Just as promised, here is part 2 of the 42 strategies to successfully optimize your website. If you had a handful on the previous one, this is the rest of your homework

20. Don’t worry too much about PageRank. PR is good when you have it, but it is not that important when ranking in Google, or Bing or Yahoo. What matters always the most is relevance of your content.

21. Print your website in your business cards, flyers, radio/TV ads, newspaper ads, brochures and everywhere you can think of.

22. Give something for free. Free is always good. People tell other people about free stuff. People normally go online for free stuff.

23. Advertise your site on Craigslist. It’s free, relevant and localized when using your keywords.

24. Do NOT EVER, EVER use frames.

25. Submit your site to DMOZ.org. It takes time, but it’s worth it.

26. Create an XML sitemap of your site and submit it to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, et al.

Image via Wikipedia

27. Comment on Flickr photos. Also, create your Flickr account and upload images and photos of your business and products. Use keywords related to those products to mark and tag them. It works best if you have an idea that actually is worth looking at, rather than just creating random pictures and uploading them with keywords.

28. On your Contact Page ask people if they would accept receiving your newsletter.

29. Send out a newsletter. A well thought, well planned, well designed email newsletter. Don’t become SPAM and learn the laws of email marketing to avoid any issues. And please, use a real email marketing service to track and measure your campaign and deliver your emails as opposed to using Outlook or other email clients.

30. Go to seminars for Website owners. You will learn a lot. If you find a free seminar, even better!

31. Find quality and relevant blogs and leave a comment, with a link back to your site of course. Ensure the comment is really adequate to the article. Submitting random comments of “great article!”, “Just wanted to say hi” and such, in most blogs, will hardly get your comment published as these are usually caught as spam.

32. YouTube, Google Video, Viddler and other video sharing sites as well, are excellent portals on which to launch a viral campaign. You will not always get viral, but if you optimize the video properly, it will rank high in Search Engines and bring lots of traffic of interested prospects to your site.

33. Create a Yahoo Group in the niche where your business and products sit. Remember to manage and update it.

34. If you sell products that are advertised on television by the manufacturer, add “As Seen on TV” to your site. Also consider getting seals of quality, recognition or at least the BBB to create trust in your company.

35. Avoid proprietary technologies like Java, Flash and Active X.

36. Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

37. Put downloadable content on your site, but make sure it’s not manufacturer specific – eg. mp3 as opposed to wma or avi versus wmv.

38. Contribute to related subject areas on Wikipedia. Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.

39. Utilize user friendly page names and URLs – most tools come with some way to fix this.

40. If you must have a Flash homepage, make sure you have a “Skip Intro” link. Preferably keep Flash to a minimum, as in most cases is unnecessary and people get annoyed.

41. Tell your local rag about your site. These newspapers are desperate for stories.

42. By maintaining a very useful blog and other related activities, become a leading authority on your chosen subject.

Hope this SEO strategies help you obtain success online.

Good luck!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc… all search engines designed to help us find websites that otherwise we would not know they even exist. All is good and great until you start seriously thinking about it. The search engines have the power to control, regulate, veto, censor, block and promote whoever they want.

What makes the SEs know better than myself what I’m looking for and what I want? I find myself visiting page 20 or 40 in the SERPs just to see what’s beyond the “wall”.

This begs the question: Can Search Engines control you?

In regards to businesses, as the internet becomes a more crowded and professionalized arena, it will be harder for small entrepreneurs to succeed online. Will this make the web static? The same old thing like TV, radio and movies?

The internet is an agent of change, and will still be for the time being. We need to keep being creative, weird, strange and as unpredictable as we can to keep its spirit alive.

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.

As soon as Bing came out and announced it, Google was not far behind. We last heard that Google was in the talks with Twitter and they have apparently closed the deal.

Currently, if you do any google search, you will find that for some results Twitter twits are already showing in the SERPs. More will be coming soon. Real time results is what the buzz is all about these days. Exposure will become much more sensitive and businesses need to keep learning as fast as the market evolves. Speaking of which, Google Wave is coming too and that has some people talking about revolutionizing the way we email and do internet in many ways (and a healthy dose of detractors, of course).

Getting back to Twitter in Google, this was mentioned in Google’s blog yesterday. See the blog post here: Google Blog.

Bing has been showing some improvements recently in regards to market share and seems to still be working out a deal with Yahoo. The marketshare war is still very hot, in spite of what most of us believed. Bing keeps kicking back, will this be it for Microsoft? Is this Microsoft’s retaliation for Google’s intrusion into the OS markets with Android and Chrome OS?

Ma Cualli Ohtli!

©2012 the Marketing stuff. All Rights Reserved.