Issue - December 2000
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Issue - December 2000 |
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Dynamic Internet
Marketing
Newsletter "Driving traffic to your web site ..." |
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Search
Engine News Flash + AltaVista is now carrying paid links provided by GoTo.com, making it the latest search engine to be co-opted by the paid placement service. GoTo also has paid links appearing live at Netscape Search, AOL Search, Lycos and HotBot. AltaVista said that it expects to roll out a paid inclusion program in the near future. + NBCi announced that it expects to add an express submission service this month. + You may be aware that Google scores web pages with their own "PageRank" to measure their popularity. However, Google chief technical officer Craig Silverstein explained to conference attendees that the "page" in page rank is a reference to Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page, not to web pages themselves. + Yahoo has dropped the ability for sites to submit for free to two commercial categories of its directory. Sites wishing to be listed within the "Shopping and Services" or "Business to Business" areas of the web guide must now use Yahoo's $199 "Business Express" service. A free submission option remains for those submitting to other areas of the Yahoo.com site or to regional commercial areas at Yahoo's non-US editions. Feature
Article: THE SECRET WAY to Make Gateway Pages Work But only if you use them right! The search engines have been tough towards gateway pages lately. They have introduced "anti-spam" policies that limit the number of page submissions from each domain. They have given higher priority to home pages. They sell all sorts of sponsored links that show up above the actual search results and bury them deep under. Many of them purge their databases on a regular basis to toss out the doorways. And still, there IS a way to make gateway pages work for you in spite of all these troubles! How? Read on Imagine you have an online store selling computer monitors. Type "computer monitors" in any search engine and you'll get hundreds of thousands pages. No chance to compete! But what if you search for "Samsung SyncMaster 700NF"? Or "CTX VL700T"? A handful of truly relevant pages, at best. Which gives us a good chance to get a top 10 or even number one position! Are you getting my idea? Right, narrow searches! Of course, you will not optimize your home page for that sort of phrases. But why not create a simple doorway page focused on that specific item and bring people who search for it right to the best place to buy it your website? Note that this traffic will be extremely valuable. If someone looks for a definite model, do you think they are just window-shopping? Imagine 100 or 200 simple gateway pages in the engines, each precisely targeted to one product! How many people will they bring to your site? The idea of creating 100 pages can make you cry. But scare not! I said we are going to make "simple" pages, and I mean it! Because these doorways will not work in a highly competitive environment, there's no need to bother with keyword densities, neither there is a problem of keyword choice. Also, I advise you to forget about design. When a search engine spider comes to a page devoted to, well, "dogs", it looks for the word "dogs", not Javascript or Flash. The higher the keywords appear, the better. So: - Leave off all scripts, style sheets, even tables. - Put the product's title (and nothing more!) in the TITLE tag. - Create a short plain English description of the product (or use your standard one). Put the product's title right at the start of it and use it in the DESCRIPTION tag. Remember: the description is not very important for your ranking, but it is what the searchers will see in the results. Make them want to click on your link! - Skip the KEYWORDS tag. Because so many people stuff tons of irrelevant words there, the engines pay little attention to this tag now. - Start the page with a heading ("h1" is of course the best) and put the product's name there. - Use your standard product description as the body of the page. Make sure the product's name appears in the first sentence (e.g. Do not say "this monitor". Say "CTX VL700T"). - Provide a link to your home page, the category page or right to the product page in your database. Say something like "for more information, click here!" Do not use URL redirection the engines track and ban that. - All right, all right, include a picture of the product :). Link it to your site as well. That's it! If you are HTML-capable, it will take about 3 minutes of your time. Even if it brings one customer, I guess it will pay for itself! After you've built a page for all or most of your products, you might go further trying phrases like "CTX VL700T Monitor" and so on. Just don't spend too much time at it there are so many other great promotion methods! Now what are we supposed to have after some time? Your amazing home page and category pages that rank high (I hope) for generic phrases like "computer monitors", plus about a hundred of gateway pages to handle all those specific searches! Although each individual page will only bring a narrow stream of visitors, together they will make a river of highly valuable (remember?) traffic. The last thing I would like to add is: Be careful when submitting the pages. Most search engines only allow a limited number of pages from each domain per day. Everything above the limit will be ignored. The safest method is to submit one page a day. Also, think about how you can get the pages spidered instead of submitting them manually. In some engines, this will give them higher relevance. Good Luck! P.S. By the way, if you want some more search engine tips, just email me at engines@artofebiz.com and I will send you some great articles! ------------------------------------------------------------
DynamicSubmission2000
- Finalist: "Best Business Software of the Year" Dynamic Submission 2000 has been named a finalist to the Small Business Show’s Brother Business Software Award,the richest of its kind in the world with the winner going off with over a quarter of a million dollars worth of prizes. As a finalist, Dynamic Submission 2000 had the opportunity to showcase itself at the Business Software World Trade Show held in Darling Harbor, Sydney. A total of 30 finalists were selected throughout Australia and they were judged as having designed key software that will help small businesses in their day-to-day operations in the coming years. According to Chairman of the judging panel, Roy O'Malley, "When you evaluate a product it must be an all-round product, so ease of use becomes one issue, attention to detail to make sure that it does what it says it does, user functionality where a person can clearly attempt to do something and get it right first time round rather than have to try, try again to make it work." Competition was fierce, although Dynamic Submission 2000 did not win the first prize, we are very proud to announce that Dynamic Submission 2000 has been selected as a finalist to the category of Best Business Software of the Year for Outstanding Achievement in the Research, Development, and Presentation of Business Software. The opportunity to attend the tradeshow as exhibitors opened our doors to many opportunities and exposure to future business partners and clients. As a prize, we received $5000 worth of software including Microsoft 2000 Developer, Visio 2000 and Project 2000, ShowCuts Cash Register and Computer Associates Vet Net Surfer and Commonwealth Bank’s Quickline online banking software and Better Business Planner. First prize includes the opportunity to showcase in the world’s biggest computer tradeshow, CeBit, in Hanover, Germany new March, participation in Microsoft’s Tech Ed Seminars in the United States next year, $10 000 cash and much more. Click here for more information about Dynamic Submission 2000. A
newsletter publisher's main task: packaging value content This might sound quick and easy, but it is not. Publishing a quality newsletter is more than just cutting and pasting quality content into your newsletter. A quality newsletter is more than just the sum of its parts. The more the different sections in a newsletter support each other, the more benefits subscribers can get from it. A quality newsletter makes sense out of the Internet chaos. A good newsletter editor understands the Internet big picture and is able to pick out relevant information which is packaged into one newsletter issue in a way that makes sense for its readers. A poor quality newsletter is easily produced in less than 15 minutes of cutting and pasting quality content text. One issue of a good quality newsletter takes one day to produce - it might also select from the same content pool as the poor quality newsletter - but it takes more time in selecting the right combination of available free content for each issue. Extremely high quality content, randomly aggregated into a newsletter makes a poor quality newsletter. Somewhat lower quality content, expertly packaged and organized make a high quality newsletter. Your editorial note (that introduces each newsletter issue), shows how much understanding and effort you put into this critically important step. Publishing a quality newsletter is a creative process. It does not involve following three easy steps. Good editors will find this article packed with value, others will consider this article as utterly useless. Quality newsletters gets edited by the most senior, experienced people in an organization, not on a rotational basis by anyone with some free time on their hands. The following are some concepts that help a good newsletter editor in his or her task: Integration: combine the value content of several experts in their fields into one newsletter issue. Each of these experts can only contribute expertise on their topics. However, when these standalone expert contributions are combined into one newsletter issue, all their contributions grow in value because it is part of a larger solution. Your newsletter subscribers can possibly get all your newsletter content easily elsewhere, but come to you because of the way you package and present it to them. Position: by publishing a newsletter, you position yourself as the central point where they go to get quality Internet content, nicely packaged to address their exact needs. Team: your newsletter will be more valuable if its content is produced by a team of people. This team of people consists of: guest article authors, contributors of tips, subscribers that provide questions and software products authors that ask you to review their software. Benefits: your newsletter is only about providing benefits to its subscribers. The more value content you have the more benefits your subscribers get from you. Value content like: feature articles, guest articles, questions and answers, link to value resources, product reviews, your editorial comments, tips. To summarize: you, as newsletter editor and publisher, use your newsletter to combine the content of your team of contributors into a logically-arranged, benefit-rich newsletter for your subscribers. Your newsletter is benefit-rich when it is packed with useful, practical content that is directly relevant to the needs of your readers. A newsletter is not benefit-rich only if it contains detailed, step-by-step articles. A newsletter that helps its readers understand the bigger- picture meanings and implications of the Internet on a more philosophical level also has benefits. Such a newsletter should focus on educating its readership on how to apply their insight practically and on a daily basis to their business. A newsletter that focus exclusively on step-by-step articles makes its readers work harder. A newsletter that focus exclusively on philosophical, Internet bigger-picture visions make its readers think harder. In my opinion, a combination of these approaches is best. Such a combination will make your readers work hard - smarter. There are two main (opposite) approaches to packaging a quality content newsletter: Your write all the content yourself ... very time-consuming. You select and package content created by others ... the more practical and realistic approach. Most editors choose a middle road where they contribute some original content and get the remainder of their content from other contributors. If a good newsletter editor's main task is packaging value content, a good newsletter subscriber's task is to read, understand and ACT based on the insight the gain from this content. A good newsletter is your personalized to-do list for the week. -----------------------------------------------------------
The Most Important Engines Looksmart is currently charging for all submissions to their database. You must submit your web site to LookSmart manually from their web site at: http://submit.looksmart.com/info.jhtml?synd=US&chan=lshomeft - Media Metrix's ratings show Yahoo!'s audience reach is 69.1 percent. Audience reach is a measure of how many surfers visit a search engine during a month. - Yahoo!'s web properties were visited by more than half of the active Internet users in eight countries as measured by Nielsen//NetRatings in June, making it the leading global property. The company's first international report on web use showed Yahoo! drew 67.8 million visitors in June. - AltaVista gets 50 million searches per day. - StatMarket ratings show what percentage of all search engine-related traffic came from each of the search engines through the hundreds of thousands of sites using HitBox counters. The top three are Yahoo! with 53.4% of the traffic, AltaVista with 18%, and Excite with 6.7%. This totals 78.1% of all search engine traffic. - LookSmart has two million links. It powers the main results at MSN, AltaVista, Excite, and iWon. LookSmart's search service network reaches more than 52 million people a month, the equivalent of 74 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. - Excite offers a smart, practical way to further focus a search by giving users a lot more than just a search engine. It offers everything from news headlines and a fast-loading personalized start page to directory-style content organization and chat. This is a nearly irresistible engine for casual searchers and web newbies. ICANN approves seven new TOP domain names The addition new domains should help relieve pressure on the overcrowded .com, .net and .org spaces. The seven new top domains are: -- .biz - for businesses
How to subscribe and unsubscribe We need your feedback. We hope you find this information useful. If you have any interesting articles about tips, tricks, or comment on marketing promotion issues that you want to share with others, please simply send to: mailto:Editor@DynamicInternetMarketing.com?subject=Share Do you want to contribute an article in exchange for some free exposure? If so, send us your contribution, with your brief, promotional byline, to: Editor@DynamicInternetMarketing.com?subject=Contribution About DynamicInternetMarketing Newsletter Your FREE subscription to Dynamic Internet Marketing ezine is brought to you by eDynamicSoft, a division of Apex Pacific Pty Ltd, the creator of Dynamic Submission 2000 - award winning web promotion software that drive traffic to your web site. To download a FREE trial of eDynamicSoftware, please goto: http://www.eDynamicSoft.com/ Don't hesitate to forward a copy of this newsletter to friends and associates, but please ask for permission before reproducing the content in any form -- we would like to know who you are. Dynamic Internet Marketing Newsletter is powered by Dynamic Opt-In Emailer -- the choice of professional email marketing software that allows you to send "personalized" bulk email messages to your customers and subscribers. Let Dynamic Opt-In Emailer save you time and money by improving your marketing effectiveness. More details at http://www.eDynamicSoft.com/doe.html. Copyright (c) 1997-2000 eDynamicSoft, a division of Apex Pacific Pty Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole, or in part, without the express written consent of the publisher.
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