Internet Marketing SEO: SEO Techniques With My Personal Experience

I want to share my Internet marketing seo techniques with all of you when I am actually implementing these strategies with my site www.bestplatformbeds.com.

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Look Beyond SERP on Yahoo

Today, right after Google, Yahoo is one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month and that's why webmasters are all trying their best to get a high ranking on Yahoo. Let's look beyond SERP, other than organic search, there are some other ways you can promote your business on Yahoo.

* Mobile Site Submission
* Podcast Submission
* Yahoo Directory Submission
* Media RSS Feeds
* Yahoo Answers

Mobile Site Submission
The code for creating a mobile web sites is either xHTML, WML, or cHTML. As there are way more cell phones today than computers, it is a good idea to prepare your web site to be easily viewable on cell phones. Thus, people can view your web as long as they carry their cell phones.
To get your mobile site indexed by Yahoo, enter the URL on their submission page. Only the top-level page is needed, the Yahoo Crawler will explore the rest of your site from there.


Podcast Submission
According to Information Week, podcast users are expected to reach 60 million by the year 2010. With these kind of numbers, it makes sense to start implementing podcasting into your own marketing strategy.

Yahoo released their podcast directory in 2005 and it is now one of the best places to submit your podcast and start picking up some extra subscribers. Simply go to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish to get started.


Yahoo Directory Submission
Unlike mobile and podcast submission, this one will cost you $299 a year(unless your site is not a commercial site). While there are benefits associated with getting listed on Yahoo directory. I really doubt whether it is worth paying that. For Yahoo directory submission, you have to use your business as the title of your site but not the one within the title tag, which is most often the keyword you want to target. So it is very likely that once you get your site listed, you will find that the ranking of your homepage on Yahoo (when you type the keyword you want your homepage to target) will likely to drop. So think it through before you decide to pay $299.


Media RSS
I think it is always fun to see a real person speaking or talking in front of the screen. Nowadays, other than only having plain text and images online, more and more site provided online audio and video for business promotion. As the variety of content has increased online, Yahoo has been continually adapting. They now allow you to search specifically for audio and video within their search engine. You can see my previous post for Wholesale Furniture Broker's online TV commercial.

If you are looking to increase your web site's traffic, creating audio and video content for your web site could be the answer.

To get your audio, video, and other visual content into Yahoo, you can submit it via a media RSS feed.


Yahoo Answers
Yahoo! Answers was launched on December 8, 2005. It is a community where anyone can ask questions and anyone can answer questions. When you search "XX" on yahoo, at the bottom of your search results, you probably will see "XX from Yahoo Answers" and it shows the recent questions asked by other people and it also shows how many people have provided the answer. If you feel like your site can provide clear answers, you can go ahead and tell the people who asked the question.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

SEO Marketing: Add Del.icio.us to your blog/Site

Have you ever heard of Del.icio.us? If you did, are you taking advantage of that?
The following are excerpt from del.icio.us/about

"What is del.icio.us?"
del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Use
del.icio.us to:
  • Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
  • Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
  • Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.
Add this to your site and if someone likes your content, he or she can save this to his or her favorite item. This works kinda like a RSS feed. What makes it more exciting is that once someone add it to his or her favorite, the tag will appear on the homepage of del.icio.us and if someone else there find the tag appealing, he or she can save it to his or her favorite. Thus, it is a great way for you to acquire one-way quality back links and to increase visibility. One of the advantages I can think of is that the majority of the time your tags will be removed from community members because the members are technically savvy and intolerant of any type of commercial push.

At this point, you might want to see a real example. Look at my blog and you will see "Save to del.icio.us", if you already had an account there, then you can click on it and add it to your favorite. What's more, if some people see your item is of great value to them, they can add this to their favorites off your list. (I am not triggering you to do that though.....)

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Marketing SEO: 10 Ways to Promote Your Blog

Yesterday, I read a newsletter talking about promoting your blogs. It shows 10 blog tools that can help you market your blog. Personally, I think it is very helpful and I believe that you probably have known most of them. But there maybe always something you never thought of, so let us take a look:

10 Essential Blogging Tools
By John Jantsch (c) 2006

Feed Reader
The best way to learn about blogs and blogging is to read, or at least scan, lots of blogs. One of the wonders of blogs is that you can have every new post from every blog you want to read delivered to your desktop or to online location via RSS, so you can easily read and scan the posts of many blogs in a very short time. Newsgator is a good online choice for feed reading and also has a version that integrates with Outlook. I use a frëe online service known as Bloglines.


Subscriber Center
You need to make it easy for your blog visitors to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed – so they can read your blog in their favorite feed reader. The best way to do this is to go to FeedBurner and burn your own RSS feed there and use the tools they provide to set up automatic subscriber links so people who want to use Bloglines, Google Reader, MyYahoo or Pluck, for instance, can clíck on one button to subscribe. Tech types can figure this out without the buttons but why not make it easy for anyone to figure out.


Email Subscription
A lot of people will nevër get the whole feed thing, but everyone gets email. Create an option for people to subscribe by giving you their email address – they will simply receive your blog posts like an email message. FeedBurner offers this service for frëe. FeedBlitz is another option or, if you already have an autoresponder email list service they may offer this service. AWeber offers this and helps me integrate these blog email subscribers into my other mailing lists.


Blog and RSS directories
There are hundreds of blog and RSS directories and getting listed in many can be a good thing. I use a piece of software called RSS Submit , but you can also visit Robin Goode's frequently updated list and submit your blog and feed by hand. Hint: Subscribe to the RSS feed he offers and you will be notified when new directories are added.


Ping Service
Pinging is a term used for letting the various blog and RSS directories know when you have posted new content. Again, FeedBurner offers this as an automatic option called PingShot and you should activate it. PingGoat and Ping O Matic are other options but they require that you visit and update your record each time you post new content. Bookmark Manager

As you surf around the web or hop from blog to blog you may find sites that you want to point out to your readers. Online bookmark managers allow you to bookmark and categorize web and blog pages as you collect them and are a great tool for managing all of the stuff you find on the web. I use del.icio.us but BlinkList does a fine job as well.


Blog Stats
I like to track a few key stats in real time because it shows what other blogs might be linking to you or posting about your blog. A lot of people just like to track this kind of thing for fun and frequently visit sites like Technorati. I like to track it for networking opportunities. I use a tool called MyBlogLog because it allows me to see where traffïc is coming from but also tracks what links on my blog visitors are clicking on. It's amazing how this data can help you write more effectively. (MyBlogLog also ranks your links so visitors can see which links on your site are the most popular.)


Desktop Posting
With most blog software you must go online and post using a set of tools provided by the blog software. Many bloggers like to use a desktop application to create and submit their posts as it gives them some extra tools and allows them to more easily integrate content and files on their computer. I use w.blogger but also like Performancing, Qumana and ecto (apple folks) (w.blogger also doubles as a really simple HTML editor.)


Tell A Friend Script
My blog software (pMachine) has a feature that allows a reader to clíck a link and send the post to a friend. This tactic brings me lots of readers. You might try looking here for some simple scripts that do that same: http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/tellafriend.shtml http://www.stadtaus.com/en/php_scripts/tell_a_friend_script/


Republish Your Feed Headlines
The ability to republish your blog posts on other web pages, sites you own or sites of strategic partners is a great way to expose folks to your blog content. One more time we turn to FeedBurner for a painless way to republish your blog post to any web page you choose with something they call BuzzBoost.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Platform Bed Forum Goes Live

After implementing some basic SEO techniques and with a high ranking on MSN, The traffic to www.bestplatformbeds.com has dramatically increased over the past two months. Therefore, I decide to take my site to another level by allowing a more open and easy interaction with my audiences. The easiest way for facilitating the interaction with my audiences i s to build a forum where the audiences can hang around and post any questions they have about platform bed. In this way, audiences can help each other and they can easily share their experiences with each other. In the forum, i also included a section just for platform bed manufacturer such as Lifestyle Solutions and Rizzon Furniture so that online shoppers will be informed quickly if there is any new styles available from the manufacturers.
To view my forum, please visit : Platform Bed Forum

This is a snapshot of my forum:

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Online Marketing - Submit Your Video and Put On Your Site

Other than some traditional online marketing techniques we have seen over the past 10 years, such as on page & off page optimization for top rankings, press release, PPC and online blogging, we are seeing more and more people adopt "multimedia" to get more exposure and response to their business and products.

Besides your favorite site for submitting the video and pod cast, you should definitely submit your video to Google and Yahoo. Additionally, you can get a code that you can simply put on your page and show the video on your site. Since the video is not on your server, so you do not need to worry about the possibility of slowing down your site. By adding a video and especially if a third party can be present and tell people about all the "cool" stuff of your business, you will be able to gain a lot more credibility than just putting plain text on the site.

Below is my sponsor's (as you probably already know - Wholesale Furniture Brokers) first TV commercial and I copy the video code from Yahoo so you can take a look at it. If you don't like it, just do not hit the "play" button.


Thursday, June 01, 2006

Running Contest to Promote Your Site

Bestplatformbeds.com's sponsor - Wholesale Furniture Brokers starts its official $3000 grand prize contest today in hope of generating more traffic.

As we know, there are many forms of online marketing tactics such as online blogging (what I am doing now), search engine optimization, ppc ads and even word of mouth. But some other forms of marketing can also be effective depends on the type of your online business and how you implement the strategy. Personally, I have never experimented tactics like sweepstakes, affiliate programs or contest to promote my site. So it will be interesting to see how they run it and promote this contest and what kind of result they will get. I am sure I will be able to learn something from this contest. They have issued a press release and you can take a look if you are interested. If you want to know more details about the contest or you want to learn something from this type of marketing, you can visit their contest page.