Weiss Report Blog

If you’re looking for someone who offers SEO consulting services, what criteria should you use to select the ideal vendor? With an industry that has no standards and is built on opinion more than on science, that’s a very important question people should be asking themselves. It’s easy enough to pick out “popular” SEOs who present at conferences but some of those conference presenters are really bad SEOs. Why do they get on the panels? Because they are well-known.

A recent trend in search engine optimization marketing has been to capitalize on the demand for real science. Some people have begun publishing nonsense studies that look and feel scientific but which have been roundly criticized for being amateurish goofups. These people are the champions of dysfunctional SEO strategies like PageRank sculpting, competitive link analysis, and using correlative studies.

The best SEO consulting services are built upon a solid foundation of true search engine marketing science. That kind of research goes beyond the glossy white paper marketing that the snake oil salesman throw in your face. Real search engine optimization science identifies and applies clear principles of behavior within the searchable Web ecosystem. Real search engine optimization science is validated by successful SEO field work.

There is a great deal of interest in the performance of search engine results. People have begun to realize that one way to distinguish between junk Websites and the higher quality sites is to look for “brand value”. What makes a brand is an interesting question, one that is answered by marketing science. The science of marketing does provide some basic structure to successful search engine optimization, but it doesn’t go far enough toward explaining why search systems behave the way they do.

Although many people now provide simple guidance in SEO the deeper, more advanced search engine optimization is not easily understood by most members of the SEO community. To be blunt, most people in the SEO industry don’t encounter situations requiring advanced search engine optimization knowledge, so they have few opportunities to acquire it. There are no legitimate “advanced SEO” classes.

To find a reliable SEO consultant, your search will have to look at the factors that contribute to the methods of the consultant’s practice. If they offer a robust selection of options for you to choose from, you can be reasonably sure they have a lot of experience and don’t just offer a cookie-cutter approach to building your Website’s visibility and search traffic.

“HLE” is a bit of a joke term, (or possible tongue in cheek could be a better label) coined in my Network Marketing Group - it stands for “Hens Lay Eggs” and is a take on the exponential growth theory - recruit two people, who recruit two, etc, and in six weeks you’ll have 50,000 people sending you $250,000 - the false promise of MLM.

The MLM exponential growth chart makes sense mathematically but is flawed. Unfortunately the ordinary person can’t see the flaw, so buy into it, and you get your 95% of people who do MLM and can’t make it work. We all know the story.

The logic is the same as “Zeno’s arrow”, based on an ancient greek philosopher and mathematician who preceeds Archimedes and Pythagoras. Or in the famous “missing pound” logic problem. More on these in future issues.

But here is the HLE analogy explained:

A hen lays six eggs. If the chicks grow up to be hens they also lay eggs and the hen becomes a “grandmother”. There is no guarantee that all 6 chicks will lay 6 eggs, etc. Also there’s nothing to stop the hen laying another batch of eggs, maybe six, maybe 5 or 8. It’s not set or guaranteed.

Also there is no guarantee that the eggs will hatch into chicks - “don’t count your chickens before they hatch” after all. In this sense, an egg is a prospect, a chick is an affiliate who has signed up. Whether that chick now grows into a hen and lays their own eggs is the next issue. And a lot of that is down to how you - the mentor - or “Mother Hen” - help them develop in their early days, months, even years.

So it is with network marketing, MLM, EMM - whatever you want to call it - we call it “HLE”. As Shakespeare said “a rose by any other name will still give you hay fever”, or to quote Bruce Lee “it’s just a name don’t fuss over it”

The same goes for EMM - Exact Method Marketing - the McDonalds formula example (more on that later).

So what I now do is lead with FREE affiliate programs, the best of which is the SFI scheme with their free online VStore. This means no signup fees, no upgrade fees, no forcing the distributors to buy inventory. The money is ONLY made from the sale of the product and money is ONLY made by helping your downline make sales.

When someone joins under me they HAVE to sell the products and I HAVE to help them, I can’t just sell them the opportunity as they do in so many companies that are DESIGNED to take advantage of the fact that the new affiliate won’t be able to make any sales or recruit any downline. THESE schemes don’t need them to - they have made the money from selling them the opportunity - the startup fee, upgrade fee, and they sell product to the distribrutor who “must stock inventory” - they don’t ever expect him to be able to sell it on - they don’t need him to.

HLE, taken literally, is more “viral”. It’s like when someone sends you a joke on email, if you look, each “level” has dozens of different names the joke has been spidered out to.

That is “viral”, and that is how you pass on the products and opportunity. It spreads like a virus - person to person - which is how network marketing is supposed to work. No spam, no sticking people on autoresponders - no junk mail.

Real people, real products, real opportunities, real results.

Silke Stahl is an International Internet Marketer and Home Business Entrepreneur. Originally a respected photographer and writer, contributing to many magazines, she began network marketing as a sideline. Marketing on the Internet and running her own business was a logical next step. She now owns her own domain SilkeStahl.com and runs her Internet Marketing business from there: her business opportunity: http://Silke247.Opportunity.com and her forum at: http://thestork.proboards20.com

Search engine optimization is best left in the mystical land of the Intenet Marketing Guru right? Good Search engine rankings are tough to achieve. Understanding search engine marketing takes years of studying and only people with true insider knowledge and secret tools rank well in Google right? WRONG. Pure crap as a matter of fact.

Ranking well in the search engines is not difficult. In fact search engine optimization is relatively easy. What stops most people from ranking well in search engines is misinformation. Every week there’s yet another quick fix to ranking well in search engines and people jump from one quick fix to the next hoping for that Top 10 position in Google and never achieving it.

There are 6 key areas of search engine optimization that you need to know about. These are the basics. Getting these right will help you achieve the Google rankings that you’ve always wanted.

Domain Name - The jury is still out on the how relevant a keyword rich domain name is. What I mean by keyword rich domain name is say for example your site was going to be about money making ideas then an idea domain name could be either www.moneymakingideas.com or www.money-making-ideas.com. My own personal preference is with the hyphenated approach e.g. www.money-making-ideas.com simply because I believe that search engines can read it more easily. To registed your domain name I would suggest using either 000Domains.com or GoDaddy.com

Content - Useful content. Not keyword stuffed, spammy pages. Write something useful for your visitors. If you can’t write then you’ll need to learn. Turn Words Into Traffic is a great resource for learning how to write content and is a resource that I use personally. Turn Words Into Traffic gives you an A-Z on article writing - from a writers perspective. If you don’t want to learn how to write content then you could always use Create Website Content Fast to help you speed the process up.

Keywords - Keywords are the words or phrases that you expect people to search for your site/service/content with. There are two distinct factors to consider when choosing keywords for your site.

1. You need to target specific keywords. For example if you have a website about dating then you’ll probably find it quite difficult to achieve high search engine rankings initially with that single term. However if you were to refine an area of your site to target say Gay & Lesbian Dating that’s more specific. You could also regionalize your keywords or key phrases e.g. Gay & Lesbian dating in Toronto. This refining process is often referred to as niche (pronounced neech) marketing.

2. You need to choose the keywords that you want people to find your site with. Put yourself in your visitors shoes - think about what they might use to find you in the search engines. What keywords or key phrases would you type into a search engine to find your site? What keywords or key phrases would your potential visitor use to search for you? Always, always think like a typical websurfer.

If you’re interested in seeing what people are searching for on the web and how profitable that might be for you I would recommened that you check out Good Keywords. It’s free and does a wonderful job of helping you find good keywords

I would also suggest that you try Wordtracker also. It’s a brilliant service for tracking down specific, popular keywords.

Keyword density - This is how often your keyword is used on the the page itself. For example if you have 100 words of text on a single page and you mention your keyword 5 times then you have 5% keyword density.

Opinions vary on this but anywhere from 1% - 7% is considered ideal. If this doesn’t make sense to you then it’s ok. The simple rule is this: less is more. Do not alter the text on your webpages to include your keyword over and over again because………well…. it looks stupid, won’t instill any confidence in your prospective customer and might also get you penalized or removed from the search engines.

Page title - Your tag is critical to your page being ranked well. Stuffing your tag with keywords in the hope of ranking well is pointless. Your tag, once constructed properly, will see you moving up the search engine rankings quickly. Bear this simple fact in mind when building your websites and it will serve you well.

Links - Having good links pointing to your site and good links within your site (an often overlooked aspect of search engine optimization) is pretty important as far as search engine ranking goes. Having other sites linking to yours proves the importance of your site to the search engines i.e. if the content on your site is so valuable that other site owners want to link to it then it must be important.

META Tags - Meta tags are dead baby. Well not quite dead but they are only used as a point of reference for search engines. It’s a shame to see websites that have their META tags still stuffed with keywords. It’s pointless. Put your primary keywords in the Meta Keyword part of your webpage but apart from that don’t lose any sleep or waste any energy on them.

There’s not enough space in this article to explain all of the above in the detail that I’d love to. Also I’m not a search engine expert so some of the explanation is best left to those that I learned from (Sean Burns and Jay Stockwell take a bow please

Having learned the basics of search engine optimization and submission I have achieved Top 10 Rankings for all of my websites. It’s not hard to do this. It just takes work, a little patience and a little common sense.

Recommended reading:

Rankings Revealed

Microsite Miracles

This article was provided courtesy of Search Engine Fuel where you’ll find tons of information on getting higher search engine ranks and reviews of SEO ebooks and software.

One of the most powerful aspects of any online marketing campaign is how do I deliver the goods in the major search engines, e.g Google and Yahoo. How do I have my site to rank substantially in Google or Yahoo?

One of the most essential aspects of doing winning in the search engines (assuming the basics suchlike outstanding content are already organized) is producing links aimed at your website. You can generate this a lots of different ways, some viewed positively by the serps and some not so happily.

One of the sure ways, that the search engines think is satisfactory is link building with articles.

Fundamentally this calls for writing a solid article, rather about something from your area of expertise, and then submitting it to a free article directory.

You really cannot lowball the crucial nature of link building. If there is one signal that means the most to the search engines, on the whole, it is links. Sure, there are bus loads of other signals, for example the domain name, but you are misguided if you suppose you are going to be listed well, and easily heard, if you do not realise any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?