The easiest method to get interesting content on your site is article writing, especially when contrasted with the difficulties of uploading photographs, podcasts, presentations, and video.  This is why choosing an article writing service provider could be one of the most important tasks to undergo when you are trying to get attention to your website.  You can use the articles for SEO and produce those backlinks to your site, which are essential in getting a higher rank in the search engine results to attract more site visitors, and thereby enhance sales and profits.  Of course, you may opt to make the articles yourself, but this will come with the disadvantage of requiring much time - you will not be able to churn out articles as fast as an article writing service provider.

Even if you have to spend more when buying articles, having another person to write your articles will be vital in raising your profits.  One of the reasons for this is that writing them yourself will leave you with little time for other important Internet marketing tasks.  Doing these important tasks is sure to enhance your sales and profits.  Another reason is that a professional article writing service provider would permit you to submit more articles in the same amount of time that you write them yourself.  More articles mean more interesting content, more backlinks that drive visitors to your website, and the improvement of the position of your website in search engine results.

However, before you begin looking for an article writing service provider, it is advisable to ensure that you have thorough knowledge of the writing work that is required, or have actually written some articles yourself.  This will provide you with criteria to which you can compare the performance of your provider.  You will also know the quality of articles to expect and what would constitute a fair price.  It is often an error to select an article writing service provider primarily on the basis of their rates.  While cheap articles are very attractive, you would have to check on their quality first before you can commit to working with them. 

After hiring an article writing service company, you will then make sure that your specifications on quality, keyword density, grammar, and other standards are met when you receive the articles.  After inserting your backlinks, you then submit your articles to the directories based on category.  You will need to ensure that your articles are appropriate for the directory and category, or the administrators of these directories will reject them. Check out http://articlesontap.com for more.

Exactly What Are The Added Advantages To Being An Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing has turned out to be one of the most successful ways to advertise online. If you own a website this is one of the fastest ways to earn additional money online. Affiliate Marketing is an understanding concerning a merchant and a website owner. The affiliate or websites owner, permits the use of their own website for the marketing of the vendor’s products by linking to the retailer’s website.

In trade, the merchant gives a percentage to the affiliate on all sales created by the affiliate marketer. Every time someone clicks on the link on the affiliate marketer web site and then continues to make a sale, the affiliate marketer gets a monetary fee. The product owner will pay out the affiliate marketer simply when a buyer clicks on the product website link and makes a purchase.

It is really considered to be a win-win arrangement for both the merchant and the affiliate marketer simply because of the pay-for-performance scheme. Together the merchant and the affiliate experience certain gains in web marketing. There are numerous advantages on the vendor’s side. It gives the product owner a broader market in which to promote a product or service.

 Internet affiliate marketing can give the service or product the utmost advertising mileage which it may possibly not get using various other traditional promotional strategies. The more affiliate marketing internet pages a product owner carries, the larger the targeted traffic, which in turn can convert to sales. Affiliate marketing is the equal of having an army of marketing individuals that will do the advertising and marketing and will certainly solely get a commission if a consumer purchases.

Since the relationship between the affiliate and merchant is a win-win relationship, the affiliate also enjoys many benefits. Primarily among these is the easy strategy to generate a profit. The affiliate may produce income by having an ad or affiliate link to the product owner’s web site, which inturn would-be consumers may hopefully click and continue to make a sale.

The moment the individual clicks on the text ad on the affiliate’s web page, they usually are redirected to the product owner’s internet site and goes on to obtain that targeted product, the affiliate earns a commission. By acquiring additional website traffic the affiliate marketer stands to produce a lot more income for their endeavors.

If you are considering having a work at home career then affiliate marketing is an excellent option There are essentially no manufacturing expenditures. The merchandise is definitely been designed and proven by the product owner, and all you need to do to find, as many prospective buyers as you can which will gather in the income for equally the vendor and the affiliate marketer.

Affiliate marketing networks are commonly zero cost to sign up for, so affiliate marketers do not have to be bothered about start-up expenditures. There are tons of offerings you can choose from. You can find affiliate programs for every product under the sun. Surely, there is a product or service out there that is relevant to your website.

As an affiliate it is certainly not a requirement for you to possess any sales practical knowledge at all The majority of affiliate programs provide you with exceptional help when it comes to administering promotional materials. The ease of affiliate marketing enables you to be an affiliate marketer at the minimum cost and the most convenience. You can certainly even build a successful affiliate marketing business right in the convenience of your private house.

In affiliate marketing, an individual’s responsibility is simply to find potential customers for the product owner; you do not need to be troubled concerning inventory, order processing, and item distribution. All these, along with customer satisfaction support are the responsibilities of the vendor.

As a result of the global reach of the internet, you can effortlessly locate countless numbers of prospective buyers. You can intensify your advertising and marketing campaign by taking advantage of more competitive and effective approaches such as viral marketing. Through attracting far more potential customers, you additionally take full advantage of your own possibilities to generate income.

 Another benefit of an affiliate marketer is the minimal financial risk involved. If the product or service you are advertising is not making cash then you can easily eliminate it and opt for a different product. Generally there are generally absolutely no long-term binding agreements tying a person to items which are definitely not making a sufficient amount of cash.

However, the very best advantage of becoming an affiliate marketer is the ability to expand your earnings; and you can easily produce a profit even if affiliate marketing is simply a part time online business. Through your own affiliate marketing business, you may easily earn additional revenue, despite the fact that you do need to apply effort and hard work and use your creativeness to take advantage of your earning possibilities.

 Certainly, affiliate marketing is one of the quickest and most efficient online business opportunities on the world wide web today.

Other useful sites How to create a PDF ahd How to PDF

Using forums to create traffic and links back to your website is a fantastic seo tool you can use today. Forum posting strategies do not cost much cash or time and are great for new and old websites alike.  I wrote this article to give you all the information you need to make successful forum posts.

The first thing you will need to do is find relevant forums to post in. Use your favorite search engine to do a search for your keywords along with the word “forum” or “forums”. For instance if you have a website on skateboarding, you would type “skateboarding forums” into your search engine.

Next you will want to determine how active the forum is. The reason for this is because you will not get much traffic from a forum that only has a few members posting to it. Find out how many registered users are in the forum by scrolling to the bottom and finding the site statistics.

Ensure that the forum is a “dofollow” forum rather than a “nofollow” forum. Find a link within one of the posts or signatures and view its properties. The links in the forum will show up as “nofollow” if they are nofollow links.

Signatures are great places to put links back to the homepage of your site. Our favorite Minnesota seo company suggests you always make sure that the forum allows you to put links in your signature by checking other users signatures for links or by reading the forum terms and conditions.

Finding forum posts that are sure to follow helpful links is a great way to build traffic to your site. Great posts to seek out are posts that ask specific questions about a topic your site contains the answers to. For example a post containing the question “when is Iron Man 2 going to be released”, would be a great place to insert a link to your page on movie release dates.

Make relevant posts and people will find value from them and click through to your website. Readers of your post may decide to buy what your selling and link from their sites to yours. Also each post you make will build a link to your site which will raise your standing with google, yahoo, and bing. Are you starting to fall in love with forum posting yet?

Thanks for reading this piece on forum posting for links and traffic. Refer back to this page as often as you like.

Are you a webmaster in need to have of additional revenue?  Or are you planning to set up an on the internet organization but you even now don’t have any item to sell?  If so, marketer advertising and marketing may be the finest solution for your troubles.  With internet marketer advertising and marketing, you won’t need to have to worry about the merchandise you need to sell.  All you need to have is a web site with sufficient contents which are related towards products of a certain online organization supplying affiliate marketer software programs.  By growing to be a member with the plan, or by turning out to be an internet, it is possible to start earning a particular quantity of dollars right away!

Internet marketer advertising is some sort of enterprise relationship established between a merchant and his affiliates.  In affiliate advertising and marketing, an marketer agrees to direct some site visitors to a merchant’s site.  If that traffic is converted into some sort of action, like a visitor purchasing a item on the merchant’s web page or a visitor turning into a lead to the company, the affiliate who directed the targeted traffic will be compensated.  Compensation may perhaps take the form of either a percentage product sales commission for your revenue generated or a fixed fee predetermined upon the application of the marketer on the merchant’s affiliate software.

Promising a whole lot of benefits both for the merchants and the affiliates, marketer promoting has grow to be a single on the most popular on the net advertising and marketing techniques nowadays.  In fact, nearly every product owner or retailer web page currently delivers an marketer program that any a single can join into.  Most retailers would entice folks to turn out to be affiliates or members of their software by promising great gains like significant commissions, lifetime commissions, click via incomes and a good deal of other benefits.  But would all these internet marketer applications bring off exactly the same advantages?

Most affiliate programs would pay out you, as an internet marketer, a one-time commission for every sale or lead you brought on the merchant’s web page.  Commissions for this sort of marketer applications are typically big, ranging from 15% to a high of about 60%.  Other internet marketer programs would pay you a fixed charge for every click as a result of or visitors you send on the merchant’s internet site.  Software programs like this usually shell out a smaller fee for each click via, typically not getting any bigger than half a dollar.  The very good thing about this type of plan, however, is that the visitor won’t need to buy anything in order to the internet to get compensated.

An additional sort of affiliate marketer plan is the residual earnings affiliate marketer program.  Residual affiliate marketer applications commonly spend only a small percentage of product sales commission for each sale directed by the affiliate towards the merchant’s web page.  This commission generally comes only from the range of 10% to 20% sales commission.  Because of this, quite a few folks ignore residual marketer program and would rather opt for the large paying one-time commission internet marketer plan.  Are these men and women generating a mistake, or are they generating the appropriate decision?

We can’t tell, for sure, if folks are doing a mistake by choosing a high paying one-time commission internet package.  But we can absolutely say that they are creating a large mistake if they ignore residual internet plans.  Residual affiliate marketer plans would indeed shell out at a lower rate, but merchants offering such type of programs would usually spend you regular and ongoing commissions for a single internet marketer initiated sale!  That signifies, for the exact same effort you made in marketing a specific affiliate plan, you get compensated only when in a one-time commission system, and a typical and ongoing commission for a residual plan!

So, are the advantages of advertising residual internet software clearer to you now?  Or are they nevertheless vague?  If they are nevertheless vague, then let’s make them a bit clearer with this example.

Suppose you can find two on the net merchants both supplying web hosting services on their sites.  The first product owner delivers a one-time commission sort of affiliate marketer software that pays $80 for every single marketer initiated sale.  The 2nd merchant also offers an affiliate marketer plan, but this time a residual affiliate software that pays only $10 for each single affiliate initiated sale.  As an marketer, we may get attracted at once at what the initial product owner is supplying, as $80 is definitely a great deal larger than $10.  But by thinking things over before truly getting into them, 1 might be able to see that the second merchant is providing us additional opportunity to earn a greater amount of income.

Supposed you have directed targeted traffic on the vendor and it converted into a sale, you’ll get compensated once by the very first product owner to the sale you’ve initiated.  But with the second vendor, you’ll get compensated monthly for as extended as the client you’ve referred on the merchant continues to avail from the web hosting service.  That means that for that same effort of having 1 customer to avail on the merchant’s service, you get paid out monthly in residual marketer applications while you only get paid as soon as in a one-time commission kind of internet plans.

So, are residual marketer applications worth advertising?  Certainly yes, due to the fact you virtually get a lot more cash from these types of affiliate marketer applications in the long run!  And would residual affiliate software work best for you?  Almost certainly not, almost certainly yes.  It is not definitely for me to tell.  But using the gains that residual internet marketing and advertising can offer, it would really be unwise to ignore such programs.

About the author: Ron has been written articles for nearly 2 years. Come visit his latest website over at pacotes cancun wich helps people find the best spring break cancun and information about pacote cancun .

Internet. Company. Profit. To entirely integrate all of these words into a productive merging you may need another term. Traffic. Every write-up you may locate about producing your website or organization successful would usually consist of the importance of generating targeted traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, visitors could be the most vital thing to some successful web dependent company company. Apart from ensuring that you simply possess a fantastic item to sell, you employed free website templates to develop your website, and you might have your company’s internal organization nicely taken core of, it would be time to get towards the nitty gritty of things, producing targeted traffic.

If you currently have a site and you want think that you’re not getting the targeted traffic that you are supposed to become acquiring, then its time to reconsider. If you might be contending in these extremely competitive enterprise, you must always be considered a action forward of the competition, growing your visitors flow ought to have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is vital, that’s an old adage recognized to every person. But with generating visitors, you must often be in your toes and be a day ahead of every person. By no means believe of nowadays and tomorrow as a beginning point for creating your website traffic laden, it ought to often have been yesterday. Downloading business website templates can be a great step in developing a productive site.

To assist you out in producing a lot more traffic for your site, right here are some seven surefire methods to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good marketing with search engines

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture supply fantastic marketing schemes that are really truly well-liked and assures fantastic visitors. Although with this surefire method to increase your targeted traffic would cost some funds. Whilst some would shy away from spending funds to improve traffic, it is crucial in this case to accomplish so simply because Adwords and Overture could be the best surefire method to increase your traffic.

You could see for your self the success this search engine marketing techniques have reaped rewards for so numerous firms. Plenty of site function these advertising system and several have signed on to reap the advantages. Do not be left behind. Each and every penny is worth it with making use of Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging hyperlinks with other web sites, each of you’ll advantage in the efforts both of you do to boost your web sites traffic. When one site features one more web sites link, they could supply 1 an additional using the traffic one site generates. The endeavours are doubly advantageous because it would appear like each of you might be functioning to produce much more visitors. The more back links traded with more sites the much more traffic could possibly be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing and advertising

Viral marketing allows you to spread the term about your company and product without any charges or if ever reduced costs only. This is really a marketing approach that will be very sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, item or website link to some specific media for example a funny video, entertaining game, an fascinating write-up or even some cool website templates. With this particular method, folks get infected using the creativity and entertainment with the medium which they will pass it on to many folks.

4) Lookup and use proper keywords and phrases or keyword key phrases for your websites articles

Search engines appear for certain key phrases that they would display in their results page. In doing so, getting the right keyword and keyword phrase can be a high requirement in ranking in higher in search engine outcomes. You could compose your own content or you can hire somebody to complete it for you.

5) Write Articles that will lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would include the exact same topic that your website deals in. In case you sell automobile components write press releases and articles about cars and vehicle elements. Attach your web sites description and providers in the finish of the post as well since the website link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a marketplace and display your expertise and credibility. Whenever you found a good foundation for your site, individuals will believe in you and your website and will pass on to several individuals their believe in. Traffic will definitely boost simply because they know that you can supply what they require.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many folks know what you might be about and your existence is shared with numerous other people, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with a lot more traffic by recommendation. Should you arouse the curiosity of your clients they will be pushed to help you with your targeted traffic.

You may or may not know, but YouTube is only 4 years old.  With the super fast ‘give it to me now’ world we live in we sometimes forget that sites like YouTube and Facebook are in their early stages, paving the road where there has been no road.

Let’s face it, if you have not heard of YouTube it’s either because you have been living in the subway sewers for the past four years or you have never been exposed to the interest.  Point blank, odds are that you know exactly what YouTube is; a video sharing community.

Sure, you have watched video’s and probably submitted some of your own.  For most people that watch and share their own videos, YouTube is fun, exciting, creative, entertaining, captivating, and motivating and so much more.  But what if your goal is to upload a video on YouTube and have it go viral? It’s a whole different world when it comes to optimizing YouTube video for viral and search.

The other day I had the opportunity to hear Greg Jarboe, author of Marketing an Hour a Day speak at the SES Chicago Expo 2009.  Normally, the session intervals have 3 or 4 guest speakers that last roughly a little over an hour.  The nice part about Greg’s session was that he had the audience all to himself for that hour plus.

Greg Jarboe Speaking at SES Chicago Expo 2009

Greg’s presentation was focused on YouTube optimization, basically optimizing your YouTube video for its highest search ranking potential on YouTube as well as traditional search engines.  Although he covered much of his book in the hour plus at SES, he did not cover everything contained in his book.

The good part is that what he did talk about the most critical elements in optimizing your YouTube video.  With this being said, all of the below stats, data, tips and tricks are courtesy of Greg Jarboe as discussed during his presentation at SES Chicago Expo 2009.

Just to shed some quick data on the power and usability of YouTube, realize this:
-    People watch more YouTube videos than they perform Google searches.
-    YouTube has a 57% reach on the 18 to 34 year old age group (FYI, that’s 36.9 million users alone).

Just taking these two usability factors into consideration, why wouldn’t you fully optimize your YouTube video to perform at its highest potential?

As Greg Jarboe said “YouTube is the biggest and most underleveraged marketing channel” today.

With this being said, let’s move into what Greg mentions are the three most important factors to consider strategizing your YouTube marketing efforts:

1 – Discovery: Will/Can your video be found?  Is it fully optimized for YouTube and SERP search?
2 – Watch:  Is your video worth watching or is it junk?  Does your video add value to the viewer?
3 – Share: Is your video worth sharing?  Why would someone want to embed your video on their site? (this is how videos on YouTube go viral)

To put a little more emphasis on the ‘share’ aspect, I believe it’s important to understand how people discover your video which self explains why embedding of videos is so important for your YouTube success.

-    45% will discover your video on a video site such as YouTube
-    44% will discover your video by a site owner embedded your video into their blog
-    6% will discover your video through traditional search engine results pages
-    2% will discover your video through social bookmarking
-    -1% will discover your video on a niche video search engine

Technically, YouTube is a search engine.  However its search is very basic and limited and primarily concentrates on ‘text-matching’.  Optimizing your video on YouTube is almost like old-school SEO.  Let’s break down the most important factors that the YouTube search engine algorithm takes into consideration.

1 - Text-matching: when a user queries a phrase can that phrase be found in your video title or description?
2 – Tags: Just like blogs, can the words you choose for the video tags be found in the users broad keyword query?
3 – Relevancy – Is the users broad keyword query relevant to your videos title, description and tags in general?
4 - Number of hits/views (popularity)
5 - Ratings (good ratings get ranked higher)

What are the three most important text-matching elements when optimizing your YouTube video?
1 – Title – did you do your research? Do you have your keywords within your title tag?
2 – Description – utilize all characters available, most people don’t.  Do you have your keywords within your description?
3 – Tags – smoke em’ if ya’ got em’, use any all relevant keywords and phrases as possible.

Once you have properly optimized your YouTube video what can you do to boost the video views without any fancy 3rd party automation or stealthy ‘leaked’ info from self proclaimed video gurus?
1 – Use links in the video description – cross promotion on/to your channel or your website
2 – Create video responses – point users to your next video with video responses
3 – Use Annotations – link to other similar video(s) of yours
4 – Use Captions – add subtitles to your video and reach a broader audience
5 - Embedding – encourage others to embed your videos so it can be shared and go viral

Finally, what kind of video will you create?  Well, rather than guessing here are ten proven approaches in creating your video that have worked for years and more importantly work on YouTube:
1 - Humor
2 - Slice of life
3 - Testimonials
4 - Demonstrations
5 - Problem solving
6 - Talking heads
7 - Characters
8 - Reasons why
9 - News
10 - Emotion

YouTube can be a massive asset to your online marketing strategy if performed and optimized properly to maximize its potential in order to get those million plus views…  With a little elbow grease and following these simple tips and tricks, your YouTube video can go viral.  In the words of Greg Jarboe: “Video MUST go viral to be successful.  People must SHARE your video”.

Don’t forget to sign up on my RSS Feed on the top of this site to get more great online marketing tips, tricks, news and more.

The first session interval I attended at the SES Chicago Expo was entitled: Search, A Real-Time Paradigm?

Search engines strive to have the most up-to-date content on the web, indexed and ready for display to searchers. They are moving towards that goal quickly, showing fresh, instant content higher in the blended search results. Google has created ’show options’ which includes pages crawled in the last 24 hours and forum/review results. Others like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are indexing instant submissions and making them highly visible in search results. Fresh content is a high priority for search marketers and advertisers to create and optimize.

First up to speak was Bill Fischer of TwitterJobSearch.com  Bill runs a job search site through real time semantic algorithms based on social media sites like Facbook, Twitter and Linkedin that brings job seekers and employers together through social media.  Bill’s presentation apparently never got sent to SES so he had to use another presentation with European stats, which being an American and all was kind of odd for me but understandable under the circumstances.As briefly as possible, Bills organization feels that classified advertising is moving in the direction of social media which is why they jumped on the idea.  Imagine a job opening that you are aware of even before the hiring companies HR department has even publically made the job available on their local domain or Career Builder or Monster.  Imagine a way to find qualified people and land a job faster, pretty cool huh?

Overall, Bills presentation was little short and lacked information.  Slightly understandable as his true presentation was lost, which may have been more enlightening; but we will never know.  What I look for in these sessions, presentations and panels is ‘actionable’ items that we as an audience can take away and apply ourselves.  I did not get any action items from Bill, only what his company does; however his site is pretty cool.

Next up was Nathan Stroll, co-founder of Aardvark.  Aardvark allows a user to ask a question, and the system finds the person who can answer it through social networking.  The system gathers knowledge from those in your network and finds those in your network and well as friends of friends of friends within the networks who can possibly answer your question.  A real interesting social platform if you ask me because it has nothing to do with Google.

Nathan did give one good piece of advice for social networking:
-    You need a reason why someone should follow you online on facebook or twitter, what’s the incentive for this other person?

Overall, I felt relatively left in the dark as with Bills presentation in that the focus was about them and what they are doing.  Nathan did mention ‘who knows what the future holds?’… No real actionable items to take away for the average online marketer.

Third on the panel was Rob Walk of NovaRising.  Novarising.com is a music indexing and search site for the BBC.  It uses semantic search and indexing to find top songs and artists worldwide through comments, posts, plays and views from Bebo, Google, iTunes, Last.fm, MySpace and YouTube.  Basically a music popularity contest across multiple platforms.  Users can narrow down search and enhance searches by genre, age, sex, etc..  Rob mainly talked about the nova project, some features, and some challenges.  Same as before, no real actionable items to take away for the average online marketer during this presentation.

Last up was Ho John Lee, Principal Program Manger of Bing Social Search.  Ho John was the best speaker in this interval in my mind as I had the most notes and ‘take-away’ from him.  Ho John spoke of real time social media in relation to Bing network and how Bing is adapting with the trends.

Why real time through social in relation to search engines?  Mainly because it’s fresh and ‘now’.  Ho John did reveal some information and tips to get placement of your social media efforts on the Bing network.
-    Remember that content determines meaning and relevancy
-    Low relevance ‘noise’ (chatter) can become ‘signal’ in aggregate
-    Information may not be accurate, but its fresh
-    Real time search is frequently and about ‘discovery’ not search, what are people talking about, who are people following?
-    Real time social search results differ from traditional web search results (he didn’t say exactly how)
-    Spam communities are highly visible to the search engines, don’t be part of a large social community.
-    Share good links
-    Attract real people

How does Bing use and score social in its search engine:
-    Top tweets
-    Shared links
-    Re-Tweets in last minute, hour and day
-    Your physical location

Although I did not expect a representative of Bing to spill the beans, these tips do help in general because prior to knowing this it was all guess work, assumptions and testing.  Sadly, it still comes down to more guess work, more assumptions and more testing to get higher placement on the search engines with or without social; at least now we have a little more direction from Bing at least.

In general this interval was about fresh real time search; it delivered what it promised.  I personally was not impressed basically because I want to learn how to be better at what I do for a living through these panels at this expo (that’s why we pay money to attend).  Ho John from Bing did provide the most informative and actionable presentation from the group.  When all is said and done, real-time fresh content is still an infant and has a long way to go.  If you can grab hold of it now, you will be far ahead of your competition.

You will find my overall personal experience at the SES Chicago Expo on a separate post.  What I wanted to dive in here is in regards to the first keynote speaker Jeff Jarvis, Author of What Would Google Do?

Without any doubt Jeff is a great speaker, hands down.  I have not read his book and have little anticipation of doing so as my understanding is that it deals with a lot of hypothesis which I like facts a little more; but I could be mistaken.  Also, part of me is lazy and I have kids, so personal time…HA… I don’t think so.

Probably the most significant ‘take-away’ I got from Jeff’s presentation was “Content With No Links, Has NO Value”.  How true is that, millions of people add content to web daily and no one knows about it unless you builds links and send traffic to your content.

Jeff Jarvis Speaking At SES Chicago Expo

Jeff spoke of a very interesting topic in that users of the internet are moving away from search engines and relying more on their social networks for information and advice.  I found this to be very true from what I see on a regular basis.  Just go ahead to Google Trends for a minute, and search for the phrase ‘Chicago Hotels’.  Notice how the search for this phrase is trending downward year over year.  Why is this?  Well, more and more people are utilizing social media and web2.0 sites for information, reviews, rates/pricing and much more.  Why visit a search engine when you can ask your social network which are honest views and reviews, not some affiliate trying to make a buck.

Anyway, Jeff’s past in largely in media.  He spoke of in the past how media outlets had the strategically approach of ‘we tell the people what the news is’ and ‘people will find you’ (meaning people will find the media).  Because we are in the new age of technically, there has been a complete shift in the media approach.  Now, more than every ‘the people decide what news they want’ and ‘you must now find the people’ (meaning the media must seek and bring the news to the people).  Is the new age of technology killing media? Kind of.  But media outlets need to adapt.  People would rather follow a niche site on a RSS feed or follow a Twitter link from a trusted friend rather than pick up the newspaper these days.

Something else I wanted to mention that was said by Jeff is that “Home Pages Are Dead”.  Now that’s a big statement.  But what he meant by that was in the past a home page was the entry point, the gateway if you will for site visitors.  Now, through social media your back end content pages are the entry point.  Create a great piece of content, and distribute it your social network; odds are this new and fresh content is not on your home page but rather a sub page or sub domain or blog.  Long story short, less and less people visit home pages of media related sites when getting their news.  People now search from links in emails and social networks to find newsworthy content, not XYZ Media’s home page.

My final thought: SES Chicago Expo made a great choice in having Jeff Jarvis as Keynote Speaker.

I’m back at the SES Expo in Chicago.  Last year I attended this expo and wrote a few posts about my experience….. This year I am attending the three days of speaker sessions as well.

Because I live outside of the Chicago area, about 45 to 60 minutes or so, logic told me to drive to the Hilton Chicago where the expo is being held.  Well, because we only have two seasons in Chicago; winter and construction, I got stuck in the first snow fall of the year during my drive.  Typically I allow myself about an hour and 15 minutes to arrive in downtown Chicago and let’s just say that my drive yesterday into the city was well over two hours.  Best words to describe my driving experience… It Sucked!

From Inside The Hilton Chicago

Well, today is day two (Tuesday) and our lovely Chicago weather does not fail as oddly enough the three SES Expo is also the ‘three day winter advisory’ for Chicago, awesome (tomorrow should be even worse).  So, right now I am sitting on a train on my way to downtown Chicago.  I do not take trains very often; it has been at least 4 years since my last train ride so I feel a bit out of place when taking the train.  Good news is that I am not the only way on this train car typing away on a laptop.

So now that I have said that, I believe it’s time to talk about the expo itself.  For the life of me, I could have sworn that last year’s expo had five days on speaker sessions and not three like this 2009 expo.  I have been thinking about it left and right, and I keep assuring myself that I am not crazy but rather SES has taken away two days.  Funny enough, it was not until I started writing this post that I realized that I have been crazy in that the 2008 SES Expo had three days of speaker sessions as well. Oh well, a lot happens over the course of one year and I know I’m not the only one that has seen 2009 fly by quickly.

In overall comparison of the 2009 vs 2008 SES Expo, I think first day experiences will go in favor of the 2008 expo.  When I arrived at the registration booth I received the same nylon mesh bag as I did in 2008 filled with junky ads, a pen and a notebook.  In the 2008 on top of the previous mentions I also received a search engine marketing hard cover book, a few novelty promotion items and hand sanitizer.  Am I complaining? Yes, but just a little.

Funny enough, I am more disappointed in the fact that I did not get the hand sanitizer like I did in 2008.  Not because I like free stuff, cause we all do; but because I am somewhat of a germ phobe in these past few months due to swine flu.  It would have made beyond sense to give out hand sanitizer at this 2009 expo.

My second minor beef in general is that it seems like a lower budget event this year as compared to last.  A pass to the three day expo costs over $1,000.00 per person.  Needless to say, it is not cheap to attend the SES Expo’s and spending a few bucks on SES’s part would be nice.  Sure, I understand; economic conditions, costs of the Chicago labor union and other overheads add up fast, and we are all in business to make a buck.  I just expected a little more.

When it came to my ‘free’ lunch at the expo, I guess they spring for lunch so that’s not too bad; I should have not been surprised but was.  I stood in the lunch line with a few colleagues for a good 15 minutes like cattle waiting to get slaughtered.  The lunch on Monday was sponsored by Google, basically because they wanted to pitch everyone on apparently the enhanced features of Google Analytics.  As we entered the main ball room for lunch, the line just got longer.  More noticeable then the line to get your meal was the utter lack of seating.  The room was filled with round tables, most of which were already taken and there were a lot of people to be seated.  Imagine 300 seats and 500 people that need to be seated.  In retrospect, seating was not as big of a deal as I am making it out to be.  What I found frustrating was the Hilton and SES tool a round seating table that was suitable for eight people and crammed in 10 people.

Now, I’m not a small guy by any means. But I do need some room to at least stretch.  When I fly, I get an aisle seat, when I ride a bus I sit on the upper deck in the single seats; I really don’t like rubbing up against strangers and I like to have leg room.  None of which I got at the lunch tables.  As a matter of fact, all ten of us the table were so short on space I could not even lean over comfortably to fork in food to my jaw, so I had to bring the food far from the table to my mouth and hope the napkin caught any mishaps.

I know what you’re thinking, what did Google talk about?  Well, I have no freaken’ idea.  The room was loud the presenter spoke softly and showed what I can only assume was power point presentation on single projection screen for everyone to see.  Ohh and by the way, 50% of the people couldn’t even see the presentation (you know, cause of the round tables, duh SES & Hilton, DUH).

Anyway, I chowed down as quickly as possible and left the ballroom.  Not because I was cramped, but that would have been a great excuse.  But rather because by the time you got seated and took a few bites the next round of speaker sessions began.

What I really enjoy this year at the SES Expo within the speaker rooms is they added tables and power chords at the front of the room for those with laptops.  I found myself with plenty of leg room, a spot for my computer and power very nearby, not to mention front row seating.  Bravo SES, very well thought out.

So, this basically sums up my personal experience for day one at the SES Chicago Expo.  You will find that I have created additional posts regarding the presentations, speakers and some not so good pictures I took inside the conference rooms.  After all three days have passed, I encourage you read my final thought on the SES Chicago Expo, I know day one may seem negative but I’m not here to feed you a bunch of bull shit, just pure honesty.

Back in May 2009 I created a post regarding Google Meta Keywords Tag, Do They Really Matter in which I provided information from the Google Webmaster docs showing no specific details to Google using the Meta Keyword Tag in its ranking considerations.

Well, now Google has officially stated Google Does Not Use The Keywords Meta Tag In Web Ranking

According to Google:

About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag

It’s possible that Google could use this information in the future, but it’s unlikely. Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.

Does this mean you should not include the meta keywords tag? Absolutely not!!! Google is not the only search engine available.

I have had a few intense conversations (for a lack of better words) with clients regarding the keyword tags. For some reason clients (mine at least) have a tendency to focus on what their competition is doing and not focus on facts in terms of keyword tags. Meaning that if a client is seo savvy enough they are in tune to these types of elements. The issue is that they always pull out the “if my competition is doing so, so should I” card.

Well, I hate that sentence. Why? Who says the competition is performing seo properly? Who says the competition is targeting the most relevant terms? Just because the competition is ranking well on terms that are found in the meta keyword tag does not mean they are converting on that term. Ranking number one on a keyword is a HORRIBLE way to gauge performance. And rankings are NOT determined by keyword tags.

I even had this one client that during the dev phase, the meta keyword tags were not implemented. Months went by… Then one day during a site audit, I discovered the tags missing throughout the site at which point the tags were placed in the site. Months pass again, and to this day there are no significant improvements to the sites organic performance that can be associated to the meta keyword tag.

Anyway, I’m slightly off point, (just had to vent I suppose) getting back on topic… Now that Google has released the above, I would not deviate from what you are currently doing with the keyword tag. Its business as usual, this is not new news. For Google the meta keyword tag has done nothing for years, changing it now does nothing for Google.