Press Release: Hot Spot Social enters pre-launch.

Hot Spot Social is the webs newest social networking community offering video, photo, music, and mass communication facilities.

From people seeking friends and relationships to building careers and business presence Hot Spot Social has it all. Cool features like our in house affiliate program and Hot Spots make us a great place to grow with. Contest and group activities, rate a friend and hot or not provide reasons to stay active.

Hot Spot Social is free to join and members get a full range of services like the video and music sharing mentioned above, blogs, personalized profiles, forums, and groups. The possibilities are endless.

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Hot Spot Social - New Social Networking Community

Most of us spend many hours online, and shoppers are no exception. Many businesses have an online store that helps bring in new customers everyday and anytime. The Internet has made this possible, and there are new forms of social media that have generated widespread popularity due to their ease of access over the Internet. You can expand your online business’s reach even further when you use search engine optimization with a knowledgeable search engine optimization service and apply it to social media.

An SEO company will use social media such as blogs, podcasts, e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, to promote a website. What connects them all is the Internet, and because they are all online, the way many people access them is through a search engine. Continue Reading »
Search Engine Optimization & Social Media

Informative and easy to understand guide describing the process of organic search engine optimization. Topics covered include content and keyword analysis, website structure, link popularity, registration of your website, and much more. Click to read the entire SEO Guide.

You may have recently begun to hear the phrase search engine optimization bandied about in discussion of search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your site “search engine friendly” so that search engines will be more likely to rank your site highly in search results. With so many millions of websites competing to be found via search engines, it is wise to make it as easy as possible for a search engine to recognize that your site is a valuable match.

Many people new to the world of search engines assume that there is a significant human aspect involved to search engine rankings. That is, they think that a team of people review websites and then ranks the website accordingly. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Search engines are purely automated things. Google indexes over 4 billion web pages. It would be impossible to employ enough people to categorize so many. Therefore, search engines have automated computer programs called “search engine spiders” that look at each website and determine under which search terms it should appear.

So what exactly is done during optimization to make a site more search engine friendly? The process is multifaceted, and not easily pinned down to one or two steps. Because of this, search engine optimization is often viewed as a vague, almost nebulous process, but its many aspects are actually well-defined. Search engine optimization is something that involves the entire website: its design, marketing strategy, copy, structure and popularity.

There are several steps that go into optimizing a website. Following is a brief overview only. It is not supposed to be a complete guide, but rather a general introduction to help newcomers understand the basic aspects of search engine optimization.

Keyword Analysis
First, you should determine which keywords you wish to optimize for. That is, when searching for your product or service, what search terms will your potential website visitors use? What words will they type into the search box? If you sell stuffed toys, will they type “stuffed toys” or “plush animals”? The phrase most often used could vary slightly but return quite different results, such as “used socks online” and “online used socks.” So you will really want to put yourself into the mind of your customer. Once you have decided which keywords to aim for, you will want to include these key phrases and terms in your content.

Design from the Bottom Up
You get better results if you design with optimization in mind from the beginning. If you incorporate optimization into the very construction of your website, it is much more seamless and genuine than if you build your site and then try to tweak it for optimization. The most search engine friendly sites are straightforward sites built from basic, non-frame, non-Flash, HTML documents. Your site should also use a static internal links as these are most easily indexed and followed by search engines.

Content
The web is a text-based medium, and search engines do not see graphics. Think about it: How is a computer program supposed to tell the difference between a picture of Willie Nelson and field of daisies? It can’t. A computer program such as a search engine spider can only see and interpret text. So give them lots of it. Creating large websites with lots of great copy is one of the best ways to get ranked well in search engines. Not only do search engines appreciate the extra text, but people will be more likely to link to your site if it’s got depth and plenty of useful information. This linking will help your link popularity, discussed below.

Link Popularity
You can determine how popular you are by how many people would list you as a friend, and the same goes with websites. Search engines notice how many other sites have links to your site. This has unfortunately led to the rise of some “link farms,” sites with no real content, just lists and lists of links. Link farms are considered “spam” by search engines. On the Internet, “spam” does not mean “spiced ham” but rather “undesirable and annoying stuff,” which could describe the way some people think about spiced ham anyways. In any case, you do not want to be associated with a link farm or any sort of spam whatsoever because search engines don’t like it. So, don’t just link with anybody. Find some fellow, quality website that deals with similar content and see if you two can share links with each other.

Search Engine and Directory Registration
Once you have your site all pretty and optimized, you have to make sure search engines know you exist before you can hope to show up in their Top Ten ranking for your particular niche. As long as you have at least one quality link pointing to your site, search engines such as Google are more likely to pick up your site. To speed up the process, many people opt to submit their website to search engines and directories.

Some directories allow you to pay for inclusion, such as Yahoo that charges a flat fee for the year. DMOZ is another important directory. Their submission is free, but they can be very exclusive. When submitting to any directory, you will want to adhere to their submission rules exactly. Directory listings such as these will not only help searchers find you directly, but they will help with your link popularity as well.

Many search engines such as Google will not allow you to pay for inclusion. You can, however, submit to Google which will add your website to a queue which Google maintains and periodically trolls electronically.

Now, keep in mind, being submitted to a search engine such as Google will not automatically put your website in the top ten. This will merely include you somewhere in the billions upon billions of possible results. Getting ranked in the top ten under your chosen key phrases can only be accomplished through optimization. The two processes (submission and optimization) should be combined in your marketing efforts.

It should be noted is that there is a right way and a wrong way to do optimization, and if you or the company you hire does not follow the proper rules, your site could be banned for life from some of the most popular search engines available, which is suicide for your traffic. So, in order to make sure that everything is done correctly, you should know the proper processes involved. Do not allow any spamming, any connection to link farms, or any other shady dealings that you would feel uncomfortable explaining to your clients or to search engines. Remember, search engines, and more importantly your customers, are looking for useful content as the optimal result. So build your website with your visitors in mind, and it will be easier to succeed in your optimization as well.

About the Author:
Sean Odom runs a Houston, Texas based SEO Consulting firm specializing in search
engine marketing and Social Media Optimization.

Hook
Your homepage is the first thing that your website visitor sees, so it better be good. It’s your hook. But contrary to popular belief (and sometimes natural intuition), your goal for a homepage is not to inform or to tell anyone anything. Your #1 goal for a homepage is for your website visitor to click forward and not back. That is, it is to convince them that you have something on your website worth spending their time on.

If you’ve ever taken a sales class in anything, they’ll tell you the first step to selling is making the customer say “yes” to something, anything. That’s why telemarketers always ask you stuff like, “What would you say if I told you I could save you 10% on your phone bill every month, and it would only take you 10 minutes of your time today?” Because what are you going to say? I don’t want to save 10%? Of course not. You have to say, “Well, I guess that sounds pretty good.”

Clicking is the web version of saying “yes” in the sales world. So your first step is to make the customer want to click forward. Fortunately, you don’t need to tell them much to do that. To do that they only need to be able to answer two things:

What’s in it for me?
Where do I click?

If they can answer those two questions quickly, then you stand a darn good chance of selling your product. If you babble too long…Well, unfortunately web surfers are finicky, impatient creatures that are all too happy to click the back button.

Once you can get them to start clicking, then they have already taken a proactive approach to your site, and they will start reading deeper. So don’t cram your homepage with too many details. Tell them just enough to make them click forward. Don’t worry, once they get interested, website surfers will read deeper.

Line
Once you get your website visitor into your site, you need to make sure they feel comfortable and welcome and that they follow the line you want them to take: to the telephone, to the order form, to the buy now button… To do that, you need to know how to write website content.

Website content should be some 50% - 75% shorter than content created for print. Font’s should be larger, sentences more concise, paragraphs shorter, and space should be used frequently (but not after every other sentence). Why? Because reading on the web is hard. Computer screens just don’t make comfortable reading platforms. So, concentrate on making it easy for people to scan pages. Break things up with headers and well-considering spacing.

Easy and short, however, does not mean that you can leave out the details. Once you get your visitor to start clicking, then they are going to want the details. They better be there, and they better be easy to find. The web is a medium for propagating information: So give it to them. If you don’t, they’ll buy from someone who did.

So how do you get a lot of content onto a short web page? You don’t. You create a lot of unique web pages.

If you have 10 products, make a main products page and 10 products web pages. Don’t try to cram all the details about every product onto one page. If you have a long industry article, break it up into several shorter pages and provide a way for readers to click forward or backward within the article at the end of each article page. If your services require extensive explanations, break up the info. If merited, each service can have its intro page, benefits page, installation page, FAQ, order form, whatever.

But beware. There is a careful balance between short and stupidly short, between breaking up pages and breaking up flow, and between giving your reader places to click and confusing them to holy heck with too much navigation. The solution? Never lose sight of your reader. Put a little thought into how you are going to break up your pages. In fact, put a lot of thought into how you are going to break up your web pages. Professional website content writers spend as much of 1/3 to 1/2 of their time plotting navigation, creating outlines and drawing page layouts before they write the first sentence.

And Sinker
The goal of your homepage is getting your visitor to click forward. And the goal of your site is to get your visitor to take action. That is, to buy your product. Your ordering process must be simple. And, if at all possible, it should be automated and online. If your product or service doesn’t lend itself to a shopping cart system, then at least make sure that you’ve got a simple online request form where potential customers can input answers to some basic questions about themselves and request a free quote or a call from a customer service representative.

During the ordering process, never ask your customer to fill out more than you absolutely need to complete their order. If you can get away with asking for just a credit card number and name, do it. Loosing people that already decided to buy because you just had to know their demographics is not a good thing.

Not sure if your ordering process is simple enough? Here’s a stretch: Go through it yourself. Too many website owners have never once been through their own ordering process. Still not sure? Ask your son or daughter. If they can’t do it. It’s too complicated.

About the Author:
Wintress Odom is a professional copywriter with over half a decade of experience in writing technical and advertising copy. She runs a successful copywriting agency, The Writers for Hire.
Article Copyright © 2007 The Writers for Hire, Inc. All rights reserved

Follow the simple code example below in order to implement a page specific 301 redirect. This is also a handy redirect for informing a search engine spiders that a web page has permanently moved.

Warning, you will be editing your .htaccess file, so please be careful and make a backup of the original just in case there is a problem.

First, download the .htaccess file via FTP. Next open the .htaccess file with a plain text editor such as notepad. If there’s already code in the file be sure you skip a line before adding the code below. Now copy and paste the following code into the .htaccess file;

(without the “<-- -->” part)

RedirectPermanent /old.html http://www.yoursite.com/new.html

Next, replace the “old_page” portion with your unique “page name”, save and upload.

Now when somebody requests old.html they will be automatically redirected to http://www.yoursite.com/new.html.

Note, be sure to include a space between the old page and new location portion, see below;
/old_page.html space http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html

For more information about 301 redirects, please see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#redirectpermanent

About the Author:
Sean Odom runs a Houston, Texas based SEO Consulting firm specializing
in search engine marketing and Social Media Optimization.

Do you know what your website is telling you? A crucial part of your online marketing efforts lie in understanding your website traffic patterns. If you don’t know how people find your site, what they do once they’re on your site, how long they stay on the site, what they respond to and what they reject, you won?t achieve maximum online results.

Look at your website traffic logs

Information is collected as visitors find and move through your website. This information is displayed on what is referred to as “traffic logs.” This marketing data is pure because it is collected mechanically as visitors move freely throughout your website. Your website offers unprecedented opportunities to gather visitor and customer behavior data. Keep reading to learn more about this valuable information source.

Traffic logs provide key indicators of online marketing performance

Before diving into the wealth of data available through these logs, let’s clear up a common misconception that exists amongst most business executives: “hits” really aren’t a sound

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Web Analytics and Why is it Crucial for Online Marketing Success

Click fraud has become a major problem for online marketers. If you participate on Google adwords campaigns or Overture, you must already pay a lot for your campaigns.

What is click fraud?

Click fraud is the deliberate clicks to PPC search engine ads for completely other reasons than expressing interest for buying the related products or services.

Overture defines click fraud as clicks arising for reasons other than the good-faith intention of an Internet user to visit a web site to purchase goods or services or to obtain information.

Google defines click fraud, or invalid clicks, as any method used to artificially and/or maliciously generate clicks or page impressions.

In simple words, Click fraud means that someone is cheating you and that you pay too much Continue Reading »
How To Eliminate The Click Fraud Problem

There are some really great sources of information on planning and executing a successful paid marketing campaign, from researching your audience and the keywords they use to managing your bid portfolio.

Using the sessions from SES NY as a guideline, I’m going to introduce you to what the “experts” are doing in PPC.

There is probably no one who doubts that PPC is here for the long term. And while many dismissed PPC in the early days, it is clear, based on earnings reported by the search engines, that PPC is here to stay.

Therefore, online marketers need to understand what it is, how to use it and what your competitors are doing. It is also important to know what some of the most effective tactics are out there.

The first thing to know is that PPC marketing is evolving just like organic placement. There are new players entering the Continue Reading »
Pay Per Click Tactics in 2006

Every site owner wishes to get his site promoted effectively. Can we all do it?? Even if it is done, is it done effectively?? There are several ways also for site promotion which can play immense role in this regard. Here below ten (10) guiding points are mentioned for the benefit of web owners particularly for the new owners.

1. Appearance makes a difference. From the very beginning the point to be kept in mind that professional attitude pays everywhere. To give your site an edge over others you Continue Reading »
Ten Points to Ponder for Website Promotion