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For webmasters, e-marketers and e-merchants...

The New Year has brought in a host of amazing new features for search engines. Google is now digitizing libraries, Yahoo is offering a new video search and MSN has a beta version of an entirely new search engine! See our Stay on Top section for all the details.

We have also provided some essential New Year's resolutions for webmasters. See our feature article on SEO resolutions for 2005.

I hope that you enjoy this issue of our newsletter.

- Jason Campbell

Announcement:

New Client - Oxford Distance Learning

We are proud to introduce Oxford College ODL as a company who has recently made use of our web promotion services. A leading force in the distance learning industry, ODL promotes quality home study education worldwide and is regarded as one of the most renowned distance education providers in the United Kingdom. Be sure to check out their site at www.oxforddistancelearning.com if you or someone you know is interested in distance learning. Also, see our proven results page to read what academic director Dr. Darren Wood has to say about Red Carpet Web Promotion.

Search Engine Navigator

A Search Engine Optimizer's New Year's Resolutions With the ringing in of the New Year, I resolve to become a better search engine optimizer (SEO). Below is a list of resolutions that I have made in order to make my clients' web sites the absolute best on the web. I will not use flash as text. Even though many search engines can now read some of the text embedded in flash, flash sites do not perform as well in search engine results as non-flash sites. Flash should primarily be used to enhance sites; in the same way one would use pictures to make the site look better. I will not use images as text. Although I personally believe that text in images will be read by search engines by the end of 2006, we are not there just yet. As it now stands, image text is invisible to search engines and therefore should not be used in that capacity. I will use good usability techniques. Usability is simple to test. Get three friends to complete a task on your site as you silently watch and take notes (have them talk out loud too). You will be amazed as to what you find. Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox has a good introduction to usability. I will not use cloaking. Cloaking is frowned upon by search engines. Once they catch you, you will get penalized (or in some instances, banned). I will not use frames unless I have a REALLY good reason to. Frames complicate things for the search engine. There are very few good reasons to use frames and thus they should be avoided whenever possible. I will use a catchy title with the keyphrase in it. Marketing is what we are all about. A catchy title will bring in the customers. A title containing the target keyphrase will raise the result in the search engines. Put the two together and you have a professional marketing title that works hard to bring in traffic. I will track the return on investment (ROI). By tracking the ROI, I will clearly see if the site is making or losing money. To track ROI one needs to co-relate the marketing dollars spent with the revenue earned. This statistic is usually hindered by the site's owner, who cannot (or does not) provide the financial information, nor the conversional statistics I need to track ROI. I will write an alt tag that clearly depicts what the image is, for every image. This will help people without images on their screen know what the image is about. Using the keyphrase in the alt tag is a bonus because it will help the rankings slightly in the search engine results, but it is most important to describe the image as clearly as possible. I will use good informative content. Ah yes, "Content is King". All the above resolutions are meaningless if I don't have good content. This is what will bring in the search engines. This is what will bring in the clients. And this is what will bring in the dough. I will not stuff the pages with keyphrases. Stuffing the page with keyphrases goes against the golden rule of good content. If you stuff the pages with keyphrases, they will no longer read well, and readers won't like to read them. Consequently, people won't enjoy your site, and because the search engines are designed to figure out what people like and then display it to them, the search engines will eventually begin to disregard your site. Therefore, ALWAYS use keyphrases wisely. I will not use "spammy" techniques. "Spammy" techniques are anything the search engines say not to use. These techniques may do well in the short-term, but in the long run they will get you penalized (or even banned).    - Google has a list of guidelines here    - Yahoo has a list of guidelines here I will use pay-per-click (PPC), even if it is for a very small amount. I have found that using even a minuscule PPC campaign will bring in more traffic. It also propagates links to your site throughout the Internet, and thus makes your site more prominent. If you are worried about losing money, then use the free conversion tracking tool available at both Overture and Google AdWords. USE IT. Only then will you know how effective your PPC campaign really is. I will track unique hits to the site. By keeping track of whether the site's traffic goes up or down, I get a big picture of the health of the web site. If traffic goes up, then the rankings probably went up. If traffic goes down, then rankings probably went down. Of course there are also seasonal variations (and marketing pushes), but you should be familiar enough with the market to know when to expect such cyclical fluctuations. I will get a good copywriter to write the content. "Content is King", so get a professional to write it. You may think you are good, but are you really? Would you bet your Internet presence on it? Use someone who knows how to write specifically for the Internet. Use someone who knows how to balance writing for people, writing for sales, and writing for search engines. I will not send out "spammy" emails asking for reciprocal links. Reciprocal links don't bring in clients, and they tend to only slightly boost your PageRank. An SEO's time is better served getting the site listed in directories and on sites where people would be looking for it (such as associations, suppliers, clients, and more…). Personalized emails to these sites requesting a link to yours are fine. Templates or mass emails requesting reciprocal links are definitely not. I will work hard getting valuable links to my site. "Linking is Queen", thus getting links is essential. Find directories that relate to your market and take your time to submit to them (in the best category). Contact your suppliers and/or resellers and see if they will link to you. Figure out where your potential clients hang out on the Internet, and get those sites to link to you. Do your homework to choose where you want your links to appear, then roll up your sleeves, get out the elbow grease and get those links to show up! With a little dedication and a lot of work, I will get my clients into the top search engine results. If you want to do well with your web site, stick to these resolutions and before you know it the traffic (and the sales) will roll in smoothly, just like the New Year. Shawn Campbell Shawn Campbell is the co-founder and Chief Search Engine Optimizer at Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. www.redcarpetweb.com

Stay on Top Each month we review articles from leading industry magazines and newsletters. The following articles are the most interesting out of all the articles that were reviewed in the last two months. Click on the links below to read the full articles. Microsoft Unveils its New Search Engine - At Last http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3434261 SearchEngineWatch - November 11, 2004 - After months of speculation and two "preview" releases, Microsoft has taken the wraps off of its new MSN search engine, the first major competitor to join the big leagues of web search in nearly a year. Some cool features: 1) There are three sliders available. One lets you select the degree of match between your search terms and result pages, from an exact match to an approximate match. The second lets you specify page popularity, from very popular to less popular. The final slider controls freshness of results, from updated recently to static pages. 2) Other settings allow you to change the number of search results from the default of 10 to 15, 30, 50 or 100 per page. 3) You also have the ability to influence the number of results displayed from a particular site. Search results from the same site are grouped together, with a maximum of two displayed by default. You can change this to display one, two or three results. Firefox 1.0 Makes Flashy Debut http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65668,00.html Wired - Nov. 11, 2004 - Firefox 1.0, available for the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems in more than a dozen languages, is the result of two years of work. The browser is an absolute joy to use -- smart, fast and very user-friendly, while still offering a slew of advanced programmable and customizable functions for those who want to tinker. Up, up, up goes online advertising http://www.online-publishers.org/?pg=newsletters&dt=f120604#rsrch1 Online Publishers association - December 3, 2004 - "...TNS Media Intelligence/CMR announced that online ad spending rose 26 percent in the first nine months of 2004, outpacing overall ad growth of 10 percent and the growth of all other segments. Much of the boost for offline advertising came from the Olympics and political campaigns. Then AdZone reported that online ads took in $692 million in September alone, up 14 percent over the previous month." Link Development: The Key to Successful SEO http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/article.php/3431741 ClickZ - November 8, 2004 - Here is a good Quote from an otherwise standard article on Link development: "Choose quality over quantity. Link quality carries more weight than quantity. Spend time getting the highest quality links pointing to your site. One of search engine spammers' biggest sales pitches is, "Get millions of links to your site." Don't fall for that arcane, useless pitch" Link Building 101 http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2616 SearchEngineWatch forums - November 7 2004 - 1) Links should be used only for ethical purposes to point web users to useful and relevant information and not to deceive the search engines. 2) Links can be bought, sold, traded or received/given away for free. Being creative and thinking outside the box will most likely get you very many of them no matter which of the hundreds of strategies you choose, just do it or your competitors will do it before you. 3) Don't only think about link building only for the purposes of search engine algorithms or metrics such as PageRank. Same rule applies: Think what is best for your users first, the search engines will adapt. 4) Stay up to date, search engines change, users change, and businesses can change for the better or worse if not up to date. Like my friend Brett Tabke says, "read, read, read until your eyes hurt". 5) My Golden Rule for Link Building: FOCUS ON PERMANENT LINKS. Yahoo Launches Video Search Site http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118974,00.asp IDG News Service - December 16, 2004 - Users can search by file format, size, and duration. The site, at video.search.yahoo.com, went up on Wednesday, and pits Yahoo against competitors such as Singingfish, which is owned by America Online. Google Partners with Oxford, Harvard & Others to Digitize Libraries http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3447411 SearchEngineWatch - December 14, 2004 - Google is working with libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University and the New York Public Library to digitize books in their collections and make them accessible via Google Print. Google Hits the Stacks http://www.traffick.com/2004/12/google-hits-stacks.asp#comments Traffick - December 14, 2004 - Google's been going nuts lately with all of these novel content-indexing ideas. You had the recent announcement of Google Print, and the latest is a major collaboration project with some of the top libraries in the world, in which the big G will index millions of out-of-print and copyrighted books for online searchability. Wow. I've long thought that there should be no limit to the content that is available for searching online. Google plans to display AdWords ads next to such content, and this move is clearly a win-win-win for Google, book publishers, searchers and -- maybe -- for authors (Wouldn't it be nice if authors were able to get a cut of this?). There will surely be some vexing issues to solve as a result of this project, but if they can be worked out, consider the possibilities! No one gains anything by having a dusty book tucked away on a neglected library shelf. This project will help ensure that the wealth of knowledge hidden in books is fully revealed to anyone with a web browser. It will be interesting to see how Amazon reacts to this news. Their "search inside the book" feature holds much promise, but doesn't seem to have gained much traction yet.

Letters to the Editor Send your questions and comments for our next issue to news@redcarpetweb.com. Be as specific or general as you want -- other subscribers are probably wondering the same things you are. You should also let us know of any promotions, sales or new products on your web site.

Next Issue - New feature article - More on how Search Engines work - Stay on top: Articles from industry newsletters and magazines - And more... To subscribe to the Promotion Press, go to the subscribe page and fill in your email address. To unsubscribe from the Promotion Press, go to our unsubscribe page and fill in the address you subscribed with. This Newsletter is produced and published by Red Carpet Web Promotion, Inc. © 2000