Marketing Public Relations in 3 Easy Steps

Step 1

Develop a news-worthy, informative release that both introduces your company and informs a targeted audience about anything from new key hires, new service offerings, how a political climate affects your small business, or promoting your attendance of an event.

The key in step one is to write the release so that it both informs without sounding promotional and uses key words, a couple of links, and an About Us.

Step 2

Prepare the release, select related topics, identify relevant keywords and target its distribution based on geography and interest.

A targeted release will result in more valuable traffic. What you don’t want to do is submit releases that drive a tremendous amount of traffic that never convert to something more.

Step 3

Choose a delayed send of the release. The release should be timely, but sending the release out on a Friday night will result in it being seen as “old news” by the public come Monday morning.

Conclusion ::

Your online press release is as easy to distribute as cut and paste. It’s more powerful than self-serving online banner ads and it’s much less expensive than you might think.

Give online press releases a try. You’ll see that it’s really pretty easy.

Page Rank(PR) Algorithm

PageRank is a registered trademark and patented by Google on January 9, 1999 which protects a family of algorithms used to assign a numerical relevance of the documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are discussed by experts in search engine optimization. The PageRank system is used by the popular Google search engine to help you determine the importance or relevance of a page. It was developed by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University.

The initial PageRank algorithm where their creators presented the prototype of Google: "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine":

PR (A) = (1 - d) + d (PR (T1) / C (T1) + ... + PR (Tn) / C (Tn)



Where PR (A) is the PageRank of a page; PR (Ti) is the PageRank of pages that link to you A, C (Ti) is the number of outbound links on the page you; d is a variable factor which can be between 0 and 1.

PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of the value of a specific page. Google interprets a link in a page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks beyond the volume of votes, or links a page receives and also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages considered "important" worth more, and help to make other pages "important". The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank of all pages that link.

Benefits of Online Marketing Public Relations

Aside from possible media exposure, online press releases are an extraordinarily easy way to increase your website’s reach and rank within search engines.

The reach of your website is dramatically increased as your promotional press release makes its way all over the web through news distribution sites. This larger reach opens up numerous channels for traffic to get to your site.

In addition to increasing the reach of your site, online press releases also increase your site’s rank. Search Engines rely on more than keyword frequency within a site to determine if the site should be displayed or not. They also rely on the number of sites linking to your site. The thinking is that the more sites that link to yours, the more likely your site stands as credible and expert.

Whenever you submit any press release.Within minutes the release is featured all over the web from new-related sites to industry blogs. Overnight your site will be seen by search engines as being linked to by not one or two sites, but hundreds. This increase in the number of sites linking to your own will both increase the number of channels for traffic to make it to your site, but also increase your site’s rank, achieving a higher position in related search engine queries.

Optimization For The Yahoo Search Engine

Most companies today take advantage of the internet as a major marketing and information dissemination tool. To maximize the use of the internet, companies rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their websites and web pages muster enough traffic. Although search engine optimization aims to have websites at the top of almost all search engine result pages (SERPs), it’s quite common to see search engine optimization focusing on major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

--- Giant Search Engines Targeting ---
It is hard to do search engine optimization resulting to a good ranking in almost all search engines since every search engine relies on different basis and categories on ranking sites. In other words, different search engines make use of different algorithms to determine every site’s importance. Criteria that search engines set for result ranking vary from search engine to search engine. As a result most SEO service providers opt to maximize sites for search engines that can provide the most ideal volume of traffic.

--- Google-centric SEO is Short-Sighted SEO ---
Most SEO’s would basically focus their efforts to maximize websites relative to Google because it is the most commonly used search engine. But if you take a closer look into the matter, you will conclude that disregarding the searches done through Yahoo could mean a considerable amount of lost traffic. Although Yahoo does not process as much searches as Google, it still consists a good fraction of the searches done on the internet.

--- Balancing Google and Yahoo SEO ---
Both Yahoo and Google depend on keyword density to rank a website. The only difference is that to optimize your site with the Yahoo search engine, a higher keyword frequency is required. Keyword density is more important a factor for Yahoo than it is for Google; although you don’t need to use the same word or group of words to attain the ideal keyword density. Yahoo will consider synonyms and other word variants that are of the same or related meaning to the given keyword to make up the keyword density calculation. Even the plural from of the keyword is still counted when considering keyword density.
Taking the keyword factor into consideration, though, Google and Yahoo possess a very different approach in keyword density. Since Yahoo is very much keyword-based, you may fear that stuffing your site with too many keywords would endanger your site ranking with Google. However, this is not really the case.
It is true that Google may turn its back on your site because of overwhelming keyword count. But as stated above, your site does not need to contain the same keyword form to attain the keyword density for Yahoo. Taking advantage of the fact that Yahoo counts synonyms, plural forms and variants in assessing keyword density, your site could justify both Yahoo’s and Google’s keyword requirement.

--- Yahoo SEO Special ---
Content is very important to attain a good ranking with the Yahoo search engine. This refers to both quantity and quality of your site’s contents. Be mindful of relevance of your site’s contents to a given keyword and at the same time make sure that your site is full of it. Adding relevant contents from time to time would also be a good strategy to take the top spots with the Yahoo search engine results pages.
Aside from content, format should not be taken for granted if you want to have Yahoo on your side. Unlike Google’s web spiders, Yahoo’s bot doesn’t dig deeper into your sites pages to index them. It is therefore very necessary for you to create a very good site map to guide this very lazy animal!

And lastly, even though Yahoo is very much into your site’s content when it comes to ranking in the SERPs, don't forget that inbound links are still very important. Aside from making sure that your site does well with Google when it comes to links, Yahoo will also need the help it gets from inbound links to index your pages.

Increase your online business with PPC advertisements

PPC advertisement is the most important way to attract targeted traffic to your site that results increased sales and ROI. Mostly online business companies today prefer PPC advertising in order to get better sales and revenues. In this article, you will learn the 4 ways to maximize your sales and profits through PPC advertising:

1. Understand deeply the market trend and your potential clients. Identify the keywords that bring more profit and use them in your PPC campaign. To make your campaign more targeted, analyze your target market. Identify their gender, their buyer power, their needs, and the keywords they are most likely to use whenever they use search engines. These will guide you in making a suitable PPC campaign that is highly targeted.

2. Meet the needs of your target market. Identify the problems that your target markets are currently facing and what products or service you can offer them to resolve their pressing issues.

3. Optimize the landing page of your PPC campaign. Your landing page is a very crucial element in ensuring successful sales, thus it is equally important that your landing page is enticing. You can do this by posting strong recommendation or unbiased reviews of your products. You can also post testimonials of your satisfied clients to further entice your online visitors to purchase from you.

4. Evaluate the performance of your PPC ads and your landing page. Monitor, track and evaluate each aspect of your PPC campaign. Are you getting more than enough clicks but not making a sale? Then, there must a problem with your landing page.

PPC advertising, when done in the right way, can bring enormous sales and traffic to your site. Thus, you must know how to use this tool properly in order to augment your profits.

Submit Sitemap to MSN, Google and Yahoo

In November 2006, Google, Yahoo! and MSN joined forces to support a new industry standard for sitemaps: Sitemaps 0.90 (see MSN announcement here). As long as webmasters follow the protocol, they can ensure their sites are fully and consistently indexed across all the major search engines (a real step forward). This article is important for all those with missing or poorly ranked pages.

The official site for the joint venture is at http://www.sitemaps.org/ and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it's syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=your sitemap_url

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, We provide instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three search engines...

Creating your Sitemap

Some hosting providers(for example 1and1) provide utilities via their web control panel, to create your sitemap, so you should always check with your provider first. If this service is not available, then make a visit to http://www.sitemapspal.com/ and enter your site URL into the generator box. Copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, then save-and-upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual amendments), pay a visit to the SmartIT XML Sitemap validator where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.

Submit sitemap to MSN

MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at April 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the following pages:

MSN Site Owner Help
Livesearch official blog (where future announcements are likely to be found)

Whilst MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com! You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

For example, to submit the sitemap for this site, the correct entry in the browser is as follows:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.seo-expert-services.co.uk/rss.xml

Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests that submission to moreover.com will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3 weeks.

Update 18/07/07: MSN still do not support direct submission but now suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Submit sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verfiy that you indeed own them. The verifiaction is achieved by adding a metatag between the head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:

<meta content="unique code advised by google" name="verify-v1">

There are full instructions on how to do this on the Google site.

Submit sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit sitemap to Ask

Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap, you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is located:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

After clicking return, you will get a reassuring message from Ask that they have received your submission. Very neat!

Some Web Design Mistakes and Golden Rules

1. Keep Everything Obvious

Visitors to a website expect certain conventions, breaking these is a great way of losing visitors. People expect to find the navigation at the top of a page or on the left hand side. Logos are mostly found on the top left. Much research has been conducted into how people view and use web pages. The good news is that you do not to know all of this; instead look at how larger companies such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft structure their pages and the language they use, then emulate them.

2. Limit Colours

A website using too many colours at a time can be overwhelming to many users and can make a website look cheap and tacky. Any users with colour blindness or contrast perception difficulties may even be unable to use the site.

Limiting a palette to 2 or 3 colours will nearly always lead to a slicker looking design and has the added bonus of simplifying your design choices, reducing design time.

Software like Color Wheel Pro can greatly simplify the creation of a pallet by showing which colours sit well together. If you really do not have the eye for design then software like this provides the perfect way of escaping monotone or badly combined colour schemes.

If your site uses blue and yellow together or red and green then it may present problems to anyone suffering with colour blindness. Vischeck.com provide free software that can simulate different types of colour blindness.

3. Be Careful With Fonts

The set of fonts available to all visitors of a website is relatively limited. Add to that the possibility of a user having a visual impairment then the options become even smaller. It is advisable to stick to fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Courier, Times, Geneva and Georgia. They may not be very interesting but your content should be more interesting than your font and if it can't be read, what is the point of having a site?

Black text on a white background is far easier for the majority of people to read than white text on a black background. If you have large amounts of text then a white or pale background is far more user friendly. Always ensure that there is a good contrast between any text and its background. Blue text on a blue background is okay as long as the difference in shade is significant.

Verdana is often cited as being the easiest to read on the screen. Georgia is probably the best option for a serif font.

4. Plan for Change

If you fix the height of your page to 600 pixels will you still be able to add additional menu items without completely redesigning your page?

The ability to add or remove content from a website is fundamental to the ongoing success of it. Having to rewrite the entire web page or website each time you want to make a small change is sure fire way to kill your interest in your own site and will negatively impact your overall design and usability.

Getting a good idea of how your website is likely to grow will clarify how best to structure your layout. For example, a horizontal navigation is often more restrictive than a side navigation unless you use drop down menus; if your navigation is likely to grow and you hate drop down menus then your design choice has been 99% made for you!

Understanding how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), avoiding unconventional layouts and complicated backgrounds will all help enormously.

5. Be Consistent

Again, don't make your visitors think! About how to use your site at least. If your navigation is at the top on your homepage, it should be at the top on all other pages too. If your links are coloured red ensure the the same convention is used on all sections.

By using CSS correctly you can make most of this happen automatically leaving you free to concentrate on the content.

6. Keep it Relevant

A picture is better than a thousand words but if the picture you took on holiday is not relevant to your Used Car Sales website then you should really replace it with something which reflects the content or mood of the page; a photo of a car perhaps!

If you can take something off of your web page without it adversely affecting the message, appearance or legality of your website you should do it without hesitation.

Avoid the need to add images, Flash animations or adverts just because you have space. This wastes bandwidth and obscures the intentions of your website. If you absolutely must fill the space, then exercise your imagination to find something as relevant as possible.

Keeping your content focused will ultimately help your search-engine rankings.

7. Become a CSS Expert

Cascading Style Sheets should be any web designer's best friend. CSS makes it is possible to separate the appearance and layout of your page from the content. This has huge benefits when it comes to updating and maintaining your site, making your site accessible and making your site easy for search engines to read.

8. Avoid Complexity

Using standard layouts for your web page will save you development time and make your site easier to use. Pushing the boundaries nearly always leads to quirky behaviour, cross-browser problems, confused site visitors and maintenance headaches. Unless you really do like a challenge then avoid complexity wherever possible.