My question for readers is how do you promote?

Here are some of the different methods I use for my sites:

1. Blog postings
2. Blog Comments
3. Forum Comments
4. Forum Sigs
5. Pay Per Click (PPC)
6. Banner Ads
7. Text link ads (such as adbrite etc.)
8. SEO efforts
9. Press Releases

If you have any other ideas post them, or put links to your favorite ad networks.

Danny

302′s are the first I’ll talk about since they are “Temporary”. This is used if you are working on a page lets say your “about us page” and you don’t want people or search engines to go there, but want them to come back later. You can 302 a page to a temporary page, and later stop forwarding it. For everyday users this really doesn’t do much, but for Google etc. This tells them come back later an re-index the original page you attempted to get too. So it’s very useful if you are developing a site and have links to a page and Google finds you.

But the more important one is a 301 redirect. This is a permanent forwarding, and tells search engines. “You found something that is now over here forever —-> Don’t index me, index the new page, oh and also if the page you were looking for had page rank, the new page should have it now.” This is very useful if you are pushing a new website out that will replace an existing one. A 301 can be from one domain to another or from one page in a domain to another. So if you are creating a new search engine friendly url and want to make sure any previous page that was indexed is now recognized as the new page you would use this.

example: http://www.dannycoburn.com/signup.php might get forwarded to http://www.dannycoburn.com/viri so any thing that was indexed on signup.php is now pushed to the new /viri directory.

The most IMPORTANT use of 301′s that you can possibly use for search engines is to ensure that all pages are viewed the same by the search engines. Did you know that http://dannycoburn.com and http://www.dannycoburn.com are 2 different pages? They don’t look like it but for some reason search engines will treat them differently. So what do you do? You need to make sure you 301 all non-www pages to their comparable www page. Want to see an example? Click this http://dannycoburn.com. You’ll see it adds the www.

If you are on an apache server (if you are on a linux host you probably are), here’s the code you put into  your .htaccess folder

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Until next time.

But enough about the research, how do you start to rank?

1. Use key phrases multiple times in your content
2. Use internal site links to that page using your term
3. Get links for quality external sites to your page
4. Use basic HTML formats like H1′s and title tags to emphasize phrase

When you are writing your article/page/blog make sure you are aware of what you are looking to be ranked for and use it a few times in the body. Also make sure you use it in the title and header of the article. It’s important that Google knows that the content is the primary reason for sending some one to this page. One of the most important things to understand is that you should not over stuff the phrase onto the page. If you use it every other word, the search engine will throw it out knowing that it’s simply being put there for ranking. While there’s debate of the % the phrase should be used it can be anywhere from 3% – 7% of the content. I tend to lean towards the lower side to prevent spamming penalties.

When you are creating your webpage you can feel free to link to your own pages using key phrases to pass it along to other pages. So if you want to rank for “best noodles in vegas” create a link on your home page that points to that article with that term as the clickable text. Also repeat this on other authority web sites. One way to find them is simply go to Google and type the term in and see who comes up. Contact them and see if you can get a link exchange with them. Some will want to charge you, but be weary as Google’s getting smarter about purchased links!

I mentioned headers and titles but wanted to stress how important these are to Google. With everything on the web being pretty, it’s important to realize Google is a color blind dog, they don’t care what the biscuit looks like, they only care if it tastes good. A trick I was once taught was to remove the style sheet and see what the page looks like to Google and the other engines. If you use an H1 the text is the largest on the page and is therefore more important to the read (stands out). Same goes for Google. But only use 1 per page. If you feel you need more start using H2, H3 etc. The higher the number the more you can have on the page. The title which should be one of the first pieces of HTML will define part of how you show up on Google as will the meta description. Use these as they also add weight to your page for those terms.

Is this all you need to do for SEO? Of course not, but it’s a great start for a first timer and is a base understanding. Feel free to leave a comment, I’ll try to answer anything I get.

1. Introduction
2. Affiliate Marketing
3. Traffic Methods – PPC
4. Traffic Methods – Free
5. Search Engine Optimization
6. Social Networking

Introduction to Internet Marketing:

While I would not consider myself an expert in making money by selling products online (yet), I am an expert on the internet and marketing on it. In my professional career I work marketing on it every day. My goals are to obtain leads, increase sales, make sites more visible and purchase 3rd party advertising. I am responsible for a multi-million dollar budget, so it makes it hard to simply turn around and do marketing on my own as my habits need to be changed from work to personal. I have to be much more fickle with my own money while starting out. Now that you have a little on me…

Internet marketing is a large ocean of opportunity. It is estimated that 1.4 BILLION people use the internet and that’s only 21% of the world population, and it continues to grow daily. So that is a potential customer base larger than any single market. If you have a product that is of interest to .1% that is still 1.4 MILLION customers that are interested in what you are selling.

Internet marketing is about using different methods to help people find something they want, and hopefully that is something you have to sell. There are many different methods that I will talk about in the next few posts, but suffice it to say it will not be exhaustive. If you want to get started today check out traffic tactics world, it has a lot of information to offer if your just starting out.

Up Next: Affiliate Marketing