do you think this spam is preventing searchers to locate the best search result.

Search engines receive many violation reports everyday and will investigate each claim seriously and act quickly to penalize or ban true violators.

Good linkages are important for your page rank too!

Wondering why some pages are very well optimized (with lots of keywords) and still not rank as high as the other pages that has less keywords?

The answer might lie here.. the pages which rank high might have a lot of good links (will define good below) to its pages. Many search marketing experts claims that as little as 25 high-quality links to a site can increase its ranking in search engine significantly. However, links from 25 non-related sites will not help to rank a page any higher.

Google places a very heavy weight in link popularity. Others, might not weight it as strong as Google, still place an important weight for links in their ranking algorithms.

So does that mean you just need to work on getting as much links as possible, and you can rank high? Well... It depends...

We need to look at the followings:
1) Link Quantity
2) Link Quality
3) Anchor Text
4) Link Relevancy

Link Quantity
- Usually, page got more links should rank higher. However, not all links created equal. We still need to look at the quality. If the quality is the same, we will look at quantity. For example, if my site has 10 grade A links and yours has 5 grade A links, mine will rank higher than yours.

Link Quality
- It concerns about where your links are from. If your links are from a very popular site (a site with lots of links to it), this linkage is a good linkage.However, when comparing links from 2 sites with the same high popularity, one link is 1 of 5 available links from the popular site A and the other link is 1 of the 50 available links from the popular site B, of course the link from site B will be seen as of higher quality.

Anchor Text
- Anchor text is very important to search engines as it is the text a visitor clicks and to follow a link. It is one of the key page ranking factor in the search engine algorithms. Page search queries tend to return the linked page that have variants of the queried terms in anchor text.

Link Relevancy
- Since words can have different meaning, it is not enough for anchor text to use similar words. The links you get have to be contextually relevant to your site. Search engine will look at the words around the anchor text, words on the entire page and the entire page being linked from. By doing this, search engines can return pages which are more relevant and useful from a search query.

Some Don'ts or Things to beware of:
Don't try to fool search engines by doing the following stupid link tricks. You can jeopadize your site ranking by doing so:

1) Blog Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated blogs with your URL to impress search engine (increase one way links)

2) Guest Book Spamming - Do not mass posting comment on unrelated Guest books to increase one way links

3) Link Farms - Do not try to artificially build link popularity by fabricating sites that have have many links to the sites you want to boost traffic. Do not post your site in link farms nor set up numerous sites just to contain thousands of your URL be crawled by search engines. Search engines will penalize your site if found. Your competitors or anyone can report your trick to search engines (see the next post).

4) Hidden links - Do not load up hidden links on high ranking pages to the pages you want to boost traffic

5) Link E-mail spam - Do not use a software to spam different webmasters requesting links from their sites

6) Fake two way links - Many site will link to yours if you agree to put their links on your page. However, some try to trick you and other webmasters by utilizing links cannot be detected by search engine. By doing this, not only you are not getting the reciprocal linkages, but only your "partner" is getting credit from you for the more valuable one way link.

The best image host for your blog, website or e-bay store!

Need to host images for your blog, your website or your e-bay store? Seriously, I have tried many different image hosts until I found this one: Allyoucanupload.com. Personally, I think this one is the best!!!

The upload time is fast and it is extremely easy to use. All you need to do is to select your file and click the "upload" button. You can then copy the html code generated (the one appropriate for your use) and paste it in your webpage or blog. See the image below for the 8 different html codes the site will generate to fit your different needs.



For the more than 10 image hosts I have tried, this one is the best - the easiest and the quickest way to host and post images.

Click on the logo below and check it out: