SEO Epiphany of an Offline Marketer Turned Online Marketer

SEO can be maddening for offline marketers such as myself transitioning to the online marketing world. In making this transition I just had an epiphany sparked by a discussion I just had with one of my Skype discussion groups. In offline marketing we are taught to use emotionally charged words depending on our targeted market. Words that evoke emotions such as greed, fear, love, hate, pride etc. are utilized throughout our marketing and is probably equivalent to keywords in online marketing.

When I sold Real Estate for buyers we focused a lot on pride, in my tax business fear was a dominating emotion especially fear of the IRS and fear of audits. In my tax business I specialized in Home Based Business owners and my two biggest client groups were Daycare Providers and Network Marketers. The most effective emotion in the Network Marketing industry was greed.

In offline marketing we send our advertising out through mediums that get us the best results. Newspapers and periodicals are sent to people's homes, flyers are put into people's hands or on their door our car, radio is broadcast to people listening to their radios. We learn how to get a response through our ads with these emotionally charged words.

Then we are taught how to write copy that not only uses these emotionally charged words but we are taught how to use tie downs like wouldn't it, couldn't it, shouldn't it. We are taught how to develop closing sequences that get lots of little yeses leading to the big yes.

Then we come to the online marketing arena and all the rules change. At first the changes are not obvious. We hear familiar terms like call to action and compelling headlines. But unlike in the offline marketing arena it appears that to play in this game you have to contend with this huge monster called Google. And this creates a huge paradigm shift in how one has to develop their marketing tactics. Offline we send our stuff out, online you have to be found. And you have to be found through Google. Bing does not really matter; Yahoo does not really matter only the Google search engine at this time really matters.

Sure there are advertising sites, Google AdWords, Craigslist and Facebook Classified ads and who knows what else is bound to pop up but none of these are true direct response marketing and function more like billboards and posters in high traffic areas. The closes thing to marketing material being sent directly to a person is email marketing which due to spam and individuals emails being overwhelmed with tons of stuff it is becoming increasingly ineffective unless you have a dedicated list looking forward to stuff you are sending them.

It seems that in order to market successfully on line you have to find out two things - what words or phrases that people are using to search for stuff on Google and what words and phrases that Google does not like. Online copywriters don't so much worry about closing sequences as they do Search Engine Optimization often called SEO. That means writing copy in such a way that Google spiders will find you and elevate you to the top of the heap on their clients searched words or phrases.

Besides such little things as meta tags, title tags, h1 tags and making sure your keywords and phrases are at the top of your copy, SEO is about two key elements. One is keywords, you know those words or phrases that people plug into Google to search for stuff and secondly Google perceived relevancy of your copy. Two websites being equal as far as keywords are concerned Google's perception of relevancy will determine who gets the top spots.

The precise keywords and phrases have to be strategically placed in your copy. But you have to be careful because certain words and phrases it seems Google has a hatred for and will band you. Keywords such as riches, wealth, success and money are among these words Google hates and could possibly even penalize you for using by forbidding your site from ever showing in their search results (I have a lot to say about such power being in the hands of one company but not today)

The density or the amount of times your selected keywords or phrases are placed in your copy becomes critical, too often and you will be penalized, not enough and you won't be recognized. Best rule of thumb is to use them were it makes sense in your copy. Trying to figure out percentages is simply not working with today's advanced algorithms. Best to focus on content with the understanding that if your key words or phrases are not in your copy then when people search for it you will not be found so where it makes sense you must use them.

Next is relevancy despite all the stuff we hear about backlinks there is far more to being determined as relevant by Google search engines than backlinks. Simple things such as being listed in the yellow pages can make your site more relevant than another site. Whereas backlinks are still very important you can have link spam that could make you irrelevant with Google. This topic is just too extensive a topic to cover here, besides this is about an epiphany concerning my transition from offline marketer to full time online marketing. But I will add this tidbit that I have learned about being perceived as relevant with Google. Avoid duplicate content. websites with identical pages, scraped content, heavily distributed articles and boiler plate pages/sites can hurt your relevancy perception with Google.

Even when you are the original author putting the exact same article into e-zines and blogs can hurt your relevancy if the same articles are posted on the websites you want to come up in the Google search engines. On the sites you want to rank in Google keep all content as original and unique as possible.

Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?SEO-Epiphany-of-an-Offline-Marketer-Turned-Online-Marketer&id=6713183

Why I Use an Anonymous Web Proxy Service

I've been using an anonymous web proxy service for some time now and I don't think I would ever go back to ordinary surfing.    It's not that I am some sort of shadowy cyber criminal with some secret online life, no I pretty much surf the same web sites as everyone else, I certainly don't go to illegal or criminal sites.

If you want to know why, it's simply because I value my privacy and I know what data is stored in the average organisation and how it is protected.   Take your ISP for example, they logs pretty much everything that passes through them - every single request, every web page, every email and even every image is logged.   The vast majority of this traffic is in cleartext so the majority of it is instantly readable and can be matched to your address. 

It's amazing what these logs can tell about people you can build up a lot of information about someone from what they do on the web.  So do you know who has access to these logs at your ISP, what controls are in place, how is this information stored ?

If you don't know your not alone but after 25 years working in IT, I'll pretty much bet you wouldn't like to know the answer anyway.  This is the problem with much internet communication, it's so completely open - occasionally you'll obviously use a secure site to type in your credit card details.   Yet up to the point all your information is flying across the internet ether completely unprotected and accessible to anyone who has the will and the knowledge to intercept it. 

Believe me there are plenty of people who do have an interest in your information

Why do you think a European Directive was recently passed - Directive on Mandatory Retention of Communications Traffic Data.   It's  a bit of a mouthful but what it's  actually doing  is forcing your ISP to keep a record of every email sent, every internet session and web site visited for two years.   So think back at every web site you've ever visited for the last two years and it's on record and can be matched to your own little electronic profile.

How does that make you feel?

Even if you've done nothing wrong it's bound to make you feel a little uneasy after all why do Governments want all this information about us?   If you want to feel a little more uneasy, many Governments are looking at the UK Governments idea who are going to store all this information in a central database accessible to certain organisations.     Fear not US citizens you'll not be left out - the FBI are pushing hard for similar data retention facilities.

Storing data is dangerous

If you store data you have to be prepared to take good care of it.   All the privacy erosion concerns aside, the more personal data is stored about us, the more people will have access to it.  How thorough do you think is the vetting procedure for an ISP Technical engineer ?  Who potentially has access to huge amounts of this data.    Even if implicitly trust our govenrments with this tremendous invasion of our privacy - fraudsters, identity thieves and others can create mayhem with this sort of information. 

These logs are gold dust to anyone trying to steal our identity for example - they can match up users, with web sites, pick up password and all sorts of personal information.  Even  though a small part of this information is encrypted when you're actually using a secure web site (with the padlock below) there's plenty of other personal information available to compromise your usernames, password etc.

An identity thief can pick up huge amounts of data about the average person all ready, an hour or two picking up all your web traffic and they'll also have where you bank, what web sites you visit and logon to and a whole heap more.  This unfortunately is the tip of the iceberg and I suspect you'll see many, many people protecting  their privacy online soon from identity thieves, hackers and even our friendly snooping governments.

Everything I do online is private, I use a fast professional service that anonymises my connection and encrypts all the data.  My web logs sit next to yours in a server room at my ISP however mine are all completely encrypted and unreadable by anyone, whereas yours are in clear text.

One thing I should warn people about is the use of free anonymous web proxy services which you see all over the web.   Be very, very careful about these and think why are they supplying a very expensive and resource hungry service for free?   Remember also that by using one of these free proxies you are redirecting your traffic via this server whose owner can capture and log your data himself.   Many of these are owned and run by Eastern European Hacking groups as an easy way to gain peoples traffic, so be careful.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Why-I-Use-an-Anonymous-Web-Proxy-Service&id=1679289