SuperTips Ezine: Issue 18
IN THIS ISSUE
2. "Why you should NOT link to a reseller
site"
3. Readers Forum
4. "How To Write Top Ten Doorway Pages"
5. More "Super" Tips
6. Publications of Interest 7. Next Issue
1. Greetings! Hello Folks, I've spent the period between issues busily changing every page (about 70) at my web site to make them more suitable for the search engines. That meant putting in improved titles, descriptions and keywords. I submitted them to the major engines last week and I plan to let you know how I get on, and any useful tips, in forthcoming issues. The submission process was helped by a really useful software product called Shortkeys. I do love tools which can simplify work and save time. Especially when they are free ! So Shortkeys joins my collection along with Pegasus and NoteTab. You can read about Shortkeys today. Harvey
2. "Why you should NOT link to a reseller site"
When you act as a reseller or agent for another company, which means that you receive commission for getting customer orders to the company, you will often be provided with your own personalised web site. So does this mean that in your ads you can simply refer to that site ? It does - but here's a better idea. You should link instead to a page on your OWN site so that 1. You can provide your own introduction to the product.
This can include 2. You can provide links to your own particular business 3. Your own site traffic statistics will indicate the response to your ad in addition to any stats provided for you by the company 4. You can submit the page to search engines. And there's one final advantage: should the reselling operation be discontinued you can inform and divert visitors at your own web site, rather than have them visit a non-existent page.
3. Readers Forum 3.1 My Yahoo question - answered My thanks to William Bontrager for explaining how I came to be 'listed' in Yahoo even though I had never submitted my site. Apparently Yahoo does 2 different types of searches. First, a directory search then, if it could not find a match, it does a search engine type search, using the Inktomi search engine. You can tell which one it used by the format of the Url in the referral log. Directory finds show an Url as a series of folders. Search engine finds show an Url with a ? in it. William gave an example using his wife's site 'Anywhere But In the Kitchen' at http://www.willmaster.com/kitchen/ The first is from the directory listing, the last three are links from inktomi http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Food_and_Drink/Cooking/Recipes/http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=HEALTHY+recipies http://ink.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=fast+and+easy+recipes http://av.yahoo.com/bin/query?hc=0&hs=0&p=easy%20recipes In my own case as there were only Urls with a '?' these were found from Inktomi searches. So I did not really have a directory listing in Yahoo magically created for me. Oh well - I'd better read that article again properly "Are You Listed in Yahoo?" in last week's edition. You can read it here.
3.2 No winner in my 'golden rule' contest Do you recall how I ended the last issue ?
I said Well no-one managed to spot my deliberate 'error'. One reader wondered if the rule was that 'a newsletter should not be too long' as I had stated at the start that it was a particularly big edition. But I have no such rule.
The answer was in the article I gave as the address an affiliate link, viz <http://www.marketingtips.com/creditcards/t.x/8589> Now as we have seen in the tip above it's much better to use a link at your own site. At the time the page had not yet been set up - that's why I resorted to the link above and broke my rule. So here's the new Url . You'll see more information here about how to get approval to accept credit cards and how to automate credit card sales. As there was no winner I'd like to publish the signature for William Bontrager for his help with my Yahoo problem.
---== Publisher ==---
3.3 Tracking customers - my worst mistake Reader Jeffrey Jordan wants to know how I "keep track of web site visitors who make purchases, request articles, join affiliate programs etc" Jeffrey - when I first started out I used to keep a record of everyone who asked for one of my articles so that I could follow up with a recommendation to purchase an appropriate book or join me in an affiliate program. I had an address book in the form of an Access database with codes telling me which article had been requested, which product had been purchased etc. I used to spend countless hours pasting addresses from my AOL and Compuserve mailboxes to this database (this was before I came across Pegasus). I would then use a combination of Visual Basic programs and spreadsheet commands to extract an appropriate mailing list. Also I had to allow for the fact that AOL addresses would just have a name such as fredsmith so I had to add the '@aol.com' portion in: and there were also anomalies with Compuserve addresses. The result - a nightmare of unproductive and confusing effort. One day when I write an article about the 10 worst mistakes of an online marketer this whole episode will have to take pride of place.
There are now tools to help maintain your customer database and send out
personalised Emails. As regards keeping track of sub affiliates (those who sign up under you in an affiliate program) I've noticed a growing trend for some programs to allow you to broadcast a message to all of your sub affiliates. A useful feature. I've used this to keep affiliates informed of latest developments and tips, and also additions to my collection of affiliate programs. I don't believe in a huge list of affiliate programs - I have a very small selection - but I did add one last week, IMC (Internet Marketing Challenge) which has come very highly recommended. You can read about IMC and the other programs here
4. "How To Write Top Ten Doorway Pages (An
Actual Example)"
We read a lot about doorway pages and how they can be used to get you top search engine placement. From the email and calls that I get you would think they are pretty difficult to do. Actually they are fairly simple to do. All you really need to do is create a short, simple page that targets 1 or 2 keyword phrases. To show you how simple it is, I created a doorway page targeting the keyword phrases "professional webpage optimization" and "webpage optimization." This page was specifically designed for Alta Vista but I considered how the Inkitomi index would treat it too since Yahoo feeds from this index. This page probably took no more than 10 minutes to write and refine. I designed the page using the doorway page feature of Web Positon Gold software. It took another 5 minutes to publish the page and submit it to the top 10 search engines. You would want to design a different page for each search engine since each weight the various factors differently. However, for the purpose of this "lesson" we will just look at the page designed for Alta Vista. First we will look at how it did, then we will look at WHY it ranked as it did. All of my stats are as of when I wrote this article on August 18th, 1999. If you go to Yahoo.com and enter the keyword phrase "professional webpage optimization" and then click on webpage matches you will find this page as the first of 1,404 pages that Yahoo returns. If you click on the Alta Vista link on the bottom of the Yahoo search page it will take you to the Alta Vista returns for the same keyword search. You will see that this page comes up number 1 out of 2,400,000+ pages. Not bad ;-) Actually, you got two different pages. You see I wanted to see how a page without metatags would rank compared to one with metatags. The page listed number 1 at Yahoo has metatags and the one listed number 1 at Alta Vista does not. The pages are identical otherwise. I believe in testing and experiment A LOT. It's the only way to really grasp what given search engines like. I found these results interesting since Alta Vista uses metatags but listed the one of two pages I submitted that contained no metatags. The listing just contains the top few lines of text from my webpage. This shows that if you don't use metatags to "tell" AltaVista how to list you, they just grab the text. The two pages were submitted on different days so I would also expect the other page to eventually show up in their index. These same 2 pages placed: 2 out of 3,000 at Yahoo for "webpage optimization" 2 out of 2,530 at HotBot for "webpage optimization" 1 and 2 at MSN for "webpage optimization" The page also did well for several other keyword phrases at a number of search engines but I just wanted to show that it did list number 1 at Alta Vista, since that's what it was designed to do. Alta Vista is fun to work with because they get you page into the index in 1 to 2 days. You get very quick feedback on how your page did. Now let's look at WHY it did well. The secret to this page is that it contained my target keyword phrase "webpage optimization" - in the title, in the metatags, and even in the webpage url. The phrase is mentioned on the page a number of times but not enough where the spam filters would kick in. The phrase is also in my alt text tag that goes along with my image. To the search engines this page is clearly about webpage optimization. A few people would look at this page and say that it looks rather plain. That's because I wanted to keep it simple. The more elements you put on a page, the harder it is to balance all of the factors that you know the search engines weigh. This page is designed to get a visitor to click on the link found at the search engine. He finds this doorway page and from there clicks deeper into your site. Study this example and try a few of your own. In no time at all you should also be writing doorway pages that list in the top 10 or 20 at your target search engine for your target keyword phrase. This will bring in more targeted traffic for you and hopefully more business. If you would like to get a free trial version of Web Position Gold, download it at <http://williecrawford.com/wpgold/index.html>
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5. More "Super" Tips 5.1 Save time - with Shortkeys Think of the number of times that you have had to enter your Email adress, your Url or your name into a form or a message or any sort of document. Wouldn't it be simpler if you could use some short abbreviated codes to take their place ? Well you can now do this with a utility program called Shortkeys, a free 'light' version is available at <http://www.shortkeys.com> ShortKeys can be used with any program that allows text input such as a word processor, text editor or e-mail program. It replaces a word or code of your choosing with the required text which can range from a sentence to several paragraphs (up to 3000 characters).
So, for example, I have set up short codes
If I type in ##e it is replaced by hsegal@supertips.com You may have seen similar features in text editors such as Notepad or Email programs such as Pegasus but the beauty of ShortKeys is that it works at keyboard level and so can be used for ANY program that you are running.
5.2 Don't remove your web pages ! You may be very surprised at how long information can remain floating around on the Net. I still get the occasional request, about once a month, for a product I advertised in a newsgroup back in December 1996 ! And recently a reader wanted more information about an article that I submitted to a newsletter which he had found in the archives, quoting the reference which ended.../archive/1997/May/0061.html Both these items pointed to pages at my site which I could easily have removed thinking that they were no longer needed and would have lost potential visitors. So rather than remove an out-of-date page you could change the content to link to a current one.
5.3 PC slowing down In the July 7th edition I asked if anyone could advise on this problem My Windows 98 PC is new and working very efficiently. When I work my way up and down through the various folders and subfolders of My Documents they all appear instantly, but ...and this happens every time ... after a while the speed at which it does this continually degrades. So I end up trying to access a sub-folder say and it can take 10 or more seconds. When I restart the PC it's fine to start with but again the speed degrades. I've had some suggestions like altering the Virtual Memory settings in the Control Panel/System/Performance screen but this did not help. However a tip from Maurice E White, while not getting to the root of the problem, does provide a quicker solution and you may find it useful. Apparently when you restart Windows from the Start/Shut down menu it is slow because it reboots completely. You can make this faster by restarting Windows alone. Press Ctl-Alt-Del. Select Explorer and click End Task. Wait until the Explorer panel appears with another End Task button. Click this to restart Windows.
6. Publications of Interest MARKETING TIPS that you can use NOW to increase your Online Business. EverydayBiz Online brings you Free Resources, Marketing Tips and much more! Subscribe now and get some great FREEBIES! Mailto:everydaybiz-subscribe@egroups.com or http://everydaybiz.hypermart.net/newsltr.htm SUBSCRIBE to the "GWM Newsletter" packed with web design tips, money-making marketing tips, extra-income ideas, tips and strategies to build your business, and a whole lot more. We help people worldwide and we can help you too! IT'S FREE! mailto:webmaster@gulfwestmarketing.com?subject=SubscribeGWM Janahar Promotions International: Advertising and Promotions, Business Advice, Information and Resources including Free Reports, Luxury Items site, Network Marketing articles, Online Shopping Mall, Website Design and Development and much more. mailto:jprom@connect.net.au?Subject=JPINTL_INFO_ST to be informed when our sites launch September 1999. FREE advice!! Discover how to manage and market your business effectively plus receive time-saving and motivational tips to move you toward your goals. Get a FREE gift for subscribing. mailto:subscribe@netcheckspayroll.com?subject=subscribeST
7. Next Issue SuperTips Ezine will be with you again on September 15th. If you have any suggestions to improve this newsletter so that we can make it a great resource for all our readers please drop me a line .
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