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FYI FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO USE MYSPACE TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS
Current mood:  productive
Category: Web, HTML, Tech
Reciprocal linkage can be a powerful tool to increase your web sites rankings. Some search engines include linkage as a ranking criterion. Google and Yahoo being two of these. Typically if your site is linked from a highly ranked site, your site will be given a 'bonus' boost in ranking. Links from other sites also give you another point of entrance to your site.
A while back MySpace announced that they were scrambling website links that you post to your page as protection against hackers. Now I am not saying that is not true but there is another effect of MySpace scrambling your link; It keeps you from gaining rankings in the search engines as the robots that crawl sites cannot read scrambled code. One of the probable reasons that MySpace may have done this was to keep members from competeing with MySpace. MySpace makes it's money from Affiliate links and if someone doing a, lets say Google search, types in a search for "Motorcycle headgear". What happens is that plenty of results for "Motorcycle Headgear" are returned but nothing from MySpace. MySpace does not want your business interferring with their click returns. They make their money from "Clicks" and if someone clicks your link in a search engine instead of theirs they figure they are losing money. You cannot fault MySpace for protecting their own interest after all they are in business to make money off of their users through their affiliate links.
So how then can you use MySpace to market your business if your links are unreadable by search engines? Well here's some suggestions.....
1. If you have a relationship with a store owner not directly competing with you, ask if they would be willing to cross-link with you from an site outside of MySpace. Their link will be scrambled on your MySpace page but if you post their link as a text link with their company name you are still doing them a service and you get your MySpace link listed on a site outside of MySpace.
2. Include links on an appropriate page within your store that you maintain off of MySpace. This may be a content page defined by you, offering additional information to your customers. Include the link with relevant content to avoid appearing as 'link spam' to a robot crawling your site. Hopefully you have a website outside of MySpace. If you do not it is something that you should really consider. You can use your outside page to link back to your MySpace page. A business website can be maintained for under $10.00 per month. One of the providers I use for my company is ProStores which you can visit by clicking here... They give you a free 1 month trial and they are totally integrated with eBay which means you can transfer your eBay listings to your website and vice versa. Which brings up the next point......
3. You will get more exposure for your business using eBay than you will using MySpace. By using your "ABOUT ME" on eBay as a promotional tool you can generate that link weight you are looking for. The "ABOUT ME" section is the only place on eBay where you can place a link to your website and you can link back to that page from your main site. eBay does not scramble links and if a person types in that same search string "Motorcycle Headgear" in Google right on the first page is an eBay listing for "Motorcycle Headgear.
4. Repeat customers are one key to success. The most important thing to consider in your design and content is getting someone who finds your site to bookmark and come back to you for future shopping. Good page design, well described products and extra information outside of the product information are all things to consider. Going the extra mile in content matters to many shoppers. If you are selling items related to a hobby, include general information on the hobby within your site and link to it. If you are selling a product with detailed specifications available at the manufacturer's site, provide a link but also add your experiences with the product to show that you have knowledge of the product and are not simply a reseller.
5. Think in terms of keyword phrases instead of single keywords. This will help you stand out from the competition for general terms in the search engines. Of course you still want to pick phrases that will be entered in a search. Specific phrases put you in search results where there is less competition. This should also result in traffic looking specifically for your product. Verify that your phrases exist in the product description. Without their existence in the page text they are a warning sign to spiders crawling your page.
6. Regardless of a particular spider's preference to make use of the meta keyword contents, placing common search keywords throughout the content of a page is helpful in being found in internet searching. Each keyword you feel is a likely search term should be placed throughout the page content and appear several times. It is generally good practice to get keywords in the beginning sentences of the first and last paragraph. While the placement of keywords with the content is important it is important to write well structured, clear sentences for the humans who will be deciding if your product is worth buying. Today's spiders do not consider keywords placed in hidden fields or otherwise disguised on a page. There is the potential that adding keywords outside of the readable page may be interpreted as a sneaky attempt to 'spam' the spider with meaningless keywords.
7. Writing good content for a meta description tag is very important in search engine optimization. Search engines displaying appealing meta description text will help drive traffic to your site. The text should include the keywords organized into well written sentences. Ideally you should keep the description brief enough to fit within length restrictions of search engine sites. If your best writing comes after the search engine has shortened the display nobody will see your work. Keeping text lengths below one hundred fifty characters should allow its full display within search results. Some in the search engine tuning field suggest placing keywords towards the beginning of the description is a good policy. This should only be done while keeping readability in mind.
8. Placing important keywords within the brief description of a product will in most cases place the keywords on search result pages on your storefront. If you have selected a layout that does not display the brief as part of the search result, this will of course have no effect.
9. The Open Directory Project is a very good place to be listed. Search engines value listings on this site because submissions are reviewed by humans and checked for accuracy prior to listing. This site requires you to do some research and submit your site manually to them. Please see details at www.dmoz.org
10. There are a number of search engine tools available on the internet free of charge you can use to your advantage. Some of these include meta tag generators, keyword and current ranking tools. Keyword tools include generators, proximity analyzers, density analyzers, popularity analysis and related term finders.
11. If you choose to participate in pay-for-placement type programs from a company also providing a natural search service bear in mind that some people will not view these placements as favorably as a top result in the natural search list. If you choose to pay a site only operating as pay-for-placement you will not have this comparison to compete against. Purchasing keywords can be an effective way to have your pages seen by customers. Before purchasing keywords it is advisable to check what keywords are being used by competitors on their pages. Take this information and evaluate as it pertains to your product or product line.
12. Search engine's display of your site will vary in the amount of time after a page has been submitted. Search engines may display as quickly as one week and as long as two months.
13. Post Blogs about your products and services on MySpace. Use lots of keywords about your product because the search engines will pick up on those keywords and return listings for your Blogs. Just keep in mind that these listings are low in the ranking scores but at least they do appear in the search engines. Be sure to include your outside site link somewhere in the text. Usually at the bottom of your post with your signature is a good place for this.
14. Use traditional methods of advertising your business and your MySpace page. Include the site URL on your business cards for instance and with all correspondence like email and letters. Whatever you can do to direct people to your page you should be doing for proper promotion.
15. You cannot use your own affiliate link in MySpace. Remember, they make their money from affiliate links, in fact they are the biggest affiliate link website in the world. They jeolously protect their monopoly and will remove sections of your URL to keep the link from working. Save the affiliate links for your own website.
THINGS TO AVOID
(A) Don't include a keyword or key phrase in your meta tags that is not present on that page. Keywords reinforce the content of the page. Search engines define this practice as spam and rank your page accordingly.
(B) Don't repeat a keyword or key phrase in your meta tags. Again, keywords reinforce the content of a page. The robot will be crawling your page and determining the relevance of a keyword based on how many times it is present and where it is present - not how many times it is put in the meta tag.
(C) Don't include a keyword that could brand you as an adult site and drive away business. These keywords are not only profane words but potentially words like 'exotic'.
(D) Don't attempt to up keyword counts on your page by hiding them in tiny text, hidden fields, a background with the same color as the text or anything else that could be perceived as 'sneaky'. The robots that crawl the web either already understand these 'techniques' or could be changed in the very near future to detect them. The best policy is to write good content.
(C) Don't link with 'free-for-all' sites. Having your link listed on a page with little content but many links is bad. Search engines are marking these sites as 'spam' sites. Your presence on these sites could influence their opinion of your site as well.
(D) Don't use the same title tag throughout your static pages. Using a unique title tag containing relevant keywords for the web page will benefit your rankings in a crawler's view.
(E) Don't exclusively use JavaScript links. Spiders cannot crawl links in Java Script. If you want to provide Java Script links you should also include links to the same content on standard links in an appropriate place on your page.
(F) Don't use page redirects. Anything that takes a customer to another page without an action on their part can be viewed negatively by a search engine. Some of these techniques are the use of META refresh tags, JavaScript and CGI scripts.
(G) Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
(H) Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per engine defined time frame. Engines vary in their rules on submissions and these rules could change. Keep up to date on each engine's rules.
(I) Don't include 'stop' words as one of your keywords. Stop words include he his she her I they it this of at on in that the a and are is as be for from to was and other common, short words. Search engines ignore these words as irrelevant to the content of the page.
There is a whole list of things that you can do to promote your business but the one thing you cannot do is depend solely on MySpace as your sole promotion tool. The only way that MySpace works is if you have 5 million friends on your list and that would become your full time job doing that many requests. Use other outlets for your promotion and use MySpace as a secondary tool to promote your business.
Whether you sell retail, crafts, have a blogtalk radio show, service business like tattooing and piercing or whatever you do and sell just remember this. Proper promotion takes a lot of hard work and whatever you do don't put all your eggs into the MySpace basket.
-The GYPSY- www.misfitsonline.net
8:39 AM
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