Slinky Search | Internet Marketing

Online Marketing Advice, Tips & Strategies

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Lessons Learned From Twitter Hacking

It’s the kind of story that really gets your attention: Twitter, by any measure the most buzzed about network of 2008, got hacked by an 18-year-old!

With absolutely no skill or finesse involved, either. Anybody reading this could have done the same. You just download a free password-cracker program like Crack, John the Ripper, L0phtCrack, or Cain, point it at a log-in page, and leave it run for a couple of days. It’s that simple.

Dictionary attacks have been used since at least the 1980s, before the World Wide Web even came along. System admins have been scolding users for keeping easily guessed passwords around for almost that long. So the fact that you can be on the staff of a hip, trendy ‘Web 2.OH’ company and not know better just goes to show that this problem is never going away.

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Thinking Of Doing Black Hat SEO, Think Again!

SEO is necessary to achieve high rankings. But, there are certain ethics and guidelines that most of the webmasters must keep in mind. Though there is no specific definition for black hat SEO, yet there are some things that may be considered inappropriate for websites of different categories. Something may be allowed for a gambling site, but may not be allowed for a health care site. Black hat SEO techniques are mostly those, which may break search engine rules or are a poor user experience or may have unethical presentation of content.

Some of the things considered as Black Hat SEO may even have been considered as legitimate ones earlier, but after being taken a bit too far by some, these were blacklisted. Generally, the black hat SEO practices may offer short term gains, but they may be limited to the rankings.

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More On Black Hat SEO

Avoid SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, using invisible text etc that are considered black hat SEO.

Keyword stuffing is nothing, but packing your keywords onto the website. If you have a list of keywords to use, do not make liberal use of them in you website. Use tools, which can help you to find the keyword density. Maintain a standard of around 3% to 7% keyword density. Make use of synonyms and make yourself aware of LSI to ensure that you have a good page developed within limits of acceptable use of keywords.

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Tips To Write A Good Pay Per Click Ad

Pay per click is among the most popular and successful methods of advertising your online business. Although pay per click is known to be an effective advertising tool, it has to be used accurately, in order to get the desired results. With numerous entrepreneurs using pay per click Ad technique, you really need to think of creative and innovative ways of putting up your Ad. Your pay per click Ad has to be good, in order to turn huge traffic to your website.

Pay per click Ad is the first step of pay per click campaigns. You need to understand that a browser will choose to visit your site, purely on the basis of the text in the advertisement. At this point, they don’t really know, what your product or service is all about and how would they benefit from it. The Ad has to be eye catching, so that the browsers are tempted to click on it.

Thus making of a pay per click Ad is a crucial stage and requires uniqueness along with creativity.

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How To Make The Most Of Latent Semantic Indexing-LSI

Latent Semantic Indexing or LSI is a very significant technique used by search engines like Google to determine the topic of your website by looking at all the keywords and seeing how they relate.

LSI became popular with its use by Google, mainly for the purpose of detection of spam and for detection of excessive use of keywords to fool the search engines, to get a high listing. Earlier people have used it, to make use of rotating synonyms into which keywords could be multiple inserted. You can make good use of this technology, to get better rankings.

Web masters can make use of this technology, while developing content for their websites and ensure that they use keywords and terms, which are interpreted as expert and relevant content by search engines and the site given a high ranking. Using synonyms is preferable today, rather than using the same keyword to achieve certain keyword density.

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More On How To Make The Most Of Latent Semantic Indexing

Tools like Adwords from Google are freely available. It can be used to understand, what Google considers as synonyms. You may enter a keyword and check the “use synonyms” box and click on “Get more keywords”.

You can get a list of synonyms for the keyword. This way, you get some very relevant list of keywords. You can use these in your content without repetition of the same keywords. This can help you get good rankings.

Another use of this tool is that it determines the true meaning of words on the basis of various factors. It is used to determine heteronyms, polysemes and homonyms. Homonyms are spelt and pronounced the same way, but have different meanings. Heteronyms are spelt the same way, but pronunciations are different.

Polysemes are spelt the same way, but they come from the same root and are used in different context. When you are developing content, you have to keep this in mind, so that you are clear about what keywords you are using and what it is related to.

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Analyzing Your Competitors Website

When you develop your website to promote your products and reach out to relevant customers, you have to give due consideration to your competitors’ websites.

You should make a careful study of your competitors’ websites. It can give you an informative insight on strategies used by them to attract customers. You can form your own digital strategy based on relevant information to help you score over your competitors.

You have to know the value of competition.

Identify the leaders in your field. You can use Yahoo directory, which can provide you with a view of the major players in the field related to your own industry.

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The Importance Of Web Copy In Internet Marketing

Sales copy is part of traditional marketing and advertising activities and can be sent out to prospective buyers with the aim of informing them of a product or service.

It can inform them about how the product or service will benefit the prospective buyer and to provide relevant information in a way that may induce them to buy the product or service.

Similarly web copy is either long or short text in the form of web literature generally used for selling something over the internet.

However, despite the similarity of purpose, web copy differs a lot from a traditional sales copy sent by, say direct mail.

Though web marketing continues to apply the basic principles of traditional marketing it should use copy writing to successfully do the selling.

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More About The Importance Of Web Copy In Internet Marketing

While drafting and preparing your sales copy you need to be sensitive to the unique features of internet lingo. This will help you create effective web copy that readers will find exciting – and thus compel them to make a purchase.

Foremost among them is the style of writing. Netizens are more comfortable with information that is presented in a relaxed and informal way – unlike the type used in the usual direct mail sales material which tends to use hyperbole.

The writing style of web copy needs to be engaging and friendly with a soft-sell approach.

Web copy should describe the products with a personal touch creating a relaxed feeling in the reader. It shouldn’t sound like thrusting a product on a reader.

Internet users prefer a softer approach.

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All You Need To Know About Affiliate Internet Marketing

Affiliate marketing has gained popularity with the rising demand of online Internet marketing. It is an Internet based marketing that involves three parties:

– A merchant creator
– An affiliate of a particular merchant and
– The buyers

Affiliate marketing uses regular advertising methods, which include search engine optimization, email marketing, paid search engine marketing and display advertising. In affiliate marketing when one website is used to drive the traffic to another, it is known as online marketing. So, the key to success in Internet marketing is innovation. You have to make changes and create new ideas to earn profits and success in affiliate marketing.

How does affiliate marketing work?

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More About Affiliate Internet Marketing

It is better to promote products through affiliate marketing than selling products on your own.

– You don’t need to look after the customers’ complaints and queries.
– You can earn benefits from an established brand in the market.
– Billing and delivery of product can be taken care of by the affiliate program.
– You need not invest in stock.
– Usually refunds are absorbed by the program.

So, an affiliate marketer doesn’t have a product of his own because he starts affiliating by selling products for the merchant. Later on, he may start selling his own products. Affiliate marketing can be easily started with low investment. They don’t have to pay rent or hire utilities. Most of the affiliates start their business at their home as a one man operation. They outsource the projects, where they need help such as web design.

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Google Chrome Browser

Google’s goals for its new Chrome Web browser are simple: Make the Web experience faster and, by extension, make more money for Google.

Google’s Chrome browser is now officially available as a beta, offering the promise of increased speed, security and usability. During a conference call and Webcast with the press today from the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., Google trotted out a line-up of engineers to explain what is new for Web users and what Google hopes to gain with Chrome.

Internal Linking

Here’s a great example of how you can enhance your Web site’s usability and assist your SEO efforts.

Too often, you may have created a lot of Web pages but they don’t “speak” to each other. If a visitor is on my company’s Internet Marketing Services page, then they might also be interested in our web analytics services or our search engine marketing services.

So, we’ve added links to those pages on the Internet Marketing Services page. Simple stuff.

Linking like this creates great internal linking, which is great for the user experience. These internal links provide an opportunity to use a keyword-rich anchor text link to that page.

Internet Usage Up

Almost half of all internet users now use search engines on a typical day

The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under onehalf (49%).

With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet’s all-time killer app, on a typical day.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project

Broadband use

Those who use broadband connections at home are significantly more likely than those who use dial-up to have ever tried using search engines at all, by 94% to 80%.

They are dramatically more likely to search on a typical day, and this difference persists when other factors, such as age and education, are held constant.

These are the percentages according to type of internet connections for those who search on a typical day: Broadband at home 58% | Dial-up at home 26%

Usability and SEO

The search engine’s job is to deliver the most relevant result against a given search query. In order to be seen as “relevant” to the search engines, you must first be relevant to a user of your web site.

There are no shortcuts here.

You need quality content and pages upon pages of supporting content.

Too often, people redesign their web sites to make them more “user friendly.” They believe this is accomplished by having fewer pages with less verbiage and more graphics.

If you think about it, though, people use search to read and research when they’re looking for your business.

Tracking seo results

Tracking the online traffic to your website is called – Website Analytics.

This should be given the upmost importance, after you have completed the search engine optimization process.

You have to be able to determine, which keywords and search items are helping you enhance the traffic to your website.

One tip for all you webmasters would be that search engine optimisation process does take time – so don’t be discouraged, if you don’t see any immediate results.

If done correctly, you will slowly be on your way to climbing up the search engine results page of major search engines like Google, Yahoo & Live.

Google algorithm and your SEO

Google is continually tweaking its algorithm. Often changes to the algorithm will change the position of search engine rankings.

It might be that one of the latest changes affected your website.

In 2007, Google released more than 450 changes of the ranking algorithm. That’s more than 1 per day!

Peter Brittain
Northland Digital

The secret to getting the best directory listing on the internet

By Peter Brittain – Managing Director Northland Digital & Slinky Internet Marketing

We all know that DMOZ is the famous Open Directory Project, right?

The Open Directory Project (ODP) is known as DMOZ because of its original domain name, directory.mozilla.org and is a multilingual open content directory of web sites that is developed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

Being listed in the directory is free.
DMOZ uses a hierarchical system for organizing website listings. Listings are sorted into categories, which can then include sub-categories under them. Google uses DMOZ as a directory source so it is important to have your site listed in its index. Google’s own directory is actually the whole DMOZ directory. Robozilla which is DMOZ’s web crawler checks the status of all sites listed and periodically flags websites which appear to have moved or disappeared. This helps to reduce the link rot in its web directory.

Now, it has been said that without a DMOZ listing you will not rank well in Google. This is not true, but it is one of the best authoritative links around.

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Expanding on Mod Rewrite shopping carts for SEO

There are two types of mod rewrites. Each meet the same purpose, but the advanced URL rewrite is more search engine friendly. The following examples will give you an idea of the important factors.

Non-URL Rewrite URL

http://www.yoursportsshop.com/shop.php?cat_id=1&item_id=2

The above URL indicates to the database that the returned information should be from the category with id equal to 1 and the item id equal to 2. This works fine for the system because it understands the variables. Many search engines however do not understand this form of URL.

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