The Long Tail is the phenomenon that the sum of less frequent searches is greater than the sum of the top searches. The tail are the niche products, individually unimportant, but collectively significant.

One example of this is the theory’s prediction that demand for products not available in traditional bricks and mortar stores is potentially as big as for those that are. But the same is true for video not available on broadcast TV on any given day, and songs not played on radio. In other words, the potential aggregate size of the many small markets in goods that don’t individually sell well enough for traditional retail and broadcast distribution may someday rival that of the existing large market in goods that do cross that economic bar.

Long Tails everywhere?

The Long Tail is one of those business books that, ironically, deserves more than a niche readership. Anderson encourage others to see Long Tails everywhere, so my vision of “Long Tail of Searches” and “Long Tail of Online Marketing” is illustrated in the bellow charts.

Listen to the podcast with Chris Anderson talking about the ideas in his new book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

The Long Tail of SEO and searches

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Word of Mouth is an organic way of spreading and invite to conversation, done with no financial effort. Word of Mouth Markting is not anymore a free tool but rather a new aproach which usually involves a large quantity of funds. Lois Kelly is the founder of Foghound, a strategic communications consulting firm specializing in branding, whose clients have included Sun Microsystems, FedEx, and others. Based on her previous experience I found interesting to read some of the real world cases, for example IBM vs CA approach to Workd of Mouth Marketing.

All the the relations between you and your customer must be seen as a conversation, not only blasting a message at them. This is the best message you as a service provider should learn from this book. I proud myself to follow Lois advice regarding the development of our applications, we use the ideas expressed in forum posts and per email (we receive around 100 emails per day only with suggestions and new directories suggestions).

But there is always place for improvement and some of the techniques described will be used in our next campaignes. The book is to be found on Amazon and is a catch for cutting-edge marketing innovation readers.

Listen to the podcast: How is conversational marketing different – and better – than word-of-mouth marketing?

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Beyond Buzz-The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

A lot of web masters opt to trade links with other web sites to gain these links. This can be quite effective, provided the sites they trade with are related in some way to their site, but it’s typically not as effective as submitting sites to directories. In this lesson, you’ll learn why incoming links are so useful, how to gain more incoming links using directory submission, what the benefits of directory submission are and much more.

Why Do I Need Incoming Links?

You already know about search engine spiders and how they go on the hunt for sites with particular keywords. But did you know that they also search for links? It’s definitely true. When a search engine spider browses through a site, they look for not just keywords, but also for links. If they find a link, they go the site which the link represents. They’ll then browse through that site and go to any links found there. Each time, a log is made and is sent back to the search engine. As you already know, the more a spider visits your site, the higher the ranking you get.

Incoming links are a very important thing to search engine optimization because they can lead to higher search engine rankings, thus increasing traffic to a site. If you have a lot of sites linking to you, you’ll have search engine spiders visiting more often than not having these links. Over time, this will lead to more site traffic than you could have ever imagined before.

How to Gain More Incoming Links Using Directory Submission

Most site owners prefer to manually gather links by doing a form of link exchange with other web masters. It’s a practice that is pretty old, and not as effective as it once was. That’s because many web masters abuse the practice. They go for incoming links from just about any site. This is a bad practice because search engine spiders have been programmed to ignore links on a site that are not relevant to the site. For instance, if a piano site links to a dog site, the link to the dog site will be skipped by the spider. That’s why it’s so important to get good quality links, if you choose to do link exchange.

Getting quality links can be a bit of a challenge, which is why it’s best to go with directory submission. Directory submission allows you to quickly and easily get good incoming links to your site. These links are followed by the spider and almost never ignored. All you need to do is simply submit your website to the directory and you’re done.

Website Submitter is the easiest web semi-automated directory submitter tool. You can quickly and safely promote your web site for traffic-driving results. You can submit to your website to 4500+ directories. Website Submitter does all of the work for you. All you have to do is click and wait for the visitors to arrive!

The Benefits of Directory Submission

Here’s a brief list of the benefits of directory submission:

• - Your Site is Listed Alongside Relevant Sites: As we’ve pointed out, spiders have been programmed to ignore irrelevant site links. Directories list sites in specific categories, so if a search engine spider comes across your site link in a directory and the site is in the right category, the spider will visit your site via this link.

• - It’s Fast: It can be frustrating and quite annoying to look for sites relevant to yours and ask them to link to your site. You also have to typically link to your site. There is a lot of time invested in emailing web masters and asking them to please put the link on their site. It’s time most web masters don’t have and it can take away from the overall quality of the site. Submission to a directory generally takes less than 10 minutes.

• - It’s Effective: Some of the best search engine optimized sites have the majority of their incoming links coming from a directory. Submission to a directory can and usually does greatly increase traffic and rankings.

Directories to submit sites to

There are a lot of directory sites out there, but not all of them are good enough to submit your site to. The best directories for web site submission are dmoz.org and yahoo directory. You can find more possible directories by running Website Submitter and order by Google PR ( watch a video demo on how you can submit in directories ). The 4500+ directories contained into Website Submitter will be enough for boosting your backlinks.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Lesson 5 – Gather more incoming links using directory submission 4

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What are Keywords?

Keywords are words which are very important in the eyes of search engine spiders. These are words which make search engine spiders pay attention to the content of a site. You can think of it this way: you’re reading an article about NBA basketball players. Every time you see the key phrase (which is a set of keywords strung together) “NBA basketball players”, it reminds you of what the article is about and makes you take notice. That’s the same effect seen on search engine spiders with keywords. When they spot a keyword or key phrase, it reminds them of what the purpose of the site is and catches their eyes. The more you catch the attention of a spider, the more the spider reports your site back to the search engine. The more “reports” the search engine gets, the higher your page is ranked. That’s pretty much how it all works.

Why Do I Need Keywords?

You should already know why you need keywords for your site: they allow your site to get ranked higher. Keywords are the very fundamental part of search engine optimization. Without them, there really is no search engine optimization going on in a site. If you wish to create a site that is search engine optimized, you must incorporate keywords.

How Do I Select Keywords?

Selecting keywords is not as complex as you might think. It’s actually very easy, provided you know the process for doing it. We’ll go over that right now.

The first step of the process is to determine what exactly your site is about. What is the purpose of your site? Who do you want to attract to the site? The answers to these questions will tell you what to do next.

When you’ve decided what your site is about, you can now determine what keywords to use. If you are running a site on digital cameras, you’ll want to choose keywords that are relevant to this niche. For instance, you might use key phrases such as “canon digital cameras”, “kodak digital camera”, “nikon digital cameras” etc. The point is to try to take your niche and create keywords based off of this. That way you’ll have legitimate keywords that are relevant and not “cheap”. You might want to check out Google and see what keywords are used the most and which aren’t used as much.

Next, you should create a list of 5-10 keywords based off your research. You should then pick a keyword for each page of content. This keyword or key phrase will be used throughout the content of a page. If you use different key phrases or keywords for different pages, this will make your site diversified and will prevent keyword stuffing, which is a bad SEO practice. It will also help your SEO rankings because you are using various keywords.

Writing the Content

When it comes time to write the content of your site and use the keywords you’ve selected, you have two options. The first is to hire someone to do it. The second is to write the content yourself. The former is a very easy way of getting the content for your site as you can go to any freelance site and hire a SEO writer. The latter is a more time invasive, yet often more effective way of getting the content. By writing the content yourself, you ensure that it lives up to your standards and uses the keywords enough.

If you choose to write the content yourself, you’ll want to make sure that you have a good keyword density for each page. As you learned in Lesson 1, keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the total number of words. So if you use the keyword 5 times in a 500 word piece of content, you have a keyword density of 1%, which is a pretty low density. You’ll want a keyword density of 3%-5%. To achieve this density, all you need to do is sprinkle in the keywords into the content in a natural manner. That’s it.

Lesson 3 Wrap Up:

In lesson 3, you’ve learned practically everything there is to know about keywords and can now apply this fundamental SEO principle to your site.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Lesson 3 – Keyword research for best positioning

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That’s OK, as it’s not something that many people have learned about. While it’s not as common knowledge as it should be, SEO isn’t a very difficult subject to learn thoroughly enough. In fact, learning the techniques of SEO can actually be very easy. We’ll teach you all about SEO in this lesson ( Just kidding, we will need more lessons for this job ).

What is SEO?

SEO is search engine optimization. What does this mean? Well, it essentially means you are creating a site that is search engine friendly. Search engines, as you probably know, are responsible for a lot of your web site’s traffic. The more search engine friendly a site is, the greater the chance people using a search engine will find the site. Basically, by making your site SEO, you are increasing your traffic. That’s why SEO is a very important part of current web master work.

Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Now that you know what SEO is, you’ll want to know how to apply it to your web site so that you, too, can reap the benefits. There are several SEO techniques to learn, and we’ll cover three very important ones that you can apply immediately to your site.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #1: Keywords and Key phrases

The most basic SEO technique is that of the use of keywords and key phrases. Keywords are basically words that a search engine spider ( basically a program which scans web sites and reports its findings back to the search engine database ) is trained to find. If these words are found, the site is more likely to catch the attention of the spider and get listed. Key phrases are just like keywords, except they are basically two or more words strung together. For instance, a common key phrase might be “cool web sites”. Using such a key phrase or key word enough can really help a site to become SEO friendly.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #2: Correct Titles

If you look at the top left of your web browser, you’ll notice a piece of text that states what site you are on and perhaps also gives a brief description of what the site is. This piece of text is known as the “Title” of a web page. The title is one of the first things a search engine spider will notice when visiting a site. Thus, it is important to make sure your web site has a meaningful title. The title should not include excessive amounts of keywords, and whatever keywords you do use should be relevant to the site at hand. Spiders have been trained to spot sites with excessive amounts of keywords and they will ignore such sites. So don’t ever overuse keywords. If you have a site dedicated to PRS electric guitars, an appropriate SEO title might be something like “PRS Electric Guitars.com – “ Your source for PRS guitars”.

Search Engine Optimization Technique #3: Keyword Density

There is such a thing as overusing keywords, and it can be worse than using no keywords at all in terms of getting ranked highly on a search engine. Keyword density is the number of keywords divided by the number of total words in a page. So if you have 500 total words and 10 keywords, you’d have 2% keyword density. An appropriate keyword density is anywhere between 2% and 7%.Anything more than this is considered keyword stuffing; anything less than this is considered too little to make an impact.

Lesson 1 in Review

In this first lesson on SEO, we’ve covered a lot of ground. You’ve learned the basic principals behind SEO and should now be able to apply those to your site.

Article published in Submit Suite Blog.

Lesson 1 – Introduction to SEO techniques

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