At WebMasterWorld.com World of Search #7 in Las Vegas Greg Jarboe, President and co-founder of SEO-PR revealed a blockbuster secret back door to top search engine ranking when he presented to a comparatively small share of attendees at WebMasterWorld.com World of Search #7 conference. Jarboe presented a case study of client WineZap.com showing their press release which was distributed online in July of 2004. Jarboe provides optimization and distribution of press releases for online companies seeking publicity and search engine positioning for websites.

Jarboe projected side by side views of a before and after optimization press release for WineZap.com, an online resource to research and price wines. WineZap was seeking publicity for the launch of their new website and wine search engine. The changes to the press release were relatively minor, but made major differences in the most critical spot - the headline, and use of wine related search phrases in their release. They also incorporated a call to action and discount coupon for those who clicked through from the press release to a special landing page with newsletter sign-up to qualify for substantial discount on wine purchases through the WineZap web site.

Jarboe recommends a “sweet spot of 400 to 500 words” as the ideal press release length and though he wavered on the right keyword density and recommended experimentation to find the perfect density for rankings, he showed a list of wine related terms included in the WineZap press release from “wine prices” to “wine variety” of about a dozen keyword combinations. Critical terms were included only once each, but were each included in the short 400 word release. Important keyword phrases were hyperlinked within the text and the release posted to the PRweb.com site press release archive.

Jarboe showed ranking results from within both Yahoo News and Google News searches where the release turned up in top 5 rankings, with similar results in standard web searches within a few days. This ranking is unheard of in a highly competitive wine and wine magazines online for search phrases dominated by long-time online players and were achieved within a week for WineZap, a newly launched wine website. This client had paid for tracking of results over time and Jarboe showed slides showing over 90,000 views of the press release on the PRweb site with 1400 views by journalists! This for a site launch in a competitive sector got them press notice and reviews.

Jarboe provided insight into standard search algorithms and news search algorithms, which vary dramatically and some are nearly opposite of standard rankings. News searches rank based on how many news sites are writing about the topic of your press release, how recent or “fresh” stories are, the length of the story when covered by the press and the frequency of the search term. One element of news search algorithms that’s vastly different from standard algorithms is that the number of sites linking to the release is hugely discounted because news is expected to be new, and as such, won’t have time to gather links.

As a matter of fact, the news release gets picked up and used on dozens of sites with live hyperlinks to the website issuing that release, since the item is considered time sensitive is linked very quickly. This has the effect of gaining widespread permanent links to the client site because it is reproduced by topical sites, sometimes archived, which gives the site issuing the press release both very early visibility in news sites and news searches, and in standard search engines because they’ve been linked to through that release on relevant and topical sites, therefore gaining long term rankings and visibility.

For a cost of between $400 and $2000, depending on press release length and additional services ordered, (archiving, tracking and optimization) a site can gain immediate and long term rankings for critical search phrases if they distribute newsworthy, topical and well-timed press releases. Smart SEO’s should seriously consider adding press release writing, optimization and distribution online as a value added service. Jarboe offers a partnership with PRweb and distribution channels eMediaWire.com, plus a network of promotion partners.

Jarboe presented additional items of interest about news search, including statistics showing that 98% of journalists go online daily, that 92% go online for research purposes, and the most stunning statistic claims that 73% of those journalists go online to search for press releases! News releases are typically indexed within three days. Online news search queries are for vastly different topics than standard web searches and are performed using much more targeted and intelligent phrases than standard web searches.

Probably two-thirds of WebmasterWorld of Search attendees were down the hall at the Las Vegas Convention centre at a session called “Link Building and Referral Tracking” hearing about tired SEO link building techniques which are rapidly declining in effectiveness while a sprinkling of really smart attendees were listening to Greg Jarboe talk about the most underused new blockbuster technique for link building - online press releases.

Of course, link building should not be the purpose of press release distribution online and is secondary to gaining Media attention for your online business or event. But when releases are distributed to journalists online and used in major media, it can lead to television and radio appearances as well as site reviews by journalists covering online business.

Jarboe pointed out that “Public Relations” is 100 years old this month and told the story of the first press release, which was sent to newspapers by snail mail for damage control on the first train wreck by offering to transport reporters fr�e of charge to the scene of the accident (by rail) to witness the scene themselves and give first hand accounts of the accident so that rumours and embellishments didn’t destroy the railroad industry.

Vastly different from today, where we email press releases to thousands of journalists as fast as we can write them and click the “submit” button through online press release distribution services such as Jarboe’s SEO-PR.com. Press releases online are currently used by large corporations routinely through their in-house PR departments, but small business webmasters and online businesses should learn the value of news search rankings and media attention gained through online press release distribution and optimization.

Press releases are the new back door to high search engine rankings for popular and competitive search terms and SEO’s need to learn to integrate press release strategy into their search ranking services as a value added service.

By Mike Banks Valentine
Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101.com and performs ethical search engine optimization and press release optimization & distribution online. If you’ve got news you can rank at the top for your search phrases.

Many marketers know that search engine marketing is among one of the best methods to get visitors to their websites. It’s a profitable way to reach new subscribers and new customers.

But getting search engine traffic is only one of the first steps to the doorway of incoming success. While getting top search engine rankings will open the floodgates of targeted traffic, all this traffic is useless if your website visitors don’t take any action be it a subscription to your newsletter, a purchase of your products or your affiliate products or any other action.

To capitalize on your search engine traffic, you need to be able to convert those visits into at least one action. Of course, not all your visitors will do anything on your website apart reading any valuable content you might have or download any free stuff. This is also a good way to get repeat visitors which can lead to an action in the future.

Now is the time to concentrate on your website conversion strategies which will be very crucial for success. In fact this is the second most important aspect of Internet marketing after getting the initial traffic.

The formula is as follows:

=> Targeted Traffic: Good Conversion: Sales/Leads/Subscribers

Here are 2 powerful ways to capitalize on your search engine traffic:

(1) Your Website Design Layout
Website design which does not seem that important is extremely crucial to get success on the Internet.

Consider this, you visit a site which is very unprofessional with flashing graphics, poor navigation, slow loading time, getting you confused and gives you a feeling of mistrust. Your only action would be to click on the “Close” button at the top of your browser. Now this site has already lost a potential customer or subscriber.

Or you visit a professional site this time, but you don’t really know what to do on the site. The reason is that the person who has designed the site has not taken into consideration the visitors like what he or she wants them to do once they arrive on their homepage or any other pages. Each page on your site must have an objective.

So one of the things that you need to do is to ensure that your site is as professional as can be i.e. has a friendly navigation menu, fast loading and avoid unnecessary graphics where possible.

The other thing is you need to know beforehand what you want your visitors to do once they arrive on your professional site. When the traffic comes, the best strategy now is to tweak your conversion and make testing often to see what works better for you.

If you run a newsletter, you can place a subscription box on the upper left or upper right corner of your site or if you have some products to sell, you can display one or two on another space. So when your visitors come to your site, either they subscribe or buy one of your products. When any one of these actions is taken, your site is doing its job.

(2) Your Sales Page or Pre-sell Page
If you have affiliate products that you’re promoting, the best thing is to pre-sell those visitors, hence you have more chances in making sales. It’s like a personal endorsement.

If you have your own products, make use of the following:

(a) A powerful headline which catches attention and entices the visitors to read more, meaning more chances in making sales. Use quotes in your headline. They have been proven to make it more effective. A headline like “Discover 3 Hidden Steps That You can Quickly & Easily Use to Start a Profitable Internet Business in Less Than 48 Hours” is an example of a catchy headline which can make the visitor stop dead in their tracks.

(b) Bullets to emphasize benefits of your product not features. Benefits sell. People want to know how your product can benefit them.

(c) Real testimonials from other satisfied customers. Sometimes you can get unsolicited testimonials which are good but when you don’t, a good way to get testimonials is to offer your product for FREE to experts so that they can review it and send you their feedback.

(d) A professional banner which reflects your product and any benefit that your product conveys.

(e) The use of other colors apart black. The color red catches attention, green makes you think of money, blue soothes the mind.

(f) Use sub headlines to break your mini-site sales copy into chunks of information to make it well organized and more readable.

(g) Use power words to make your sales copy more effective. Words like discover, exclusive, proven, secrets, guaranteed, limited-time, results-fast, quickly, easily etc…are simple little words that can have a dramatic influence on your sales.

(h) Give bonuses or discounts for a limited-time. Put the price of the bonuses and offer genuine discounts.

(i) Use a Post Scriptum (P.S) - This is used at the end of your sales letter to re-state the product benefits and what will happen if these people don’t order today or how your product will make their lives better.

(j) Be brave and put your own picture on your site. This seems to be rather banal but putting your photo on your site makes you more credible. Remember trust is important when doing business on the Internet. People like to know they are dealing with a real person instead of a machine.

(k) Use a clear call-to-action eg “Click here now”, “Click here now to take advantage of this limited-time offer” or “Click here now to get your discounted copy”. This is very important. Don’t expect your visitors to take action by themselves. If you have done everything right and forget about including a strong call-to-action, don’t be surprised if you see your conversion drop.

The AIDA principle
(1) Attention (2) Interest (3) Desire (4) Action
Should be implemented in any sales copy.

(l) State that all purchases are done securely on your site, hence inspiring trust. Include a picture of credit cards.

(m) Offer a guarantee and use a guarantee icon.

(n) Allow people to contact you by providing your personal details.

Working on your website conversion is fundamental to the success of your Internet business. Traffic without any type of action is worthless and when your conversion improves, you’ll probably get more results with the same number of traffic numbers simply because you know how to convert better. So now, you have no excuse not to get more positive results with your search engine traffic.

By Jean Lam

A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don’t realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.

Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimization and usability compatible? Aren’t there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I’m sure you can guess the answer!)

1. Keyword research carried out
Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com), you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases.

Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site’s usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you’ll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.

For example, you might decide to target the phrase, “sell toys”, as your website does in fact sell toys. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for, “buy toys” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “sell”, when you want to buy something?). By placing the phrase, “buy toys” on to the pages on your website, you’ll be using the same words as your site visitors and they’ll be able to find what they’re looking for more easily.

2. 200 word minimum per page
Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.

In terms of usability, it’s also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information. Don’t be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don’t mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid scanning (such as employing sub-headings - see point 6 below) it shouldn’t be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they’re after.

3. 100kb maximum HMTL size
If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it’s simply too big for them.

A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc0504.pdf). Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you’re looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!

4. CSS used for layout
The website of Juicy Studios (http://www.juicystudio.com) saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search engines prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:

• The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
• Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
• There is a greater density of content compared to coding

Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.

5. Meaningful page title
If you know anything about search engine optimization you’ll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.

A meaningful page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.

6. Headings and sub-headings used
Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarise the content immediately below them.

Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don’t read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we’re after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.

Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.

7. Opening paragraph describes page content
We’ve already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so, on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it’s the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.

As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we’re after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the page content, should help us out.

8. Descriptive link text
Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can’t gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.

One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush’s bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush’s bio appears top of the search rankings!

As web users, we don’t generally read web pages word-for-word - we scan them looking for the information that we’re after. When you scan through text you can’t take any meaning from the word ‘click here’. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.

9. Frames avoided
Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren’t as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can’t follow links between frames.

Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they’ll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!

Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and book-marking. Put simply, say no to frames!

10. Quality content provided
This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimised website, but it’s actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.

By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.

Conclusion
Optimizing your website for both search engines and people needn’t be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently.

By Trenton Moss