A Step-by-Step Plan To Get Web Traffic

A Step-by-Step Plan To Get Web Traffic
by Matt Bacak and Jim Sapp


Matt:
We wanted to thank you for taking the time to purchase this CD. This is Matt Bacak, The Power Promoter. And I’m sitting down with James… Jim Sap. Now, and… he’s got an absolutely amazing story of what he’s done with his life regarding free traffic, web traffic. And today he’s gonna go over an actual plan. How he plans and how he does it. Actually it’s a huge here’s how to do it guide to making this happen, with search engine traffic. James, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, before we get started, just so they know. You guys, we’re sitting here… I’m sitting here with the powerhouse! And he’s done some amazing things. Why don’t you kind of explain what you’ve done.
James:
Well, I got started, Matt in Internet marketing back in 1995. But at the time I was just basically, looking to generate some extra cash revenue. It was basically something that somebody just suggested. “Why don’t you do marketing on the Internet?” It was like a light bulb went off in my head. Sounded like just an incredible idea. I didn’t know anything about it. It was my only obstacle at the time. But I wasn’t going to let it stop me. I just basically got my hands on everything I could do, everything I could read. I just started diving into it. Learned a lot of things through trial and error. But the bottom line is, I just started selling products and it just kind of snowballed and I just started selling more and more and more. And I just learned more and more. And it just grew and grew and grew from there.
I’ve always taken a little bit of a different approach to Internet marketing than a lot of people. From the very beginning the whole idea of my website was to sell products. It wasn’t just to hand somebody a business card and say go to my website, check me out. My whole purpose was to get it out there. Get it on the Internet and get positioning in search engines, get traffic to my website and sell them a product. So that has always been my focus from Day 1, Matt. And I think what sets me apart from a lot of people, is that I’ve done basically everything. Design the websites, I’ve put them together, I’ve written copy, I’ve gone out and gotten people to link to me, I’ve gone out and optimized a site and learnt all about the search engine, gone out and getting the free traffic from the search engine. I’ve done the whole thing, so I know how all of that works. So even though I am specializing specifically in the area of search engine marketing, I know when somebody is kind of steering somebody in an incorrect direction, than a direction that’s maybe more optimal to them and less to the person they’re advising.
Matt:
Yeah. Well, it sounds like you rolled up your sleeves and went and actually have done this stuff. And not only that, and there is a lot of things, and I have a lot of respect, when I sit down with somebody that’s actually done it themselves. And they’re talking about something that they’ve actually done. And that is something that I have… and what I admire you for, is that, you’re sitting here, and you’re about to explain to people about something that they have done… that you have done yourself. There’s a lot of people that are out there, that are gonna, like you said steer you in the wrong direction or ... because maybe they don’t know. But there are also a lot of people that are out there that are going to give you some information, that they might have heard and that they read about and they regurgitated, and they are giving it to you. That’ s not happening right here right now. What’s happening right here, right now is actually “Here’s how I did it. Here is how you can do it too.” So why don’t we get started about the planning? And you know, you… you’ve said… you’ve got a… I mean - you’ve been doing this for a while and there is a way that you think. There’s a way that your thought process is. I want to get inside of your mind right now, and know exactly how you actually think about it and what you do to do that.
James:
Well, thank you Matt. Yeah, well – what I do is, well first of all if I was… this is what I would go through, because I’ve done this for myself. This is the process I go through to putting a website out there to target towards a specific area. If I was going to advise somebody or work with somebody, this is the… are the exact steps I would go through also. So the first step that I would go through would be to define, or have somebody define their targeted market. And, I liken this to what is you reputation? What do you want to be known as? Okay? And in some cases, it might be obvious. You’re selling plumbing supplies or water heaters, so your market is plumbing supplies and water heaters. Um… because the search engines work off your reputation. In other words, when they list you on their site, it’s like, “What is your reputation for?” So everything you want to do goes towards establishing that specific reputation, uh… within the search engine. The better are you able… you are able to define this reputation, the better off you’re going to be.
Let’s take an example here. Let’s say your niche is you’re selling phones, cell phones. Well, what is it? Is it selling the cell phones or is it providing service for the cell phones? Or maybe it’s cell phone repair? So it’s important. Because if you’re just doing one of theses things and you’re targeting cell phones, and it’s cell phone repair, by not adequately defining a niche that’s specific enough, the when anybody is looking for cell phones, or whatever, you’re competing with all those people. Because there’s a lot of different categories that may fit with cell phones. You want to get very specific about what you’re actually going to market and define this as the purpose of your web page.
You can basically - at that point, you’re wanting to establish this, because of later on follow up. The words of the web page, you want to be thinking, okay, once we get them there, you only have… it’s just 3-5 seconds they are going to decide, they’re either going to do business with you or they don’t. The other thing is that you’ve got to know what you’re wanting to target because when they’re... when the person finds you on a search engine and gets to your website, you have to… basically, they have to know that they’ve found the right thing within 3-5 seconds. So the words are very key, that you put at the very beginning. Because… and you’re going to need to be thinking in terms of what are they looking for, what is the person… and so when they find you, um, they know they found the right thing. And they don’t just go off elsewhere.
In this regard, you want to sit down, you want to brainstorm your keywords. Not necessarily in terms of where you think you are, but in terms of what people would do to find you. These can be two different things. So you want to go through value, typically, if it’s you yourself doing it, then you want to do it yourself. If you’re working with somebody else, then you would sit down with somebody else. And if I was working with somebody else, I would get them to think along those lines with you, sit down together and do that. Because, keep in mind, with the search engines, it’s people looking for you, specifically, okay. It’s like the Yellow Pages. With Yellow Pages you’re going… searching on specific topics. Search engines are very similar. They are looking you up and coming to find you. So you’re trying to place yourself in front of them thinking, okay, “What would they look for to find me?” Not, how you would identify yourself.
From there, I see a lot of mistakes people go into. They go into… when they title their page, they name maybe, according to what their company is. A specific example, there’s a company, as an example, you might use is a company would be uh, there’s a great company, networking and business company in the Atlanta area called Freedom builders. To them – they just have the title of their page, “Freedom Builders”. If nobody has heard of “Freedom Builders” they are kind of selling themselves short. Instead what you want to be thinking of is what people find you under. What is your reputation? In their case, things like business networking, business things, business referrals, things that people might find them. These are the things that you would want within your title so that nobody can… so people can find them. You want to be found so you need to be putting things there that will help you to be found. If your name or your business is unknown, then to use that name of the business is… nobody is going to find you. You know, don’t do that.
Uh, and then, target, target, target! Here you wanna get real specific, because when people are looking for you they’re not… uh, they may search on a particular keyword, but the more you are able to target specifically, the better off you are. Now, let’s use an example of something that I know all about, because I’ve sold a lot of them, is vitamins. I mean – I just did a recent search on Google for just the listing “vitamins”. Well, 9,190,000 listings popped up. I mean that’s a lot of competition. But here’s the inside scoop. When people are searching for vitamins, they’re typically searching for something specific in their minds. They may be thinking, “Okay, I’m looking for something for my circulator… circulation system.” For my brain, for my heart, for my joints. Something very specific. Like if you have a car, if you’re looking for a car, you’re not just looking for a car. You’re looking for a red convertible, or the Mustang red convertible, or a 2-door car, or a minivan, something very specific. So BE… TARGET very specific, because one, when they find you, they’re a lot more likely to buy. For example, if we were targeting towards prostate vitamins, well a search on prostate vitamins only returned a listing of 285,000 on Google. Well, here right off the bat, you’re about 40 times better off at being found! Quite a difference! 40 times better! So if they find you with this search, because they were looking for prostate vitamins, they are also about 20-30 times more likely to buy. ‘Coz that’s just specifically what they were looking for. So one, be very specific in what you TARGET, and one, you’re going to be found a lot better, and two, once you are found, they’re a lot more likely to buy. So in this regard, I would advise people to brainstorm, okay. If you have a website that’s maybe going to touch on 4 or 5 different categories, maybe you are selling vitamins that are selling 5 different categories of vitamins. Well, get very specific, list those categories and TARGET those specific categories. Don’t just use some big generic, one-size-fits-all form. You’re not gonna succeed very well. You go up against too much competition. And the other problem there is, is people are looking for something specifically. They very seldom are looking for something very generic.
Matt:
Mm hmm.
James:
So be very specific, you know, because one thing you’re gonna wanna do is, once you develop these specific categories that you’re targeting, those will generally be part of your navigation menus on each page. That will also help to serve build your link reputation, because links towards your own page also count towards that link reputation and link popularity. It doesn’t necessarily HAVE to be from outside… an outside source, or an outside domain. Things within your own domain yourself, count towards link popularity. And the other thing is, once you have established… established your targeted market is, define what your linking strategies are gonna be. A linking strategy is very important. Today, I see a lot of people going about them in the wrong way.
Um, you know, Google looks at these very… and they have what’s a link… a page rank feature where they basically base the importance of your page. Obviously, Google ranks themselves as a 10. Okay, and they rank something from a 0 to a 10. The more important a page, the higher the number. Um, Google is a 10, I think something like Netscape is a 9, and AOL is a 9. So, bottom line is, this becomes established essentially by who is endorsing you. You know, if Google themselves was to link to your page, I mean that’d be like Ole Jose and a Mother of Mary, and that’d be great you know. If they were to link to you, you’d… you’d have it made and saved, basically. But the bottom line is that Google isn’t essentially going to link to your site. But the more that a reputation site that you have that links to you, that goes towards building your link relevancy and how important the page is. You need to determine how you’re going to go about this.
Matt:
Right. And stop right there for a second, because when you said determine your page… like where the page is… is there a way that you can do that? I mean…
James:
There sure is, Matt. And we’ll be sending out… there’s within the text, a way to get a toolbar on your website, and of course if you wanna just go to Google, and search on page rank toolbar, there’ll be instructions that come up that shows you how to download that, but we can get somebody specific a specific web-address, and really it’s just http://toolbar.google.com it’s just toolbar.google.com, and that’ll give you instructions on how to download and install this as part of your Internet Explorer. What that allows you to do is, every site that you go to will show their ranking. And so now when you go to your site on Internet Explorer it’ll show you what the ranking of that site is. And it show’s you how important that site is. And this can be very good in determining linking strategy. Because, you know, if you’re looking at a site that says zero, it’s not real important that you get a link from that specific site. So by knowing how important a site is you can… I use that to go out and approach different businesses, to get them… especially if I’m starting a new site, to get them to link to me. And one of the ways that I evaluate that site is that page rank feature.
Matt:
Well – thanks for giving it – for giving us that. So um, can you kind of go over something’s that kind of make Google tick?
James:
Uh - yeah. Um, Google, and of course, there’s lot of different search engines out there although in reality we’ve only got six of them that count. There’s about six of them that give you about 90% of all web-traffic. Google, still is the majority. The most traffic comes from Google. So we’ll touch on Google here. A lot of these things are applicable to other search engines. But each search engine has it’s nuances. And each search engine is a little bit different. Uh, so something that works best on Google may not necessarily work best on AltaVista, for example. But they’re all very similar in what they look at.
So within Google, the most important attribute in Google is the title. The Title tag goes up in the Header of your page, and the most important… basically if your keyword is not in that title, then forget it. I mean, right off the bat, any searches you expect to be found under, that keyword that somebody is searching on better be found in your title. Because it all starts with that title. Um, Google will typicall list 83 characters, so you’ve got 83 characters of title that you can put in that title. They actually index up to about 125 but they only list about 83. What I mean by list is when you pull up a search, it is what is displayed is 83 characters. So the most important thing right off the bat is that your keyword must be found in that keyword search…uh, within your title, excuse me. If it’s not in that title – you will not be found.
The next thing Google looks at is very important. And we looked at this and we’ll discuss this a little bit more in detail, a little bit after this.
But um, the next thing is link relevancy. You know, what do I mean by link relevancy? Well, we’ll discuss this a little bit more in detail, but link relevancy is if say you’re getting a review. Say you’re a restaurant. And the food editor in the local paper goes out to your restaurant and gives you a review. And let’s say you are an Italian restaurant. Okay. Let’s say they write you… do a write-up on you, and the whole write-up is about Chinese food. Well, they’re saying that you’ve got great Chinese food, but you are an Italian restaurant, well you’re not going to believe that Editor, because he’s saying you’ve got Chinese food when you’re an Italian restaurant. He obviously does not know what he’s talking about.
Matt:
(…Laughs…)
James:
So, within Google the relevancy aspect comes into play, where they say somebody is linking to you, and the way Google reads that is the text that you actually click on. Okay, that’s how they determine… they match that text up to what is in the title of your page. So if the one’s saying “Chinese Food” and this says “Italian”, there’s kind of a disconnect. So ideally you want what is in that text link coming back to you to match, as much as possible, what is the title of your page. So that now, Google is looking at that and going, “Okay, he says he’s this. The page linking to him says he is the same thing. That’s very relevant link. They match.” Okay, if they don’t match, then basically that’s not a very relevant link. The better able they are to match, the more relevant the link.
The other things to be… that are important to be aware of, is that within Google, for example, the searches are not case-sensitive. So if you type something in all capital letters or all small letters or whatever, it doesn’t matter. There are some search engines that it matters more. I mean, in Google, it doesn’t. Now, Google also supports “word-stemming”. Now an example of “word-stemming” would be if somebody typed in H-A-W-A-I-I or H-A-W-A-I-I-A-N, for the purpose of Google, they look at H-A-W-A-I-I as being the same as H-A-W-A-I-I-A-N.
Matt:
Yeah, and just so that you know… for those that are listening right now, how Hawaii is spelled, because I’m not a very good speller. Hawaii is spelled H-A-W-A-I-I, and what he’s talking about Hawaiian is spelled H-A-W-A-I-I-A-N. So you see what he’s talking about here? It has the same base word, they’re just kind of adding the ‘A-N’ to the end of it.
Glenn:
Yeah, so if you were putting keywords on your page, “Hawaiian Islands” or “Hawaii” or “Hotels in Hawaii” or “Hawaiian Hotels”, you know Google, will basically be reading them as the same. It’s not that important, basically to cover all bases.
Also, keep in mind that keyword order, or the order in which you use the keywords, can be important. For example, if you had the phrase “tracking vehicles” instead of “vehicle tracking”, okay, this could make a difference. Not in all cases. It kind of depends on how competitive the search is and so forth. But it can make a difference, how the order of the keywords that you use.
Typically Google recommends that you use, if there is a very important keyword or phrase, that you use it in the first 1/3rd or 30% of your title versus the last part of your title, so the more important keyword search is they recommend you use that in the first 30% of your title.
The other thing Google looks at is that they equate plurals as the same. For example, “toy” is the same as “toys” within a Google search. So plurals doesn’t matter and that make a big difference in how you choose keywords.
The other thing that may surprise you about Google is that they don’t support or index the made-a-keyword tag. You know, the made tags, and the made-a-description tags and the made-a-keyword tag. Everybody talks about how important it is to put the keyword in this keyword tag and list all these keywords under a tag. Well then within Google, they don’t even consider that made-a-keyword tag. You don’t even really need it. Now, that’s not to say that you need to get rid of it, because other search engines like AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek also are looking at your pages and indexing them and some do look at that keyword tag. So you don’t want to get rid of it altogether, but on the other hand, you don’t want to overstuff that keyword tag full of keywords. I’ve seen some people, they’ll come up with 200 differ rent keyword combinations and they’ll put it in that keyword tag. And they just overstuff it. If you do that then Google could penalize you. So don’t just get carried away.
The other thing to consider too, if the keywords that you’re listing aren’t really covered on the text of the page, then you’re really kind of wasting your time anyway, because if it’s not found in the body of your page, you know, they’re not going to look just at that keyword tag and see the keyword and go “Oh! We’re gonna give this a high listing”. No. They’re looking at what’s in the text of your page, they’re looking at what’s in the links of your page, and so forth. So don’t get too hung up on just stuffing your keyword tags full of keywords.
Also, newly submitted pages, will not necessarily score better, so don’t get hung up on whether it’s an old page or it’s a new page or … it doesn’t really matter. You only need to submit the index page. The Google Spider will find every page that it can find through that index page.
The other aspect of that too is, one thing most people don’t know is, that you need to have your page linked to some other site within Google, that’s already within their engine. If it’s a brand new site, it’s going to be very, very hard to get listed on Google. I never use the word impossible, because there are exceptions, but typically if you are not linked to from some other site that’s already within Google you’re not going to get listed. The biggest thing that you can do to start submitting your pages and stuff, is to get some other site to link to you. And then Google will find you through Spidering that site and list you anyway.
Matt:
So do you have any link building strategies or link exchange strategies that you can share?
James:
Definitely, Matt. Definitely. This is an area that I see a lot of ignorance in. I see a lot of misconceptions. I see a lot of people going about this in the wrong way. I think I wrote some papers on this. There’s some right ways of doing this and some wrong ways of doing it. Most people know just enough to be just, kind of dangerous. To themselves and others, you know.
Matt:
(…Laughs…)
James:
Most people are just kind of out to get as many links as possible linking to them. And keep in mind as… evaluate the website, I mean you know, if it doesn’t look like trash and is it something you really want… I mean think about it like this, if it’s somebody maybe a person whose disrepute or you know, would you necessarily want an endorsement from Adolf Hitler? Let’s put it that way.
Matt:
(…Laughs…)
James:
No… I mean that kind of thing. I mean, look at the person, look at the web page, that’s endorsing you, ‘coz that’s essentially what they are doing, that they are endorsing you by linking to you. If it’s somebody you don’t really want endorsing you, then you are better of not really doing that. The other thing is they may be involved in who knows what kind of link farms that are out there. Whish is not good to be involved in because Google could penalize someone because it looks like that’s what they are trying to do. Because keep in mind that the whole purpose behind… to understand why Google and these other search engines look at link popularity as being important, think of it in terms of the restaurant example where a bunch of people are saying, “Hey, you gotta go to Matt’s restaurant! The food is outstanding!” The more people saying that then the more popular it becomes and so forth. Google is kind of looking at it the same way. If a bunch of people are linking to your site, then they’re kinda saying, “Okay, that’s an important site.” That means a lot of people think that there is a lot of good, valuable content on that site, they’re gonna rank that high, because, you know, they’re in business to make money. If all of a sudden it just beomes that a lot of disreputed sites are linking to you, your sit is junk for example, and people are finding you, and you think, “Hey, why am I being found under this search?” then this reflects upon Google. And they start losing ad revenue and things like that.
So the searches need to be very relevant. So just to have a bunch of sites linking to you isn’t going to just cut it… isn’t going to cut it. So look at it also in terms of relevance. It’s a lot more important… it would be a lot better to get a 7 or 8 Google ranks of 5’s or 6’s linking to you than hundred with page rank 2’s for example, because also like the Julia Child effect, I term it the Julia Child effect, that the relevance of the link means a lot more than just the link. Because if it’s somebody well known, a very important person, endorsing you then that means a lot more than just… er just… a nobody, or so to speak.
Matt:
Right.
James:
But keep in mind that within the search engine, it’s just a machine, I mean, a computer’s a machine. It can’t tell the difference between Donald Trump and myself, for example. So what they do, is they look at it in terms of the page rank. The higher the Google page rank endorsing you, then that’s like the Julia Child. Okay, so it’s not necessarily the person, but the reputation of the page itself. And that’s why it’s important to have that page rank on your Internet Explorer browser so that you’re able to see what that page rank is.
Matt:
Yeah. You put a lot of emphasis on the Google toolbar. But is there any way that you can actually explain page ranks or a website or a URL that people can use?
James:
Sure, there’s a website that somebody could go to and it explains how it works, and of course they can do a search on Google and pull it up but the address is simply www.Google.ca/technology/index.html. And we’ll send this information out in a sheet, and some other great things too, that you should receive. But it just explains the page rank. Gives you a better understanding of what they’re doing with it.
So getting started, it’s always important for you to be a smart linker. You know, just like when you plan your website, you know, you want to have a good idea of what you’re doing. Links should be essentially planned the same way. Avoid link farms, traffic exchanges… one that I tend to stay away from is one called “Zeus”. “Zeus” I s a kind of an automated software that just creates all these links for people. But I kind of stay away from it, I see too many sites that I don’t think a whole lot of there and I’ve heard stories of “Zeus” being penalized and so on and so forth. So I would tend to stay away from them.
Um, you know, not in all cases, but some sites have an “Add Your Link Here”. I’m not saying stay away from those, but approach it with caution. I would not ever, name your link page, “Link Page”. I would name it something like “Valuable Resources”. Any of the links to your “Links Page from your home page, for example, I wouldn’t call it “Links Page”. I would call it “Valuable Resources” or something like that. Just stay away from the word “Link”. I just think that it’s a term that just does no good in terms of the search engines. Search engines are never going to look at it. So just stay away from it. So don’t necessarily stay away from sites that say “Add Your Link Here”, just approach it with caution.
Keep in mind too that it’s not quantity, but quality and relevance to your own site that gains you ranking points. Look for sites that complement you, but that they don’t necessarily compete with you. For example, if you were selling a weight-loss product, you might search for a site that sells weight-loss books or exercise plans for weight-loss. Then you might have a good complementary match because you are mostly dealing with weight loss but you are not competing with each other.
Um, you’re sites… unrelated sites can link to you but they don’t carry as much weight. For example, somebody is selling camping supplies and you’re selling weight loss. The camping supplies store can link over to you, and that counts for something, but not as much as if it were a site more directly related to what your site deals with.
And another thing that people don’t take time to consider is in creating their own link popularity. Whether you’re in your own domain or outside your domain, all links need to be relevant. So for example if you’re just sub pages within your own domain that are linking back to other pages within your own site, try to make those relevant. In other words, use keywords within those texts that you click on. Now don’t get carried away, to where it just looks like… your link is ten different words there you know. Try to kind of make it fit within your navigation bar. But also, just don’t click … have a link back to your Home page just say “Home Page”. That’s great if you’re in Real Estate or selling Homes but if your selling camping supplies, it’s not very good. So if you were camping supplies then maybe you would have something like “Camping Supply Index Page”. So now you’re actually taking advantage of the relevancy of camping supplies. So, and you can do that within your own domain. So obviously if it’s somebody that is linking to you from another site or another domain, then you want them to have that camping supplies within the link that’s going back to you.
Okay, so, keep in mind within your own site, keep those factors in mind, and so that, it’s just a smart way to do it. And like I said, a link is considered relevant if the link text that you click on, matches or closely matches, the title of the page it links, you know, so it seems like a good j=keyword match. Not necessarily all keywords, but some keywords.
So like I said, we mentioned how it was a mistake to just put “Home Page” on each page. I was saying to stay away from that. You know other points to consider when getting links from other sites, is, will the other site require a reciprocal link? Now a reciprocal link is, for those who don’t know, “I’ll link to you if you link to me. “ And most sites require that but if you can deal with somebody on an individual basis, a non-reciprocal link is always better than a reciprocal link. Because if somebody links to you, but you’re not necessarily linking to them, then that’s better, it counts for more. It’s just a better way of linking. Ways to get around that is, let’s say you have several different domains, and say you’re talking to a site guy and let’s say who’s name is Bob. You say “Hey Bob! I would like for you to link to me. And I would be happy to link to you, and let’s do this because a reciprocal link is superior to a non-reciprocal link. I have two sited, A and B. I will link to you from my B site, if you link to my A site. So now I’m linking to you, you’re linking to me, but as far as the search engine is concerned, they’re both un-reciprocal links. Because they’re coming from two different domains.”
So you know, that’s a way to improve your links. In some cases, you can’t do that. You always have to go with a reciprocal link. But if you can try to work something like that out. It’s always beneficial to do that. Other things to consider is in your outbound links to other pages. There again, if you can get them coming in to you from several different domains and you can link out from one site, and link into another site with different domains, it’s gonna be better.
We talked about it and we’ll stress it again, don’t call this something like “Links.html” or “LinksPage.html”. Name your links page something like “Resources” or “Valuable Resources” or something like that. Stay away from the word “Links” or any text link to that page. Also don’t talk about “Links” just have something like “Valuable Resources” or “Useful Resources” or something like that. Um, you’re just going to be much further ahead.
Learn to negotiate, learn to negotiate with anybody you’re linking to. You know, one thing I tell people, there are no real shortcuts on the Internet. There’s no… er, everybody is trying to sell you a… or do this, or you know, you know. All you gotta do is spend ten minutes a day and you’re gonna make a $100,000 a year on the Internet. Isn’t going to happen. There are no real shortcuts on the Internet. Because on the Internet, there are things to save a lot of time, and do things the right way, but there’s no magic software packages, there’s no magic things that you can do that’s going to do everything for you, and you’ve just got to sit at home and go out to your mailbox everyday and checks come in to you.
You know, there’s certain things you have to do. So, by the point I’m making here is in terms of link strategies, if you find some really good… what I like to call “antelopes” or very big important people on the Internet, you’re gonna have to negotiate with those people. You’re gonna have to approach them, email them on an individual basis. Don’t just try to go through some link management software that automatically sends e-mails submissions to them and stuff like that. In cases like that, find out how you can be of value to them or offer things that may help sweeten the deal. Because you know… or maybe give them something… some product of yours or something like that something to that important enough person or something like that that’s going to be invaluable.
Matt:
Well, lets kind of… well, I kind of wanna go over a couple of things. One, you really created a whole scenario and actually the whole kind of planning process for this to happen. But could you say, like can you give me the ultimate situation? Like if I have a website right now, what is the ultimate situation? What… what … would be the ultimate situation… like if I had this picture in my life right now, what would it have? You know, like you said have the tool… the title bar.. you wanna have the title bas having this….etc. What is the ultimate thing? You know, having links… having links that are kinda… you know, what is the ultimate situation I want to be in when it comes to the strategy?
James:
Well, keep in mind… um, good question. First of all, starts of with your title bar. And the title bar needs to match the reputation of your site, your main keywords that your targeting… keep in mind here, it’s best, especially starting out, not to over target. You know, target towards a more specific niche in your title. So you want to target it to your specific niche within your target market.
And then, you want to… the other things that Google looks at is very important is the… it’s very important to, within the… each individual page, you tend to have links. You have like a navigation bar with maybe links to other pages within your site or maybe have some links on your page that link to certain things.
But the other thing that Google looks at that’s very important is the keywords also within those text links. Google likes to see that at least 10% of your text links on your page, contain the keyword phrase. So you know, to score well within Google, at least 10%, if it’s got 10 links on a page, one of them… text links should have the keyword phrase in it. So make sure that your keyword phrases are in the links on the pages, so you wanna be thinking in terms of your navigation bar. And your navigation bar should contain some of the keyword phrases if you’re selling a vitamin product on Antioxidants then the Antioxidant phrase should be in that link that’s part of your navigation bar. So, you want to have your title, you want to have your keywords within your navigation bar, your text links. The other thing is that’s very important is, you have a specific, marked linking strategy. You want good sites coming back to you that will boost your key rank… your page rank. So you want that good strategy coming back to you. You do all of those things, you’re gonna do pretty well.
Okay… then what we ca… then what comes into factor after that is just how competitive your market is. The more competitive your market is, then other factors become more important. How often, for example, how many times you say your keyword in your page? Keyword density, for example. Did you use it 5% of the time or did you use it 3% of the time, those things become more important, the more competitive the environment that you get into. There are software tools that allow you to count what percentage your keyword is of your page and then you can adjust up and down. There again that stuff comes into play more in very competitive markets, if you work in a very competitive market.
The other thing is you want to have, you know, other pages within your site that help build the reputation of your thing. If you can do something like put out a log or a little newsletter or something, put those on a web page. Because those will end up getting indexed with the searches, and of course those all tend… those all have links back to your main site or your main pages. So each one of those that gets written, now can get registered within the search engine which further endorses your stuff, plus those can pick up other keywords that you may have missed on your website. It sort of serves as a funnel to funnel additional traffic back into your main site.
Matt:
Mmm.
James:
So anything you can do, anything you can write, just put it on a web page, have it link to… maybe just have… you know, other archived articles if the search engines pick them up and have it link to your navigation on your page. Those will tend to register in the search engines, those’ll score, they’ll link back to your site and it further improves your find ability to your site. You know, every little thing adds up one on top of another. So do those and just with anything you write, do that.
Do those things well and you’ll start to score very well, but keep in mind, you know, it takes a while to get this stuff on there, it takes a while for Google to register things, Google has 3 or 4 different indexes, you may locate on one index and not in the next. They may rotate in and out of an index for a month or two, so everything builds up. So there’s a 3 or 4 month process even after your site is built out there, before you really start getting well-established out there on the search engines.
Matt:
Mmm. So let’s kind of go from another situation. That was great! I mean, actually, you guys just got… I mean here is the ultimate scenario that you want to be in. But let’s say okay, I’ve got all this information, I want to… I want to implement it. Where do I start? And you went over some things, but what’s two action steps or a couple of action steps I can take right now to get started? What would you tell me to do?
James:
Um, well…this can… whether you do it yourself, or you hire somebody to do it for you, you have to have your web design layout. Okay, you’re gonna have to have the layout of your website. And keep in mind; here that it’s very important here to keep the same reputation for what you’re trying to project. Now, if you’re a fun site selling balloons, and clowns and things like that, you’re going to have a different type of website as you would for a professional business site. So you want the look of the site to match what you’re trying to project. I mean it’s stupid to have clowns and balloons on an Attorney’s site. It just wouldn’t sell. So that has to match. So in that regard, if you don’t know what you’re doing, seek help, just… at least get some advice from somebody. Even do searches on the Internet and find things that may help you in that regard. But first of all get that format that you want down. Then it’s a matter of content. You know, you’re either gonna have to find content or write your content. And then that goes within the context of those pages. You know, you’re going to have your basic design layout, where you have your navigation bars, and your headers and stuff like that, and in the middle of that you’re gonna have your content. And that content’s gonna have to be developed. Like I say, depending upon the business you have, you may have to write a lot of that yourself. It may be something that you can just find. Get elsewhere and just put it there. The content has to be developed. Keep in mind that search engines are very content oriented. Content is very important.
You know and that’s why I say to you constantly, if you’re putting out, you know, tips on a regular basis, save them as a web page and put them out there because that’ll get indexed on the search page. So you’ve gotta have that content, and then if you know all these things that we just talked about, in terms of knowing how to, you know… put the title on your page, how to key that stuff in then you need to do that. Now if you’re doing it yourself, there’s some software programs out there. I use Adobe GoLive! A lot of professional people use Dream Weaver Macromedia. Frontpage is okay. There’s some free tools that you can get out there. But if you’re not comfortable yourself, then find somebody who can do this for you. But the neat thing about knowing all this is, you’re able to check, are you doing this, can it be doing this, because they may be able to put a website together very well, but they may put it together such that you’re cutting your arm off in terms of listings on search engines. Because you’re not doing it the correct way, and knowing this stuff, you’re at least able to say “Well, I don’t want my title to read like this. I want it to read like this.”
Matt:
Right.
James:
And so on and so forth. So you wanna plan each page. The title should be a little bit different. You don’t want the same title for each page. It would be kind of stupid, because each page is essentially talking about a little bit different topic. So you want to optimize the title for the topic of that page. If you do all those things, you’re off to a very good start.
Matt:
Well, how about… you know and it’s… how about even like when they look at your web pages? Like, I’ve heard that… this from somebody, a friend of mine actually said that the first two hundred and fifty words are the most important on your website/ Is that … is that mean anything, or they just…?
James:
Well exactly.
Matt:
Or is there even like positioning or… even like…they read the right side before they read the left, or the left side before the right, you know?
James:
Well, keep in mind that most people in the United States and most English-speaking people, have been taught to read from left to right. Now if you’re Chinese, or Hebrew, or whatever, some of those people read from right to left. But because, generally you’re geared towards English, you’re reading left to right, so things should kind of flow from left to right. And keep in mind that at the top… you want the headline of your web page should be like an enticement. The whole purpose of your headline should be to get them to find out more about what you have. Then your sub-headline should be geared toward getting them to want to know more. So I recommend that you use what I call “magic” or “power” words. There’s a … probably the best in the business is guy by the name of Ted Nicholas, in terms of writing ad copy, and you can pick up some things by him, and well there’s 27 or 30 different, what we call “magic” words. And these are words like “breakthrough”, “exciting” , “amazing” – different words that get a response from people. And you wanna use these in your headlines. Ted Nicholas recommends that no headline be longer than 17 words. Now you’re gonna have sub-headlines from your headline, but keep inmind that you want very descriptive headlines… sub-headlines. Something powerful. Something that also tells you about your topics. Also – the headline needs to reflect on what the person thinks he came there for. You know, you kind of want to tell them… if he thinks he came there to find information on prostate vitamins, then your headline should read something like “Amazing information on Prostate vitamins.” – or “How you can better … get better prostate health.”
Well, now because he was looking for that and he saw that in your headline, he knows he’s found the right place. And that every little… you can do things like sub-headings occasionally. You wanna maintain a lot of white copy on your page. In other words, you want some nice breaks between your copy and leave a lot of white apce. In other words, don’t make it look like you’ve got a lot of reading to do. Break up your text a lot. Put bold headlines and stuff to keep it…’coz putting a lot of bold headlines spaced out through your website, somebody can skim through your whole web page and basically get the gist of it without reading all the words. They can just read this header, this header, this header, this header, this header. And they can get the gist and decide whether they wanna buy, or read the whole thing, or whatever.
So leave a lot of web… er, white space. If you make everything too big a paragraph and everything else, it looks like a big task to read all of it, and they won’t read it. So break things up a lot by using bolding or underline. I wouldn’t get too carried away a lot with color or fonts. You can use different colors, but don’t get too carried away. If you get too carried away – it’ll take away some of the professionalism from the site. But use some different colors, make things bold. If you do that it’ll make people want to read all of your website. But keep in mind, each sub-heading; the whole purpose of it is just to get them to read further. So you know, keep in mind that there are ways to do that through asking questions or ways to pull people in by asking them things like… “It has been shown that,” for example, “there are three different categories of people. Which one of these are you?” Well, you gotta… well because now it involves the reader, you’re apt to read on because you’re gonna want to find out what one of these categories of person you are. So, anything that you can put in there that… that causes the person to interact with the copy, you’re going to better off. Does that make sense, Matt?
Matt:
Yeah! It makes a lot sense! Actually, this is kind of like a bonus section because this is something that I would wish I had known five years ago. You know regarding, outside of just the search engine stuff. Now, we’re gonna actually, kind of wind down here. ‘Coz we’re coming close to the time, and just actually what we have had here. Abut before we leave, I kinda would just like to… is there any more nuggets, like um, golden nuggets that you’d like to leave with the individuals that are listening right now?
James:
Well, uh… keep in mind, that, like I say, there’s no real shortcuts for the Internet market. But keep in mind that the person with persistence, the person who perseveres, the person who doesn’t think that in one month’s time, he’s gonna have all these great listings on the search engines, the neat thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people… you’re gonna run a lot of people out of the business, because it culls down the competition, because everything is too easy, and if all you gotta do is do something and then a month later you’ve got all this stiff coming to you, then everybody and his brother would do it. But what I tell people that they just stick it out, past one month, two months, three months or so, that what’s gonna happen with virtually every case is that traffic is eventually gonna start coming. Because one, they’ve weeded out all the people that didn’t have the vision to stick through with it, so the most important thing that you can do, is not give up, is just keep persevering. Because, once you get to a certain point, most people have given up before that. So you’ve eliminated, by a process of elimination most of your competition have given up. Go for the niche. Go for the specific niche, especially starting out. There’s some good programs out there that can help you identify niches, and one of them is WordTracker. It’s a service you can buy. What this allows you to do is one, it tells you how many searches people are looking… how many… what searches people are looking on. For example, it will tell you do people search on this keyword. But also it will tell you also what websites are addressing this keyword. So, for example, what that allows you to do is, there may be one particular search phrase that has an incredible amount of competition. There may be 10,000 websites addressing it. But there may be something very similar where only 500 websites are addressing it. So, now maybe it’s only searched on half as much, but there’s 25 times less competition. So you’re better off, going in that area that has less competition. Then you’ve got a lot more chance of being found.
That’s a neat little tool you can use. There’s a lot of neat little tools, so. You know, especially starting out, as much as possible, find a niche, try to avoid the competition, and do sample searches, see what websites come up. If it’s a very important listing, you’re never get Google, no matter how well you do these things, it’s never going to list you over the Government, so.
Matt:
(…Laughs…) Yeah!
James:
You know, so they’re always gonna just do things like that, so. Follow that… those niches, if you can, then expand out from the niche.
Matt:
Yeah.
James:
You know, follow the rules of the search engines. Know what Google looks for and just follow it, you know. We just covered a lot of those things to look for. Um, and content. Once again, if you develop something, put it on a website, put a link to it. It’ll get indexed on the search engine. You’ll find some of those can be some of the best traffic generators in terms of funneling traffic into your main site.
Matt:
Hmm.
James:
I’ve got sites like that, that, you know, are just pages of information that I wrote that funnel all kinds of visitors. It’s amazing how well those things will spool on the search engines and the traffic that it’ll get.
Matt:
Hmm. Wow! Well thank you. You know, one thing that uh, I’ve took on, and that I’d like to kinda include is, “Act as if it’s impossible to fail.”
James:
Oh exactly!
Matt:
(…Laughs…) You know. I mean, quite honestly, that’s… I …I’ve done… I have grown leaps and bounds just by actually taking on that one phrase right there. Act as if it is impossible to fail.
James:
Belief is key! I mean, if you believe you can succeed, I mean I know that it’s a cliché, but I mean, most people, they come up with a good idea, they believe it’ll work. But then what happens is, all these self-doubts start creeping in. And like I tell people that once your self-doubts, your unbelief becomes greater than your belief, then you’ll stop. Your belief is dead. Your work on that project will end. And you’re doomed for failure at that point. Belief that it’ll work always has to outdistance the self-doubts and so forth that creep in. Example on how I got started, and this is a sheer fact. I spent literally 400 hours working on just learning how to develop web pages, develop copy, content, writing web pages and so on and so forth. And during that time, it was during a ten-week period, I made $22. I mean – I made nothing. I mean chump change. I mean, I was making 10 cents an hour or something like that. But I never had a doubt where I could get to once I got all this stuff in place.
And that’s where somebody needs to be. They need to just believe something will go work, and it’ll work, I mean, it’s amazing!
Matt:
So you can guarantee us, that if we implement the strategies that you just said, that we can see the same success that you’re having?
James:
People eventually start seeing results! And there again, there’s other factors. I mean, how competitive is the field and this kind of thing. But you will start seeing results. I mean, once they start seeing results, then it becomes easier to learn from it more things, and do more things. Now you’re seeing result, it’s easier to get more excited, and wanna do more, wanna learn more. And results flow even faster.
But yeah, people will get results, but the biggest thing I see, I see it over and over again. People give up before they… they… they’ve got this instant mentality of “I want it now!” and they give up way too… too quickly. They don’t see it through.
Matt:
Well, thank you. I mean, I’ve really enjoyed this and uh, I know that you guys have enjoyed it too. There’s a lot of information out there. You follow the steps he said. Get started now. I mean, time to start is now. Some people talk about “Thinking Orig”, I want to write my own book called “Acting Orig!” I mean, that’s really what it is about you guys! I mean, act as if you cannot fail. And start acting now and get started!
James:
One thing I would like to leave you with, is just get started, don’t worry about if it’s perfect. I mean, if you would have looked at my web page that I initially developed and looked at it today, you’d say “Holy Cow! That looks like junk!”
Matt:
(…Laughs…)
James:
Of course, back then you didn’t have to work with what you have to work with today. But the point of it is that I put something out there, and it sold. And just put it out there. Just get it done, then worry about fine-tuning it because one thing about getting it out there, is, one it’s going to take a while for the search engines to start indexing it and spidering it, and during that time you can kind of upgrade and so forth. So don’t wait until it’s totally done and stick it out there because you’ve got a built in time factor after that. So get something out there, the upgrade and keep improving it…
Matt:
Yeah, ‘coz you’re getting, I mean… I mean… well I’ll just continue on that a little bit, ‘coz when you get it out there, what happens is you get feedback. I mean, you’re getting feedback from results, you’re getting feedback from other people. I mean, now you have something out there, where you can say, “Hey look at this. What do you think?” Or you can actually get feedback from the people that are going to your site. There’s tons of different… feedback’s gonna come from different directions. It’s from the results, from… everything. Feedback is the key to winning this whole game. Uh, you know, I don’t know where I got on the feedback thing but quite honestly tell me what you… if you don’t get started, you’ll never get feedback, and if you never get feedback, you’ll never know what to do next!
James:
Don’t worry that it doesn’t look good enough, or something like that. I mean, it’ll get better. I mean… you know, I mean… of course if it’s done, you know, by a professional developer, you know, it tends to look very good from the beginning. But the point of it is that is this – just get it out there – get it there – you know. And that too, don’t wait till it’s totally done, get it partly done and work with it out there, then add to it. Add to it. Add to it. Add to it.
Matt:
So it’s all about getting started. So we’re going to get off right now, but as you get started, we’re gonna get off!

Marketing Tips Provided to You by:
Matt Bacak, The Powerful Promoter
Author of Powerful Promoting Tips

Improving your Adsense Click-Thru

The leader in the pay per click (or PPC) market is Google, with its Adsense program, but if you're already an Adsense subscriber, with adverts on your own pages, you might not realize the importance of the design of your advert and the placement of the advert on the page.

You probably already noticed that the Adsense ads on this page are slipped inline into the main text, on the left. Further, you have also probably noticed that there isn't some strong color scheme and border lines blocking off and visually distinguishing the Google ads from the rest of the content of the page.

I've experimented and I can tell you that these two steps (putting the ad in the middle of the content and removing any overt border colors) can at least double your click thru rate (or CTR) and that means that you'll be making more money with the same number of visitors. And that's a good thing.

So let's have a look at how to do this.

First off, have a look at the different ad formats. Most people seem to go with the default "banner" format ads, which is too bad: after the last few years of surfing, I think people have been trained to ignore these banner adverts. Even the spiffy new graphical banners, like this:
sample banner from google

Instead, pick out a different size and think about how you can get creative with the placement. Also, if you're going to have an advert, why not offer the most options for your readers and have a layout that has at least four ads, if not five? Really, the one-ad box makes no sense to me: if you're going to have an ad at all, why not maximize the chance it'll have something of interest to your reader?

Anyway, off that soapbox!!

How do I accomplish the layout trick I have on this page? I do something a bit sneaky: I drop the Google ad into a <table> and then use the attributes of the table to shift it left and let the text flow right around it:

</table><table align="left" border="0"><tbody><tr><td>
Google adsense code goes here
</td></tr></tbody></table>

No too hard, is it?

Improving your Adsense Click-Thru