First off don’t panic and remain calm. These things happen to website owners and business owners from time to time. If you feel that your website has been given some sort of Google penalty then the best thing you can do is to first stop any new online marketing and make a list of all your search engine optimization and internet marketing efforts that you have executed for the last year. Sometimes the problem could be one minor link sitting on a website or it can also be a much deeper rooted issue that has been building for some time. You might have been given a penalty at Google if your rankings suddenly dropped (not the normal ranking fluctuation) or visitors from Google dropped over time. In drastic situations, your website is unlisted from Google. If your SEO efforts are white hat (following Google’s webmaster guidelines) then there are places to start your hunt and discovery to solve the Google penalty problem.

Here is a short list of some suggestions to consider if your website has been given a Google Penalty:

• Google Webmaster Tools: If you don’t have Google webmaster tools installed on your website yet even without the penalty this should be the very first step you take. Google webmaster tools allows you to see what types of links are pointing directly to your site. This will be a very good and important starting point for your investigation. Once Google webmaster tools is installed take a step back and go through all your links. Make sure none are point from any spammy or irrelevant websites. If you have found any that might not be right for your website you will have to contact blog and website owners to remove the links. By installing Google webmaster tools on your site you also show the search engines that you have nothing to hide and you welcome them to look at your efforts.

• New Website Changes: If you have made any website changes over the last six to twelve months go through all those changes. Identify any new content that might have a bit too many keywords listed in it or if you have updated any links to any of your pages make sure you did not add to many links or links pointing to sites that Google does not like. Per Google guidelines a web page should not exceed fifty links. You don’t want to make too many changes backwards just yet. Make some and then wait and give it some time to see if that was the issue. Once you have a penalty it could take some time along with trial and error until you find the problem.

• Google Analytics: Check your Google analytics (or your web stats program) to see when the problem first started occurring. You will quickly be able to see where the dip in traffic occurred and allow you to associate with what possible marketing efforts where conducted at that time for the problem to occur.

In conclusion stay calm and use your analytical hat to be sure you have covered all of the bases. Also, be sure to spend time learning (before there is an issue) search engine optimization best practices and Google’s webmaster guidelines as well.

It’s not stalking. It’s research. It’s you doing research on your competitors to help you stay up-to-date on what they’re doing so you know which direction you should go. It’s not stalking and everyone’s doing it.

Here’s a list of 11 tools that can help you track your competitors movements on the Web and give you actionable information that you can use. It doesn’t make you a bad person. It makes you a savvy site owner.  We’ll start off gentle.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are great little inventions because they allow you track virtually anything and have it delivered either to your email or RSS. What kinds of stuff should you be tracking? The name of our competitor’s company, their employee names, their CEO, product names, locations, mentions of new features, etc. What kinds of media are you looking for? Their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos, Flickr accounts, Facebook pages, etc. Why? The more you know, the better off you are to make smart decisions.

Twitter

Follow your competitors on Twitter. Follow their employees. Follow the people that engage most often with your competitors. Follow the people your competitors are following. Use Private Twitter Lists to do it all discretely. Private Lists are a goldmine for stalking. I mean, researching.

Twitter Search

Create RSS feeds or Save Twitter Searches to track important keywords, competitors’ Twitter user names, and product names (yours and theirs).  You can also use the Advanced Geo search to key in a certain radius from your competitor’s storefront.

Bit.ly

If you’re using Twitter, you’re probably already familiar with bit.ly. It’s one of the many URL shortening services out there. What’s different about bit.ly is that it gives you really great link stat information. It will tell you how many people clicked on your link, how many times it was retweeted, how many people clicked on the retweeted link, what times of day people retweeted it, who was doing the actual retweeting, etc. It’s a really great way to find and identify your network online so you can leverage them in the future.

Yahoo Site Explorer

Knowing that links are an essential part of getting your site to rank, Yahoo Site Explorer can show you WHO is linking to your competitors, as well as who’s linking to you. Where are competitors getting their links from? How can you get links from similar sources? What holes do they have in their link profile that you can capitalize on? This tool will tell you.

SEO for Firefox

This is great FF plugin offered by SEOBook’s Aaron Wall that gives site owners a robust look at whatever site they’re looking at. It tells you a site’s PageRank, age, number of links at a certain domain/page, how its done in social media, how many people are subscribed to its blog, if it’s listed in DMOZ or the Yahoo Directory, etc. Because it offers such great information about links, many people like to use it evaluate competitor’s content pieces.

Quarkbase

Once you put your URL in it will tell you the most recent and the most popular pages from a certain site that have been submitted. You can see where they’ve been submitted, how many votes they received, how many subscribers they have, etc. You can also search by “submitted on” or “submitted by” to see where your competitors are having their content submitted and who’s doing the submitting.

SocialMention

This is a pretty neat tool. Enter in a search term (competitor’s name, product name, keyword, etc) and SocialMention will track down what people are saying about that term across different blogs and social outlets. It will even attempt to track sentiment analysis to tell you if the mentions are positive, negative or neutral (this can get a bit wonky). It will tell you how many times a keyword was talked about, the time frame, and let you subscribe to an RSS feed for that term or export the information as a CSV. It’s one of my personal favorite tools to play with.

Compete

Compete will give you a complete profile of any site on the Web. You give them the domain and give you an approximation of their unique visitors and the keywords that are bringing people to their site. You can also compare several different sites up against each other. There’s a paid option which will give you even more analytical type information, as well.

copernic.com

Copernic offers a great tracker tool that will look for new content on your competitors’ Web pages and then email you a highlighted version so you know what they changed. If they put up a page about a new product they’ll soon be carrying, you’ll know. If they start altering text to rank for different keywords, you’ll know. If they update their employee page to create new positions, you’ll know. It’s a $49.95 investment but, I think it’s worth it.

Domaintools.com

DomainTools will collect a bunch of information about a Web site and report back. You can find out if your competitors are listed in the Yahoo directory, get registration details, what other sites are on the same IP (may be sites that company also owns), etc. You can also set up Registration Alerts to inform you each time your competitor creates a new domain name or a Mark Alert to tell you if they’ve used a particular keyword.

There you have it. A list of some of my favorite spy tools. You still trust me, right?

EBay’s online auctions have created business opportunities for thousands of people. Now the Trading Assistant program is making it easier than ever to start a business from home.

Trading Assistants act as brokers, selling merchandise for others and keeping a percentage of the profits. The profit potential can be great, especially when selling high-value items.

Though there are millions of registered users on eBay, many people still don’t know how to sell goods themselves. A Trading Assistant fills a need in the marketplace, allowing you to make a profit while helping others unload their stuff. Almost everyone has a box of items in their garage or closet that they would like to sell.

Getting Started

You will need to decide what types of products you are willing to sell and may want to set a minimum value on merchandise you accept. It can be difficult to make a profit on $5 items so many assistants require the products have a minimum estimated sales value of $10 or $20.

Most assistants set their fees between 20%-40% of the ending auction price. You may also want to charge a per-item listing fee of $1-$5, and possibly deduct this from the commission if the auction ends successfully.

As a Trading Assistant, you will list the item for sale, handle all buyer questions, collect payment and shipping fees from the buyer and ship the item. You may also need to do some research on your customers items to determine their value. Search the closed listings to find out what similar items have sold for and list your auctions accordingly.

You should create a simple contract that your customers sign to indicate that they agree to your services and fees. You can check out the competition in your area to determine what services other Assistants are offering and how they are structuring their fees. Check eBay s directory by zip code at http://www.ebay.com/

You will also need to decide how to obtain the items from your seller. You could offer a pickup service, visit customers homes and complete a contract there. Or you can offer a drop-off service, where customers bring their items to you. Many assistants operate from their garage so buyers don t have to enter their homes.

Promote Your Business on Ebay

Ebay offers a directory of Trading Assistants that consumers can use to locate services in their geographic area. To get listed in the official Trading Assistant program, eBay requires that you have a feedback rating of at least 50, have sold at least one item in the past 30 days, and maintain satisfaction rating of 97% or higher.

A listing in the official directory is free and you can also download best practices information and other tools from eBay at
http://www.ebay.com/

Other Ways to Promote Your Business

Here are some ideas for getting the word out about your service:

• Create a simple brochure and ask nearby businesses to display them for you.
• Leave brochures or fliers on doorsteps in your neighborhood.
• Place classified ads in the local newspapers.
• Place free classified ads on www.craigslist.org.
• Contact small business owners and offer your services to them. They may want to unload their overstock and your service could provide the perfect solution.
• Post fliers and brochures at colleges, retirement centers, and community centers.
• Ask your kid s school to mention your service in the newsletter.
• Visit garage sales and flea markets and offer your services to sellers.

Launch Your Business

Make sure you follow the rules of running a home-based business and check with your county offices to apply for a business license and resale permit. Though online sales are not heavily governed, someday they will be and it is better to comply with business laws.

Also make sure to set expectations with your customers. Since many aren t familiar with how eBay works, explain the process and set realistic expectations for the final values of sales. Some may expect their items to be worth far more than they can get on eBay, and you don t want to disappoint or worse, upset a client by selling an item for less than expected.

If you don t yet have any experience on eBay yourself, it s easy to get started. Begin with some spring cleaning and list some merchandise from your home. Make sure you have a good understanding of how eBay works before you represent your services to others.

A Trading Assistant business is a great opportunity for anyone interested in a relatively easy homebusiness. Once you launch your business, repeat customers and word of mouth should help your business grow. Your only regret could be that you didn’t start sooner.

]]> http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/become-an-ebay-trader/feed/ 0 20.308622 85.821121 20.308622 85.821121 Pintu http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/linkbaiting-for-fun-profit/ http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/linkbaiting-for-fun-profit/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:02:08 +0000 rakeshpradhanblog http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/?p=164 ]]>

Linkbaiting is one of the most universally effective tactics for promoting a site, both for search engine rankings and short-term traffic boosts. There’s no special list of guidelines that sets linkbaiting apart from normal content building or promotion except the knowledge that you’re creating something that’s specifically designed to appeal to link-savvy bloggers and web content creators.

Understanding what content, features, and subjects are “in” with the technorati (the web-literate individuals, not the blog aggregation site) is a subjective, but important piece of the linkbait creation puzzle. Right now, for example, one could search through del.icio.us/popular and digg.com to find examples of sites and pages that are getting lots of press. Blogs like Lifehacker, Threadwatch, Gizmodo, and others can also serve as inspiration when you’re searching for the latest crazes. My current experience shows that there are two big fields getting attention – web 2.0 applications (which include mashups, community-based sites, tags, feeds, content aggregation, map interfaces, etc.) and trend-announcing posts (or articles) that present new data or talk about how existing trends are affecting industries. Both of these get hundreds of links from bloggers who can’t seem to resist pointing to something their cohorts will later reference them for.

A lot of folks have also pointed out that SEOmoz’s very own Search Engine Ranking Factors served as very tasty linkbait recently, garnering a few thousand links in less than 3 weeks. Other examples of this same type of linkbaiting exist across the web, ineveryindustry. If you can gather up a group of well known and well-respected industry professionals to write a best practices guide or offer their opinions on factors/trends/issues affecting the industry, you’ve got a golden opportunity for on-topic links.

The second step in creating linkbait is the initial promotion. With SEOmoz, it was easy to write about the ranking factors article in the SEOmoz blog and watch the links fly in. With lesser trafficked sites, it can be valuable to actually email some bigger bloggers or writers in the field and ask them if they’d offer constructive criticism. Don’t ask for a link – bloggers hate that (even I hate it). Ask for their advice, tell them you respect their opinion and like their blog (if you don’t, find someone whose opinions you do respect) and are hoping their feedback can help you improve. 99.99% of the time, if you implement some small changes they ask for and email them back saying you’ve made them, they’ll write about it in public.

Once a great site, great application or trendy post is written about somewhere, it gets picked up and dragged across the web. Social tagging and popularity ranking sites (like the aforementioned Digg & del.icio.us) help to give the document massive visibility to hundreds of sheep-like content creators, who’ll happily link to you (without any input). Linkbait is a beautiful thing and to those who become experts in applying it to industry niches where natural links are hard to come by (think e-commerce or pharma), a great reward awaits.

]]> http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/12/04/linkbaiting-for-fun-profit/feed/ 0 Pintu http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/google-bing-perform-well-in-latest-comscore-report/ http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/google-bing-perform-well-in-latest-comscore-report/#comments Wed, 25 Nov 2009 06:19:18 +0000 rakeshpradhanblog http://rakeshpradhanblog.wordpress.com/?p=161 ]]>

The latest comScore report concerning the search market has arrived, and although it may not cause too many jaws to drop, there are some interesting tidbits contained within.  It seems that Google hit its stride again in October, and Bing continued to make some impressive gains.

Google experienced a couple months’ worth of shakiness earlier this year, failing to win any share between May and June, and then actually losing a little heading into July and August.  But between September and October, Google moved its needle from 64.9 percent to 65.4 percent, which is fairly impressive.

In fact, according to comScore, the search giant managed a 17.4 percent year-over-year increase.

Bing, for its part, did even better, pulling off a 30.8 percent gain in the same time span.  And in terms of just the last little bit, Bing bumped its share from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent between September and October.  Not bad at all.

It’s Yahoo fans who have cause to be disappointed.  Yahoo’s share of the search market has sunk 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis, and comScore determined that it dropped from 18.8 percent in September to 18.0 percent in October.

Source:-webpronews

LinkedIn Applications enable you to enrich your profile, share and collaborate with your network, and get the key insights that help you be more effective. Applications are added to your homepage and profile enabling you to control who gets access to what information.

•

SlideShare Presentations

by SlideShare Inc

SlideShare is the best way to share presentations on LinkedIn! You can upload & display your own presentations, check out presentations from your colleagues, and find experts within your network.

•

My Travel

by TripIt, Inc.

See where your LinkedIn network is traveling and when you will be in the same city as your colleagues. Share your upcoming trips, current location, and travel stats with your network.

•

Box.net Files

by Box.net

Add the Box.net Files application to manage all your important files online. Box.net lets you share content on your profile, and collaborate with friends and colleagues.

•

Blog Link

by SixApart

With Blog Link, you can get the most of your LinkedIn relationships by connecting your blog to your LinkedIn profile. Blog Link helps you, and your professional network, stay connected.

•

Google Presentation

by Google

Present yourself and your work. Upload a .PPT or use Google’s online application to embed a presentation on your profile.

•

Polls

by LinkedIn

The Polls application is a market research tool that allows you to collect actionable data from your connections and the professional audience on LinkedIn.

•

WordPress

by WordPress

Connect your virtual lives with the WordPress LinkedIn Application. With the WordPress App, you can sync your WordPress blog posts with your LinkedIn profile, keeping everyone you know in the know.

•

Huddle Workspaces

by Huddle.net

Huddle gives you private, secure online workspaces packed with simple yet powerful project, collaboration and sharing tools for working with your connections.

•

Company Buzz

by LinkedIn

Ever wonder what people are saying about your company? Company Buzz shows you the twitter activity associated with your company. View tweets, trends and top key words. Customize your topics and share with your coworkers.

•

Reading List by Amazon

by Amazon

Extend your professional profile by sharing the books you’re reading with other LinkedIn members. Find out what you should be reading by following updates from your connections, people in your field, or other LinkedIn members of professional interest to you.

• Company

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 40 million members and growing rapidly. LinkedIn connects you to your trusted contacts and helps you exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals.

Watch this short video for an overview of what LinkedIn is and how it can help you.

Four basic step

1. Establish your professional profile

LinkedIn gives you the keys to controlling your online identity. Have you Googled yourself lately? You never know what may come up. LinkedIn profiles rise to the top of search results, letting you control the first impression people get when searching for you online.

2. Stay in touch with colleagues and friends

In today’s professional world, people change jobs and locations constantly. By connecting on LinkedIn, your address book will never go out of date. Your contacts update their profiles, keeping you current with their latest jobs, projects and contact info. You’ll stay in closer contact with great tools to communicate and collaborate.

3. Find experts and ideas

Sometimes your immediate circle can’t resolve a unique business challenge. Tools like Answers and Groups let you locate and interact with experts through trusted introductions. LinkedIn Search lets you explore the broader network by name, title, company, location, and other keywords that will help you find the knowledge you’re looking for.

4. Explore opportunities

Whether you’re looking for a career opportunity, winning new clients or building your professional reputation, LinkedIn connects you to jobs, sales leads and ideal business partners. With our powerful search engine, company research tools and a jobs board that shows who you know at listed companies, LinkedIn is the place to turn for new opportunities.

Source:- http://learn.linkedin.com/what-is-linkedin/

Please visit my profile :- http://www.linkedin.com/in/rakeshpradhan

Google has always dominated the search engines. There’s no doubt about it. Every time web users want to look for some information on the internet, most likely they will immediately use the Google search engine. Or when you ask somebody about something you’re not knowledgeable of, the most common reply would be “Just Google it and you’ll find it.”

The Google people have been putting their best foot forward in making this search engine the most preferred by web users. But that’s not all there is to it. Unaware to many of you, these same guys have been developing a more advanced version in the recent months. This has been the most talked about topic in the internet these days especially among software developers.

With their dedication to make searching for information on the internet as quick and easy as possible, the Google team never ceases to come up with better and more advanced service. The latest web infrastructure this innovative team has developed in relation to information search on the internet is called “Caffeine.” This particular advanced update has made certain modifications to the search engine and aims to provide better search results and at a faster speed at that.

Caffeine is now in the testing stage to determine whether more changes will be needed in terms of codes. In other words, it’s only the basic infrastructure that’s available for people to test and no other mobile or international versions at the moment. Power searchers and web developers are the main target of this early preview in an effort to get their feedback.

So far, this Google Caffeine update has been receiving mostly positive feedback with many people seeing only minimal changes in the search results aspect during their test. They look forward to using this regularly in the near future. Owing to the trusted and respected name that Google has established for a long time now, most web users don’t see any serious issues with this search engine infrastructure going forward.

Thanks to Google associate Matt Cutts, web users are well informed about this Caffeine update. Cutts who joined the Google team in January 2000 as a software engineer for the Search Quality group, has been providing details of the infrastructure and the changes that are to happen through his blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/

Cutts emphasized that as they maintain Google’s top position as a search engine, they still continue to do what they’ve done in the past which is to always aim for search quality. Acknowledging the high regard of people for Google, he pointed out that they are serious in working for search quality and will always keep improving for the long term.

For people curious about this Google Caffeine update, you can test it yourself using the url http://www2.sandbox.google.com and find out the differences between using it and the original Google search engine. Keep track of indexing speed and accuracy in the search results.

Without a doubt, Social Networking has changed the world of making money online. People can now market to specific groups of people and introduce them to what they have to offer for free!. If you are not currently using social networking as a means to market your business, I highly recommend you get started as soon as possible as it is a highly effective and free method of advertising that can be used at any time.

Here is a List of Social Networking Sites; The Top 9 Most Popular Sites that you have to choose from on the Internet:

1. MySpace: This is a general, worldwide site that can be used for almost anything from business, to music, to blogging.

2. FaceBook: This is another very popular general site that is great for networking and attracting leads.

3. Twitter: This is a great site that allows you to be updated to what your friends are doing at any and all times of the day with what they call a “Tweet”.

4. YouTube: This social networking site enables you to share videos to brand yourself and business and demonstrate your products and/or services.

5. LinkedIn: This is a professional social networking site used for businesspeople to be able to network with other people in their field of work.

6. Squidoo: This is a popular social networking site that lets you create a page, or “lens”, about any topic you wish to write about.

7. Xanga: Another site where you can create a blog, share photos and videos, etc…

8. MSN Groups: A social networking community for connecting with any person also using MSN.

9. AOL Hometown: This is also a networking community designed for the purpose of socializing and connecting with other people.

How to Use Social Networking Sites for Business and Marketing:

Social networking sites are a great way to promote your business, by generating interest and traffic to your websites for free. The best way to do this is to market and brand yourself as an expert in your industry by writing about your success and experience in a friendly, helpful way. Keep it simple and stay humble and you will be sure to generate genuine interest and honest inquiries. Get involved with the forums, discussions and blogs. Offer helpful tips and information and you will be sure to build your business in a steady and powerful manner while developing your personal brand as a knowledgeable expert in your field!

Does this sound familiar?

You’ve picked a topic that your ideal readers are dying to know more about. You can write about the topic with authority. You’ve even chosen an interesting angle. In short, you’ve got a killer post that should bring your blog thousands of new readers.

You’re also smart enough to realize that you need to tell other people about it. So, you send an email to all of the top bloggers in your niche, pointing them to the post. Then you sit back and wait for the links to come rolling in.

But nothing happens.

You don’t get any links. You don’t even get a reply from any of the bloggers you emailed. You check your stats, and none of them even clicked the link that you sent them.

No, you got ignored. And worse, you now realize that no one is paying attention to you. You wonder, could you really be that much of a nobody, that no one would even read your email?

Yep. You could.

The Oldest Blogging Myth

“Content is king.”

It sounds good in principle. Produce a truly great piece of content, and you’ll get all the links you could ever hope for.

Maybe it worked too, several years ago. The Web used to be a fairly quiet place compared to what it is now, and it was easier for people to notice great blog posts.

But not anymore.

Now great is no longer good enough. The Web is full of so much remarkable content that bloggers don’t have enough time to read it all, much less link to it.

If you want links now, you need to be more than great. You need to be connected.
The Secret to Building a Popular Blog

Remember the saying “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?”

Well, it’s kind of true. A mediocre writer that’s friends with every member of the Technorati 100 will become a popular blogger faster than a brilliant writer with no friends at all.

Why? Because bloggers link more often to their friends than anyone else. If you write a reasonably good piece of content that interests their audience, they’ll link to you, mainly because they like you.

The secret to building a popular blog isn’t just writing tons of brilliant content. It’s also having tons of well-connected friends.
How to Make Friends with Popular Bloggers

So… how are you supposed to make friends with all of these popular bloggers and get them to link to your best posts?

Traditional wisdom says you should link to their posts, hoping they’ll notice you and start reading your blog. Sometimes it works, but in my experience, you need to be a little more creative. Here are some ideas to get you started:

* Write a guest post that gets lots of traffic and adoring comments
* Attend conferences that all of the “Who’s Who” of your niche go to and network your tail off
* Volunteer to “vote” for any posts that they’re pushing on social media sites like Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon
* Email them an irresistible question, hoping to spark a discussion
* Leave lots of truly memorable comments
* Interview them in either a post or a podcast, making sure to ask lots of intelligent questions
* Join their private membership program (like Teaching Sells) and make lots of smart posts in the forums

Give and Ye Shall Receive

We’re not talking about anything new here. Really, it comes down to one of the oldest principles of persuasion: reciprocity.

Contrary to what many people think, A-list bloggers aren’t islands, separate and self-sufficient. They deal with problems and annoyances, just as much as anyone else. If you can help alleviate them, they’ll thank and remember you for it.

The key is finding ways that you can be genuinely useful to them. Make yourself relevant and then use that opportunity to start building a relationship.

Give it a few months, and then start pointing them to your best and most relevant content. They’ll probably link to you anytime you do anything interesting, bringing you lots of readers. They’ll also introduce you to other popular bloggers, giving you a chance to do more favors and expand your network.

It’s hard work, but it’s worth it. If you put as much effort into building relationships as you do writing great content, you’ll have a popular blog in no time.

And better yet, you’ll have made friends with some of the most interesting people on the web. That’s a reward in and of itself.