What Makes Good Marketing? Good Content. What Makes Good Content? Good Marketing.

When the blogosphere was beginning to catch fire, like many of our clients, I was getting very excited about starting a blog. We were installing blogs for our clients and showing them how to use their shiny new blogging tool. What we did not teach is that you must blog often, or not blog at all. This is much more obvious today as blogs are visited, trusted and relied on by millions of users.

No matter the topic, a good blog should always lead to good marketing. Whether you are promoting your company or yourself, blogging should draw in visitors like a trout to a caddis fly. Interesting content will not only put you on Google’s radar, but will also give users a reliable place to learn more about you, your company, your area and your website.

So how do I begin to build a good blog you ask? Well, think about marketing. One of my favorite blogs is on a local ski resort website. The purpose of the website is to sell lodging and activities to people visiting the area. However, the blog does not just discuss “heads in beds,” rather it touches on personal stories of the blogger, cool ski runs, dining experiences and a whole slew of different and interesting topics. It’s personal and authentic. It gives me an “insider’s perspective” on the resort. It makes me want to come back to see what the blogger will be writing about next. And thus the website has evolved as not only a resource for skiing and lodging options, but also for in-depth information on the resort as a whole...

source: http://www.bluetentmarketing.com/blog/

Inside the SEO

It is a bit interesting to see your site is ranked in the SERP (search engine result page), but when you are working as SEO, you toiled hard to get the satisfaction. The factors influencing your rankind are devided into 2 parts: on-page and off-page optimization.

On the page optimization relates with the following key terms:
1> Site analysis,
2> Competitor analysis,
3> Link structure analysis,
4>Keyword research and analysis,
5> Content analysis,
6> Keywords optimization
7> Meta tags preperation,
8> Other optimization factors,
9> Image optimization,
10> HTML & CSS validation,
11> robots.txt & XML sitemap creation,
12> Performing google webmaster tools,
13> Google analytics set up,
14> Demodraphy Performance

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/inside-seo.html

Why Article Submission

Introduction to Article Submission

One of the best ways for one-way link building is through article submission. Now-a-days article marketing has kept the internet marketing a step further. Article submission provides any site with high quality traffic and virtually free of cost.

How Does Article Submission Work?

First you need to write high quality, informational articles and then submit them to online popular article directories. These directories have its own editorial guidelines which need to be strictly followed in the time of submitting the articles. This is important otherwise the articles can be banned permanently from the article directories. Usually, every article submission directory has a specific, standard format. You should add the title in the Title Box, then the body of the article in the main section and finally at the end is the Resource Box. It is the place, where all the promotion takes place. Promotion in the article body is not allowed.


source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-article-submission.html

How to Measure Success and Benefits of Social Media Campaign

While social media campaigns are becoming increasingly popular among Internet marketers and is today considered as a mainstream marketing tool, it is important that we define some method to measure the success or effectiveness of such campaigns.

The traditional methods of measuring success of any internet marketing campaign can be put into two points

1. Increase in Unique Visitors and Page Views
2. Increase in ROI

However, with Social Media Campaigns none of these seems to be the perfect parameter to measure success. Social media is about people and building relationships. Social Media campaigns develop by fostering connectivity between people and developing communities. It is therefore powered by collective knowledge and gives a closer reflection of the real life., which makes it very difficult to quantify the success of a social media optimization campaign.

Eric Peterson puts up a more logical view to calculate effectiveness of Social Media Optimization by measuring how "engaged" a visitor is when they come to your website.

Eric defines an engaged visitor as one who involves in

1. Reading my weblog
2. Reading other user generated content on the web site
3. Participating in a truly social activity facilitated by my site
4. Joining a social network of web analytics people
5. Contributing content directly to the web site
6. Submitting a comment to my weblog
7. Emailing me directly

Now considering these points, we need to agree that visitors who subscribe to some type of "push" feed are more engaged compared to the ones who view content sporadically. Also, it can be concluded that a visitor who just reads the blog has got moderate level of engagement, while someone reading the content and contributing to the content has got a higher level of engagement.

Now what do we get from this "engaged" visitors? Do they actually contribute to your sales and improve your ROI ?

As Jeremiah Owyang says:
"Some folks tied measurement back to hard ROI: (Does Social Media shorten the sales cycle/reduce cost, and does it increase revenues). For other companies, business blogging is about thought leadership, or building better products, how could you apply these models to the Wells Fargo blogs, that are designed at reaching out to communities?"

Your Social Media Campaign can actually help you to create :

1. Thought Leadership
2. Provides a platform for two way communication with the consumers for the companies
3. Get valuable customer feedback that contributes towards improving your existing product ideas
4. New product ideas can generate through user contribution
5. Increase your credibility
6. This "engaged" users can be a great media to spread the word about your new products and service.

So, though not directly contributing to the sales, SMO has actually become an extermely important marketing weapon for the corporates and can effectively contribute to brand building and also gives them a direct access to understand their consumer reactions.

Causes for 404 Error Code and Solutions

This morning I received an email from one of my blog readers who is a bit disappointed by the overwhelming number of 404 error code that shows in his server log. He is aware of the fact that 404 HTTP status code stands for "Not Found" but that confuses him further because all his links are working fine and there is no link that leads to a page not found. ( Well, I guess he is missing the fine difference between "Not Found" and "Page not found" )

Instead of answering his email I thought I would put up a post here, so it can be of help to all my readers who are struck with such 404 error issues.

As per the W3.org, 404 HTTP status code is defined as "Not Found". It further says,

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address. This status code is commonly used when the server does not wish to reveal exactly why the request has been refused, or when no other response is applicable.

Here are some of the common causes of 404 Error

• Moving a Web Page - At times you reorganize your website or move resources from one page to another for various reasons. Now even after you have removed the page it is likely that you will still have some references to the page both on-site ( links from other pages) as well as off-site ( search engine result pages, links from external sites etc) While you can take care of the internal pages and remove all references you are helpless with the external references and any visitor following those links would get a 404 error.
  Solution: Set up a 301 redirection from your old page to new page. All your visitors would be able to find the page. Search engines would also recognize the move, drop the old page and index the new one.
  
  
• Mistyping by Type in Traffic - If your website is very popular you might be getting a lot of type in traffic. Any mistyping by those visitors would return a 404 error page.
  Solution: Not really a solution for this because you don't know what your visitors are going to type but as a best practice try using file names that are logical, short and easy to remember. Also, you can gain back some of these traffic by using a custom 404 error page ( will write a separate post on this soon ) .
  
  
• Misspelled URLs in External Links - Its always good to get links from other websites, but if the URL is misspelt all visitors would get a 404 status code.
  Solution: Monitor your 404 error logs and see if they are sent by any particular site. If it is a case of misspelt URL, contact the webmaster and request them to change the link with correct spelling. If that is not possible, create a page with the misspelt URL and set up a 301 redirect from that page to the intended page.
  
  
• Renaming Documents & Change of URL Structure - At times pages are also renamed or URL structures are modified. This is a common case with old dynamic websites with complex URL structures with parameters who might be changing over to a nice static looking URLs with URL rewriting. Even in this case the old URLs and file references remain in various locations on and off the site and any visitor trying to access the old URLs would get a 404 error.
  Solution: Again 301 redirection is the best solution that you can have to avoid these 404 error codes.
  
  
• Case Sensitive File Names - While this is not an issue with IIS this can be a major problem if your website is on Unix or Linux server. Apache is case sensitive in respect to file names. If your file name is seo.html and you have linked to SEO.html , your server would return a 404 Http status code.
  Solution: Be very careful while naming your files. Its a generally accepted practice to have file names in lower case and following the convention should save you much trouble in case you are on Unix or Linux server.
  
  
• Old Domains - Many of us would buy an old domain and put our site on that in lure of those few extra backlinks, PR juice and domain authority. Now these domains might have some of their pages still indexed in search engines or linked from other websites which can give you a trickling flow of visitors and most of them getting a 404 error code ( unless coincidentally some of your URLs are same as the old site).
  Solution: You would probably like to ignore this traffic unless the traffic is highly relevant to your website and the volume of traffic is also good. In case you see a good amount of traffic flow, you can always set up a new page based on the old URL.
  
  
• Missing Favicon.ico - Favicon.ico is a small graphic icon that gets displayed on the address bar when you open a URL in Firefox or when you try to bookmark a URL in IE. Its great for branding to have a small logo beside your URL or eside your bookmarked URL. Some of the browsers like Mozilla would call for this favicon.ico file whenever it opens a page and IE would call for this file whenever somone tries to bookmark a page. Now if you don't have a Favicon.ico it your server returns a 404 http status code to the user agent .
  Solution: Simple ! Add a favicon.ico to your website. If you are good with graphics you can do it yourself using Photoshop or other similar programs. Alternatively use this Favicon generator.
  
  
• Missing Robots.txt - All search engine spiders and bots calls for the robots.txt file whenever they visit your website. A robots.txt file contains the directives that tells the bots which part of the website they should not spider. These days robots.txt file is also used to provide links to XML sitemaps so it is easier for spiders to crawl the entire website. Each website must have a robots.txt file in their root directory. Even if you don't want to block any part of your website from the spiders, upload a blank robots.txt.
  Solution: Make sure you have a robots.txt file in your root directory. In case you want to know more, read how to create a robots.txt .

30 SEO Tips in 30 Days to turn your website SEO ready

Having less time to do SEO by your own :) do not worry, now you have a chance to turn your website SEO ready in just 30 days by applying one SEO tip a day? Here are those 30 SEO tips

Tip [1] Add Titles related to targeted keywords, place only important keywords, do not exceed more than 25 characters
Tip [2] Meta description should be unique for each pages with targeted keywords. Do not stuff keywords into Meta description.
Tip [3] Layout pages with CSS, avoid tables
Tip [4] Add Keywords towards H1 tag as page headlines.
Tip [5] Implement Bread crumbs for increasing web site navigation structure example Home >> Service >> SEO
Tip [6] Create Static Header and footer navigation links, Links should be text not as images
Tip [7] Analyze your targeted keywords using Google suggest
Tip [8] Keywords in navigational links play a vital role and have its own importance to search engine eyes
Tip [9] Use most important keyword in file name or URL
Tip [10] Minimize table especially nested tables
Tip [11] Say yes to Quality links and No to Quantity links
Tip [12] Never try to place hundreds of link for a new site on the very first day
Tip [13] Your targeted keywords need to vary a lot in anchors
Tip [14] Always have a good combination of links from new and old sites
Tip [15] Try writing articles having links and have them in the resource page of your site
Tip [16] Images are important, make sure your site logo contains your keyword
Tip [17] Put CSS and JavaScript into external file / folder
Tip [18] Pay special attention to your content
Tip [19] Make sure to have sitemap as text links
Tip [20] Place robots.txt in root on your server
Tip [21] Create Google site map to your web site
Tip [23] Start a blog and participate with other related blogs
Tip [22] Submit site to open directories
Tip [24] Create feed xml and ror xml for xml search engines and directories
Tip [25] Try to avoid automatic directory submission and build manual links
Tip [26] Monitor your hits and traffic by using free Google analytics
Tip [27] Know how to analyze the reports and to optimize the results
Tip [28] Know about redirection methods and theory - 301, 302, and 200 response codes
Tip [29] Implement, understand and react to website analytics reports
Tip [30] Make your body copy sufficiently long and keyword rich