Many of us in the marketing services and/or agency business are starting to see some real tangible marketing patterns emerging that businesses need to be aware of if they want to leverage their marketing dollars in this “post .com implosion economy.”

Good Web Site Design increasingly More Important

It’s imperative for a company to have a quality web site today - but many firms are still throwing up web sites that are just poorly designed or overly complex. Poor navigation (menus and overall site structure) when coupled with low quality graphics is really problematical (!) - online visitors think less of your company as a result which will hurt revenue in the long run. Many think just doing a minimal job is sufficient but they aren’t factoring in how close your competition is! On the web any potential customer is only one click away from seeing a high quality web site that is well designed and conveys a quality image

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What Professional SEO Can Do
 by: Glenn Ford

The amazing thing is that professional SEO services are not expensive and yet they can make a huge difference to any web site or blog, in terms of the traffic and ultimately the revenue they receive..

Professional SEO services can only be provided by an individual or business with a thorough understanding of how search engines work and the implications of the frequent changes the said search engines usually make.

Professional SEO Helps To Grow Traffic

The first and most important thing that professional SEO should do is dramatically increase traffic by ensuring that the client web site is highly visible through a prominent page ranking. A prominent page ranking will mean that the web site will score highly again and again during searches which will in turn guarantee that a sizeable amount of the people carrying out searches using various key words, end up visiting the web site. This can translate to tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of visitors every month.

Professional SEO Will help Sustain A Web Site’s high Ranking

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What is RSS? To begin with, it’s one of those things everyone says is easy to understand. And it is, as soon as you have your own ‘ah-ha’ moment.

I think the easiest way to explain it is to walk you through an example of RSS in action. I’m not going to try to explain everything on the subject, but this should help get you started.

>> Let’s sign you up for the Excess Voice RSS Feed

If you want to read the Excess Voice newsletter every two weeks you can either read it in your email inbox, or read it in your web browser.

You already know how it works when you subscribe to a newsletter via email. You sign up, hope the spam filters don’t block some or all issues, and then read the newsletter in your email program, whatever that might be.

With RSS, instead of subscribing via email, you subscribe via a web page.

>> Let’s walk through the subscription process

If you have a Yahoo! account, go to My Yahoo! and click through to the Add Content page. On the right side of the ‘Find Content’ area you will see a link that reads, Add RSS by URL.

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Newsletter publishing has always made a lot of sense. It makes sense for firms to target their advertising dollars to clients and prospects that have expressed interest in their products and services.

However, for many, newsletter marketing has been more a source of frustration than sales. This is due to eight closely inter-related newsletter-marketing mistakes. By examining what hasn’t worked in the past, we can come up with a new concept of newsletter marketing that is already working better for others. Following are three of the eight biggest mistakes that newsletter marketers make.

1. Too much time between issues. The biggest problem of conventional newsletter marketing is the amount of time that goes by between issues. Consistency is the essence of success. Your goal is to maintain your firm’s constant visibility. You have to consistently publish, in order to be there when your market is ready to buy. Otherwise, "out of sight, out of mind."

Think of the oscilloscope on E.R., monitoring a patient’s heartbeat in Intensive Care. Every time the patient’s heart beats, the trace reaches a peak and the oscilloscope "beeps." But ? almost immediately ? the trace begins to disappear.

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Back in the ancient days of 1994 when Mark Andreesen and his band of hardy programmers were inventing a ground-breaking product/application/way of life called a browser, a dedicated group of entrepreneurs started publishing Netsurfer Digest a modern day “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” for the web. I subscribed to this wonderful newsletter and reference guide back in those heady days of yesteryear and have been a loyal subscriber and advocate since then. Sadly on this past Sunday I received notice that Netsurfer was moving to a paid subscription only model and would no longer be able to continue publishing their three primary newsletters by utilizing inserted ads as their sole source of revenue.

Netsurfer became the proverbial canary in the coalmine that succumbed to the hazardous winds blowing across the online advertising market. They simply couldn’t build a sustainable business model via ad inserts, even by delivering a million impressions a month to an upscale, well educated, target rich demographic group. This denouement has broad implications to many who are dependent on advertising supported business models. If this wonderful award winning publication with excellent graphics, topical information delivered in snappy “let’s get to the point” journalism can’t make it then it’s time to batten down the hatches - the rough ride is still underway for online advertising.

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We have all heard that adding quality content to your web site will give the search engines a good idea of how to index your web site, it’s a topic we covered in "Content, Content, Content" back in November 2004. But the secret to luring the search engines to your web site, and in part to improving your position within those listings is your inbound links.

So what are inbound links? Inbound links are simply the links from an external web site to your web site. You will also hear the phrase "link popularity" which is simply a search engines measure of the number and quality of links pointing to a single URL. We will cover "quality" later in this article but a site’s home page usually has the highest number of inbound links, or highest link popularity, because site owners tend to link to home pages rather than any other content page.

What makes a quality link?

Achieving good rankings using links used to be simple; today things have become more complex, with search engines using very complicated algorithms to measure the quality of the links that involves:

· Number of links to your site?

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Gettng Links To Your Site
 by: Terry Echols

In my experience this is the single most important factor to increasing your search engine rankings. Links count as a vote for your site, so the more you have the better your site will rank on all the search engines.

I have listed several methods below which will help you get links to your site and increase your search engine rankings. I have also listed the different types of links available for your site. Check out the links forum if you have any additional questions, I am happy to answer them for you.

But before I get to the linking methods you need to know a few very important linking basics.

Anchor text - Very Important!

Anchor text is the text used to link to your site. This is also the keyword/s or phrases you want to be found under in the search engines. If you have a site about Florida Real Estate and that is your target phrase in 60% of your link requests you would want the terms “Florida Real Estate” used when linking to your site.

Mix up your anchor text!

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The internet has grown explosively in the ten or so years that it has been in widespread use,and internet marketing has grown along with it. Many factors contribute to making the internet the ideal business medium.

Let’s examine a few.

Low Startup and Overhead Costs. Even as recently as five or six years ago, it could cost one hundred dollars or more to register a domain name, and a similar monthly fee to host a web site. These days, both of those costs are down to around $10 US. An HTML editor can be had for around $50 US, or one can subscribe to a service that provides hostingand an online web site editor for as little as $20 or $30 per month, and includes many other features and services in a “one-stop” package. Unlike a traditional “bricks and mortar” business, an online business requires no expensive leases, no employees, no commuting time or expense, little or no stocking of inventory, and little or no shipping expense.

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How To Get At Least 50 Visitors A Day Free!

Every eBusiness owner is constantly looking at ways to get free traffic to their site. After all, if you have no visitors you will never have any sales. So getting visitors to your website is the first major step to get underway in your marketing campaign.

Pay-per-click search engines are one of the most highly recommended ways to get immediate traffic to your site. However, there are times when eBusiness owners ? particularly newbies ? don’t have the cash needed to continuously run pay-per-click traffic campaigns.

I have discovered a little known traffic generating technique that could seriously result in more profits in your pocket with extremely little effort on your part. In fact, you’re not going to believe how easy this really is.

If you’re serious about your Internet business then you must be using a truckload of products and services on a regular basis. The $60,000.00 question is - Do you spend time giving testimonials for the many products and services you use in your day to day life? If not, then you could be missing out on an incredible stream of no cost traffic to your site on a regular basis.

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What’s the difference?

For those who aren’t quite clear what the term “natural” or “organic” search engine-listing means, they describe the “editorial” search results on any particular engine. These results are professed to be non-biased - meaning that the engine will not accept money to influence the rankings of any individual sites. This is quite different than the paid advertising (Pay Per Click) that appears in the “sponsored” or “featured” results, in which higher positions are awarded to the companies willing to pay the most per visitor or click.

Why is organic search important?

Although paying for Pay Per Click listings initially seems the obvious answer, organic search listings are still very important to both searchers and web site advertisers. Knowledgeable searchers, who understand the difference between paid and organic results are more likely to hold the natural results in a higher regard, much like a person reading a newspaper or magazine would be more positively influenced by an article about a particular product or service than by a paid advertisement from the company that sells it. In addition, organic results even the playing field. Companies or individuals with smaller marketing budgets can complete with larger organisations as the natural results are based on relevancy to the search term rather than the amount you are willing or able to pay for each click through to your web site.

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