Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that examines the 7 factors of incoming links that Google considers when choosing a spot for your website in it's SERP's.

Why incoming links? First because these are what Google places the highest value on. But, all incoming links are NOT created equal. This 7 part course looks at the kinds of links Google values when "rating" your website in the SERP's. Each type of link discussed is important to your overall link strategy and consequently your free traffic levels.

The first factor is of course the anchor text used in your incoming links. The importance of the keywords used to link to your website are more important to Google than the content that is actually on your page. You can generally use anchor link text with your keywords and not even have the keywords on the page and still get a good ranking in Google for that term if enough incoming links have that keyword pharse in them.

If you've heard of the phrase "Google Bombing" then you know what I'm talking about. Basically it's when a set of webmasters or blog owners decide to get a page ranked for a certain term and all leave links back to the selected site with the keyword phrase that they want that page to rank for.

The most notorious example of this is the "bombing" done by several blog owners to the George W Bush biograpby page. Several bloggers left links to the page containing the keyword text "miserable failure" and consequently this page turns up as the number 1 result in Google for the term, even though the words don't appear anywhere on the page.

The "Google Bombing" was done by at most a few hundred links with this link text pointing to the page. Though more links would probably be necissary for a more competative term. Still, it goes to show how important link text is to the rankings of a page.

Google Bombing is nothing new. But what many people don't realize is that Google places more relevance on the anchor link text that it finds when it first discovers a link to your website. Each consequent link either adds value to that first impression or subtracts from it.

Many times you can control which link google finds first just by knowing where google goes regularly (like on a daily basis) and effectively placing your link in it's path. This is called "baiting" the google bot to visit your website through this link.

Each link you place after this initial link should further show google that their first impression (or the first keywords it discovered that linked to your website) was and still is correct. Each subsiquent link is a "vote" so to speak to validate Google's original impression of what your website is about.

Placing that first link to be found by Google is only the first step, but a very important one. Choose your anchor text keywords carefully. Each incoming link you place after this one should serve to validate this first impression. Part 2 will discuss the appearance and disappearance of links over time and how they effect your traffic and search engine placement.

Leah J. Bradshaw is the author of the <a target="_new" href="http://www.thefreetrafficreport.com">Free Traffic Report</a>; "Jumpstart Your Traffic in as Little as 10 Days". She also authors a <a target="_new" href="http://www.wahm-blog.blogspot.com/">Free Traffic Blog for wahm's</a> to help work at home moms get free traffic.

Search Engine Marketing Hype Killing Small Businesses

Think about the first thing you ever heard about &quot;marketing a website&quot; on the web. 99% of the time the first words anyone ever hears are &quot;search engine marketing.&quot; Or some semblance of the phrase.

And from that point on, the hammering of misinformation never lets up. You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines. You are led to believe that only people who can guide you through the mine field of search engine optimization are the SEO &quot;experts.&quot;

Also you are told time and again that the only way to market online PERIOD is through the search engines. You are conditioned over time to focus most, if not all, of your efforts on tricking the search engines into liking your site above all your competitors for search terms where &quot;there can be only one.&quot;

Well, here's a wake up call: The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines.

Just look at the deluge of information there is out there on Google and how to rank well with them. People are picking apart their ranking patent application right now to try an glean a website promotion strategy based upon what Google reveals in their application about their ranking system.

Is this information valuable to a small business wanting to sell its wares to a whole market rather than just the part of that market which uses one of the big search engines?

It is in extreme moderation, yes. In a well balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to bring in targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can, and you move on to all the other ways there are to promote your business.

Yet, so many people are falling victim to the gleam and glitter of search engine riches being pushed on them by SEO firms and people selling search engine how-to manuals.

It is not long before a new business finds itself wrapped up in a game where the only winners are the geeks and deep pockets.

If you do not fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs.

&quot;But I hired a 'big dog' SEO firm to make my business stand out and compete with the geeks in my market niche.&quot;

More power to you. In actuality, unfortunately, you probably just hired a teenager from India with an internet connection in his parents' house. Most small business start ups cannot come close to affording a major SEO firm. They charge corporate-level premiums to be able to access their services.

Everyone else in the SEO world is practically working out of their garage in comparison.

Scared yet? You don't have to be as long as you are spreading your marketing around to the non-search engine traffic you should be getting.

Writing articles and syndicating them in your market is a direct traffic strategy that has nothing to do with search engines. Except that search engines find your site through those links as well. But you should be doing it solely for DIRECT TRAFFIC from readers on other sites and taking the search engine traffic boost as mere icing on the cake.

You see, as people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites.

You could have done everything completely on the up and up and gotten dropped in the engines because they made a new rule that everyone who registers their domains only for one year is a possible spammer. There goes your legit site. Hope you weren't planning on search engine traffic for your SOLE source of traffic.

Can you see how dangerous it is to get bitten by the search engine bug? YES you can propel your business overnight from a profitless dead zone to a glamorous profit machine with one top ranking.

Of course that is possible. It is not likely.

People who are turning their small online businesses into success stories are doing one thing across the board: Conducting a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes search engines along with a good mix of other non-search engine marketing such as reciprocal and non-reciprocal linking tactics too numerous to mention here.

If you want long-term success online, you must be willing to look past all the sleeze merchants selling you dreams of riches through search engine marketing.

Search engines care about one thing: Their own hides. You should care more about your hide than anything else and use a well-planned, disciplined marketing strategy that puts search engines in their place. Not in the epicenter of your marketing campaign, but just another tool in your toolbox for bringing in targeted traffic.

Do this, and you will escape the fate of thousands of startups this year who will realize too late that they hung their hopes on the wrong marketing strategy as their engine for profits.

Copyright 2005 Jack Humphrey

Jack Humphrey explains his proven marketing strategies in the all new Power Linking 2005 at <a target="_new" href="http://power-linking-profits.com">http://power-linking-profits.com</a> Jack is proudly NOT a &quot;search engine expert.&quot;

Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

There are methods to increase your search engine rankings which may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue.

I did once upon a time until I realised its not so bad after all! I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking as you can manage for your website is essential to get any free visitors rather than burn your wallet on pay per click such as adwords for example.

At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site.The higher the pages come up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website.

That's what search engine optimization is about.

You can lose in all the technical information to figure out how to optimize your web pages. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, and quite likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.

Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.

Next, click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you click through. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself.

Avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.

Website content has much relevance. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than amazing graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your information etc such as your site.

Aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. For ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However,the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.

To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.

Next I need to mention something called meta tags. I never paid much attention here previously as I did not really know what they are about in web page design.It is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect.

Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.The rules always seem to change anyway! To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source."

If there are meta tags, they appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.

Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.

If you type in "free link popularity check" in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. If there aren't many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign.

Contact quality sites and request that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.

Only if its a relevant link will the traffic be of value.Oh.. by the way don't get upset if you get no response from a request to exchange links, its nothing personal and if you have low ranking, you need to improve it before someone might consider a link swap.

Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. I have to admit to ignoring it for a long while mainly because it seemed like long and tedious work! There was a time maybe only a few years ago when you could show up in a search engine like google quite quickly like a month.

Well that day is over for many sites due in part to sheer volume of pages on the web from the very good to the very awful. Its easy to find or look for the latest SEO secrets some of which are recycled rubbish so why not, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself.

This is a critical all-important factor in Internet marketing. Ok, we can't all have the number one spot but occupying the millionth listing is not so clever either.Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality visitors will be directed your way.

Sure there are probably a few good people or companies on SEO but you can start off with the tips above and apply them if you have not done so before now.

Christopher Ruane

New to ecommerce and looking for a resource to help grow your online enterprise? For solid advice for digital money tips go to: <a target="_new" href="http://www.Digitalmoneymakers.com">http://www.Digitalmoneymakers.com</a>

8 Essential SEO techniques

1) Title Tag - The title tag is the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it's own title tag.

2) ALT Tags - ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn't show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what it's about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don't over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!

3) Link Popularity - Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don't even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).

4) Keyword Density - This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don't over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.

5) Page Size - Your web page's speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.

6) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that's related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.

7) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today's leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.

8) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

Matt Colyer is the owner of the <a target="_new" href="http://www.superiorwebmaster.com/">Superior Webmaster</a>. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.

What is Your Sales Message?

So you built a website, you have a product, but it's not selling. What's your sales message? Does your site scream out to potential customers "BUY ME!!" or does it simply say "Hi, we're here, we have a product, if you want one...well you could buy it here...or go...YUCK!

Let's look at a simple way of changing that perspective of using a call to action.

Dr. Jerry Teplitz in one of his lessons at a place I will call IBI. You can look at it as the Free Enterprise Forum through IBI Global, located at <a target="_new" href="http://www.ibiglobal.com/">IBI GLOBAL</a> described people's reading habits when reading a webpage as that of looking at a large capital letter "Z".

Within that letter "Z" are about 5-6 action points or calls to action. At least there should be. Upper left...Subscribe to our newsletter...upper right...BUY our PRODUCT...middle of the page...did you know this?...lower left...join our mailing list...lower right...BUY MORE PRODUCTS.

Question is, does your web page do this? If not, it should. Why? What if I told you that by doing this one simple thing, that you could increase your revenue from your website by as much as 30%! Would you do it then? If you were making $0.00 and you could increase that by 30% I think you might. Or if you were making $1,000.00 per month and you could increase that to $1,300.00 per month..or more. It keeps going up. Best part is 30% is not the limit of the increase. It goes up exponentially.

Granted this will not do it alone. You still need traffic coming that is searching for your product, or your service, and you need an attractive price point to deliver them to your shopping cart. However, this will increase their stay time on your website, and the longer people are there, the more apt they are to buy. This is a proven fact.

Language is key to everything in sales. Positioning of the product, size of images, attractiveness of the image/box, the way you ask someone to buy. The way that you "close" the sale.

Don't be afraid to ask for the business. Ask for it directly. Offer incentives to customers. Offer a money-back guarantee. All of these things instill confidence in your being the best alternative and make sure that you communicate that they'd be foolish to do business with anyone else but you.

You can be direct in that language "You'd be foolish to buy a product similar to this one". Or you could say "If I were you, I'd think twice about purchasing a "similar" product. You figure out what works for your buying public, but make the message clear. You want the business, you're willing to do just about anything to get the business, but you're the best deal going.

Once you have done that, your sales will increase. Make the message clear, position the product calls to action on your webpages in obvious places and then hire a firm like DocMurdock.com to optimize your website and expose it to your target market with traffic looking to purchase your product or service. Nothing like having a website for auto parts and the visitors who show up are looking for candy and don't buy anything. I can help you change that. So don't waste your time and your money. Come to someone who will work with you, examine your expectations, ensure they're realistic for your website, and help you with consulting for offline as well as online marketing.

After all, just because you built the building, filled it with goods and hung out the sign that says "OPEN FOR BUSINESS" doesn't mean people will flock in and buy. You still have to market to them, and give them a reason to purchase from nobody else but you.

See you on the web.

Michael Murdock, CEO
<a target="_new" href="http://www.DocMurdock.com">DocMurdock.com</a>

Michael Murdock former Macintosh Systems Engineer for PIXAR, and Systems Engineer at SUN Microsystems brings his expertise of the web to SEO. He's been doing this for more than 8 years and helped many companies gain prominence on the Internet Search Engines. He can be found at <a target="_new" href="http://www.docmurdock.com">http://www.docmurdock.com</a>

Search Engine Ranking... Oh, the Mystery!

Rankings, Rankings, Rankings!

How do you get your website ranked well by the search engines? Well, it isn't as hard as you think, but it may not be as simple either. It takes patience and an ongoing commitment to making search-engine ranking a long-term investment in your website. You will need to give it time and energy ? it isn't a quick fix.

One caveat before I dive into this: If you are a company that is working on attracting local customers, there are many other incredibly effective offline marketing tools to DRIVE people to your website. So, what if you really want to work on search-engine ranking for your site?

Keep these points in mind:

1. Search engines often change their ranking formula.

2. Each search engine has its own algorithm (formula) to determine site ranking.

3. META tag keywords are not a magic bullet to improve your ranking.

4. Search engines can take many months to index new information, so patience?patience.

5. Be cautious with graphics-rich websites if search-engine ranking is important.

How Do Search Engines Work?

Let's start at the beginning. When you type a query into a search engine, what happens? Some people think that each time a search is entered into a search engine like Google, that the program hunts through the entire Internet to produce the answer. This is NOT what occurs.

Let's say I type in the words &quot;dog obedience&quot; into Yahoo. Yahoo then takes these keywords and searches through its own unique database of indexed websites to find matches. To add to and update their databases, search engines have programs called &quot;spiders&quot; that crawl through pages on the Internet looking for pages and sites to index. However, they do NOT locate sites on their own. They find sites if someone has purposely entered a website into a search engine's &quot;Add URL&quot; form. They are also able to find a website if another site in its database has links to it.

When a search engine finds a site, it considers the text on the website to be the number one thing to extract. It places data its database categorized by information it perceives as being important. So, if you have a company that has free articles teaching people how to train their dogs, but you don't have the word &quot;obedience&quot; listed anywhere, your site may not be listed in the above sample search.

So then, after all of this ? how do you get a high-ranking search engine?

Your Keys to Search Engine Ranking

You must think of search engine optimization as a long-term investment in your website. It is an ongoing marketing effort that takes persistence. As you begin to implement optimization techniques, remember it can take several months before you see the results, so be patient. Here are some tips to help you improve your website rankings in the future.

1. Plan Your Content: Before you develop your site, make a list of all the possible search words and phrases you think a potential customer would use to locate your website. A research tool such as WordTracker can help you in this process. Write compelling, professional marketing content for your site that is rich with these search words and phrases, especially on your home page. Make pages about 250 words. Tip: Hire a professional web copywriter to write your site content.

2. Meta Keyword Tags Are Overrated: Contrary to what many people believe, your META keyword tags in your HTML code have very little bearing on the words a search engine uses to reference your site. What does this mean for your site? Make sure your web pages have easy-to-understand paragraphs that describe your site and contain many of your important search words. These search words should match your META keyword tags, otherwise, the spiders tend to disregard the keyword tags.

3. Title Tags Are Vital: Most search engines give a lot of weight to your title tags. These are also the phrases that appear at the top of each web page. So, take the time to create juicy and precise title tags. Use words and phrases that people would be likely to use in their search for your business. Reflect what is actually on the specific web page.

4. Meta Description Tags: This is the area where you write HTML content to describe each of your web pages. Although it is not a major factor in search engine ranking, it IS what is displayed in the search results. People searching will use this description to make a decision to visit your site or not. Use this area for marketing purposes to entice people to click on your link.

5. Design a Site That Search Engines Like: Websites that have graphic Splash pages or are designed in Flash are not as friendly to SE indexing. For the most part, search engines do not index graphics. They read text (but not graphic text). Use small amounts of Flash animation and graphics in appropriate places, along with great HTML content. Along with these graphics, use text for your image ALT tags. If you have a graphic-based navigation system, make sure you have a site map that the spider can use to find all of your site page links.

6. Create a Compelling Site: If you haven't created a website with gripping content that speaks to your visitors in plain, easy-to-understand language, you won't get good long-term search-engine visibility. Nor, will visitors ever want to come back. Make your site so good that people will want to link to it. They will want to provide their viewers with your copious amounts of useful information. You can also go to sites that offer complimentary services or products and e-mail their webmaster to ask them to add a link to your site. This will enhance your link popularity, something search engines tend to consider important.

7. Submit your URL to the Directories: Read each search engine's FAQs and follow it exactly. Mistakes in the submission process can make things extremely difficult to change down the road. Keep your website description short and sweet. Be sure to include keywords, but don't use a lot of sales jargon.

8. Balance Your Online Marketing Approach: You will get the best results if you create a website that is content rich, popular with viewers, has a credible reputation, and is programmed using a smart approach to Meta tags.

Search engine spiders can be extremely slow to index new information, so be patient! It may take months to see your changes affect your search engine ranking. Remember, a website is a dynamic marketing tool that you are building over time. Treat it well, give it a little love and attention, and your long-term rewards will be well worth your efforts!

Wendy Maynard, your friendly marketing maven, is the owner of Kinesis. Kinesis specializes in marketing, graphic and website design, and business writing. Visit <a target="_new" href="http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html">http://www.kinesisinc.com/resources/articles.html</a> for more articles and free marketing wisdom.

You can visit Wendy's marketing blog, Kinetic Ideas at: <a target="_new" href="http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com">http://www.wendy.kinesisinc.com</a>

Want to harness the power of kinetic marketing? Sign up for Kinesis Quickies, a free bi-monthly marketing e-newsletter: <a target="_new" href="http://www.news.kinesisinc.com">http://www.news.kinesisinc.com</a>

How To Choose Keywords Before they Skyrocket in Popularity

Long before the days of researching phrases with the helpful online resources of today, the art of keyword/phrase selection was often left just to guesswork. However, guesswork by today's highly competitive standards is just not good enough. So how is it possible to select a powerful traffic-pulling phrase in this fashion without researching it in real time? Better yet, is it possible to choose such a phrase and get positioned before it becomes popular?

Well of course it requires some research, but in a slightly different way. Every single day, we have a world of information that happens all around us. With all of the focus on the Internet these days, we need to also consider giving our attention to other medias as well. We have television programs, we have the news and the radio which all bring us current and upcoming events. With the news itself, there are often many ideas that can help the SEO to really think and plan ahead for some truly unique optimization strategies. I am talking about the potential of developing part of your client strategy around an upcoming newsworthy event. Of course it needs to be relevant and useful to the target audience. It also needs to genuinely "relate".

If at first, it does not sound that exciting, let's think about it and give you an example.

Here is a simple example.

If I were promoting a video store online right now, one of the things that I might be doing would, would be to optimize a page for the single search phrase "Johnny Eck." Perhaps an information or a tribute page would work.

But wait....Who was Johnny Eck, you ask?

A way back in 1932, there was a movie by Todd Browning called "Freaks" starring a man named Johnny Eck. The film "Freaks" was about the fictionalized lives of physically and mentally challenged people who, in them days, were exploited in what were commonly called "freak shows". Johnny Eck just so happen to be born into this world without the lower half of his body and was just one of the "main actors" exploited in this rather unusual film which marked the end of Todd Browning's career as a Director.

Although you may have never heard of Johnny Eck, in over 60 years you can count on the fact that everyone will soon know who he is. The film "Freaks" (1932) already has a tremendous cult film following around the world.

So why optimize a page for a film which is over 70 years old?

What many people may not be aware of, is that a brand new movie based on the lives of Johnny Eckhardt is currently being produced. The new movie has a big budget, good script, and you can be certain that many, many people are going to plan to see this film on it's release. There's no way to predict for certain, but it'll probably be quite a blockbuster.

Simple Strategy: Optimize well and relate to the audience

As part of the strategy, you could prepare this optimized page offering to sell the old movie, which is now available on video. On the same page, I would talk about the film. I would write about my remembrances of seeing it for the very first time. As strange as the film is, it makes quite a statement about the how so called "normal looking" people can be very cruel.

You could talk about the film, review it. Talk about how it made you feel. Really try to relate to the audience. In creating the content, you would write for voice, just like you were talking to an old friend. At the same time, offer some trivia or anecdotes about how the film was made. I would prepare the page and get it ranked firstly for the phrase "Johnny Eck" and perhaps secondly around the name of the old film.

The Traffic Payoff:

Usually when a new "big name" movie is released, there is always a tremendous flurry of activity on the Internet by movie goers who enjoy looking up information about it. When they start searching for info on the new film and your pages come up in the top ten, they'll also be reminded about the old film and quite possibly want to purchase it. In this type of promotion, don't take the page down after the movie comes out because you may get double waves of heavy traffic. Actually, if you're lucky the whole routine is going to happen all over again when it's released on video usually six to eight months later. Might there be a third wave when it finally makes it to DVD?

Fine Tune Your Thinking:

Think along these lines, now ask yourself if there may be value to optimizing a page around other big events that are definitely scheduled to happen. The use of a new movie release is only one idea, amongst hundreds of others. If you practice thinking this way, you can develop strategies for retail, professional clients or even business-to-business Web sites. Newsworthy events happen all the time.

<ul>

<li>Do you think "the Olympics" might benefit a sporting goods store which offers an overview of the various participants.

<li>Do you think that a scheduled tour of a famous rock group might influence traffic to a music site offering a contest for free tickets?

<li>How might that upcoming children's film influence traffic to a toy store?

</ul>

These are only a few quick examples but learn to think laterally about news events. Take full advantage of the media in its entirety to bring maximum benefit to your clients. It's just a matter of paying close attention to those big scheduled events and creatively examining how these might benefit a your strategy.

In the scenario I explained above, it would be ideal for a video store who is selling old classic films to (if they have any films available starring Johnny Eck) to take advantage of the public interest that might be generated by a new movie.

By the time the film is released, (assuming it is created at all) I expect there will be a flurry of interest about this actor's life and any old films he may have appeared in.

About The Author

John Alexander is the Co-Director of Training of Search Engine Workshops with Robin Nobles. Together, they teach 2-day beginner, 3-day advanced, and 5-day all-inclusive "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. John also teaches online search engine marketing courses through <a href="http://www.onlinewebtraining.com" target="_new">http://www.onlinewebtraining.com</a>, and he's a member of Wordtracker's official question support team.

<a href="mailto:john@searchengineworkshops.com">john@searchengineworkshops.com</a>