Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to ‘blended’ search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query ‘777 built in 4 minutes‘:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually ‘see’ what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled ‘Dog’ is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled ‘German Shepherd Police Dog’ will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

(Via TechCrunch.)

9 SEO plug-ins to help you optimize your wordpress pages weights

1. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack will help you the basic content of the blog search engine optimization elements, including a separate page title, Meta tags, keywords and description.
(Note: All in One SEO Pack is easy to slow down the system and some of its functions can be achieved manually change the code, you can refer to the egg of this article.)

2. Redirection
Modify the previous text of the old Bo, WordPress upgrade or modify the permanent link structure, especially in the blog after the move, there will be blog post link to change.
Generally speaking, each post has a unique permanent URL address, the address change may occur after the visitors unable to visit, redirection plug-in will bring visitors to the new address, to avoid the situation can not be accessed.
(Note: not just SEO, for many useful Windows host friends,, redirection can also help you to remove a permanent link in the index.)

<3. Robots Meta
Under normal circumstances prime search engine will crawl your blog, and contains all the pages, this can easily lead to the appearance of duplicate content, so you need to guide search engines included prime, Robots Meta will make your blog get more weight and flow.

4. SEO Smart Links
Internal links are SEO, one of the key issues, more importantly, the content should have more internal links, you can search within the chain, told the prime engine, what is most important. If the manual to create internal links would be very time-consuming and laborious.
SEO Smart Links will allow you to specify a word such as ‘search engine optimization’ and then the contents of the article it appears a ‘search engine optimization’ is the word, it will be automatically turned into the designated links.

5. SEO Friendly Images
Photo Also in the blog optimization play an important role, so to establish the correct label image becomes very important, and this is precisely the function of SEO Friendly Images, if you prefer to use images in the blog article, then the SEO Friendly Images is a must for small.

6. Google Positioner
Choose the right keywords is very important that this plug-in can help you to bring traffic to track the search keywords, you may aimlessly choice words and then create some content, in the hope to get a good result, but the SEO need to take the initiative to track the results.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
Blog main common mistakes is to choose a permanent link to the wrong structure, and start writing blog when you feel the most appropriate choice, but over time you may also intend to change the permanent link structure, and this time you may take several months prime time in order to be search engine re-included.
Permalinks Moved Permanently and Redirection role similar, but more likely a better way to manage a permanent link to change.
(Recommendation: no matter what the situation is not going to change your permanent link.)

8. Nofollow Case by Case
In the last two years, nofollow attribute has been deeply affected a blog, WordPress for all of the message of the connection have used Nofollow tags, which means that a message in the connection does not pass Page Rank (PR). If you want to attract more visitors comments, Nofollow Case by Case allows you to remove the message in the link Nofollow tags, which require exposure of a new blog is very useful.
(Note: Dofollow is indeed a good idea to publicize your blog, but the same will be destroyed Spam your blog, nofollow also the effect of weight change.)

9. SEO Slugs
Do not use was found to prime the engine ignores words, posts often have their title may be elements of search engines is meaningless word, so if you post entitled ‘What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings’, then the a permanent link to the default may be what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings, but you are not more like a permanent link to the following: immediately-higher-rankings
SEO Slugs can automatically link to permanently remove from the meaningless words, to help you achieve better rankings.

Internet marketing is still a complete mystery to a large majority of Internet users. For many users, internet marketing is seen as some foreign area of the web, populated with silly get-rich-quick schemes and unsavory characters ready to rip off the innocent and uninformed consumer at the click of a mouse.

In reality, Internet marketing is populated mainly with hard working professionals promoting and selling high quality brand products by many of the world’s Top 500 companies.

Worldwide there are now over a billion Internet users, representing one large global consumer base or marketplace. The total amount of goods sold online has been steadily increasing each year as the Internet gains in both popularity and familiarity. Studies have shown people shop online because of lower prices, a wider selection of products, easier comparison shopping, and many just prefer not having to travel to stores to make a purchase.

Still Internet marketing has gotten a raw deal.

If you mention to any group of professionals that you’re an Internet Marketer and that you work full time on the Internet… you will receive some very skeptical looks and more than one arched eyebrow of disbelief.

Regardless of this lingering skepticism, Internet marketing has become a viable alternative for many disgruntled professionals dissatisfied with their working hours or conditions. It has become a viable alternative for many people from all walks of life. From the college student to the bored housewife to the retired doctor… all are enjoying a part time or full time income from the comfort of their homes.

And since the Internet is now practically available to everyone, anywhere in the world – Internet marketing is a level playing field. There are many forms of Internet marketing. There are many online business models you can follow. There are countless ways to earn a good honest income from the Internet. Which path you take will be largely determined by research, work habits, and the time you are willing to put forth.

Here’s a quick rundown of the most popular forms of Internet Marketing:

1. The Brick and Mortar Store Online. Most major companies and retail stores have created online versions of their brick and mortar businesses. Even if consumers don’t buy online, many use these sites for gathering product information before buying in the real world. A factor many savvy businesses are exploiting in their overall marketing strategies.

2. Online Services. Many service industries have moved online, everything from travel to banking to dating! Again, the Internet can be a profitable extension for any service company.

3. Internet Gurus… Internet marketing has a whole history of pioneers who have forged the methods and techniques of marketing online – opt-in lists, mini-sites, article marketing, pay-per-click advertising, joint ventures… a brief history populated with such names as John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Ralph Wilson, Yanik Silver, Corey Rudl, Ken Evoy and countless others.

A whole new industry has grown around ‘How-to’ market online, info products, workshops and web seminars – teaching people how to market on the Internet. A marketer creating his own product can prove very productive – as seen by John Reese’s 2004 launch of Traffic Secrets, which earned over a million dollars in one day. (Without a penny of paid advertising!)

4. Online Advertising and Pay-Per-Click advertising such as those offered by Google Adwords and others, presents another viable marketing route. Keywords (the exact words typed into a search engine) fuel a large portion of the web’s activity. Keyword marketing has become a major driving force behind most of the economic transactions on the web. This is a very lucrative sector for those Internet marketers who know exactly what they’re doing.

Then there is the whole section of SEO experts and consultants who command high prices for positioning companies or products in the top positions on the major search engines. Acquiring organic Top 10 search results will greatly determine the profitability of your online product or company.

5. Affiliate Marketing. One of the least understood, yet one of the most profitable forms of Internet marketing is affíliate marketing. An online marketer can join any affíliate program and promote its products or services on the Internet. You market the products, find customers for the company and receive a commission for each sale you make from your marketing efforts. These commissions can run anywhere from 2% to over 75%. One affíliate click can earn you anywhere from a few cents to several hundred dollars.

Major third party affíliate programs or companies such as Commission Junction, Clickbank, LinkShare, Amazon, Shareasale… act as a brokerage or go-between, representing thousands of Top Brand companies such as Sony, Apple, Dell… to online affíliate marketers. Marketers can join a program such as Commission Junction or LinkShare and be able to promote and market hundred of top quality products or services online. They can consolidate their affíliate marketing through these third party programs.

Perhaps the most common business model for the majority of online marketers is the last example, or a combination of advertising and affíliate sales. Many work-from-home professionals have adopted this business model. They have created a site or sites on the topic that interests them and of which they have or have gained some expert knowledge.

Once these sites become established and gather a large amount of targeted web traffíc each day, making a nice income can only be a matter of putting the Google Adsense code on their pages and placing a few appropriate affíliate links on their sites.

The more traffíc these marketers deliver to their sites, the more income they earn. The more unique content they create, the more income they earn. The more web sites they design, the more income they earn.

What many people outside of the web marketing field fail to realize is that the Internet is a 24/7/365 business. The Internet is always on and working for you. It is automatically producing income for you 24 hours of the day – while you’re sleeping, while you’re enjoying a nice meal with friends, or even while you’re on vacatíon.

Internet marketing can provide you with a lifestyle that is totally liberating – you can live and work anywhere in the world. You can be the boss, set your hours and work from the comfort of your home. Plus your whole online Internet business can be automated so it basically runs itself.

Internet marketing is totally flexible. You can adjust your workload to suit your work habits. Internet marketing is scalable, once you have learned how to make your first dollar; it is only a simple matter of repeating and scaling up what you did to earn that dollar. Computers and the Internet make it just as easy to handle a thousand sales as it is to handle one sale.

As Internet marketing becomes better known, it will gradually earn more and more respect. It will become a well recognized profession that many will aspire to and follow as a life long career. Mainly because Internet marketing will give you the freedom rarely seen in any other profession.

It offers you mobility, a high standard of living, and a working environment that can’t be beat. It gives you the freedom to follow your interests and hobbies; all the while turning those interests into viable revenue streams that supports the lifestyle of your choosing.

When it is all said and done, earning a living just doesn’t get any better than this.

By Daniel Scyphers

“

Internet marketing is still a complete mystery to a large majority of Internet users. For many users, internet marketing is seen as some foreign area of the web, populated with silly get-rich-quick schemes and unsavory characters ready to rip off the innocent and uninformed consumer at the click of a mouse.

In reality, Internet marketing is populated mainly with hard working professionals promoting and selling high quality brand products by many of the world’s Top 500 companies.

Worldwide there are now over a billion Internet users, representing one large global consumer base or marketplace. The total amount of goods sold online has been steadily increasing each year as the Internet gains in both popularity and familiarity. Studies have shown people shop online because of lower prices, a wider selection of products, easier comparison shopping, and many just prefer not having to travel to stores to make a purchase.

Still Internet marketing has gotten a raw deal.

If you mention to any group of professionals that you’re an Internet Marketer and that you work full time on the Internet… you will receive some very skeptical looks and more than one arched eyebrow of disbelief.

Regardless of this lingering skepticism, Internet marketing has become a viable alternative for many disgruntled professionals dissatisfied with their working hours or conditions. It has become a viable alternative for many people from all walks of life. From the college student to the bored housewife to the retired doctor… all are enjoying a part time or full time income from the comfort of their homes.

And since the Internet is now practically available to everyone, anywhere in the world – Internet marketing is a level playing field. There are many forms of Internet marketing. There are many online business models you can follow. There are countless ways to earn a good honest income from the Internet. Which path you take will be largely determined by research, work habits, and the time you are willing to put forth.

Here’s a quick rundown of the most popular forms of Internet Marketing:

1. The Brick and Mortar Store Online. Most major companies and retail stores have created online versions of their brick and mortar businesses. Even if consumers don’t buy online, many use these sites for gathering product information before buying in the real world. A factor many savvy businesses are exploiting in their overall marketing strategies.

2. Online Services. Many service industries have moved online, everything from travel to banking to dating! Again, the Internet can be a profitable extension for any service company.

3. Internet Gurus… Internet marketing has a whole history of pioneers who have forged the methods and techniques of marketing online – opt-in lists, mini-sites, article marketing, pay-per-click advertising, joint ventures… a brief history populated with such names as John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Ralph Wilson, Yanik Silver, Corey Rudl, Ken Evoy and countless others.

A whole new industry has grown around ‘How-to’ market online, info products, workshops and web seminars – teaching people how to market on the Internet. A marketer creating his own product can prove very productive – as seen by John Reese’s 2004 launch of Traffic Secrets, which earned over a million dollars in one day. (Without a penny of paid advertising!)

4. Online Advertising and Pay-Per-Click advertising such as those offered by Google Adwords and others, presents another viable marketing route. Keywords (the exact words typed into a search engine) fuel a large portion of the web’s activity. Keyword marketing has become a major driving force behind most of the economic transactions on the web. This is a very lucrative sector for those Internet marketers who know exactly what they’re doing.

Then there is the whole section of SEO experts and consultants who command high prices for positioning companies or products in the top positions on the major search engines. Acquiring organic Top 10 search results will greatly determine the profitability of your online product or company.

5. Affiliate Marketing. One of the least understood, yet one of the most profitable forms of Internet marketing is affíliate marketing. An online marketer can join any affíliate program and promote its products or services on the Internet. You market the products, find customers for the company and receive a commission for each sale you make from your marketing efforts. These commissions can run anywhere from 2% to over 75%. One affíliate click can earn you anywhere from a few cents to several hundred dollars.

Major third party affíliate programs or companies such as Commission Junction, Clickbank, LinkShare, Amazon, Shareasale… act as a brokerage or go-between, representing thousands of Top Brand companies such as Sony, Apple, Dell… to online affíliate marketers. Marketers can join a program such as Commission Junction or LinkShare and be able to promote and market hundred of top quality products or services online. They can consolidate their affíliate marketing through these third party programs.

Perhaps the most common business model for the majority of online marketers is the last example, or a combination of advertising and affíliate sales. Many work-from-home professionals have adopted this business model. They have created a site or sites on the topic that interests them and of which they have or have gained some expert knowledge.

Once these sites become established and gather a large amount of targeted web traffíc each day, making a nice income can only be a matter of putting the Google Adsense code on their pages and placing a few appropriate affíliate links on their sites.

The more traffíc these marketers deliver to their sites, the more income they earn. The more unique content they create, the more income they earn. The more web sites they design, the more income they earn.

What many people outside of the web marketing field fail to realize is that the Internet is a 24/7/365 business. The Internet is always on and working for you. It is automatically producing income for you 24 hours of the day – while you’re sleeping, while you’re enjoying a nice meal with friends, or even while you’re on vacatíon.

Internet marketing can provide you with a lifestyle that is totally liberating – you can live and work anywhere in the world. You can be the boss, set your hours and work from the comfort of your home. Plus your whole online Internet business can be automated so it basically runs itself.

Internet marketing is totally flexible. You can adjust your workload to suit your work habits. Internet marketing is scalable, once you have learned how to make your first dollar; it is only a simple matter of repeating and scaling up what you did to earn that dollar. Computers and the Internet make it just as easy to handle a thousand sales as it is to handle one sale.

As Internet marketing becomes better known, it will gradually earn more and more respect. It will become a well recognized profession that many will aspire to and follow as a life long career. Mainly because Internet marketing will give you the freedom rarely seen in any other profession.

It offers you mobility, a high standard of living, and a working environment that can’t be beat. It gives you the freedom to follow your interests and hobbies; all the while turning those interests into viable revenue streams that supports the lifestyle of your choosing.

When it is all said and done, earning a living just doesn’t get any better than this.

By Daniel Scyphers

One way Google is celebrating this event is through funding 10 million dollars for the idea that can help the most people. An idea that could have the most impact on our world.

You can find out more about Google Impact Project here: 10 to the 100

Google Has Already Impacted Many People

Like a lot of webmasters and marketers out there, I am very grateful to Google. Mainly because Google has been very good to me and has made my online livelihood possible with organic rankings, Adsense revenue, Adwords…

Maybe I could have done it without Google, but it would have been a much more difficult job. And it’s very hard to imagine a world without Google.

It’s also hard to believe Google has only been around for 10 years… it has made all the difference to my onlíne marketing. I have used Google and Google Tools every day for the last six or seven years.

And it seems Google is only getting stronger and better. The new Google Chrome browser will only add to the long líst of Google’s helpful offerings to the public.

With this thought in mind, here is my (biased) líst of the most 10 useful marketing tools Google has produced.

10 Most Valuable Free Google Marketing Tools

Google has become the dominant search engine on the Internet. It would be hard to imagine a web without Google. For that matter, it would now be hard to imagine a world without Google. As frightening as that may seem to many people, it is none the less true.

For better or worse, Google has permeated into almost every aspect of our everyday life. Being Googled is now a common expression and an act carried out by millions of users around the world each day. New Google products and services are coming on stream at a staggering pace, further increasing Google’s impact on our lives.

Despite this dominating presence, many people still don’t realize Google offers some excellent free marketing tools for marketers and webmasters. Marketing tools which can prove extremely valuable to any webmaster or marketer trying to promote their sites or products online. Useful tools that will make your promotions easier and much more profitable.

Don’t be fooled by the ‘free’ label, these marketing tools might be free but they are also valuable. One even wonders why Google would be giving away these tools and services for free? It probably makes good business sense in the long run. By providing these free tools Google is fostering a lot of company good-will and building up the Google brand name in the process. Good PR is good business.

Every marketer and webmaster should be taking advantage of Google’s good-will and snapping up these professionally run services and marketing tools. Here’s a quick run-down of the 10 most valuable free Google Internet marketing tools:

1. Google Analytics

Perhaps the premier marketing tool offered by Google. It will prove helpful to both the marketer and the webmaster. Google Analytics gives you a daily snapshot of your web site. Google Analytics analyzes your traffic, where it comes from and what it does once it enters your site. You can monitor up to three sites for free.

Google Analytics is extremely valuable in analyzing your marketing funnel. It tracks all the steps leading up to your sales or checkout page. Vital information for raising your conversion rate and ROI.

You may be placed on a waiting líst for this highly in demand service from Google.

2. Google Sitemaps

Webmasters can use Google Sitemaps to almost instantly place newly created pages on their site into the Google Search Index. This is a XML file that is uploaded to Google as new pages are added on your site. Needless to say this can be a valuable service for any webmaster or marketer who wants to get their information on the web quickly.

3. Google Alerts

Be notified when someone or another site lists your site or mentions your name. Great way to keep track of all your online activities. Great way to monitor all your online business interests and products.

4. Google Froogle

Froogle is Google’s price directory! It simply lists all the cheapest prices for different products on the web. For marketers and webmasters who are promoting products, it should be studied and analyzed. Optimizing your site’s content for Froogle may prove to be very beneficial.

Follow Froogle or Google directions exactly on how to líst or display products on your site. Froogle will spider your site and display your prices and products to thousands of targeted customers. That, as they say, is priceless.

5. Google Checkout

Not exactly free but for those marketers who use AdWords – for every $1 spent on AdWords you can process $10 for free. You can also place the shopping cart logo on your AdWords ad and take advantage of the prestige and trust the Google brand name has built up.

Over time marketers may find this tool to be very effective and valuable.

6. Google eBlogger

Blogging has become vitally important to the health and functioning of your web site. No site should be without at least one blog and RSS feed. Creating a blog (online journal) on the topic of your web site or product will bring in extra traffic and targeted customers. eBlogger is a simple free blogging service that even lets you publish or post your blog files to your web site server. Keep in mind, each blog has that all important Google Blog Search bar.

7. Google Toolbar – Enterprise Version

Try the new enterprise version of the Google Toolbar for your company or business. Integrates countless features with all your employees or corporate network. These could include a common customer database, company calendar, financial news…

Keep in mind, Google also ranks every page it indexes on a scale of 0-10. While it is important to know the Page Rank of your pages, it is even more important to know the PR of your competitor’s pages. You can use the toolbar to get the PR of each page you’re visiting. Extremely helpful information for webmasters and marketers to know when forming online linking or business arrangements.

8. Google Groups

Every marketer knows the important of having a large contact líst of people with a similar interest. Social networking will play an ever increasing role in your success on the web. Just look at the growing popularity of sites like MySpace and LiveJournal.

Google groups is another form of social and business networking that every marketer should be aware of and pursuing.

9. Google Adsense

One simple way to monetize your web content is to use Google Adsense. Just place the Adsense code on your site and receive a check from Google each month. For webmasters who are not really into onlíne marketing (do such creatures exist?) Adsense can be a painless way to earn extra íncome from your site.

For professional marketers, using the Adsense system can supply a tremendous amount of marketing information on the keywords in their particular niche. It keeps the marketer informed on what keywords are being bid on and how much advertisers are willing to pay.

Adsense also has an excellent real-time tracking system you can use to keep track of all your important web pages.

10. Google Docs

A recent addition to Google’s stable of free products. Google Docs (Writely.com) is a full featured online writing editor with spellcheck and great collaborating features. It also lets you publish your content directly to your blogs. One feature that may be of interest to marketers, is that it lets you save files in the popular download format of PDF.

Let’s face it, until video takes over the web in four or five years time – the written word is still king on the net. It is the medium that markets, promotes and sells your content or products. Writely will help you write better.

Honorable Mention – Google Trends

This Google program will let you search popular trends, important for marketers searching for the latest hot product to promote. You can also break down these trends by different regions.

Final Note

Please take note that signing up for a Google account will usually help you in obtaining most of these free services or programs. Some of these programs may have to be applied for individually. But be assured, all these free Google marketing tools are well worth your time and effort. They will make your marketing easier and they will help any webmaster or marketer run their online business more efficiently.

By Titus Hoskins (c) 2008

Got a brand new website? That’s great, but nobody cares.

OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. The truth, however, is that just having a website doesn’t get you much.

Many business owners I meet are surprised to find, once we look at the numbers, that the shiny new site they had built not too long ago gets little to no traffic on a daily basis.

Many newcomers to the web make the mistake of thinking that just by buying a domain name and putting up your site, visitors are going to happen by – something like when you buy property and build a storefront in a busy part of town.

It just doesn’t work that way. The web is harsh. You can have the best looking site in the world with great resources and content and go entirely ignored or unnoticed. It happens. It’s happening right now. Somewhere out there in the ether is a brand new gorgeous website loaded with great content, and nobody cares. Poor little lonely site.

But there is hope. Every website had its early days. Even sites that get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day started out with none.

Here are 7 simple things you can start doing right now to help drive traffic to your site.

1. Get Some Quick Links From Trusted Directories
Link building is a long-term process with long-term goals, but for brand new sites with no history you’ve got to start somewhere. There are a number of directories out there that provide free and paid listings (subject to editorial review, of course). Here are the ones I recommend:

• Yahoo!
• Business.com
• JoeAnt.com
• DMOZ.org
• BOTW.org

2. Start Blogging
OK, blogging isn’t for everybody (especially you boring people), but it’s a great way to build relevant content at your site on a consistent basis. It also gives your visitors/ customers a way to engage with you. But please don’t make the mistake of being too “corporate” on your blog – do yourself a favor and check your Public Relations cap at the door. Don’t be afraid to discuss your mistakes, missteps you’ve made, and what you’ve learned from them as well as your triumphs. In short, be a human, not a brand.

3. Consider Paid Search
For new websites, the day when you receive all the traffic you need for free from search engines and other referrals is a long way off – if not just a pipe dream altogether. Often times paid search campaigns are a great way to get your site in front of your target market today. Be sure to keep your budget modest, though, until you’re confident in your ROI. Be sure to do your keyword research to find lower-cost “long tail” keywords – going after the big traffic keywords might be tempting, but it gets expensive and the ROI is often not the best.

4. Use Article Marketing To Build Links
As with any tactic, I’d recommend using this one in moderation. Article marketing is, essentially, trading words for links. It can help with link building, but the quality of the links it garners is usually less than stellar.

Here’s how it works:

• Write an informative article on your site topic (or something related)
• Include an “about the author” section as well as links in the article that point to your pages using relevant anchor text
• Submit the article through one of the many article syndication services (such as EZineArticles.com or GoArticles.com )
• The deal is, anybody can come along and publish your article on their website – provided they use the article in its original format including the “about the author” section. So when the article is published, any links you include back to your site are published as well.

5. Guest Post At Relevant Blogs
This certainly requires some up-front investment, mainly in terms of building relationships with bloggers in your topic (a little brown-nosing never hurt), but it can help get the flywheel turning for your site like nothing else can. Take the time to make your guest post remarkable and smart – your host blogger will appreciate it, and it’ll improve the likelihood of attention coming back to your site (which you’ll link to in your guest post, of course). Links from blogs are some of the most powerful editorial links you can get – don’t underestimate them for a second.

6. Submit Your Site to Design Galleries
Is your website breathtaking to behold, beautiful enough to make angels weep? Yeah, sure it is. But seriously, if it looks pretty sharp there are plenty of web design galleries that accept submissions for new sites and link to the sites they feature. Particularly for CSS-driven design there are a number of galleries that will consider your site for listing (provided your site uses CSS for layout/styling – and God help you if it doesn’t) – including CSSElite.com, CSSHeaven.com, CSSBeauty.com and many others. Just search in Google for “CSS design gallery.” Unless your site is ugly – in that case, I can’t help you, and stop asking me to look at it.

7. Sponsor a Local Event or Charity
OK, I admit this is kind of a tired tip – but it works! Especially for local small businesses. Is there a local event coming up in your community? A local charity that has a website? Not only will sponsoring such an event give you all of the normal PR benefits (and self-righteous bragging rights) that are the byproducts of charity, but any web announcement for the event will potentially include a mention of your website as well as a link to it. And you can feel good about yourself for a change.

Bonus Tip: Be Patient
Alright, this one is cheap, I admit it. Not much of a tip. But it’s important to remember that you’re not going to see your unique visitors count skyrocket immediately for your new website. Most “overnight successes” actually take a few years to get going.

And if you find yourself checking your traffic numbers on a daily basis, please do us all a favor – step away from the computer, go toss the ball around with your kid, maybe take your niece out for ice cream. Contrary to popular belief, staring at your site traffic data has no positive effect on it.

By Mike Tekula (c) 2008

Google isn’t just talking about hosting applications in the cloud any more. Tonight at 9pm PT they’re launching Google App Engine (link dead until launch time) an ambitious new project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access (anticipated here and here) and GFS data store services.

At first blush this is a full on competitor to the suite of web services offered by Amazon, including S3 (storage), EC2 (virtual servers) and SimpleDB (database).

Unlike Amazon Web Services’ loosely coupled architecture, which consists of several essentially independent services that can optionally be tied together by developers, Google’s architecture is more unified but less flexible. For example, it is possible with Amazon to use their storage service S3 independently of any other services, while with Google using their BigTable service will require writing and deploying a Python script to their app servers, one that creates a web-accessible interface to BigTable.

What this all means: Google App Engine is designed for developers who want to run their entire application stack, soup to nuts, on Google resources. Amazon, by contrast, offers more of an a la carte offering with which developers can pick and choose what resources they want to use.

Google Product Manager Tom Stocky described the new service to me in an interview today. Developers simply upload their Python code to Google, launch the application, and can monitor usage and other metrics via a multi-platform desktop application.

More details from Google:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.

Google App Engine: The Limitations

The service is launching in beta and has a number of limitations.

First, only the first 10,000 developers to sign up for the beta will be allowed to deploy applications.

The service is completely free during the beta period, but there are ceilings on usage. Applications cannot use more than 500 MB of total storage, 200 million megacycles/day CPU time, and 10 GB bandwidth (both ways) per day. We’re told this equates to about 5M pageviews/mo for the typical web app. After the beta period, those ceilings will be removed, but developers will need to pay for any overage. Google has not yet set pricing for the service.

One current limitation is a requirement that applications be written in Python, a popular scripting language for building modern web apps (Ruby and PHP are among others widely used). Google says that Python is just the first supported language, and that the entire infrastructure is designed to be language neutral. Google’s initial focus on Python makes sense because they use Python internally as their scripting language (and they hired Python creator Guido van Rossum in 2005).

Update: Here is Guido van Rossum at the launch event talking about App Engine:

(Via TechCrunch.)

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