Why are links so important?

Bad company corrupts character. Links are much like referrals in the real world. The better people you hang with the more perceived validation you receive. When you started in business you probably did not know very many people but as you got more clients then people would refer business to you and you knew people you could refer out to. Links work the same way in the virtual world. 

If you get a link (referral) from a valid website like an .edu or .gov then Google does not need to find out if those organizations are legitimate. They are which means you are in there mind. The more valid companies within your sphere of influence will build better validation for search engine spiders. In the real world this takes time and a lot of effort. Expect the same thing in the virtual world but also expect the retun on investment. 

What happens when you go from 2 links to 250,000 overnight? Well you guessed it. The Google flag goes off and they say "You cannot build your business that fast so why would we believe you could do it virtually. This is a great way to get banned. Growing your online business is like growing a regular business. Slow and steady and you WILL win the race.  

The benefits of video testimonials on your website

It is obvious that the referred customer is the best customer. They have a reputable person that they trust sending them to purchase a product or service from a worthy company. The trusted friend has saved them time by doing the research and was satisfied with their purchasing experience. This leads to an easy sale. This concept can be translated to the web via video testimonials.

The fact is that there are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. Understanding these different methods of learning is important to how video testimonials can educate almost every type visitor that comes to your site.

The visual learner retains information that is seen rather than heard or spoken, the auditory learner listens to learn, and the kinesthetic learner connects emotionally with an experience to learn. (For more information on this topic visit http://www.usd.edu/trio/tut/ts/style.html )

Video appears to be the most universal way to communicate with and educate your web site visitors no matter what learning style. Written testimonials are good however, will only capture a small portion of your visitors. The main idea is to turn your visitors into customers. Video testimonials will accomplish this by capturing the attention of a much larger portion of your audience.

Stay tuned to this blog for examples of clients that have used the Magnetiks Video Testimonials Service to turn their website visitors into customers.

Are your visitors Viewers, Readers, or Users?

Do you know the profile of your website visitors? Regular website statistics can provide a lot of information in regard to who is visiting your site. Unfortunately business owners do not have time to give these statistics a proper analysis. This is an essential part of determining exactly who is on your site and how to profit from it. Not knowing can cost you big dollars. It is absolutely critical to have a professional give a true evaluation and determine which way to shift or change the website based on the stats. With all of this taken into consideration it is apparent that hiring a professional web analytics company to gain true perspective on your visitors is a must for any serious business.

Below I have given some insight as to the three categories of web visitors. The dollar signs represent what type of revenue you can expect from each visitor type:

Type 1: The Viewer $ - The viewer type is primarily on the web to be entertained. They like Flash elements, animations, shiny colors, and overall graphic and audio driven sites as appose to text. The viewer type make the fewest online purchases.

Type 2: The Reader $$ - The reader type is more only online to read blogs, articles, forums, and magazine or book like sites. In other words they are using it for free reading material. Reader type visitors do have a higher online purchase rate than the viewer type however, it is unlikely that their purchases will cover your business costs.

Type 3: The User $$$ - The user type should be any business's target market. These users prefer mostly text based, fast loading, direct to the point sites. They want to move through a linear purchase process and find there desired information, product, or service quickly and easily. Any distracting Flash, graphics, unwanted ads, and such will drive this user from your site in an instant and they will never return.

It is possible with traditional web statistics and a professional evaluation of them to develop a primarily user type of visitor profile or audience on your website. For more information call Magnetiks @ (281)362-9855 or visit us at our main site: Magnetiks Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Friendly Flash???

For myself, Flash is a great tool. I am more the "viewer" catagory of website visitor. I love the intensive graphically enhanced sites that have the wow factor integrated. Cool intros, visually stunning headers with slick motion graphics and so on.The big problem with these Flash elements is that currently there are only a few solid ways to have Flash movies indexed by the search engines. Eveything that would normally be indexable is "locked away" in the Flash movie.

There are a few tricks that are emerging that can help solve this problem. While doing some research on this topic I came across a neat way to incorporate seemingly search engine friendly Flash navigation into any webpage. I hope this is somewhat helpful for those who are Flash advocates and plan to continue using it for web projects. Here are some quick tips from for overall good SEO Flash Design.

Key Factors For SEO Flash Design:
+ Clean design
+ Search Engine Optimization
+ Accessibility for a wide variety of browsers, including screen readers and mobile phones
+ Code validation and standards compliance
+ Correct functionality with IE

Follow the link below on tips for SEO friendly Flash:

CLICK HERE FOR SEO FRIENDLY FLASH TIPS

Custom Web Sites -vs- Templates

In today’s world of ever growing small business the internet can provide a cost effective method for any company to gain exposure. When you put your business online it is absolutely critical for your website to correctly translate your business model in every aspect. This kind of translation requires a custom web solution including: A proper analysis of your current business methods, services and products offered, and a modern interpretation of your image. Template based web pages are unable to correctly translate desired image onto the web in most cases. Templates are also, for the most part, difficult to expand upon in the future. Companies that offer mass template website packages work based on the volume of sites they sell rather than quality.

Custom sites built by professionals can provide a fully expandable, modern, solution that is a precise fit for your ever changing company needs. A website that works shows you a return on investment (ROI) because visitors can find and use it. A true custom solution requires working with you one on one for the most accurate depiction of your company model which will represent you well. This is essential with a Search Engine Marketing plan in place. Site traffic will increase significantly and it is crucial to have a solid, professional, and true representation of how you do business.

Press Release Submission - Free or Paid — Can it be any harder?

So my task this week was do some research on submitting a press release.  I was thinking

"Cool something that should be fairly easy to decipher." 

I thought writing it was 90% of the battle but I now realize that submitting to the right place is just as important as the writing of it maybe even more important because if you write something fabulous and no one ever sees it then who cares.

So I start my search by finding out who the top press release web sites:

prweb.com
prnewswire.com
prnewsnow.com

Of course all these cost to submit.  So of course being the frugal person that I am I decide to look for free press release distribution.  So I start my search with seochat.com to find out what maybe someone knows that I do not know.  I come across 2 lists of free press release submissions.  I will show part of one list :

http://www.afly.com
http://www.afreego.com
http://www.baygo.com/press
http://www.betanews.com
http://www.bizeurope.com/pressrelease.htm
http://www.worldcasinodirectory.com/press-release.htm
http://www.downloadjunction.com/submit_press_release
http://www.express-press-release.com

After going through these I felt the pressure that should not come from submitting a press release, so I narrowed my search to "Top Press Release Submitters"  and I found this article.

http://www.11amdesign.com/faq/index.php?sid=880316&lang=en&action=artikel&cat=26&id=1212&artlang=en

This list was based on 2 factors by Gary Logsdon on July 21, 2007:

1. Search Engine Friendliness
2. Circulation

This now became my starting point for finding the best free press release web sites.  Just so you know I will quote from Gary what these factors represent.

"Search Engine Friendliness - One important factor of a prevailing press release campaign is to gather backlinks and under anchor text, if possible. Since most press release sites do not allow backlinks, a notation has been made to the ones that do.

Circulation - The second important factor of the press release is getting your message to reach a widespread audience. Since some press release websites are visited by thousands of webmasters everyday, a notation has been made to the ones that do."

So according to the data  prleap.com would be the best choice.  And according to its web site it does tell you that you that more than likely will get your release online even in Google news if you pay the $50 Newswire Distribution fee.  But even you go the free route prleap.com, who have been around since 2003, press releases generally get included for FREE into Google News, Google, Yahoo Search, MSN, MSN Newsbot (UK) Moreover, Ask Jeeves, Teoma, News Now and many other leading sites.

Note: PRweb.com does guarantee your press release into 5 targeted industries and 2 metropolitan areas for $80 including Google and Yahoo news.

Now of course I need to submit and test to find out who does what they say and it goes where they say it goes.  Will let you know the results when they are in.

Well this is what I come up with so far but search continues to find the best places to submit to so if you happen to have a better place then please share and end my madness.

SEO Tool - xenu

One of the tools that I use to quickly find broken links on a web site as well as tell me the titles of the pages. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

The first thing you do is enter the url of the web site you would like to check. When I first check a site I do not check for external links, I run the report for inner linking. Let me give you an example: I was working on dugoutsports.com. XENU got stuck on url by producing more and more urls like this:

http://dugoutsports.magnetiksimedia.com/products_new.php?amp;action=buy_now&
products_id=21&page=1&products_id=96&action=buy_now&products_id=83

It kept adding the & over and over. So fixed it first. Then I noticed that my .htaccess was working for the linking page. So I fixed it next so the urls went from looking like this:

http://dugoutsports.magnetiksimedia.com/links.php?lPath=1&page=1&page=1&sort=2a

to this: http://www.dugoutsports.com/softball-leagues-l-1.html

Last but not least I noticed that pages the products new page with pagination was causing the spider a lot of issues so I came up with 2 solutions.

• Use the robot.txt file to tell the spiders not to index those pages.
• Change the setting to show only one page with no pagination.

I chose the later. After I ran the next report there were no broken links. Then I decided to check the external links by clicking the checkbox option. It found one broken external link to a pdf. So I uploaded the pdf to the server and referenced it locally.

I hope this too will help someone with their internal and external broken links.