Online Business Versus Offline Business (physical Business)

Online Business v/s Offline Business

One thing that I find a bit surprising: I’ve read several statistics about offline-entrepreneur success rates..and it seems that offline there aren’t too many successful “serial entrepreneurs” – defined as entrepreneurs who run a successful business, and then start another one (or a third one). People often talk about how luck is a vital factor in business success in the offline world, not “only” skill. Online, on the other hand, it seems like actual skill is almost 100% of the formula. It seems that the people who have successfully launched and marketed/SEO’d a website (for example after working for a long time as SEO consultants/SEO employees), have little trouble doing so again, and again and again. How come highly-skilled online entrepreneurs can pull it off so consistently, whereas offline entrepreneurs apparently have rather low success rates (even after running and selling a first successful business)? Maybe the reason is that online, the cost of starting something is so much lower than offline, thus people who are very experienced/skilled in SEO,etc. can afford to launch multiple sites and if it doesn’t work out, they can just abandon them….thus luck would even out? Is anyone familiar with people who have pulled it off again and again offline? Is success in online business more about true skill and less dependant on luck (in comparison to offline entrepreneurship)?

www.OnlineSEOFirm.com

Browse in the Fast Lane- Mozilla Firefox 3.5

Upgrated version of Firefox 3.5 has been announced

Download it at – http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5.4&os=win&lang=en-US

Faster, Safer, Smarter, Better – The Fastest Firefox Yet

Things move quickly online, and we’ve beefed up the engine that runs Firefox to make sure you can keep up: Firefox 3.5 is more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2.^* As a result, Web applications like email, photo sites and your favorite social networks will feel snappier and more responsive.

Implementing Best SEO Strategy – SEO Pakistan

Best SEO Strategies

The process of SEO is not easy to tackle, largely because so many pieces of a site factor into the final results. Promoting a site that writers on the web are unlikely to link to is as deadly as creating a fantastic website no one will see. SEO is also a long-term process, both in application and results – those who expect quick rankings after completing a few suggestions in this guide will be deeply dissapointed. Search engines can often be frustratingly slow to respond to improvements that will eventually garner significant boosts in traffic.

Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO. The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed. The best sites adhere strictly to these guidelines:

1. Unique Content – Something that has never before been offered on the web in terms of depth, quality, or presentation (i.e. a unique value proposition)
2. Access to an Adoptive Community – Connections or alliances with people/websites in an existing online community that is ready to accept, visit, and promote your offering
3. Link-Friendly Formatting – Even the best content may be unlikely to be linked to if it displays ads, particularly those that break up the page content or pop-up when a visitor comes to the site. Use discretion in presenting your material and remember that links are one of the most valuable commodities a site/page can get, and they’ll last far longer than a pop-up ad’s revenue.
4. Monetization Plan – Intelligent systems for monetizing powerful content must exist, or bandwidth, hosting, and development costs will eventually overrun your budget.
5. Market Awareness – If your site is targeting highly competitive terms, you should make available an online marketing budget, including funds for link buying, and hire or consult with someone experienced in bringing newer sites to the top of the SERPs.

If you take these steps and have a robust knowledge of the methods described in this guide, you are ready to begin an SEO campaign.

Quantity vs. Quality

In order to optimize a site to rank well in the search engines, pay diligent attention to the quality of your website and the effectiveness of your promotional tactics. While creating thousands of pages targeting every conceivable keyword may seem like a viable tactic, in fact, a single, phenomenal article or content source on a single term is far more likely to be profitable and less likely to be flagged for spam by the search engines.

This same rule applies to the sphere of promotion. While thousands of low quality, spammy pages or reciprocal free-for-all links pointing to you may provide some boost in the SERPs, a far greater effect can be achieved with just a few highly valuable, well-placed links from relevant sources that will drive both traffic and rankings. In the age of advanced link spam analysis, search engines will give greater credit to one link from CNN.com, Berkeley.edu, or Usability.gov than from 50,000 guestbooks, forum signatures, or reciprocal link directories.

Measuring Success: Website and Ranking Metrics to Watch

One of the most valuable sources for data, analysis, and refinement in an SEO campaign is in the statistics available via website tracking and measuring programs. A good analytics program can provide an incredible amount of data that can be used to track your visitors and make decisions about who to target in the future and how to do it.

Below is a short list of the most valuable elements in visitor tracking:

• Campaign Tracking – The ability to put specific URLs or referrer strings onto ads, emails, or links and track their success.
• Action Tracking – Adding the ability to track certain actions on a site like form submission, newsletter signups, add to cart buttons, and checkout or transaction completions and tying them together with campaigns and keyword tracking so you know what ads, links, terms, and campaigns are bringing you the best visitors.
• Search Engine Referral Tracking – Seeing which search engines sent which visitors over time and tracking the terms and phrases they used to reach your site. Combined with action tracking, this can help you determine which terms are most valuable to target.
• Referring URLs & Domain Tracking – This allows you to see what URLs and domains are responsible for sending you traffic. By tracking these individually, you can see where your most valuable links are coming from.
• First-Time vs. Return Visitors – Find out what percentage of your visitors are coming back each day/week/month. This can help you to figure out how “sticky” and consistently interesting your site is.
• Entry Pages – Which pages are attracting the most visitors and which are converting them. You can also see pages that have a very high rate of loss – those pages which don’t do a good job pulling people into the site.
• Visitor Demographics – Where are your visitors coming from, what browsers are they using, what time do they visit? All these questions and many more can be answered with demographics.
• Click Path Analysis – What paths do your visitors follow when they get to your site? This data can help you make more logical streams of pages for visitors to use as they navigate your site, attempt to find information, or complete a task.
• Popular Pages – Which pages get the most visitors and which are neglected? Use this data to help improve low popularity pages and emulate highly trafficked ones.
• Page Views per Session – This data can tell you how many pages each visitor to your site is viewing – another metric used to measure “stickiness.”

Applying the information you learn from your visitor tracking is a science unto its own. Experience and common sense should help to discover which terms, visitors, referrers, and demographics are most valuable to your site, enabling you to make the best possible decisions about how and where to target.

Working with a Pro vs. Do-It-Yourself SEO

As in many other areas of web development, a long-standing argument exists between those who feel that learning and practicing SEO should be done in-house, vs. those who feel it is best left to the professionals. There are advantages to either side, and it’s best to weigh these against each other when making a final decision:

Advantages of Working with a Professional SEO

• Diverse Experience – Professionals with several years of SEO experience under their belts can tell you what to expect from the search engines as you conduct the optimization process. They can also interpret and understand rankings data and “hiccups” in the results that may indicate certain trends or strategies that should be implemented or avoided.
• Pre-Existing Relationships – Many SEOs have contacts inside the SEO industry to folks with experience in certain fields and expertise in unique areas (i.e. press releases, article distribution, directories, etc.) that can have a great impact on the success of your efforts. Several SEOs even have personal relationships with the folks at the search engines, although the use of these contacts is very rare and SE representatives pride themselves on not showing favoritism.
• Link Building Knowledge – Professionals will have the ability to quickly identify topical communities and the most popular and relevant sites in them, thus saving time when link building. SEOs also have considerable experience with link acquisition and will recognize the requirements of certain sites for paid links, link requests, etc.
• Identifying Linkable Content – SEOs are often masters of crafting and launching content. Not only can they identify the content most likely to get links from the specific web community, they’re also experienced in how to package and promote it.
• Fixing Possible Problems – Professionals are competent at identifying and managing issues that can cause a lack of indexing, low rankings, or penalties from the search engines. This is a skill that can be very hard to develop without years of practice and experience. If you have a ranking issue, an SEO can be of great value.
• Time Savings – SEO can be an exceptionally time-consuming endeavor. An experienced SEO has the processes and systems of optimization down to a science, and can use that efficiency to provide better service in less time.

Advantages of Do-It-Yourself SEO

• Complete Control – With personal responsibility comes complete control for each element of your site’s progress. There can be no question as to who or what created a link or modified a document.
• Learn from Your Actions – The ebb and flow of the SERPs will quickly teach an amateur SEO what works and what doesn’t. Certain links, timing, and on-page changes will be fully visible and recordable, making it a learning process.
• Personal Responsibility – Your success or failure will depend entirely on your own efforts, narrowing responsibility and preventing overlaps in work or issues of blame.
• Cost Savings – Doing SEO yourself means you don’t have to pay someone else. If you find that your time is less expensive than hiring an outsourced provider, do-it-yourself SEO can be a great way to save money.

With these pieces of information in mind, you’re prepared to make an informed decision. Remember, too, that many SEOs offer consulting services, which provide you with a strategic plan that can be implemented and a helpful consultant to provide advice as needed on the project. This type of arrangement may offer a good balance if you’re torn about which direction to choose. Look for costs between $100-$300 per hour, depending on the experience and notoriety of the consultant.

If you choose to outsource to an SEO firm, be well aware of the many pitfalls that await the uninformed. SEO has classically been an industry that has attracted many untrustworthy and dishonorable firms, resulting in an unfortunate perception from many. Pay particular attention to the following:

• Manipulation & Search Spam – Overly aggressive tactics can get you banned from search engines.

• Link Exchanges & Free-for-All Links – While the promise of easy link building through link exchanges or link farms is tempting, these tactics often achieve subpar results. Natural, organic inbound links from sites that your competitors can’t get links from are the best way to rank well in the long term.

• Optimizing Pages for Search Engines vs. Visitors – Professional SEOs should have specialist copywriters who can craft well-written pages that attract both users and search engines. Repetitive keyword use (as noted above) is largely useless, but compelling, intelligent dialogue is a great way to get both searchers and engines interested in your content.

• Guaranteed Rankings – Guaranteeing rankings is often one of the first indications that you’re dealing with a less-than-reputable firm. No SEO can guarantee rankings, because the search engines are responsible for the results and are constantly changing. Be wary, too, of promised success at “thousands of engines” (remember that the top 4 account for 95%+ of all search traffic), daily submission (completely unnecessary), and other “tricks” or “secrets”. Great rankings come from having great sites with quality links – no tricks or secrets required.

• Investigate – The firm you work with should be able to provide references, preferably from both customers and industry folks that will let you know their skill and ability. Use your best judgment here – if a review or response seems canned or fishy, it probably is.

Finally, if you opt for do-it-yourself-SEO, be aware that are many, many parts of the SEO process not covered by this guide. SEO is a practice that has even the most respected professionals learning and researching every day to keep with trends on the web and algorithmic shifts in the search engines. A business or site owner will certainly want to join several SEO web communities (see the list in the links section) and keep up-to-date with information and best practices from the industry experts.

Message from NEXTAG — SEO Pakistan

Message from NEXTAG:-

Dear Valued Merchant,

The holiday season is around the corner and we would like to inform you that NexTag will be increasing your costs per click by 25% for all categories and all bids effective November 4, 2009 through January 6, 2010.

This change will affect all your clicks from NexTag. For example, if you have a bid of $0.60 per click, you will be charged a fee of $0.75 per click during this seasonal period. Your actual costs per click will be accurately reflected on your cost reports, but the bids will be displayed in the bidding tools without the 25% included until January 6, 2010.

NexTag realizes that you spend considerable effort throughout the year optimizing your campaign and that during the holiday season your bidding strategy changes. As a courtesy, effective January 7, 2010 NexTag will automatically reset rates on your behalf to your October 21, 2009 bids. If you want to adjust your bids, you can login to your account and make any changes using the “Manage Bids by Category” or “Manage Bids by Product” tools in your account dashboard on or after January 7, 2010.

During the holiday season, clicks from NexTag typically convert the best of the calendar year and we are adjusting your rates based on the additional value we bring to your marketing efforts.

Thank you for your business and have a great holiday shopping season!

Sincerely,

The NexTag Product Shopping Team —

U.S. and U.K. To Get Google’s Campaign Insights

In a bid to build a brand-advertising business, the search giant is using its vast trove of data culled from search queries and web traffic to measure the effectiveness of brand advertising.

The system, called Campaign Insights, has been in beta test in the past year with marketers like PayPal and Simplexity and beginning today, the company will start offering it to its bigger advertisers in the U.S. and U.K. Ultimately, like Google Analytics, Google will offer it to all of its display advertisers for free.

Google Labs To Add “Social Search” — SEM Pakistan

Google Vice President Marissa Mayer made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday: “Social Search,” a new Google Labs experiment that will bring in search results from a member’s social-network contact circle.

It’ll be launching as an opt-in project in the next few weeks. Then, you’ll need to have a Google account and set up a Google Profile to fill in information about the social networks that you use. Google first launched Profiles about a year ago.

“What we’ve done here is inserted, on the bottom of the page, content written by people in your social network,” Mayer said, adding that Google hopes this will “really improve the overall relevance, comprehensiveness, and quality” of search results. A search for a local restaurant, for example, could bring up your friends’ Yelp reviews for the same establishment. A search for travel destinations could bring up a post from a friend’s blog.  — SEM Pakistan

Google Plans to Launch an Online Bookstore: Google Editions

Watch out Amazon. Google is hitting the online bookstore business.

The search giant announced Thursday at the Frankfurt Book Fair that in the first half of next year it will launch Google Editions, a new service that will deliver e-books to anyone with a Web browser.

Beware of Pishing Emails – Google Adsense Account Disabled

 Google Adsense Account Disabled Email

I got today an email “Google Adsense Account Disabled” with the standard clause [about the account posing a risk to advertisers] But the email was addressed to an email we never used to sign up for the Adsense account (and also not our Google gmail account). Plus, the header seems that the email is from Taiwan Received: from mail.keronite.com.tw (60-250-229-60.HINET-IP.hinet.net [60.250.229.60]) I can still login. We’ve been with Adsense since 2009 with no slaps or violations, but receiving this type of email can still scare the living daylights out of me.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO Google)

SEO is an acronym for “search engine optimization” or “search engine optimizer.” Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

• Review of your site content or structure
• Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
• Content development
• Management of online business development campaigns
• Keyword research
• SEO training
• Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading “Sponsored Links”) as well. Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it’s a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:

• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google 101: How Google crawls, indexes and serves the web.

If you’re thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you’re considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

• Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
• Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
• Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
• What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
• What’s your experience in my industry?
• What’s your experience in my country/city?
• What’s your experience developing international sites?
• What are your most important SEO techniques?
• How long have you been in business?
• How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site’s presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

• Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
  

  “Dear google.com,
  I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories…”

  Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.

• No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a “special relationship” with Google, or advertise a “priority submit” to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
• Be careful if a company is secretive or won’t clearly explain what they intend to do.Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or “throwaway” domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google’s index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it’s best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to “help” you.
• You should never have to link to an SEO.Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of “free-for-all” links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don’t affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines — at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
• Choose wisely.While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn’t comment on specific companies, we’ve encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
• Be sure to understand where the money goes.While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they “control” other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn’t work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you’re considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
• What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?One common scam is the creation of “shadow” domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client’s behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor’s domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

  Another illicit practice is to place “doorway” pages loaded with keywords on the client’s site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO’s other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

• What are some other things to look out for?There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It’s far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
  • owns shadow domains
  • puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
  • offers to sell keywords in the address bar
  • doesn’t distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
  • guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
  • operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
  • gets traffic from “fake” search engines, spyware, or scumware
  • has had domains removed from Google’s index or is not itself listed in Google
  • requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

YouTube Promoted Videos to appear on AdSense sites

As the number of YouTube content producers continues to grow, many are looking for new ways to reach new audiences. That’s why we’re happy to announce the launch of YouTube Promoted Videos in AdSense ad units.

Promoted Videos are YouTube videos — from movie trailers to product demos to really almost any kind of video on YouTube — promoted by their creators so they can reach a wider audience. (You may have already noticed Promoted Videos on YouTube.com, as they appear on partner watch pages and alongside YouTube search results.) Extending Promoted Videos to AdSense sites will enable these content producers to broaden their reach, while providing you with another way to earn from your ad space. At this time, these ads are only available in English to US publishers, but we’re looking forward to expanding to additional regions and languages in the future.

Promoted Videos feature a thumbnail image with three lines of text, and when clicked, will bring the user to watch a video or view a channel on YouTube. They’re contextually targeted to your pages, and you’ll earn from these ads on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. In addition, they can appear in the following ad formats, as long as you’ve opted these formats in to displaying both text and image ads: 300×250 Medium Rectangle, 336×280 Large Rectangle, 728×90 Leaderboard, 250×250 Square, and 200×200 Small Square. Just like other ads, Promoted Videos compete in our standard ad auction, so they’ll help drive up competition among advertisers bidding to appear on your pages. When a Promoted Video wins the ad auction, it’ll be shown alone in one of the eligible ad formats.

All Promoted Videos are required to comply with the YouTube Advertising Policies, and the advertised videos with our Terms of Use and Community Guidelines. You can prevent Promoted Videos from appearing on your pages by adding ‘youtube.com’ to your Competitive Ad Filter list. Please note that currently, this method will block all Promoted Videos from your sites.

Finally, we’d like to mention that these new Promoted Videos are separate from our video ads offering, which stream ads in video format and are classified as image ads.

We’re continuing to look for additional revenue opportunities for publishers, and we hope these new ads will help you earn more.