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Browsing Posts published in June, 2008

SEO 101

SEO, or search engine optimization, refers to making certain changes to your web site so that it gets ranked higher in search engines.

 In a recent study, (but to be honest with you this is nothing new) the major search engines found that nearly 85% of web users used a search engine on a regular basis as part of their web activities.

This means for website owners they need to get their SEO right to get the sites ranked quite high in the search engine ranking world. It would be great if you could get on the 1st three pages of any of the popular search engines. If you could do this then your web traffic would go sky high. And of course if you get the traffic and you have good content on the site then the money or sign-ups will roll in.

You will hear many SEO people talk about loads of different ways to bring in traffic to your site and yes there are, but there are two basis steps to bring in the traffic. Good links to your site and regular fresh content added to the site.

Getting links to your site is considered by many, to be the most important aspect of  all search engine optimization. The more links you have to your web site, the higher your page rank will be and the better your search engine rankings will be. But these links must come from good ranking sites (Links from link farms , link directories are not that good and could harm your site) You are far better off having 5 good quality links from an authority site in your niche.

Article directories are also an effective method of building content embedded links. To use article directories, simply write an article and include your links within the article. Then, submit the article to a number of article directories. Other web site owners will visit these article directories, take the articles you have written, and place them, along with your links, on their site. If  people like your article and use it on their web site, you can build a large number of quality links.

Another main aspect of search engine optimization is content writing. Search engine spiders that crawl your web sites love to see fresh and original content on your site and when you do this on a regular basis the higher your web site will  move up in the ranking in the search engines.

When writing articles for search engines, it is helpful if the articles are unique so that they can not be found on any other web site on the Internet and are keyword dense. If you submit to three sites it is well worth have three different articles or re write the article three times.

Keyword density refers to featuring a certain keyword. For example you need to have the keyword appear so many times in the start of the article then appear a few times in the main body of the article a few times. Then it needs to be mentioned at the end)

Do not worry about this as I shall be including articles in this blog on how to write articles that work. But a word of caution please d not over do the keyword or else the search engines will ban you.

If you have a web site, you should spend some time learning all about SEO. Yes you can pay someone to do this but really for the average site you are very able to do this yourself. Yes you will make mistakes but with those mistakes you will learn what works and why it works also you will learn what does not work and again you will learn why it did not work.

And because we are keeping this simple to start with you need to keep your mind focused on in getting as many good quality and relevant links back to your site, and keep adding fresh content on a regular basis. All search engines love fresh content.

eBay Money Saving Tips – 1

 

Before I get into the meat of this article I would like to point out that I have researched the UK eBay site, but having looked around most of the other eBay sites most have the same fee structure.

Did you know if you start your auction off at lets say 0.99p instead of £1.00 you save yourself 0.05p a time.

If you start off at £4.99 instead of £5.00 you save a massive 0.10p a time.

For a full list of eBay fees pop a long to the eBay fee site by clicking here.

Now you may think 0.05p and 0.10p is nothing and maybe it is not but if you are listing 10 items a day at £5.00 you would pay £2.50.
Now reduce the start price to £4.99 and ten items will cost you £1.50, so you can see the savings that can be made by reducing the starting fees by 0.01p a time

Have fun and Happy eBaying

Andrew Milburn

 

 

As an eBay Education Specialist one of the top questions that I am asked is “How can I reduce the fees I am paying” I normally answer them the fees that they pay are already cheap………… You should try owning a brick and mortor store.

So I have decided to do some short articles outlining some quick ways you can save money on your ebay listing fees, and by the time this series has finished I hope you will do, and believe me it will both suprise you and help your business go to the next level.

Now I am going to be honest here, unless you understand where your money is being spent in your eBay business you will never have a large successful and profitable business nor will you be able to make savings. For how can you make savings when you do not know what you are already spending?

eBay bless them have once again been ten steps ahead of us and have things in place to help us. If you go along to your seller account, and select your latest eBay invoice and save it to an excel type program.(Excel or Google Spreadsheets or any of the free ones out there Once it has been saved you will then need to sort it via the 4th column (The fourth Column is the fee type.) by sorting by this column you will see straight away what you are spending and if you are over or even under spending.  For example If you are spending extra on a bold listing you need to ask yourself, do I really need these listings? Or if you are not spending anything or very little on lets say featured listing and your niche needs featured listing you need to sit down and work on it.

As Education Specialists we can help you and give you advice, but only you know your business and what works in your business. And only you know your business stats.

Well thats it for today, look out for some money saving tips.

Andrew Milburn – AndyUk

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