From Keyword to Business Idea in 8 Steps

Thursday, October 22, 2009 Keyword research is incredibly effective for market research because the main reason people use search engines is to find solutions to their problems. And people with problems might be willing to pay money to solve them.

But there are so many ways of expressing the same problem. "Cat food" could also be "cat treats," "food for kitty," "organic cat food." Someone who needs to feed a cat could use any of those terms in their search, or hundreds of others--and search engines record every one of them. That means there's a mountain of data about what people are searching for--and it's all waiting to be analyzed. That's why initial keyword research is a crucial first step if you're just starting an online business.

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Is That the Best You Can Do?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009 These days, everyone's a haggler. How to give your clients what they want without giving away the store.

When closing a deal or finalizing a sale turns into a negotiation, small-business owners often end up on the losing side--particularly during a recession. Fortunately, there are several strategies small-business owners can adopt to help improve their knack for haggling.

According to business ethics expert and Elegant Solutions Consulting CEO Lauren Bloom, the simplest involves setting parameters in advance.

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Bing Optimization

Sunday, October 18, 2009 Ever since Microsoft launched its Bing search engine, it has drawn a lot of interest (and speculation) from the SEO community. On one hand, this is quite logical because Bing is intended to be one more heavy-weight player and it is expected to cut some share from Google. On the other hand, this is hardly the first time a new heavy-weight player comes to the ring, so maybe the expectations that Bing will put an end to Google's monopoly are groundless. Still, Bing is quite different (in a positive way) from the other search engines and this is its major strength.
Is Bing Really That Different?

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Importance of Sitemaps

Saturday, October 17, 2009 There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you'd like them to go.

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How to get traffic from Twitter

Thursday, October 15, 2009 Twitter is one of the latest and greatest Web 2.0 apps and it gets tons of traffic. However, from the point of view of a SEO expert, it is more important that Twitter can get you tons of traffic as well. So, if you still don't have an account with Twitter, you'd better open one.

Twitter is simple to use and this is what made it so popular. Twitter is fashionable right now, so enjoy the moment. Even the creators of Twitter admit that as with MySpace and other Web 2.0 sensations, Twitter will inevitably go out of fashion some day, so hurry up and get some traffic for free now, when it is still all the rage of the season.

Twitter is simple to use, yet it is really powerful. You might need a couple of hours to get familiar with the basic functionality of Twitter and of some of the extras it has but you can harness its power, even if you don't know it very well.

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How to get traffic from Facebook

Wednesday, October 14, 2009 Facebook is not the first social network but it is the most popular one. There have been many other social networks before Facebook and while some of them were popular at some point in time, none could reach the popularity of Facebook. In addition to keeping in touch with your friends, Facebook can be (and is) used for business. You can use it to promote your products and services, to acquire new clients, or to get traffic to your site.

Like Twitter, Facebook is just one of the many ways to get some traffic to your site. Many marketers believe that it is just a matter of time for the traffic from Facebook, Twitter and the other major social networking sites to surpass the traffic their sites get from Google.

While this time might come, don't take this as a promise that even if you do everything right, Facebook, Twitter, or any other similar site will do traffic miracles for you. For some people Facebook works like a charm, for others it doesn't work at all. The same applies to Twitter. You can't know in advance if Facebook and/or Twitter will crash your server with traffic. Just try both and see which one (if any) works for you.

Unlike Twitter, which is very simplistic, Facebook offers more possibilities. Yes, you might need more time in order to explore all the possibilities and take advantage of them but hopefully these efforts will have a great return in terms of traffic. Here are some tips that can help you turn Facebook into a traffic monster:

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What Is SEO ?

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

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