Well, there is a rather simple way, although it is not guaranteed to work. What you must do first when developing your website, make sure you omit any commercial references. Make sure your website is informative and not for profit. When you have your website good and ready, full of valuable content (make sure that there is no broken links and under construction pages), you can submit it for review in Yahoo! Dir. Non-commercial websites can be submitted for free. If you’re lucky and your listing is approved, just wait a little bit and update your website with whatever you held off on to retain the non-commercial appearance.

When submitting your non-profit website to Yahoo, I would suggest trying to get a link from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) as well. Getting DMOZ to post your link is rather hard (that’s a material for another article altogether), so posting you website while it is still in the informative-non-commercial stage can increase your chances of getting your submission approved. Before you “commercialize” your site, you might want to do some research to find any other directories that give links to non-commercial websites (or are more favorable towards them) and do as much free link harvesting as you can. This approach may give you a good start with your link building efforts and jump start your website in the search engines.

Hope this short post helps you in your SEO endeavors!

- Konrad

How to get .edu links?

Together with content, links are the most important factor for your website’s search engine success. Of course, some links have much greater value than others. Due to their scarcity, incoming links from pages on .gov and .edu domains have [arguably] more value than those coming from the regular .com’s, .net’s, etc. So, how to get .EDU links? Fortunately, just because something is scarce doesn’t mean that we cannot get it.

The easiest way to get links from .edu domains are student pages. Many universities allow small hosting spaces on their servers for students’ use. As of yet, Google doesn’t [once again arguably] distinguish between an ‘actual’ university website and a student homepage, so those links are gold for an SEO.

Is your son or daughter currently attending a college or university? If so, get them to request a student page from the school’s IT department. Even if a given college doesn’t have the student page program, maybe they’re willing to start one if propped just right. If you’re not a student yourself, maybe your alma mater has an alumni program that could offer you an opportunity to score a link? It won’t hurt to ask and the benefit may very well be worth it!

If that option is not open to you, befriend some college students! Keep in mind that students usually share two characteristics: they all like beer and most of them are usually broke. A six-pack or two of beer may be just enough “motivation” needed to get you that .edu link. Alternatively, you could sign up for a short web design class – student’s need servers to practice their newfound HTML (read: “A HREF”) skills, right? Sometimes community colleges offer free continuing education classes – who knows maybe you can also learn something new (or send your child there to learn ).
There are of course other ways – some more legitimate, some less – of getting .edu links. These include but are not limited to:

• Posting comments to existing blogs and guestbooks on universities’ websites. Can’t find one? You can use Google advanced operators such as:

Keyword+inurl:blog site:.edu or Keyword+inurl:guestbook site:.edu

• - You can also do some competitive research and lookup which of your competitors has some and try to figure out how they got them. Once again search operators come in handy, just use Yahoo! and type in:

linkdomain:www.your-competitors-website.com site:edu – I recommend using Yahoo! instead of Google because it gives you more in-depth data about incoming links without access to one’s Webmaster Tools account.

• Give a seminar on your area of expertise, they may be more than happy to link to your website from the school’s news and events page.
• Offer a free redesign to a professor.

There are some other techniques on obtaining .edu and .gov links, but those are more on the “grey” side or outright “black hat” and shouldn’t be included within the scope of this article.

Hope it helps somebody!

-Konrad

http://www.kocisz.com

Burger King Facebook App

What happens when Burger King decides to use Facebook as its base for a new online marketing campaign? 233,906 people lose their friends… not real ones of course – the ones on Facebook.

What’s this all about – Burger King launched a promotion for US only, where you could install a Facbook application developed for Burger King which gave you a coupon for a free whooper after you deleted 10 friends from your list. You could of course add those friends right back on, but the idea was to show that you are willing to sacrifice friendship for a whooper (uhmm… yeah right).

People at Facebook apparently didn’t like this (surprise, surprise..) and disabled the application – after 233,906 friendships were “lost”.Weird story? – Yes, Maybe.  Stupid? – No, of course not. As much as I don’t like Whoopers, I have to admit that the marketing team at Burger King had a great idea for an online campaign. Not only did they prove a point (to some degree in a corrupted sort of way but still), they also generated lots of buzz around their company and their main product.

Apparently, the amount of buzz was big enough to get the attention of the Facebook team, which decided to pull the app. That of course generated even more buzz in an online community – think all the bloggers (hello!) writing about it and sharing it with their friends (I got this from a co-worker – thanks Jeremy!).

And that’s how we arrive at a viral marketing at its finest – hats off. Just please don’t make me eat that monstrosity of yours!

Come to think of it, this is not the first time Burger King is taking advantage of another company for its own marketing purposes. McDonald’s kind of comes to mind when BK made a TV ad with fake protests against the Big Mac, because Whooper is so much better (Yeah, and Pepsi tastes different than a coke!). Campaigns like this may work, but think of your branding guys and gals… or maybe that’s the whole point?

-Konrad

Link Building

Everybody wants back links. Everybody wants QUALITY back links that will generate relevant traffic and increase their rankings in the search engines. Here’s my list of 10 fool proof ways for link building that will bring results. Don’t expect a turn-key golden solution that will do everything for you. You’ll have to spend time and possibly money as well but you WILL get results doing things this way.

Yahoo! Directory – Getting listed in Yahoo! directory can give you a valuable link and additional traffic from people that are using the directory. Cost – $299 per year for commercial websites, otherwise free (inclusion not guaranteed).

Press Release- Press release, if done right, might get picked up by news websites and can greatly increase traffic and guarantee inbound links with anchor text of your choice. Cost – $200+ per release – you can use a free press release website, but to get most of it, I suggest using a paid solution, such as that of Marketwire. Be sure to get the SEO package ($75 at Marketwire). If you’re only concerned with links and online package, you don’t have to get the national distribution option, the local one submits it to all online media, difference is in TV, radio, etc.

Wordpress Template- With a little knowledge of web design and PHP (just the basics really) you can develop a theme for Wordpress.org. Your theme can be submitted to wordpress.org theme directory and include a link back to your site (both in the footer and the description of the theme. If the theme is of high quality its popularity may increase virally and secure a significant amount of back links from bloggers that choose to use it. You can submit more than one theme and update them in the future. Cost – free + designer’s work ~10-20 hrs per theme is my estimate, although that depends on how much time you want to spend on the design and development process.

Company Blog – A frequently updated blog with relevant, quality content may drive traffic to the website, score back links, and increase rankings – especially for long tail keywords. Additionally, a blog is a good venue for releasing link baits and viral content. Cost free + time to update ~1 – 1.5 hr per article.

Article Announcing – Relevant articles of high quality can be submitted to industry e-zines (www.itworld.comis a great example) and score backlinks. This is a budget version of press releases. Cost free + time to update and convince editors to include a given article on their e-zine/blog ~1.5 – 2 hrs per article (make sure to write quality content, not just a general description – offer something interesting or an industry secret).

Social Media Submission- Submitting quality content to social bookmarking websites (Digg, Technorati, Stumbleupon, etc.) can create traffic and links. This can be done both manually and by utilizing share-this type of buttons on your website and blog. Cost – free.

Directory Submission- submitting to quality industry directories, such as DMOZ, can gain you inbound links. Although this type of link building is falling out of favor, it can certainly gain you some traction when starting a new website. When submitting, try to focus on relevant, industry specific directories, and don’t use automated submission software – sure it might gain you links but of really poor quality! Cost – free, although time consuming.

Micro-Blogging – Established micro-blogs, such as twitter, can be leveraged in viral marketing campaigns to initially announce new viral content/link-baits, such as articles on the blog. Cost – free.

3-Way Link Exchanges- If you can acquire high PageRank web pages, you can use them as link resources, where other webmasters would give you a link to your website in exchange for links from your resource pages – effectively providing you with one-way inbound links. Cost – free + possible cost of acquiring the resource pages (buying existing websites, domains, or creating your won).

General Link Building- There are many general link building techniques to be used. The classical approach is to email webmasters and ask them to put up a link to your website. This is also known as “Link Begging” and is very time consuming – you might email 100 people and get one link in exchange. If you choose this path, I’d suggest offering the webmasters some incentive (something in return) to give you a link and ALWAYS write personalized emails including the webmasters name (if you can find it) – don’t just copy and paste! Believe it or not, you can always tell if a message is unique or not!

There are many other techniques, such as link buying, link exchange and a whole score of Black Hat techniques, but the ones above seem to work the best (at least in my humble opinion). Of course, they might take time and money, but they do work. Combined with good keyword research and smart on-page optimization you have all the tools to succeed at Search Engine Marketing.

Hope this helps and I don’t get dissed for giving too much away Let me know if you have questions or comments – I’ll try to address them promptly!

Thanks for taking the time to ready my thoughts on the subject!

- Konrad

There are many internet marketing resources out there that give out tips and pointers about increasing your website’s rankings and traffic, getting back links, optimizing a PPC campaign, etc. Just do a Google search for “SEO” or “How to get my website ranked in Google” and you will get millions of results. Unfortunately, when you try a search for “How to become an SEO specialist?” you only get websites that offer help in finding a specialist or job postings. There are no resources for those who are wondering how to actually become an SEO engineer. Here are some pointers that I think will be helpful in actually becoming a professional Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist.

No matter if you want to be a freelance SEO or work for an agency, you will need to first prove (to a prospective client or employer) that you have some knowledge of the Internet Marketing field and show some results in getting websites ranked in Google and other search engines, so lets get started:

STEP 1: Learn the Basics of SEO

This step should be relatively easy. There are many sources out there that will explain what exactly SEO is and what activities are involved. If you prefer books, you can look up some kind of SEO book, like “SEO 101″ or some such, but as I said, all this information is available online. Feel free to read up about the subject on my blog, the SEO and Web Design Guide. To learn the search engine optimization essentials, make sure to read on my article entitled: “Improve Google rankings of your website.”

STEP2: Start a SEO Website

Whether to a prospective client or an employer, you will have to prove that you have some knowledge and experience in the field and what better way to do that if not starting an SEO themed website? Don’t create the website ad hoc – go through the actual Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) of the website. Start with the planning phase and have the whole concept ready before you start the design and coding parts. I’m a firm believer that to work in internet marketing you should manage at least one website from grounds up – from design and content writing to SEO and PPC.

STEP3: Get Ranked

Use your newly acquired knowledge to optimize your website – remember to write lots of quality content and get some good inbound links – submit a press release or two. Do your keyword research and decide what phrases to target. Don’t shoot for the stars right at first, pick something that you can achieve relatively quickly just to show some results for your efforts. Target your geographical area. Good keyword examples would be “New York SEO Service”, “Detroit SEO Consultant” or “Florida SEO Freelancer” for instance – Chicago SEO in my case. Rankings for such phrases might not necessarily bring you a ton of traffic but it’s a start and you will have some proof of your SEO skills.

STEP4: Build Your Portfolio

To close a deal with any serious client, you’ll need some references – a nice portfolio might come in handy here. Go for some smaller, less demanding clients for start – the bigger fish will come when you make a mark for yourself. You can help your friends and family with their websites, pro bono or for a small fee – the choice is yours. You can also simply design some websites for yourself and get them ranked (if they start getting some nice traffic, you can always sell them or load them up with AdSense), just to have that portfolio ready.

STEP5: Get Some Leads

By now you should have enough skill and credentials to go out there and get some new clients. Your website can be a valuable source of leads, if you don’t get enough traffic yet, then a Pay-Per-Click network, such as Google AdWords or Yahoo! Marketing Solutions, might be a good source of conversions. PPC campaigns might turn costly, but if you can afford it, then you could kill two birds with one stone. On one hand you’ll be getting clicks from potential customers and on the other you will gain valuable experience and insight into PPC management – a services that you can offer your future clients. Other ways of getting leads include the word of mouth (do as much networking as possible, invest in business cards and be extra nice to your friends and family!), freelance websites (client sends a Request for Proposal and freelancers submit their bids), email blasts (try not to cross the thin line on the border of spam), and cold calls, among others. If you decide on cold calling people, you’ll have to steel your nerves. Many people don’t appreciate being solicited and may have a few unkind words for you or will simply hang up on you, so don’t get discouraged! A good tip for cold calls: look for people that do PPC (sponsored results on the right hand side of search engine result page), if they already spend money for every click then you know that those clicks are important to them and you are about to offer them FREE clicks!

STEP6: Land Those Deals!

When trying to close the deal, make sure the client knows the full benefit package that he’s getting – this will help double time if the client is already doing PPC – they understand the worth of traffic and you’re about to considerably cut their costs. Another important thing is being honest. Don’t try hiding every thing. If the client asks what have you done or what your plans are, be open about it. You can safely disclose your strategy to the client – they’ll defer to your expertise and experience. If you are overly close-mouthed, your client may accuse you of lack of communication or simply lack of service (if you can’t tell them what you’re doing then you probably aren’t doing anything). Besides, the client spends his hard earned money with you, so he or she is entitled to be informed.

STEP7: Do Your Work!

Did you get that deal? Nice, now lets go to work. You should know what to do by now but lets go through it again – do your research (Word Tracker or Google AdWords keyword tool are great resources). Make sure you cover all the basics of on-page optimization: titles, meta tags, headers, bold text and inter-linking will give you basis for your further work. Write some good, keyword rich text but avoid keyword stuffing! Start your link building campaign – submit the site to DMOZ and other directories, start local listings and do a fair amount of link begging (hey, lets be honest…). When the website gets re-crawled – review and reinforce. Remember: content is the king, links are when the king goes to war!

STEP8: Follow-up With Your Client

Make sure that you periodically follow up with your clients. A quick email or a simple call once in a while can do wonders in terms of customer satisfaction. If you’re calling to let them know about some good ranking that you just achieved for them, have them open up Google and type in their keywords and tell you what they see – you may be pleasantly surprised at their reaction! You can always reinforce your emails with an attachment – a nice report from Google Analytics with increased traffic has a way of keeping a client happy.

STEP9: Up-sale

Even the most satisfied clients have room for improvement. A redesign of their website might increase the conversion rate, optimizing their AdWords account may lower their cost per click (CPC), a nice press release may drive significant, and I mean SIGNIFICANT, increase in traffic for a period of time. If you’ve proven yourself to the client and gave him or her a good bang for their buck, they will be willing to listen to you. If you make your case and show them how the additional services that you provide will make them more money, they will go for it. Make them money and they will be more than happy to pay your fees – sky’s the limit!

STEP10: Get Referrals and Update Portfolio

Make sure that you have nice recommendations from your very satisfied client – stick them on your website, update a portfolio and shamelessly take advantage of it when closing a new deal. It is always worth the time and effort to write a nice case study after a successful campaign and upload it to your website – several nice ones and your conversion rate will soar!

STEP11: At this point you should be able to tell which is more feasible for yourself – staying a freelancer (freedom, sweet freedom) or joining an agency (benefits+paid vacation time+sales team handy). By now you should have enough evidence to support your resume to get an agency job without much problem, so the choice is yours!

STEP12: Go back to the first step and go over the cycle again – this time try just a little bit harder. Don’t ever assume you know everything, because there is always room for improvement. There are new techniques and new ways of accomplishing your goals. Look at this as a process of ongoing improvement, we live and learn.

This, in a nutshell, should give you an idea of how to follow (no pun intended) the path of an SEO, whether agency or freelance. Feel free to share your comments and success stories. Good luck!

-Konrad

http://www.kocisz.com

Google Analytics New Features

On December third, I went to a Google Analytics seminar in Google’s Chicago office (a very NICE office I might add). I always thought that I was getting close to a 100% from Analytics – boy was I wrong! That’s especially true in the light of recently added features, such as motion graphs and advanced segmentation.

I think every internet marketer, SEO or a webmaster should take a closer look at Google Analytics and what it can do for you. First of all it is a free, web-based service that gives you very in-depth data about your visitors. You can find out exactly who, when, and how got to your website and more importantly what was it that hey did while on your website.

Google Analytics can help you understand both sides of the story – how the got there and what they did there. Knowing what keywords or keyphrases got you the traffic, you can make educated decisions on which keywords to target for your organic and pay-per-click campaigns. Additionally, defining conversion goals, such as a lead, sale, subscription, etc. can help in increasing revenue fro the traffic driven to your website.

The new features can give you an even greater understanding of your visitors, their needs and behavior. Motion graphics, for instance, give you a great way of comparing variables over time – think seasonal PPC campaigns for instance. Motion Graphics add more dimensions and historical comparison to your analysis. Below, you can find a short video describing this new feature.

Advanced Segmentation allows you to divide your traffic into subsets, such as paid traffic or converting traffic, and create completely new, customized ones based on your needs. Best of all you can analyze historical data, which you might have analyzed before. Now you can go back and re-do your analysis with greater amount of detail and new tools readily available.

Another new feature are the custom reports. You can now create 100% customized traffic reports with the exact data you need. You can also schedule the reports to run at predetermined times, and send the results as an email attachment to a specified address. If you are an SEO, then this is a great way to keep your clients up-to-date and let them know that the service provided by you is in fact worth their money!

Google Analytics is a great and, I think, undervalued tool which provides many great insights to your traffic and is worth more than a passing glance!

– Konrad
http://www.kocisz.com

When asked about the other features, the gentleman replied that we will be able to pause keywords instead of having to delete them. Same with ad groups – a pause option will be added. The third feature was supposed to be addition of new tools that would allow working with keywords, ads, and others all in the same place.

Sounds like a step in a good direction but Microsoft will have to do better than that to catch up with Google and its AdWords. I guess we’ll see how it works out.

I will keep you all posted if I find out anything more.

Thanks for reading!

UPDATE:

I just received an email from MSN AdCenter that the new adCenter has been uploaded and you can now:

• Pause the delivery of your ads and keywords. Now you have more control and flexibility as you manage your campaigns.

• Receive better help with disapproved ads and keywords. Get easier-to-find information about the reasons for the disapproval and how to update the ads and keywords for resubmission.

• Create multiple users for your account. You’ll find new options for easily creating multiple account users and assigning user permissions

I also seem to be on the first page of Google and Yahoo! for “Chicago SEO” and “Chicago SEO Services”. I think that improving my rankings for those terms would require a little bit of additional link building. That might be hard, considering that I have a regular nine to five job that I have to attend to.

I think I will utilize some blogging skills at first and then focus on my link exchange (maybe eve post a video SEO tutorial on YouTube). For those who don’t know I have set up a link exchange page on my website, so feel free to utilize it if you are in a middle of a link building campaign.

Internet Marketing might be time-consuming and a little tedious at times but I sure as hell am enjoying myself when I do it! That is especially true when I see my or my client’s website pop up number 1 in Google.

I will post an update on this SEO campaign when something moves forward (suggestions are welcome!).

Any other SEO freaks out there? Or maybe potential link exchange partners or clients? If you feel like sharing something, feel free to drop me a line!

Thanks for reading! I promise I will make time to post some new SEO tips for you guys and gals within the next couple of days!

Cheers!

After we fix everything and have a 100% spam free website, we go to Google Webmasters Tools (www.google.com/webmasters). In the Dashboard, on the right hand side, we’ll have messages, and tools. Last on the list is a link called “Request reconsideration.” Note that previously it was called a reinclusion request, but since that was not really true – it’s more than just bans, but also penalties, delistings, etc., they changed it to what it is right now.

So now, how do we write the reconsideration letter itself?

Well, first of all be truthful. If you used an SEO firm, please do state so. I was fixing one site, ant the client had an SEO company do it first. They didn’t get him anywhere, actually they got him banned. What those brains from an undisclosed company did, was to put a PHP script on the bottom of every page (using a global footer) that would go into a loop and generate several hundred of 1px by 1px spacer GIFs that would be a link to one of the subpages and be totally stuffed with keywords in the alternative text attribute of their img src declaration tag. I’ve stated as much, and guess what? Within 4 days my client from ranking nowhere for anything, jumped into #1 position in Google SERP for his targeted keyword (and some other ones as well).

So yes, be honest, tell them what happened, tell them that you’ve fixed it. Also, you better be darn sure to state that you promise never to do that again!

I’ve noticed that some people tend to throw in some reference to their Google adwords or adsense affiliation, thinking that Google’s gonna let them of the hook because they’re doing business together. Well, that’s not gonna fly, so forget about this part.

That would be pretty much it, worked for me. Keep in mind that it may take a while (probably weeks) for Google to do something about your site’s status and if they do they might not even let you know about it. So yeah, monitor the SERPs for your keywords.

Quick recap of what to do when your site gets banned:

Remove all Black Hat practices.

Request reinclusion stating:

What happened?

What did you do to fix it?

Will it ever happen again (better not)?

Hope it helps, thanks for reading!