Hi
Gang,
Thanks for
being here, I value every one of you
and truly hope that you become successful online!
Summer is
here and people with online businesses are re-tooling
and catching up on things they just haven't gotten to
yet. I'm doing the same thing but I haven't accomplished
what I thought I would have by now.
The restructuring
of 9 Mistakes Online is going to take more time than I
thought, but that's ok, it will be for the best in the
long term. For you as a valued member, the changes in
9 Mistakes Online will be beneficial.
There will
be more content, more tools, more detail for other pieces
of online business success for you to use.
This edition
is fairly lengthy and has solid content...you'll be glad
you took the time to read it. There's 2 articles in this
edition and an intro with 2 parts: online credibility
and how it affects sales on products online and
getting your email past the filters!
Enjoy the
issue!
Once again,
thanks for being here, your membership to this e-zine
is what matters most to me as an Internet marketer.
"The Regular
Guy"
Karl Augustine
P.S. Webmasters:
If your site is complementary
sites to 9 Mistakes Online and would like to exchange
links, please go to the "Add URL"
link at the bottom of all pages of this site. I'll be
happy to exchange links with you. Thanks.
In
this edition of "Starting
Smart!"
*Intro
by Karl, 2 topics - Online credibility
for more sales and
email filtering.
*Featured Article #1: "Do
Commas In Your Keywords Metatag Affect Ranking?"
by John Ricera
*Remember to get your Viral tools to boost traffic to
your web site and make money at the same time.
*Featured
Article #2: "Use
this JavaScript to Hide Your eMail from Spambots"
Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic
*Welcome new subscribers!
*Copyright and Publisher Info
Intro
by Karl...
1.
Online credibility, a key element to more sales!
People naturally
are just flat out nervous to buy things online. They don't
know you, you don't know them, they don't know if they're
going to get stiffed, mislead, or just plain robbed.
Still, consumer
confidence with online merchants has gotten better in
the past couple of years, but that doesn't mean your online
credibility isn't at stake when you try to sell someone
something that you're saying is 'useful' or solves their
problem.
Make sure
you let your 'would-be' customer know what you're about,
why they should listen to you and what you can do for
them...and back it up, prove it to them if you can.
I've noticed
almost a 45% increase in conversions for my SEO site (SEOexpertinterview.com)
by adding the 'prove
it!' link. The 'prove
it' link allows the web site visitor to actually see
first hand that my system works, they can actually go
to Google and see with their own eyes that I have (at
minimum) 36 keywords (I'm goin' for 100+!) that have page
1 rankings for my chosen keywords on Google.
It is very effective because there's
no question whatsoever that what I am telling the visitor
is true and they can benefit the same way I did from the
information in the product. The visitor can put the keywords
into Google and see the results right in front of them,
instantly. Foolproof!
The point
is, do all you can to increase your credibility and put
the visitor in the frame of mind to buy because you've
made them trust you, undeniably!
2.
Email filtering, you're emails are not getting read!
I've gotten
an education this week on getting emails past the ISP's
filters and I didn't realize how important it really is
to online business. Email filters are certainly taking
the bite out of email marketing lately.
But the email
filtering is actually a good thing because the spamming
that goes on has got to be counterbalanced...someone
or something has to make sure spamming isn't tolerated!
I've adjusted
some information for you as a subscriber, you can see
how to make sure you get my messages by visiting the "thxforjoining"
page.
Evading email
filtering has been a solid business for developers and
marketers in the past and its only going to get more intense.
The experts say that up to 40% of all email doesn't get
sent through to the user.
AOL has a
strong email filtering system and so do all the other
larger ISP's.
Comcast eats
a ton of email also.
So what's
an Internet marketer to do?
Well, you
can add a toolbar to your offering, but there's no guarantee
your subscribers will download it. You can buy expensive
software that adds icons to the users toolbar on the start
up menu - this work very well, but its a little pricey.
But, you
can also educate yourself on what words to use to make
sure your emails get through to your subscriber or "would-be"
customer.
Better still,
you can use the best tool on the market to ensure that
your emails get through. I've looked around a long time
for something like this, and nothing comes close! Dori
Friend has a terrific solution that's affordable, she
left no stone unturned. Her "make sure your email
gets through" service is as good as it gets.
I won't go
into details, just trust me if you're a list owner, check
it out right now!
E-filtrate!
E-filtrate
has it all, and is endorsed by big name marketers...all
for good reason, its the best on the 'Net for email editing
to bypass email filtering.
E-filtrate
Enjoy the
rest of this edition and thanks again for reading.
Karl Augustine
"The Regular Guy"
(c) Karl Augustine
*Featured
Article:
"Do
Commas In Your Keywords Metatag Affect Ranking?"
by
John Ricera
One of our members recently
reported that Yahoo was recommending separating the
keywords in your meta-tag using commas. As we know from
experience, the official representatives of the search
engines don't always give us the best advice as it pertains
to ranking. We decided to check out this claim using
a statistical analysis to find out if using commas in
your keywords meta-tag had any affect on ranking on
Yahoo. We also studied Google to see if there was any
affect on that search engine.
Here is the methodology
I used to answer this question. I gathered the results
of the queries naturally performed last month by myself
and four associates using Yahoo and Google. I then fetched
the pages and looks at any keywords meta-tags on the
listed pages. I tallied the results for the first 8
rankings on both Yahoo and Google (keeping the results
separate) and then converted them into a percentage
of the total results for each search engine.
Here is the graph showing
Google and Yahoo results:
http://searchenginegeek.com/graphs/df03.gif
(new browser)
The X-axis shows the ranking
(from #1 through #8) of the search engine results in
the study. The Y-axis shows the percentage of domains
that contained commas in the keywords meta-tag.
The first thing to notice
is that roughly 40%-50% of all pages in the first eight
rankings have a keywords meta-tag with commas separating
the keywords. That really doesn't tell us much about
the ranking of such pages though, only the general distribution
of pages with commas in a keywords meta-tag in the top
8 results.
Still, I was surprised
that the percentages were so high. For several years,
the general consensus was that no significant
search engine even utilized the keywords meta-tag (this
was before Yahoo switched from service Google results
to their own). With that general consensus, I expected
that a vast majority of sites had dropped using this
meta-tag. However, over 40% of top ranked sites continue
to persist in their use. I find that interesting.
The next thing to notice
is that Google showed absolutely no ranking difference
between sites that use commas in the keywords meta-tag
vs. sites that do not use commas in the keywords meta-tag
or have no keywords meta-tag at all. The ranking correlation
was an exact zero on a scale of -100 to +100.
Yahoo's ranking correlation
was a -28 on a scale of -100 to +100 for pages having
commas in the keywords meta-tags.
I generally treat results
between -35 and +35 as insignificant (don't not affect
ranking or the affect on ranking is small to insignificant).
However, since Yahoo recommended
using commas, I did find the -28 result interesting.
Once again, it appears that the official representatives
of a search engine are steering us wrong (at least for
purposes of ranking higher on their search engine).
This result indicates that using commas is either insignificant
or if there is any significant affect... it is NEGATIVE!
Advice: Don't use commas
in your keywords meta-tag. Pages that use commas in
the keywords meta-tag do NOT rank higher and there may
be a slight negative affect on Yahoo.
Jon Ricerca is one of the
leading researchers and authors of the Search Engine
Ranking Factor (SERF) reports at SearchEngineGeek.com.
For access to the other
SERF reports, please visit:
http://www.SearchEngineGeek.com
| Webmasters:
Feel free to publish
any article that I have written to your web site.
To get a list of articles
that are "publishable",
click below - new browser
Karl's
Articles You Can Publish |
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*Featured
Article #2:
"Use
this JavaScript to Hide Your eMail from Spambots"
Copyright 2004 Ed Zivkovic
How to Hide Your eMail Address
from Spambots!
Ever wander why so many webmasters
refuse to insert their email address into the body of
their webpages?
The reason is to protect
their eMail address from email harvesting robots. These
robots crawl the Internet searching for email addresses
in order to build a spam list.
These spambots ignore the
robots.txt file. The robots.txt file is used to instruct
legitimate web crawling robots about where they can and
cannot go on your site. The file is observed by honest
search engine robots but not by spambots.
Spambots will also ignore
any instructions within the meta tags of your HTML. This
means that they just go around doing what they want violating
your rights as a webmaster. Spambots are boundary violators
just like the spammers who continue to do what they do.
That is, send spam.
Many webmasters today have
decided to use a contact form instead in an attempt to
throw the spambots off. This has served a dual purpose
for Internet marketers.
1. To keep the eMail address
safe from spambots.
2. Another webpage to use for the purpose of channeling
Page Rank (PR).
The contact form works fine,
but just in case you find the need to add your eMail address
into your webpages, you can use some JavaScript to hide
the eMail from the spambots.
Below you will discover two
Free JavaScript resources.
These JavaScripts are easy to use if you have access to
the HTML of your webpages. They can be added to any webpage
quickly and easily.
The Unspamable eMail Link
JavaScript
If you would like to display
your eMail link to humans but hide it from spambots, you
can use this Free cut-and-paste Unspamable email link
JavaScript from:
http://www.javascriptkit.com/script/script2/unspam.shtml
How to Edit the JavaScript
Select the JavaScript from
the text area then copy and paste it into your HTML document.
For help with copy and paste, visit:
http://webhome.idirect.com/~bowers/cutpaste/htm/index2.htm
You will notice two variables
within the script:
var name = "protected";
var domain = "cdrsoft.com";
To insert the email address
webmaster@yourdomain.com, simply replace the word "protected"
with the word "webmaster" and replace the domain
"cdrsoft.com" with "yourdomain.com".
That's it.
Automatic Encoding
Tool
This tool is easy to use.
Just insert the email address you wish to protect and
click the button called "Encode mail links":
http://www.bronze-age.com/nospam/encode.html
Also, you will need to download
a small file called "email.js" and upload it
to your website. Full details about this system are available
at:
http://www.bronze-age.com/nospam/index.html.
Advantages and Disadvantages
JavaScript - Adding an email
address builds trust with your visitors because when they
click your email link, their mail browser opens and they
know that when when they send that eMail, it is going
directly to you.
Contact Form - With a contact
form, you are sending valuable Page Rank to yet another
page on your site. From that page, you can send more Page
Rank to still other pages.
Note to Content
Management Software Developers
Some article submission services
publish authors articles along with the email address
of the author. In this day and age, this is unacceptable.
I would call this version "the barely ready beta
version". In other words, it is ready for BETA release
after this problem is fixed.
If you develop Article Publishing
software, and the published articles include the authors
eMail address, you are on a losing streak. I have spoken
to owners of this type of software and they are on the
lookout for something better.
This applies to other types
of software scripts which publish HTML with an eMail address.
Not everybody wants to open up free eMail dumping accounts.
About the Author:
The author, Ed Zivkovic is
a self-taught webmaster. His website (http://www.ezau.com)
contains articles with all sorts of tips for work at home
webmasters.
Contact Ed here: http://www.ezau.com/zcontact.html
*Welcome
New Subscribers!
For those of you just joining,
welcome!
Your time is valuable
and I'll do my level best to make this "read"
time well spent. I am just a regular guy, just like many
of you out there. I stuck with it, and now am having a
blast doing what I love to do. Keep a positive attitude
and you can do just about anything...seems like old news,
but it works and we all can use a little reminding now
and then.
Please forward this e-zine
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