Arbitrage Conspiracy is finally here! Once in a while a unique new product hits the market. It doesn’t happen often these days, and when it does it’s both refreshing, and very exciting. Now while a new product is kinda cool, it isn’t that big of a deal, until you find out the developers of this methodology NET between $50,000.00 and $100,000.00 a day. Yes A DAY. What is it? It’s a new twist on an old concept of an Underused, under exploited and WAY under-estimated stream of traffic with insane potential. This is the first and only chance you may have to learn from someone who regularly makes $100,000 a DAY online. Brad Fallon of StomperNet has just made a video talking about a closed door event last week where these guys spoke, and blew away all the Guru’s. Go watch it now, and grab the Arbitrage Conspiracy 25-page report that might just change the way you approach… forever. You too can attend the conference call with Brad Fallon, Mike Filsaime, Eben Pagan, Yanik Silver, Shawn Casey, Tellman Knudson, Buck Rizvi and Aymen on Arbitrage Conspiracy.

Content is King is what you always hear people saying but  still people ignore the truth of this common-sense phrase. People use the web to find information – it’s the content of a page that is important to them, because that’s why they’re there. Content is one of the most important factors when doing SEO

The content of a page is the primary thing that a search engine will look at when considering your site. The meta tags and the hidden text that many people like to place on their pages in order to draw search engines to their sites is much less important to the search engine. Many search engines don’t even consider meta tags any more. Don’t get me wrong, meta tags are a necessity when doing search engine optimization, but they are much less important than content.

Hidden text is not only skipped over by most search engines, it can give you serious problems with search engines. The king of search engines, Google, will remove sites from its index if they utilize hidden text. Hidden text is categorized as text that is the same color (or similar color to) the background or text that is the set as transparent using CSS.

When people arrive at your site, one of two things will happen. They will either find something of interest and stay, or they’ll turn around and leave. They make this decision within seconds. You need to have things that people want to read, or all your precious click-throughs will be for nothing. If you can’t come up with something to put on the front page of your site, hire a writer. Writers are there to create reasons for people to stay. They get paid for a reason, they are worth while.

You can never have too much information – it’s a fact that people want information. The web is great for information because you can find so much out there with so little effort. Hidden somewhere in all that information, you can be sure there’s something that you’d love to find. Search engines are there to help you uncover it. 

You could take some of this information and tailor it to your website’s needs, using bits and pieces that will be easy to read and useful to your visitors. The more interested in your website a visitor is, the more likely that they’ll stay a while, and come back some other time. You might even see make more money from them, sooner or later. 

‘Borrowing’ content word-for-word isn’t the way to go, though, because of copyright laws – but you can always create your own content. Remember that the most valuable web content is unique information that no-one can find elsewhere.

Another great method for delivering content is to provide RSS feeds from other sites straight onto your site. Many sites i.e. the New York Times site will allow you to put their RSS feeds onto your site. An RSS feed is basically an online news bulletin. If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or lower you probably haven’t encountered RSS. If you use FireFox, Opera or Google Chrome for your web browser, you probably already know how great RSS can be for personal use.  Imagine having all of that content available on your web site without having to pay a writer!

When selling products and services, make sure that you have enough information about your product’s features. Include everything anyone could ever want to know about your product. If you are running an affiliate site, buy a few of the products that you are selling and use them on a regular basis. This will give you the opportunity to find out what their major selling points are and allow you to make them into featured products and provide high quality reviews.

Think of it as leading your reader for a walk through your mind – arrange the site to help your readers see what you see. 

For example: a page on music, could lead to a page on rock music, which in turn leads to one about the various forms of music, which leads to a page on equipment, and so on and on. Each page on the site can lead into the next, in a reasonable progression of thought. Your content becomes not only new but also fun to experience, as you make it easy for the reader to understand where you’re coming from. Tell a story with your pages.

When you analyze a competitors website, you need to make sure you’re prepared to do the job correctly. Competitors’ websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. You can use these sites to analyze your own market. If a site gets a lot of hits it has to be doing something right. Check out where it is ranked, what key words it uses, how it is formatted, and what you can do to exemplify the good and filter out the bad. Also be sure to keep copyright laws in mind as a copyright infringement suit is never good for you, your site, or your blood pressure.

Identifying the Leaders.

You need to start off by identifying the major players – a good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It’s not as comprehensive as it once was, but it’s good if you’re looking for the major players. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Look for large companies, as well as innovative approaches and new products. Also use this examination as an attempt to identify the niche markets that the major players have not identified and exploited. If you can find new niches you’re basically set as far as traffic goes.

Also consider that since Yahoo!’s directory is the place that you look to find the big players, it may be a good place to get listed in order to become a big player. These little associations are important if you want to start to attain more and more traffic and conquer a niche or category. Try to identify all places that the big dogs hang out and start hanging out there. It’s all about who you know in this business so bigger is better. You might not be ready to play with the big dogs, but the only way to get there is to sit down and give it a shot.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Compete.com or Alexa. Alexa is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic to each site you visit, telling you whether it’s in the top 100, the top 1000, the top 10,000, and so on. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the pecking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders.

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors website and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for. 

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services they offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings. Look for gaps that you could fill.

2. Think about the look, feel and functionality of their website. 

3. See what advertising campaigns and offers they’re running. 

4. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view. 

5. See if you can figure out their strategy. 

When you’re dealing with publicly traded companies, you can often get detailed information from their SEC filings. Write down the names of their key players and then look for any interviews and speeches they might have made about their website. 

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps.

Now, summarize the information you’ve found into a few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note strategies that are going to be necessary to counter their offering – these will depend on your own website’s strengths. If you’re small, then you’ll need to be resourceful to exploit their weaknesses.

With this research, you can create a marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you’ll need to take for you site to come out on top. Once you’ve finished analyzing your competitors, you need to consider whether it would be better not to compete at all, and find a less-saturated market.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you’re getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than they can! All you have to do is offer your customers things they can’t find anywhere else.

As the search engines continue to improve, your SEO needs to as well. A ranking tumble for your website can be devastating. You need to recover as soon as possible – it’s not the easiest task in the world, but it’s not as hard as you’d think. The most important thing to keep in mind is that you cannot panic. You have to keep working on your SEO projects and you need to remember that  listings and rankings come and go spiratically at times but that search engines won’t let you down if your site is useful.

The experts’ advice to websites that have lost their ranking is usually to start over, following current and good SEO information. Look over your entire site and insure that you haven’t done something that would have caused this sudden change in listings and rankings. Normally if you haven’t done anything wrong, your links will slowly begin to reappear again especially if you have a nice sized linking network that is listed well.

One step that you can take is to narrow your site’s focus and work hard on one or two keywords. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s sufficient. Make sure each page of your site includes good enough navigation that someone can get anywhere from anywhere else, and make sure you do this with plain ‘a href’ links, not fancy JavaScript.

If you are using frames, now is a good time to dump them. You can replace them with scrollable <div> tags and have similar looking pages that search engines can index more easily. The most important concept in recovering from a ranking tumble is to perform damage control. Any SEO operation that you have performed that could be deemed as controversial you should immediately disband. If you are lucky, your web site hasn’t been permanently deleted from any important search engines.

Once you have performed all of the local damage control that you can it is a good idea to insure that your file sizes are relatively small. Make sure that you don’t have any excessive images or large external files that will cause a search engine to give up on its attempt to index you. Make sure that you haven’t created a linking loop that Google’s bots can’t find a way out of.

Links are very important to your website’s rankings, and you need to consider finding good link partners to improve your targeted traffic and keyword relevancy. If you have a decent corp of link partners already you can request that they move their links to your site to a higher traffic page for a short period of time so that you can get re-indexed. They may be willing to do this if you remind them that the links from your site to theirs are more valuable once you’ve been indexed than they are when you are unindexed.

If you submit to the search engines properly the first time and you have a good SEO maintenance plan, you’ll only need to submit your site once. You might consider hiring someone to keep your site regularly updated, as regularly-updated sites rank higher. If you have recently suffered a ranking tumble, use Google Sitemaps to get your page back into Google. This is the fastest method available and is the strongest damage control that you will be able to perform.

Build great content around your keywords or phrases. Remember that content is King for both visitors and search engines. Your content must be extremely relevant to your key words at this point. You don’t want to try to pull a fast one because this was probably the reason that your ranking tumbled in the first place. Remember: When you are recovering from a rank tumble, you are at the search engines’ mercy. You cannot possibly recover if you try to do anything that doesn’t seem right to the search engines.

Submit your website properly to each search engine and directory by hand, making sure you understand each site’s rules. Using automatic submissions is just not a good idea. There are so many things that can go wrong and you just don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Work by hand and if possible, contact the search engine or directory and ask them if there is a specific reason that your site was suddenly removed. Ask them if there is any action that you can take to make up for any mistakes that you may have made.

Get as many one-way links as you can from directories or pay to have good websites link to yours. One-way links are better than two-way ones. 

Monitor your results regularly to find out what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be afraid to make changes. 

Keep all these things in mind and you can recover from a rankings tumble easily.

I am trying to compile an exhaustive list of the best WordPress plugins, could you please comment and list your favorite ones?

There are five simple tasks that you need to do daily to keep your site on top. Here they are: 

1. You need to start off by managing your links. This involves making sure that none of your current links are dead, and you should also check if there are any sites linking to you that you don’t know about. If your site consists of a large number of links you should make sure that they aren’t getting out of control and get rid of anything that is no longer relevant. Also make sure that your links are sufficiently labelled to reflect the page that they link to.

2. Re-order your links, putting the best ones first. And putting them into categories if you have a high number of links. If you have a links page with 25+ links it is a good idea to turn it into a directory of some sort. This can even help you in getting more links to your site in exchange for back links on the directory that you have created. Also check the sites that you link to and make sure that any back links that are due to you are still there as you don’t have much reason to keep a link if you aren’t getting the backlink that you deserve (if the back link was, indeed, negotiated when you placed the link onto your site).

3. Process link request emails. Whenever you receive requests for a link exchange, respond quickly. Not every mail you receive will be a good one, and you should make sure to check any site that wants you to link to it. If you are declining a link request let the web master know why. Perhaps you have an incite that they do not have. They may be able to fix a few things and then become excellent link partners in the future. It is common curtesy to inform the web master as to whether or not you are willing to exchange links within two or three days of receiving a request. Web masters will be even more impressed if you send them a personalized message regarding your approval or disapproval of the link exchange.

4. Check link exchange forums. This is a similar aspect to the above except that in this case it is more difficult to keep track of all of the people who can potentially request links from your site. There is a lot of spam on these sorts of things as well as many really terrible and useless sites. If you encounter such a site or forum member, inform them of your problem with what they are doing and report them to a moderator/administrator if they do not correct their behavior in a suitable manor. It is important that these kinds of forums be kept clean or a search engine may consider it a link farm more than an exchange service.

5. Finally, you should check each feature of your website, to make sure it’s still working properly. The dynamic content that you will probably include at some point must be delivered properly. Any messages that are generated on the fly must not be generated at misopportune times. The difference between a quality dynamic site and a subpar dynamic site is that in a quality dynamic site all content is delivered at the right time and everything seems static and planned out.

Take your time with your website and make sure that you do everything you can for it each day. Keep adding anything new that you find, because updating regularly will keep search engines coming back to spider more often. Updates are crucial and if you can follow the patterns here of insuring quality and precision, you will probably be able to come up with other ways that you can insure your visitors satisfaction and your increased traffic, link count, and search engine listings.

Never agree to link to someone’s site without asking for a link in exchange, unless they offer to pay you – even then, you should think twice. All your incoming and outgoing links need to be related to your site’s content for you to be ranked high in the search engines.

Basic Link Checks.

Some sites use robots.txt to stop search engines from indexing their links pages, in the mistaken belief that outbound links will count against them. To check, just retype their URL with robots.txt on the end (for example, http://www.website.com/robots.txt). If you see a page that says ‘Disallow’ and has the URL of their links page, then they’re not letting spiders index that page. Don’t exchange links with that site.

You should also check to see if the website is being ‘cloaked’, and report it to the search engines if it is. You don’t want to get involved with these people – better to have them banned and out of the way.

Does the site offering you a link have PageRank? Even if they do, you should look at how it drops between the front page and the links page. Be aware that new pages take a while to get ranked, so PR0 doesn’t necessarily mean a site that will never have any PageRank.

Take a look at how many links are on the page already. There shouldn’t be more than 20 links – if the site breaks this rule, don’t even consider it. Plenty of webmasters collect links, thinking they’re helping their rankings, but it just has the effect of making them look like link farms. Many of them don’t even involve linking to the big spam industries, like casinos and adult content. There’s no point in having a link from a site that takes links from just anyone.

Ok, I know this blog should be about seo theory but we geeks also love the cool gadgets, and I have found the coolest toy in some time, last week I was surfing the Internet when I came accross this cell phone that is also a projector which is based on LED technology.

You can read more about the cell phone projector at the wholesaler’s page

Google’s PagerRank is named after one of Google’s founders Larry Page. The Page Rank is represented by a number between zero up to 10 which is the higest possible rank. A lot of people overestimate the importance of Google PR, while focus should be put on conversion and SERPs.

A Page Rank is casted by another page linking to that page, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself really is, meaning in Google terms a page’s importance comes from the number of votes cast for it. These votes are then taken into account when the page is ranked. 

As a general rule, Google Page Ranks along with Alexa ratings are the best indicators of how well your SEO work has been going. Granted, the ranking that you appear in on the results for your most important key words is the real indicator, but a strong Google Page Rank will help to boost this position substantially. The more links that you have pointing at your site, the better off you are. That’s a basic rule that will apply throughout your SEO operations.

Page Rank matters because it’s one of the most influential factors that determine a page’s ranking in Google’s search results. If you want to have good Page Rank, you’d better make sure people are linking to your site. 

Well, don’t jump the gun and try to get your site linked from everywhere you can, because Google doesn’t count every link. They have started filter out links from known ‘link farms’ (sites that are nothing but big lists of links), and being linked to or from these kinds of sites will get you penalized by Google. Be careful out there. They have also implemented a new relevance calculator that (true to its name) tries to determine how relevant the links into and out of your site are. The most important factor here is that Google considers long lasting links as more meaningful than a recently published link.

The best way to increase your page rank is to contact people with relevant and complimentary content (that is, content that does not compete with your own but that enhances it). These links are most likely to last and they will not only increase your Google Page Rank, but they will also provide relevant hits via the links themselves.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Google calculates the PageRank PR of all pages it indexes, taking into account all the links to and from each site.  When a page ‘votes’ for other pages by linking to them, it shares out some of its PageRank value amongst these pages.

This algorithm means that a link to your site from a page with PR4 (i.e. a Page Rank of 4) and five outbound links would be worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and a hundred outbound links. It’s not just the Page Rank of the page that’s important, but also the number of links it has.

The more links there are on a page, the less Page Rank value your page receives from them. You should also remember that it takes progressively more Page Rank to move up a level. It is generally pretty easy to achieve a Page Rank of three. Once you achieve a Page Rank of four, your site is getting formidable. Increasing past this mark may prove difficult and will require very important content. Reaching 8+ is very difficult. These ranks are usually reserved for sites that are crucial for the functionality of the internet.

Each time you add a link, or a page that links to you adds a link, you run the risk of lowering your PageRank. Make sure that you have as few links as possible, and so do any sites that are associated with you.

Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others’. You should understand that the results searchers end up with can really only be properly worked out by Google, because they’re the only ones with access to the whole index.

This is something I have been toying with since last February and I am glad to say we should have a working beta live by January.  If you are interested to be informed when I release this please sign up for updates.

The purpose of this document is to give an insight into the possibilities of using a DVDSN. The main aspects of a DVDSN are:

• Content distribution based on location or category
• Use of completely independent IP networks
• Network of independent DNS servers
• Availability
• Centralized management of content and statistics
• Geo Targeting
• Cost reduction compared to traditional dedicated hosting
• Backups through a RAIS (Random Array of Inexpensive Servers)
• Automatic pinging of new articles on the network
• Automatic intra-site linking
• Social Bookmarking
The use of DVDSN is completely transparent to the users as the optimal content distribution is handled by the software and as new servers are added to the network they automatically become available from the management console.
Content can be distributed according to criteria that the webmaster sets, the options are:
1. Category
2. Geographic location
3. Domain name
Availability is achieved by using multiple DNS servers and each server will have different IP addresses for the same host, so say NS1.xyz.com is responsible dns queries for host www.xyz.com ns1.xyz.com would have an ip address of 123.123.123.123 for www.xyz.com and ns2.xyz.com would have an ip address of 222.222.222.222 for www.xyz.com the reasoning behind this is that should that particular network server be down then automatically a secondary dns server would respond with an alternate host ip address.
The communication between the servers on DVDSN is all done through the SSH protocol and therefore all data is encrypted at all times. Replication on the network is scheduled to be performed at regular intervals.
The cost of being part of the network is relatively less expensive that traditional dedicated server packages but offers significant advantages from an availability and SEO point of view.

As data is replicated on the RAIS network, availability and backups are more secure as this is done on geographically different networks.
As data is published the CMS system also automatically notifies the major blog search engines (pinging). Further automations like directory submissions can also be done if needed.
There is also the possibility of having sites on the network automatically link to each other based on criteria set by the webmaster.
The distributed servers may also be used as a gateway for social bookmarking; the biggest obstacle with automating this process is the use of captcha fields. This can easily be solved in the following manner, let’s suppose we have a site where a large mass of users register; what we do is have them fill out a registration form and we use the captcha field from a remote social bookmarking site as follows:
Once a new user registers on one of our network sites a script on a random DVDSN server initiates a session on one of the social bookmarking sites and stores the captcha image and re-displays it to our user that is registering once the user inputs the captcha value we send this value back to the script and if the value is correct we have successfully added a new bookmark, if not the user is prompted again with a new captcha image. Obviously this process will use different user IDs that are constantly created from the different IP addresses on the various social network sites. This process can be maximized if we would use the captcha field also in the login or action (forum posts, blog comments etc) process.

Does the idea of online marketing scare  you? have you thought of engaging a pro? Well, we’ve got excellent news for you. It’s actually not complicated to perform search engine optimization (SEO) on your own – a good chunk of cash can be saved, and the same results can be achieved as the search engine pros do. Probably better results can be attained from contracting experienced professionals, but you should at least try some of these diy actions first. Once you’ve start doing some of this type of optimization  it will be easier to decide if a pro is worth his money.

Fundamental  SEO is very easy and simple – all is needed  is the willingness to go through the sometimes very boring  work. Once you are aware of the tricks of the trade it is not that complex  though it does take a lot of effort. The most important factor of a website is going to be the quality of its content.  Here are a few considerations of when you are doing SEO on your own:  

1. You will start by finding a domain, which should reflect what your site is about. Keep it brief, as long as it is somehow connected to your site. Being more specific can help.  You could prefer to name the page after one of your services or products, for example. Another method is to get a sub domain of a popular domain. This will in general help you get indexed faster though it will not appear quite as professional to your visitors. There is a trade off here, sub domains are faster to setup (and generally cheaper), but domain names are easier to remember, and, long term, better for your indexing. 

2. The next thing you should look at is your page’s title (i.e. the Title tag), which is vital in letting search engines see what the content is about, and is the first tag looked at by search engines to establish  your relevance. You should put the most important keywords in your title tags – there is no  need to care  about singular or plural forms as the search engines account for these changes in most cases. Whatever you do, do not name your home page ‘Home’ – the title should be a mini-description of the page. 

3. The two primary meta tags are not as critical as they used to be, but the description tag is still used by several search engines to display information about your website to users and help them determine whether they’ve found what they are looking for. Not all search engines bother with this, though most will put some importance on it (even if it is minuscule).

For very short descriptions the alt tag can be used. Alt tags let you describe an image or graphic file – they’re the pop-up descriptions that appear when you hover your mouse over a graphic, or when the graphic can’t be downloaded for whatever reason. 

Text within comment tags is never displayed on the page – it is used by developers and graphic artists to remind them of what that part of the page is for. Some programmers used to put scores of keywords in the comment tags, so that they would be discovered by search engines but not users, but search engines have now stopped paying attention to any text that isn’t seen by the user. Remember this when trying to post invisible text (i.e. white text on a white background). This kind of conduct can get you banished from a search engine.

4. Having keyword density in all of your content is good, but keep in mind that each search engine has its own requirements when it comes to how many times that a keyword or phrase should be in the content for the page to be relevant. Somewhere between 5 and 8 percent is a roughly optimal level – but this isn’t always possible, and you shouldn’t force it. Don’t overdo it, or the search engines might mark you down. 

5. Many search engines estimate web page importance on the number and quality of incoming links from other sites. You should link to some related sites, but not too many.  Don’t exaggerate inbound links either, and keep them connected to your site’s content. It’s also good to get sites to use your keywords as the text of these links.

If you follow the advice above, you can do it yourself and do well. SEO, if done correctly, can keep you on top of the SERPs for as long as you want to be.