Not only review their products and services, but also the USP (Unique Selling Proposition), and find out how you can effectively compete on the web. Don’t expect your web design company to do this for you unless you are willing to pay them to do it. In almost every case, the business owner, is the ideal person to be reviewing their competitors websites. Take notes when you are reviewing the site, this way you can refer to the notes when you begin making changes to your site(s).

Do not be afraid to act upon your notes and have your web design company make changes to your site to effectively compete. Be sure to have a clear discussion with the company to make certain that they understand the intention of the change and can also review the competitor site to see how they are handleing the back code portion for you to compete naturally in the search engines.

Yahoo and Google became a little closer this week, with the news that Yahoo will carry AdSense for Search in a two-week, limited test of the service.

This is really odd to me considering the Microsoft Yahoo News and how they may merge (even if Microsoft does a hostile takeover of Yahoo). Not sure why we have all 3 major search engines getting into bed right now together. Something smells fishy here and althought I smell it I cannot quite put my finger on what it is.

I will however, continue to endure these odd announcements and keep my finger on the pulse of the search engine market to advise our blog readers of what is happening.

Chris Clark, the man who had the inspiration to register Pizza.com domain more than twenty years ago, accepted to sell it for $2.6 million.

According to Baltimore Sun, Chris Clark bought the name back in 1994, hoping that the domain would help him score a contract with a pizza company. But six years later he sold his Internet consulting company, but he kept paying the $20 monthly fee for the domain.

But when he heard that in 2006 a Russian company paid $3 million for Vodka.com, he decided to put its domain on auction. Clark turned to Sedo.com to help him sell the domain. The auction has started with $100, but in just two days the bidding hit 2 million.

“Really generic description domains are hot commodities these days, especially the ones that encapsulate an entire industry,” said Jeremiah Johnston, Sedo’s chief operating officer, quoted by Baltimore Sun. Sedo.com refused to disclose the identity of the new owner of Pizza.com.

Chris Clark, who now owns Minestream Software Corp., a company that sells Internet protection products, said he has not idea what he will do with the money.

Of course, he has only one regret. “In ‘94, you could have just registered everything and anything,” Clark said. “I think about that now, yeah”.

Read the Article Online Here

In almost every case, you are going to be calling your prospect anyway, so why should you make it more difficult for them to get information or get you to call. Just get their name, phone number and email. That is sufficient. Then follow up with them as you normally would. I would rather call many people and find out more information, with the prospect that I will get the business, than call less than half of those people because I lost the opportunity to contact others due to a lengthy estimate request form.

Remember that people are busy and they really don’t want to fill out lengthly forms on websites. They also have some anxiety over having to fill out the form a second time if it doesn’t work right the first time.

The question I always get is who do I approach to get a link to my site. Instead of approaching other sites, simply do a search for "free directory" and you will find many different online directories similar to the yellow pages. Use these to gain inbound links to your site. Many of these directories permit free listing with no link back, which is ideal.

Focus on adding at least one of these free links per week. The more the better. If you are asked to link back, that is ok, add it to a links page. However, if you are asked to pay, skip that site and move to the next one. Paid links are not worth it, there are far too many free options out there. Once you add your listing, many of the sites will offer upgrades for additional money, this is up to you to upgrade or not. Generally speaking, take the free link and move on to the next directory.

Here are a couple directories that we own that you can post your link for free (you may already be there so be sure to check first), www.worcestercountybusinesses.com, and www.northeastbusinessdirectory.com. Finding directories is not too difficult, it just takes some time.

Click Here to read the article online.

If you schedule the time to work on your site, then you will do something each week. If you miss an appointment with yourself during one of those weeks, at least you have worked on your site for 3 hours that month. The key to growing your site and making it more effective is to work on it.

If you schedule the time, then you will be more likely to do something that is beneficial for your website. If you don’t have the time, or are thoroughly bored by such tasks, then you can consult a web development company to assist you in your maintenance. If you hold a meeting with the company to go over your goals for the quarter, you will be able to set an agenda for the work that you want to get done.

Working on your site each month is a true way to grow your site, it’s the number one key to growing your site. In addition, if you do the work yourself you can save some money and over the long run your site will become a good size with really good content and will be attracting the right customers that you are looking for.

Stay Tuned for Tip #9. We are counting down each week to cover the top 10.

Why is it that AMEX has contradicted themselves with their statements…..It’s because even they don’t understand SEO. SEO is about driving traffic to your site. Their second statement about good content with good keywords is the foundation for SEO. But there are many different ways of improving your site. New process and procedures come out every month or quarter. Things change in the web industry every six months, and if you are not doing things to your site to keep improving it then you could be left behind.

It’s important to keep your SEO efforts in focus, and under control, so that you don’t get taken by a so called “expert”. Cautiously review what it is you are paying for and what you should be receiving. Be very wary of guarantees. With the industry changing so much, and the algorithms at every search engine changing each week, there is no guarantee for results. The only guarantee you should expect is a time commitment in exchange for payment.

While AMEX is trying to assist their customer base with good information and they had every intent of not contradicting themselves, they managed to possibly confuse their customer base by issuing differing statements. While AMEX is recommending to their customers that they not use SEO Experts, we are recommending to our customers not to use a company that is not clear on what SEO is before making such ridiculous statements.

Beginning this Month…I will be issuing my top 10 tips to increase traffic to your website, without paying anyone, any money, including us. Make sure that you are signed up for our newsletter to receive the tips.

“The number of companies that chase the same advertising dollars as their only business model is a sure sign that we’re at the peak of Bubble 2.0. It would be much more sustainable if companies aimed to create services that users valued enough to pay for.
Right now, considerable advertising money is sloshing through the Web because most marketing managers remain clueless about how it works. They think that because search advertisements generate lots of business, other Web ads must work just as well. What a fallacy — brought on by ignorance of the basic Web user experience. People go to search engines when they’re explicitly looking for a place to do business. This is why search engines profit from sucking up the work of content sites (where users exhibit strong banner blindness).
Marketing managers won’t remain clueless forever. Sooner or later they’ll discover that Web advertising offers almost no ROI. Only two forms of Web ads actually work: search ads and classified ads (such as eBay and real estate listings). A third type of Internet advertising that might work are video ads, because video is a linear media form (in contrast to nonlinear website navigation). At this point, we don’t have enough user research about Internet video to say for sure.”