Internet Marketing Blog

FishPond(tm) Marketing

2006-10-13T21:20:00.000-04:00

"Fish where the fish are" is an old saying echoed by marketers for hundreds of years.

You can find fish in river, lake, sealine, and many other places.

So why don't go fish in a fish pond?

There are thousands of fish in a fish pond. That's a place where fish eat, sleep, play and die.

It is in your control how many fish you want to fish up anytime!

To market your business, you can either find your fish pond, your build your fish pond.

In an email marketing course I am working on, which is targeting movers, I have come up with the below fish ponds:

1. Use search engines, like Google. When people are looking for 'moving company' in search engines, they are motivated to find a moving company. SE is like a channel of fish which are flowing through. Isn't it easy to catch one?
2. Partner with Real Estate agents. Movers serve both residential and commercial customers. When a house is sold, when a property is leased, there are needs for moving. Build a good relationship with a couple of RE agents, you can sit and enjoy passive referrals.

There are other places to find people who needs to move. The two I listed here is just throw out some ideas.

This is find your fish pond.

You also need to build your own fish pond.

Business is risky. You never know what will happen tomorrow. You might face a downturn right around the corner, or you wants to sell your business as an exit, but it turns out you have no much asset at all.

That's why you need to keep all the contacts of your existing customers. I will use email marketing as an example.

Step I: Collect your customers' emails.
Build a large database. When you have a promotion or special offers, keep them informed. They feel comfortable to buy from you because they have done that before. They have trust in you.

Step II: Feed the fish reguarly.
You have their emails don't mean you can sell to them as you want. You need to build relationship and show them your respect. By sending useful and helpful tips or anything you think help, you can building a personal touch. Don't think of them only when you want to sell! - that's a mistake most people do.

There are more you can do, by using personalized emails, you actully improve the efficiency of the automated emails.

FishPond Marketing can be applied to any business!

The REAL power of Email Marketing

2006-10-02T17:15:00.000-04:00

I got a chance to re-watch the apprentice season two - I know it has been such a while, but the things we can learn will never outdate.

The tenth week's project is to compete selling bridal dresses, between Apex and Mosaic.

Sure from the programme, we can see different personalities, leader skills, but one thing brougt my most intests: Marketing.

Apex was totally lost, they think they have a bridal shop, people will come, and they can make sales. So they focus on getting vendors.

Mosaic is lucky to have a girl from wedding business. So this seems easy? She point out right away how to get traffic - during their team dicussion. She suggest blast emails to theknot.com subscribers. They spent $1000 and sent to 23,000 emails.

It was SUCH a difference to see the result. When the big time comes, there a huge lineup at the front of Mosaic's shop, but literally nobody visit Apex's shop.

How did Apex market their business?

They sent thousands of flyers in stations!!!

Who is your targeted customer? How to approch your customer in the most effective way?

Mosaic just made an excellent live example of Email Marketing!

The result, Apex profited a bit over $1000, but, Mosaic pocketed in a huge profit close to $13,000!

What a difference!

Marketing is nothing new, but creative and know how to use the BEST tools.

Donald Trump was so happy to Mosaic's success, he rewarded the team $50,000 worth of diamonds.

When it comes to marketing, never limit yourself to the level of your competitors - YOU can do much better.

E-commerce Services in Toronto, Canada

2006-09-14T16:48:00.000-04:00

Our main business is to build E-commerce solutions for Toronto and GTA's business people.

Ecommerce comes with two different formats:
1. Make an online shopping cart system with proper online payment solutions. This is the mostly used business model to leverage technology to generate more sales with less resources.
2. Use estabilished E commerce system to make sales.
The best example is eBay. eBay has been the most visited ecommerce platform for people to trade online. There similar platforms, like Yahoo! auction, craigslist.com

The first one is build a platform owned by the merchant himself, the upfront investment is big, but there are no much ongoing cost. The second one is to borrow the credibility and traffic from big players to make sales. There ongoing costs for using such a system.

That's why at Topsky.ca, we build different systems for different situations.

We can build the most advaned Ecommerce system from the scratch, to perfectly meet the smallest requirements of each client, we can also provide the just-released ebay management system to cater active ebay sellers.

To know more details, visit this link: E-commerce Toronto

P.S. Our ebay management system is seamlessly incorporated into our ecommerce system, which strongly benefits our existing Ecommerce clients. Even though most of existing clients are located in Toronto, we are looking for a better solution to deliver the product to customers around the world.

Google pay per click

2006-08-18T16:42:00.000-04:00

I ran across some google pay-per-click users today, and after some research, I realized google has been testing this since roughly Nov. 2005 - it has been a while but i never see such option available in my adwords account.

How will it work? Personally, I am shy to ask the other party to call me, i don't feel comfortable before I get to know more about the vendor.

But it is said Pay per call is a huge market.

We'll see.

Outsourcing to the right person

2006-08-09T17:49:00.000-04:00

Outsourcing to off-shore development companies can save a huge amount of cost has been widely recognized by software buyers.

But as I noticed a lot more information on some software bidder/buyer websites, a lot of people bluntly states 'NO OFF-SHORE PLEASE'.

Why is that?

According to my own experience, it is a big headache to outsource to an off-shore company, which might be located in the othe end of the earth. Here is my story:

1. Tried to deal with a small company.
They started work on it, but later run into a technical problem, so they just disappeared.

2. Tried to deal with a big company.
This company is big for its open source project. I gave them a pilot project, they failed to do to my requirements, but they keep on asking for deposits. I have been burnt, how can I gave you deposit if you can not even finish a test project? They finally go away, and left me with a unexpected eBay bill - this project is about ebay. They have no idea about eBay sandbox, but they dare to promise they can do the job!

Not a while ago, when I chatted with a very successful software investor, he commented, "****s are horrible".

I am not a racialist, I myself is also a minority in this country. But in terms of work ethic, I think people from some countries really have a long way to go.

Now, whenever I want to outsource, I find the people in my country, or in North America. I feel relieved.

So many people give you the best guarantee and shiny smile, but when the work starts, they change.

That's why the software investor recommends check reference is a must.

Before you give the work to others, check their references. It is not about trust, this is business.

alibaba.com President is on the list

2006-07-25T12:56:00.000-04:00

From business 2.0, the president of alibaba.com is standing at #15. I didn't know his Engish name is Jack, but I know his Chinese name is Ma Yun.

A pretty paranoid guy. He stood up with the IT boom, but he never failed out as others, instead, he pushed Alibaba to all the world.

Once a client mentioned Alibaba.com, that gives me some shock. Mr. Ma definitely open the door between China and the world.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/peoplewhomatter/

Google adwords 404 error?

2006-07-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

When I was using Google adwords to do some keyword research, at around 8:20pm, i saw this error.

What could make this happen? Sure the index page is deleted or something.

But when I am writing this post and check it again, it is back to normal.

Anyway, I have the screenshot, in case somebody lost money in this minute, can get evidence from me. However, keep in mind it is copyrighted :)

LOL.

eBay blog pick up fast by Google

2006-07-17T11:37:00.000-04:00

eBay blog is hot on the pot!

I created my blog there and made a simple post, the next two or three days later, when I searched keywords "toronto internet marketing", my post is on the second page in Google.

Apparently, google takes ebay blog seriously!

It is a good place to blog, go as fast as you, otherwise you might be late.

Eric Chen

Executive director of Topsky Technologies. He is a specialist in Internet Marketing and software fields.

His expertise covers search engine marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), E-mail marketing, blog marketing, affiliates marketing, joint venture, and more others.

His website is Toronto Internet Marketing, and he can be reached at info@topsky.ca

Proposal, proposal, proposal

2006-07-06T12:17:00.000-04:00

I have been busy as hell preparing proposals for a bunch of clients. So why I spend so much time to prepare a proposal?

I need a huge amount of time to understand a client's situation precisely.

I heard people giving quote on the spot at the first meeting. I heard people dropping a quotation paper right after the first meeting. So, how did they quote? Based on what?

Each client has thousands of different needs, and in many cases, the client himself may not realize what he wants will make a big difference to you.

So, after millions of questions, combining with my expertise, I can figure out a best tairlored solution to this client. This, makes things perfect, both for client and for me.

Is the time worthy? If you get the job, it is, very worthy. If not, try to ask yourself what went wrong, what's the problem in your understanding of the client needs.

As always, price is not a #1 issue to consider. Return is!

My New Office

2006-06-19T23:22:00.000-04:00

Finally, I arranged everything in my new office, and now ready to get back to work on my projects.

Last Friday, I spotted this office in a hi-tech area, with SONY, DELL, HONEYWELL as neighbours, I signed a lease right away.

Now I can enjoy working in a dedicated area, with quiet environment, and nice people around.

BTW, my office is in Gordon Baker Rd., North York.

Keep working hard.

Toronto Internet Marketing

2006-06-16T10:32:00.000-04:00

My main website www.topsky.ca is on page two of google with this keyword 'Toronto Internet Marketing'

http://www.google.ca/search?q=toronto+internet+marketing&hl=en&lr=&start=0&sa=N

Have some fun to celebrate

2006-06-13T23:27:00.000-04:00

This video is very interesting and creative:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZrKgqc1Rnw

I would like to thank you all dropping by or coming back, because my blog is back to normal. It was taken by spammers a couple of days ago. I guess because of blogger's anti-spam robot, my subdomain become available again, so I can take it back. What a great feeling it is to get your baby back.

Cheers! Keep blogging.

My subdomain is stolen!

2006-06-08T11:08:00.000-04:00

I used seotoronto.blogspot.com for more than one year, then i today I found that domain was stolen by some mofo!
That blog has a first page rank on Yahoo and first three page on Google. How the hell does this happen?

Multimedia Marketing

2006-05-10T00:46:00.000-04:00

What's multimedia marketing?

Recently podcast is becoming very popular and brings up new trends in internet marketing, together with video presents, I call it multimedia marketing.

Here I will talk about how to use multimedia to market your business.

First off, don't miss Google Video. Google video is taking over the video market quickly. Anybody can upload their video clips to google for free. Better yet, these videos can be indexed by google search engine - isn't it amazing?

If you have any new products, new releases, it is a good idea to make a short clip and upload to google. This clip and bring thousands, if not millions of visitors to your website, if you make the clip correctly.

With podcast, you can do literally more things to educate. You might not have the advantage to offer video presentation, however, many people love to listent to there iPods when they are driving. So, make sure you podcast can amuse your target customers.

Later on, I will give more details about how to make Google video and podcasts.

The Internet Marketing Truth

2006-05-02T18:54:00.000-04:00

If you are ever trying to search 'ebay', 'internet marketing experts', etc., very possibly you will be occupied by 'marketing experts' who claim to make millions of dollars online.

And, they are always trying to sell your some genius books.

I have no comment on how these group of experts, it is very obvious that they making money throgh selling their books, or ebooks.

Worse yet - sorry, not my words - they keep on selling books for each other, get commissions as affiliates.

It is not a bad thing, I am very open to any legal ways to make money.

However, this confuse many business owners.

As a business owner, can you do the same to push up your business?

You have to be careful. You must be aware that many techniques or secrets might not apply to your business.

That's why I came to feel more and more obligated to finish my marketing products for real businesses.

Since right now I am taken over by some huge projects and can't get away, I might need to outsource some work. Hopefully, I can get everything ready by the end of May.

Keep checking Toronto Marketing Sense Web Design or Toronto Internet Marketing

Google blog down today?

2006-03-14T01:07:00.000-05:00

Guess blogger.com is down today. For most of the day, I can't open my blog. Now its midnight, and it seems working fine.

I also noticed wordtracker is being attacked by DOS and disalbed trial functions. But I didn't see anywhere on the internet talking about hacking wave.

And worse yet, one of my domains is not working fine. It is still propagating across the internet.

Why you need to improve you CTR

2006-03-14T00:50:00.000-05:00

If you are running adwords program, you can NOT miss your track by increasing your bids to trigger a bidding war.

You need to improve your CTR instead.

I will show you one example here. The picture above is one adwords I am running.

Look at the underlined keyword. I set up the bidding price to $2.00, that's a LOT! But I get 25% Click Thru Rate. See how much I pay finally, ONLY 77 cents.

That's the beauty of Google adwords. The price you are paying is not only decided by how much your max CPC is, it also closely related to your Click Thru Rate.

That's how google encourages the relevancy of listing.

That finally pushes advertisers work on their ads copy.

If you ever have interest regarding how to get unbelieable CTR, subscribe to my newsletter at www.topskymarketing.com, you will see my secret weapon there.

The #1 Secret to Internet Marketing

2006-03-12T23:04:00.000-05:00

I believe everybody is eager to find the real secret to success. When it comes to internet, you might heard thousands times how those markters brag this and that secrets, which helped them generate millions of dollars, and how small or no work they have done.

But, i have to tell you, if you are beliver of quick money, you will make thoese people richer, no yourself.

There is no quick success on this planet.

So, when I tell you about the #1 secret to internet marketing, what do you expect?

Let you put it two words: Hard Working.

There is no substitue for hard work.

No matter how easy it sounds to you that those markters make millions in matter of years, you have to be altert: you can NEVER pass hard work to get there.

You have to admit that those hype is for marketing purpose. The fact is that there are way too many people looking for quick money instead of working hard.

I love one saying, "There are one million ways to be a millionare!"

That's right, you dont have to come online to make your first million, you can make it anywhere in any way.

But, it is true that Technology makes the turnaround shorter and shorter, it boosts many youngsters to million dollar worth in an unbelievable short time. That's the beauty of Internet too.

You need to learn from others, to save you time.

That's the seocond option following the #1 secret, "and smarter".

The most valueable investment is to invest in yourself. By learning from real experts, you save tons of trial and error. This make you go faster.

Don't expect you can make big $$$ overnight. No matter how big your dream is, you can only start with your first step. Make your goal tangible, attainable, be patient, and someday, your big time will come, Guaranteed!

Back up your website

2006-03-11T15:15:00.000-05:00

Today when I tried to do some clean work on my website, I made a serious mistake, and it took my whole website down.
I had a subdomain, ebay.topsky.ca, since I don't use it for a while, so I wanted to deleted it. In the control panel, I clicked delete, to my surprise, it took almost one minute to finish. No much stuff under this subdomain. So next to my BIG surprise, my service domain www.topsky.ca is gone!!!
The control panel SUCKs!
But, the hosting has no backup, and the administrators don't work on weekends.
Fortunately, I have my own backup on my computers.
That's why I can save my ass back...
Even though, I still feel terrible!

What happens if I don't have backup?

Loss of business, loss of time. Sweat...

So, please BACK UP your data now, if you have never done that, and if you are depending on your luck or God to protect you.

Catch latest Internet Marketing tools

2006-03-10T13:26:00.000-05:00

Guess most of you have heard about "podcast" as more and more iPod users are enjoying downloading commercial-free digital files from apple. This can be huge market and nobody in the Internet Marketing business can afford to miss.

Another is google video. I tried search "internet marketing" in google video, only one page is exactly about internet marketing comes out. So, that means only very small number of marketers look into this market. Google video is only beta version now, and more and more video clips are uploading to google everyday. If you can figure out a way to spread your message over the video, you should think about this potential market.

In the future posts, i will give more details about this two markets.

About the autor:
Eric Chen, Founder of
Internet marketing in Toronto
Toronto Internet Marketing Solutions

Top secret make my client get 1000% sales jump

2006-03-10T00:05:00.000-05:00

Like I said many times before, the beauty of Internet is that you can literally get exponential growth in a matter of months, weeks, even days.
This client is running a flower shop.
So, when valentine's day coming, its going to be a big time for his online flower shop. But, how can he win when flower shop bidders are getting crazy on google, yahoo, and other places?
How to get traffic would be another topic, but lets focus on how to improve the conversion rate.
Conversion rate means how many people will buy from as oppose to the total number of visitors to your website.
Lets say you 100 visitors in one single day- its a good way to use day as a unit to measure your conversion rate - if you make 1 sale, which is a normal rate for many businesses, your conversion rate is 1/100=1%. If you can work to make 10 sales, your conversion rate would be 10%.

For many crazy bidders on the internet, conversion rate is a blind spot. So, its always smart way to improve your conversion rate instead of getting involved in bidding war to drag traffic to your site.

So, what could make the difference in terms of conversion rate?

Benefits. Again, benefits. If you don't offer benefits, you can NOT improve your conversion rate. People are becoming so savvy nowdays. They compare prices everywhere just by flying the fingers, they research reviews on certain website if you are doubting about your credibility, they check your pagerank just to make sure you have good traffic. So, don't try to fool your visitors.

When they are thinking benefits, you have to reach out your own UNIQUE benefits.

I helped my client did some research, and found very few sellers are offering FREE delivery in Toronto area. Unfortunately, FREE is still a good way to promote yourself, even though that sound sad!

So, we put 'Valentine's day special: FREE delivery in Toronto Area' in the headline of the website.

Guess what, this valentine's day, my client made over $5000 online ONLY!

That's amazing. He did lose some money because he offers free delivery, but, he had VOLUME, large volume. That makes him MORE money.

The funny thing is that: he had to stop taking new orders because he can NOT handle so many orders.

If you have a business, you should always look into a way to outbeat your counterparts. You can always find a way to do so.

Help your customers save price, offer discounts, free shipping, whatsoever, make yourself stand out in your competitors.

About author:
Eric Chen
Internet marketing consultant
Internet marketing expert - offers Internet marketing services in Greater Tornto Area
Toronto Internet Marketing

Click Frauds From Miva.com

2005-11-15T12:39:00.000-05:00

I already heard people are screaming about Miva.com (formerly FindWhat.com), but I at last gave it try.

Unfortunately, I got some clicks out of nothing, according to my log, those clicks were not even recorded.

I complained to Miva, a lady called me back, trying to explain that those clicks are from their affiliates, so I asked, 'Am I supposed to see them in my log even though they are from your affiliates?'. This lady got no words for me.

Today the clicks are increasing, so i paused my campaign, and emailed them to pull out my account.

I can't believe a company like this will fall down like this.

Why Affiliate?

2005-11-02T22:29:00.000-05:00

I read a lot of posts about affiliate programs. I also worked on affiliate before. Some people may feel suspicious before they give it a try. I will tell you all a most impressive example.

You may notice everytime you sign in your MSN messenger - don't tell me you don't know what I am talking about - you will see ebay link in the panel. Let me ask you a question: if ebay advertise through MSN messenger network, how much they are going to pay?

Ebay is not stupid. It has the most successful affiliate system. So, I am 90% sure that MSN is affiliated with eBay. So, in this case, MSN Messenger is advertising eBay for commissions. eBay pay nothing for advertising, only pay commissions if they get registrants from MSN.

This is a win-win situation.

So, I bet you have the basic idea about why people are rushing to have their affiliate programs.

There are many articles out there teaching you how to make money out of affiliates. I would recommend this one, Super Affiliate Handbook. The author is reknowned for her expertise in affilaite programs. And she is said to make over uS$400,000 per year only from affiliate programs.

P.S. as you guess, I am affiliated with the author too. If you buy, I get some commission. If you don't buy, I urge you to go to her website to learn more about affiliate programs.

Good luck with your affiliate programs.

Text Link Brokers

2005-10-21T20:00:00.000-04:00

Just link there are brokers when you need to buy a house, now there brokers when you need to exchange or buy your links.

Have come across this site: textlinkbrokers many times. On the pitch page, they also give some testimonials from some famous SEO guys like Brad Callen from seoelite.com, Morgan Carey from SEO-guy.com.

Well, if you have the budget, of course you can throw thousands of dollars to try your luck. They do have a good idea to make money out of SEOs or webmasters.

But, how good could it be?

There are many people can do from zero to hero in the internet without spending a dime. That might take long time. But remeber, the money you spend here in exchanging links could have brought more targted visitors by puting on Google Adword.

I have no idea how this site is doing. But all the time i reach this site is from other links, not organic links from google. This might is a sign how they are doing with themselves.

No offence, though.

Interesting Google Ranking Of Some Websites

2005-10-20T23:29:00.000-04:00

Long before I only know Google.com has a ranking of 10/10. Today I ran into statcounter.com, which also has an awesome 10/10.

Later I checked MSN.com, guess you can not believe it, its only 2/10. However, the links inside msn.com are still good.

Yahoo.com has a ranking of 9/10.

I am gonna put all the sites have 10/10 into my blog later on.

How My Google PageRank Made Jump

2005-10-19T22:05:00.000-04:00

These days, i made a lot of improvements to my website, here is what happended:

1. With keyword phrase 'toronto ebay developer', my site sometimes comes out at #1, sometimes hidden miles away, I assume this is dancing. Dancing is good, its a sign Google is trying to pull your website out to a stable index.

2. My website is only 8 months old, if the Google sandbox was applied to my site, its almost time to come out. The dancing is possible a positve sign that its my relief time.

3. Google craws my website everday, so does MSN bot, Inktomi, and some others. Its fairly important to grab the hot time to make more changes, to add more articles, to optimize more.

4. Another issue might help is my blog. You might notice with the keyword 'toront ebay developer', my blog comes at #3. This is because google crawled my blog, and gives credit to my site. This helps my site to stablize in google's index.

5. Finally, i got one increase with page rank. This happens right under my nose an hour ago. Pretty cool.

Author: Eric Chen
President of Topsky Technologies
Expert of Internet Marketing & SEO
Expert of Ecommerce Web Design

Are You Trying To Beat GOOGLE?

2005-10-16T15:12:00.000-04:00

Well, the reason I came up with this topic is suddenly I realized that too many people are trying to figure out a way to CHEAT google in terms of ranking and keywords.

Since the day LOCK is invented, people have been involved a war against lock-hacker. The same thing happens to Goole. As the most popular search engine, its algorithm has become many hackers target. That leads to the fast spread of articles so-called key factors to impact your ranking on Google.

Is that the truth?

Hardly.

On the first hand, Google is working hard to protect its fair system in the world. That's one reason why you have to keep on chasing Google to make your SEO job endless.

On the other hand, there are so many websites have been led to a wrong way by these articles. I have seen many websites with strange keywords laying across ridiculously through the pages. The will difinitely drive away your customers. Do this math, if you have a both visitor-friendly and SE-friendly site, your visitors might come by often and more possible they will refer your site in other forums or websites, in the long run, it will build your link popularity. SE will give you more credit. If your site is only SE-friendly only-maybe for now, you think SE is stupid to keep you there forever with useless information.

DON't FORGET - RELEVANCY IS NO.1 FOR SE

Googe and other SEs will be smart enough to figure out your page really has the information visitors want or not. You might be penalized for abusing keywords.

Author: Eric Chen
President of Topsky Technologies
Internet Marketing & SEO Expert
Toronto Ecommerce Solution Provider

Terrific Jump On MSN

2005-10-16T13:53:00.000-04:00

Since MSNbot crawed our site yesterday, we got terrific leaps with many competitive keyword phrases.

Keyword: 'toronto software'
Standing: #2

Keyword: 'toronto ecommerce'
Standing: #2

Keyword: 'toronto ebay'
Standing: #1

Keyword: 'toronto ebay software'
Standing: #1

Keyword: 'toronto internet marketing'
Standing: #4

Keyword: Toronto web design
Standing: #14

On Google, our ranking is still dancing. Once a while, I can see our site comes at #1 with keyword 'toronto ebay developer'.

From MSN ranking, we are confident we made great success in general keywords optimization. We need more patience with Google.

Author: Eric Chen
President of Topsky Technologies
Toronto Internet Marketing & SEO
Toronto Ecommerce Web Design

What Happens If Google Fires You?

2005-10-14T12:53:00.000-04:00

Here i mean somebody working for Google right now, say, Google's employee.
If you work on the algorithm which decides millions people's fate on the internet, someday later you fire google or google kick you out for good reason or bad, what will you do?

You might want to start Googler SEO Services.

Well, I guarantee you tons of sales pouring onto your door. Just because you are the maker of google ranking algo.

Let's imagine what this will leads to?

All of a sudden your colleagues quit their jobs to make this big money, all they do this part-time. The other SEOs who are striving to chase google get outranked because the market has a real SEO with unbeatable background.

Well, hopefully, Google is not stupid.

Like the company i worked for before - Cisco's strong competitor, Huawei China - asked us to sign non-competition contract, which rules you not able to join its competitors group within 3 years since you leave the company.

I hope Google has the same strategy to guarantee its own fairness.

Please feel free to post your comments.

Author: Eric Chen
President of Toronto Internet Marketing & Web Design
SEO&Internet Marketing Expert

The Good and the Bad of SEO – From Googles Mouth!

2005-10-12T11:29:00.000-04:00

In this article I highlight some of the points made during the call so you know what Google thinks.

You know its bad when you take time from your holidays to come into work to attend a conference call. But that’s what I did a few weeks ago. You see I had to because I was going to have the opportunity to ask some Google employees specific questions on things that I’d been pretty sure about, but wanted to hear it right from the horses mouth.

The call lasted less than an hour, but in that time I found that there were many things I figured were indeed true. So lets start with the most obvious:

Is PageRank Still Important?
The short answer is yes – PageRank has always been important to Google. Naturally they couldn’t go into details but it is as I suspected. Google still uses the algorithm to help determine rankings. Where it falls in the algo mix, though, is up for speculation. My feeling however is that they’ve simply moved where the PageRank value is applied in the grand scheme of things. If you want to know what I think, be sure to read this article.

Are Dynamic URLs Bad?
Google says that a dynamic URL with 2 parameters “should” get indexed. When we pressed a bit on the issue we also found that URLs themselves don’t contribute too much to the overall ranking algorithms. In other words, a page named Page1.asp will likely perform as well as Keyword.asp.

The whole variable thing shouldn’t come as a surprise. It is true that Google will indeed index dynamic URLs and I’ve seen sites with as many as 4 variables get indexed. The difference however is that in almost all cases I’ve seen the static URLs outrank the dynamic URLs especially in highly competitive or even moderately competitive keyword spaces.

Is URL Rewriting OK in Google’s Eyes?
Again, the answer is yes, provided the URLs aren’t too long. While the length of the URL isn’t necessarily an issue, if they get extremely long they can cause problems.

In my experience, long rewritten URLs perform just fine. The important thing is the content on the page.

That was a common theme throughout the call – content is king. Sure optimized meta tags, effective interlinking and externalizing JavaScript all help, but in the end if the content isn’t there the site won’t do well.

Do You Need to use the Google Sitemap Tool?
If your site is already getting crawled effectively by Google you do not need to use the Google sitemap submission tool.

The sitemap submission tool was created by Google to provide a way for sites which normally do not get crawled effectively to now become indexed by Google.

My feeling here is that if you MUST use the Google sitemap to get your site indexed then you have some serious architectural issues to solve.

In other words, just because your pages get indexed via the sitemap doesn’t mean they will rank. In fact I’d bet you that they won’t rank because of those technical issues I mentioned above.

Here I’d recommend getting a free tool like Xenu and spider your site yourself. If Xenu has problems then you can almost be assured of Googlebot crawling problems. The nice thing with Xenu is that it can help you find those problems, such as broken links, so that you can fix them.

Once your site becomes fully crawlable by Xenu I can almost guarantee you that it will be crawlable and indexable by the major search engine spiders.

Does Clean Code Make That Much of a Difference?
Again, the answer is yes. By externalizing any code you can and cleaning up things like tables you can greatly improve your site.

First, externalizing JavaScript and CSS helps reduce code bloat which makes the visible text more important. Your keyword density goes up which makes the page more authoritative.

Similarly, minimizing the use of tables also helps reduce the HTML to text ratio, making the text that much more important.

Also, as a tip, your visible text should appear as close to the top of your HTML code as possible. Sometimes this is difficult, however, as elements like top and left navigation appear first in the HTML. If this is the case, consider using CSS to reposition the text and those elements appropriately.

Do Keywords in the Domain Name Harm or Help You?
The short answer is neither. However too many keywords in a domain can set off flags for review. In other words blue-widgets.com won’t hurt you but discount-and-cheap-blue-and-red-widgets.com will likely raise flags and trigger a review.

Page naming follows similar rules – while you can use keywords as page names, it doesn’t necessarily help (as I mentioned above) further, long names can cause reviews which will delay indexing.

How Many Links Should You Have on Your Sitemap?
Google recommends 100 links per page.

While I’ve seen pages with more links get indexed, it appears that it takes much longer. In other words, the first 100 links will get indexed right away, however it can take a few more months for Google to identify and follow any links greater than 100.

If your site is larger than 100 pages (as many are today) consider splitting up your sitemap into multiple pages which interlink with each other, or create a directory structure within your sitemap. This way you can have multiple sitemaps that are logically organized and will allow for complete indexing of your site.

Can Googlebot Follow Links in Flash or JavaScript
While Googlebot can identify links in JavaScript, it cannot follow those links. Nor can it follow links in Flash.

Therefore I recommend having your links elsewhere on the page. It is OK to have links in flash or JavaScript but you need to account for the crawlers not finding them. Therefore the use of a sitemap can help get those links found and crawled.

As alternatives I know there are menus which use JavaScript and CSS to output a very similar looking navigation system to what you commonly see with JavaScript navigation yet uses static hyperlinks which crawlers can follow. Therefore do a little research and you should be able to find a spiderable alternative to whatever type of navigation your site currently has.

Overall, while I didn’t learn anything earth shattering, it was good to get validation “from the horses mouth” so to speak.

I guess it just goes to show you that there is enough information out there on the forums and blogs. The question becomes determine which of that information is valid and which isn’t. But that, I’m afraid, usually comes with time and experience.

Rob Sullivan - SEO Specialist and Internet Marketing Consultant. Any reproduction of this article needs to have an html link pointing to http://www.textlinkbrokers.com

Toronto Internet Marketing & SEO Experts
Toronto Ecommerce Web Design Experts

Good news, #1 on Google in the morning, dissapear in the evening

2005-10-09T00:38:00.000-04:00

On Oct. 8, when i Check the keyword phase"Toronto ebay deveper", my company comes out at #1, as shown in the picture.

However, when i came back in the evening, my site was gone.

This is google, sometimes it seems so wierd. But from the programmer's view, how can they guarantee the faireness of the ranking, how can they balance over 100 factors, how can they extract keywords information from each site, all this leads to highly complicated programming job. Sooo, it makes this happen.

Don't blame google on this, especially when you want to make some money out of google. Always keep your eyes on Google, make sure stay close to each move they make.

Top on MSN, sandbox in Google

2005-10-07T23:48:00.000-04:00

If you search on MSN with keyword phase 'toronto software', our site comes at #6, and comes #2 with keyword 'toronto software company', #1 with keyword 'toronto ebay developer', #4 with 'toronto custom software'. Looks good, huh?

However, there is no such a thing on google. Our domain is pretty new, almost 8 months old. This is a so-called sandbox stage. For whatever reason, google must keep its fairness, it has to put some sites underneath for quite a while until someday all of a sudden you can jump out.

A good sentence in Internet Marketing is 'Patience is virture'

Author: Eric Chen
President of Topsky Technologies
Internet Marketing and SEO Expert

When everybody rushes to Google, How will you do your marketing?

2005-10-07T11:47:00.000-04:00

Google is so hot that you have to increase your budget day by day to keep your exposure on Google. You can use Pay Per Click, you can hire one SEO expert to improve your organic (regular) ranking, but, that requires a lot of investment.

Google reminds me of the 2000 internet bubble. Are we rushing to the same bubble, which might burst some day later? We will leave this to further discussions.

My question is: What happens if you are small business owner with limited budget to advertise on Google?

If you don't have the money to throw, maybe you should try the following ways:

1. Don't push to get more new customers yet. If you already have a good customer base, keep them all. You can save 60% effort to get to the second deal with your existing customer, compared to digging out a new customer. Don't forget them, don't get tired of them. They are your business foundation. Whey they are satisfied, they will refer more customers to you.

2. Use newsletter. Remember to get your customers' emails. Ask for their permission to send regular newsletters. You can collect whatever information in your newsletter, put 'em up together, don't forget to pinpoint what your are offering, send them out once a week. Since the recipients are opt-in, you are not spamming. It is a good way to remind your cusotmers what products you are selling, what promotions you have, what services you are offering. The more they got feed about this information, the more possible they think of you when they need such products or services.

3. Give them a call once a month. But be careful with this, unless you have reached to a certain personal relationship with your customer, otherwise, that might lead to hang-up.

4. Do more work with PR, this PR is not Google Page Ranking, it is Public Relationship. Expose yourself in media, not necessarily Google, make sure you have your website listed in any possible occasion - you have a website, don't you? - that will bring more traffic to your website.

When time passes by, when you have enough budget, hire a SEO company to work on your website and pay more to the Pay Per Click campaign.

Author: Eric Chen
SEO&Internet Marketing Expert
President of Topsky Technologies (www.topsky.ca)
A Toronto-based Internet Marketing company, offering one-stop solutions to small business owners: web design, E-commerce, internet marketing, SEO, custom software programming.