What Breadcrumbs Are & How to Use Them

Principally, they’re navigation aids website developers add to each and every page of a site for various purposes. Let me bring you an example of such internal links that you should have definitely seen in websites. They look like the line below:

Site Booster Home – Search Engine Optimization Articles – Latest SEO Articles

It indicated that you’re reading SEO articles of the year 2008, which are placed under search engine optimization articles. They also are under the homepage of Site Booster.

Breadcrumbs are sets of links that could be made using different technologies. The technology I suggest you to use for your site is simple html that spreads page rank from all over your site to higher-layer pages. As the pages in higher layers are more important, adding html breadcrumbs are extremely helpful in enhancing your internal linking structure and main site keywords. Simple html links showing pathway to the page are powerful search engine visibility. Search engines understand these links and follow them.

Benefits of Breadcrumbs for Search Engine Optimization

Simple html links showing pathway of webpage are powerful on-page SEO factors recommended to be utilized inside your site. They enhance internal linking structure of a website. In order to make the most of breadcrumbs, make sure you use the main keywords of each page as the anchor text within the links you make to the higher layer pages. This has got the following benefits in the SEO results your site will deliver :

• They will show search engines that those keywords are so important that you’ve created more content pages to explain them. Besides, several pages have used those keywords in their content and links.
• They will add to the content relevancy of your site, because a link from a page to another is for providing more information on the same topic. There should be some related topic in another page of the same site that such internal links are referring to.

Benefits of Breadcrumbs for Human Readers

Apart from the on-page SEO benefits you get from adding breadcrumbs to your site, human readers will find them very useful as well. They arrive in a page by different methods:

• They may have found a link to this page from a search engine result page.
• They may have clicked on a link at another website and landed at your page.
• They may have clicked on a link in an email they’ve received from a friend, newsletter from a site, an ebook, etc.
• Etc.

Such a landing page isn’t necessarily always the homepage of your site. Therefore, adding breadcrumbs to all pages of your site will help your readers know where they are at your site and don’t get disoriented. On the other hand, as mentioned earlier at this post, they are navigation aids. So, the surfing of your site will be much more easier for your human readers when you add breadcrumbs to your site.

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Guest post by Rahman Mehraby.
Site Booster is a website optimization company that helps you with SEO article marketing. It offers other website optimization services catered to your requirements. Visit: http://www.site-booster.com/blog/.

You might do your research tick off traffic and tick off low competition and say, ok, here’s a keyword I can go after. Then when you actually come to the market and try to monetize that you’re not really going to have anything.

I think a lot of people get scared away from markets that have competition, and if anything, I think Jeff Johnson talks about this, you want to go after markets with competition because it shows there is money there. All you have to do that is just a little bit better.

We do a lot testing at Market Samurai with the traffic component, relatively recently, Google started providing some sort of insight into how much a particular keyword’s getting. Through some of the testing I’ve done, I’m seeing massive discrepancies. For example, you can have number one position ranking for a keyword and not even get one tenth or even much less than that, click throughs on that particular keyword.

I think ultimately that’s the thing about testing, you take it with a grain of salt and you do look to multiple sources. Just like with share trading you don’t buy something just based on one signal, you look for multiple signals to be saying the right thing before you take action on something.

Most people get so tied up with analysis paralysis, and particularly with the product we provide, we provide data that people can just get so obsessed about and it’s good that it does provide some discipline and some rigor to what can be a very risky business if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I like to do an AdWords campaign first and actually confirm the data. I know that the AdWords data should be a percentage of what the full number of searches are and AdWords will tell you the number of impressions that your ad got as well. So if you’re looking for confirmation you could spend a little bit of money to get that insurance that the traffic is behind a particular keyword. Proper keywords research is key.

I certainly do the AdWords, throw it to a site and test the commercial value and the conversion and the traffic before I invest heavily going into that market.

So one of the first stages, both pay per click and SEO is obviously to do some keywords research. With SEO obviously you can take those keywords and load them into your pay per click and start to do your monitoring of conversion and that sort of thing and tweak things.

Once I’ve done the research, I consider how many keywords to pick out and where to start.

I try to pick a small subset of keywords that are tightly semantically grouped with each other that meet certain traffic competition and commerciality filters that I put on them. So I basically say I’m looking for keywords that have a decent amount of traffic, so it’s going to be worth my time, with a decent amount of commercial value.

Obviously it’s going to be the way my competition threshold based on what my SEO asset base is in terms of my other sites and my ability to get links. So I like to think of this cluster of keywords as essentially becoming categories.

If it is a blog on my site I typically have somewhere between six to twelve major keywords or something behind my site. But there’s definitely some semantic clustering of those keywords. They’re related to each other. That is really one of the cool things behind Google keyword tool. They’re actually giving you semantically relevant keywords and that’s really important.

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This was a guest article written by Jimmy Cox.
Know more about Nitro Marketing. Visit www.kevinwilke.net to learn more.

Whether or not you are already using article in your affiliate marketing efforts, you can take advantage of it during the holiday season. Article marketing is the process of using articles full of original content that display your knowledge and expertise to attract customers. Thousands of content publishers look for quality, relevant articles for their directories.

Further focus your efforts by taking advantage of what consumers need during the holiday shopping season; valuable information. Create quality content that addresses the reader’s concerns as well as provides the information they need to make an informed purchase. Treat each individual article you write like it is the one that will generate your next sale.

Knowledge and Expertise

Some aspects of article marketing don’t change whether it’s spring, summer or Christmas time. It’s always important to highlight your knowledge and expertise about the items you’re marketing. Your knowledge as an affiliate marketer becomes even more valuable during the holiday shopping season.

More than any other time of year, the holidays bring consumers searching for products they may not know much about. Many people are searching for gifts that the recipient is knowledgeable about while they themselves are not. Use your expertise to give them confidence and ideas will draw them directly to back to the sites you are marketing.

Recycle and Use New Keywords

One great thing about article marketing during Christmas is that you can recycle articles you’ve already written. There are several ways to change your focus and re-write articles so that they appeal to the holiday shopper. One way is to highlight Christmas and holiday traditions that are related to the products and services you’re selling.

Another great way to promote your products to gift-buyers and increase sales is by grouping items together. Many people love giving holiday gift baskets or themed packages. Focusing on products that complement each other lets you upsell. Upselling generates more revenue while at the same time providing exactly what consumers are looking to give.

Take advantage of your usual keywords and add targeted holiday keywords. Potential customers will be searching for gifts, holiday themes, and festive merchandise and ideas. By adding specific Christmas keywords, you attract shoppers who are specifically looking for gifts. Once they’ve found your article, they will be further impressed by the information you provide.

Christmas is a great time to draw new customers into the sites you’re marketing. By using articles to show off your expertise and the quality of your products, you attract new shoppers. They pass along great gift ideas to their friends, who will and pass the information along to their friends.

Article marketing is a great way to get the message out there for all of the products you include in your affiliate marketing business. Create a marketing strategy that includes article marketing and take advantage of the opportunity to create high quality content for consumers. Providing information they seek is the best way to turn readers into customers.

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Mike Lawson is a freelance consultant to internet marketers. His professional writing service provides quality content for affiliate marketers. http://contentcrooner.com/holiday_promotion.php

The reason that I decided to make a screencast showing the out-of-the-box SEO abilities of SilverStripe is that it has so much built in that you don’t need to hack or add a million plugins to get a good foundation for writing SEO strong content. In fact, no other CMS comes to mind with quite this amount of custom ability built in directly. Oh sure, other platforms give you custom fields or plugins that you can code up to work to help SEO, but I wanted to show you what this system can do from the start.

As I mention in the video, I’ll have to make a couple of additional screencasts to really showcase a few other major features of this system because this video just hits the tip of the iceberg.

Video notes: Having been in a semi-retirement, I have not made a screencast in a long time, so bear with me on having the volume be a bit up and down at times. I’ll get back in the swing of it soon enough. I did figure out how to make it for HD, and I strongly recommend that you view the screencast in HD so that you can see the screen clearly.

I’m embedding it here just in case you really don’t feel like clicking one link and watching the HD version, but you’ll want to view it at full screen and it will be a touch blurry.

Links From Video:
Company behind SilverStripe
SilverStripe.org – SilverStripe main website.
SilverStripe Forums

Hopefully you enjoy the screencast, and if you have more questions or thought of some features of this software you’d like me to mention in a future screencast, let me know! I have 2 more overview videos planned and several tutorials but I’m open to more ideas.

~Nicole

1. When you make a post in your blog get your keyword phrase as close to the beginning of the title of the post as possible. When you tag your post use the keyword as a tag. Then when you bookmark the post be sure to use the title of the post and again tag the keyword. This is search engine bait and if you practice basic SEO methods in your writing you will find yourself on page of Google and other search engines in a matter of days, maybe even hours.

2. Bookmark to the correct directories and the right categories. For sure bookmark to Google Bookmarks, Yahoo MyWeb, Digg, Netscape, and any other relative or favorite directory. Join Onlywire and you can bookmark to several directories with one click.

3. Post often and bookmark every post. Social bookmarking is bait for the search engines. By posting in your blog and bookmarking on a regular basis you will get the search engines showing up at Netscape for example and putting your article on page one for the keyword phrase you are targeting. This also gets them spidering your blog more regularly which can lead to more traffic on some of your other posts.

4. Social bookmarking can lead to many things. Certainly getting your article read can create credibility for you. It can also lead to traffic, repeat traffic, referrals, join ventures, sales, newsletter sign-ups, comments on your blog posts, emails from your readers.

5. Having interaction with your visitors is one of the biggest benefits that comes from bookmarking a post and getting it read. In the old days a website did not have the interaction with it’s visitors. Now you can play video, add audio, solicit comments, get your posts read via RSS feeds, and who knows where this will all lead.

These five benefits of social bookmarking have all been listed to get you going bookmarking your posts if you are not already doing it. If your goal is traffic then blogging combined with social bookmarking is a guaranteed formula for success. If you are not doing it you are not only standing still, you are going backwards.

Author: Daniel Trainor (Email)

Dr. Daniel Trainor is an established internet marketer and mentor. To find out how Dr. Trainor can help you make money from home go to http://www.emeraldpassport-info.com

The most important thing about having a website is to make sure that search engines recognise it as this is where most of your customers are going to come from. With billions of websites on the net it can be very difficult to get noticed so register with as many as possible such as Google, Yahoo and even the smaller sites.

Keep your website regularly updated as it keeps it looking fresh and can help with search engine optimisation. If your website has been exactly the same for the last five years people will be very bored of it and won’t find any reason for going onto it.

The most successful sites contain powerful, relevant, useful information and lots of it. If people can find everything they need on your site they will keep coming.

Although search engine optimisation is very important there are also a lot of very simple things you can do to attract people to your site. For example, make it easy for visitors to get around your site otherwise they will get frustrated. Also make sure that you respond to any queries quickly as this shows customers that you care about them and value their custom.

Websites are capable of gathering information about its visitors which is very useful when it comes to knowing exactly what gets people clicking on your site. This can be done through surveys, newsletter subscriptions, contests and many other methods.

Other than search engine optimisation another extremely important aspect of any website is its design as it can be the difference between customers returning or not. People are very judgemental when it comes to the way something looks so if something is plain and boring they’re not going to like it. However, if a site has good graphics, texts and colours it is going to attract people’s attention and they are more likely to come back.

Once you know all about search engine optimisation and how to create a good website there is no reason why the amount of traffic going to your site shouldn’t increase. Once people have achieved these things they often wonder how they ever coped without a great website.

Author: Derek Both (Email)

At WRS http://www.webrepairservices.co.uk we aim to help you get the most from your website investment and turn it into a high performance revenue channel.

Glam Media made news a couple of months ago when it was ranked by comScore as ‘Number One Women’s Web Property’ in a results list that had it scoot just barely past the extremely popular iVillage.com in the results top 10.

Now Glam Media is launching a new proprietary search tool for their network that they call a vertical search tool. The tool is described as:

a proprietary search tool aimed at delivering top quality and highly relevant content from Glam Media’s Publisher Network of 350+ lifestyle, celebrity and fashion sites, as well as its flagship site, Glam.com.

In the press release Glam Media explains their new search technology as follows:

In addition to classic search and indexing technologies, Glam Search uses a proprietary “curated rank” algorithm, which assigns a weighting to a page based on relevance, timeliness and an editorial analysis of the content source. This gives Glam Search results a higher contextual relevance to the item being searched.

The publishers in their network will be able to add a search widget to their sites and blogs that they can configure to show custom results.

~Nicole

Advertising through blogs is much cheaper than the traditional advertising media, mainly because it is still in its infancy. Blog advertising is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the web. It’s easy, convenient, cheap, and you do not require a website or any expertise in site building… the list goes on.

If you do not have a website or know how to set one up, focus all your attention on creating a strong blog design and template that draws attention. Bloggers are less inclined to link to a website that’s plastered with ads and all types of hype. Most search engine visitors arrive at your website looking for specific information. Once they tag you and/or buy from you, you are very likely to get them back as repeat visitors/buyers. If a blog appeals to a visitor both through content and design, they’ll be back!

Whether or not you have one or many websites, it’s – from my experience – super beneficial to advertise on a blog as well. In fact the more blogs you have going and the more often you submit to them, the easier it becomes to reach your target market. You can connect speedily and economically with a like-minded audience hungry for your product. The power of advertising through your blog lies in the fact that bloggers on the whole tend to be an influential crowd of doers.

Blog advertising is the latest and most natural way to create your brand. If you want fast recognition of your products or services, then you will find this way of marketing will do it for you.

Advertising on your blogs not only is an excellent and surefire way to reach millions of readers, but it can boost your websites search engine and page rank.

Remember, the key to a successful home business is quality traffic to your website and/or blog(s).

Unlike a business website, blog advertising is a conversation. Treat your blog as an email you’re sending to your best friend. And, just like a personal letter, it is important to communicate with your readers as soon as they respond to your ideas.

So, I encourage you to go ahead and think out of the box! Blogs are not just for fun anymore. Let your entrepreneurial spirit run free, and advertise.

Written by: Ann Stewart

About the Author:
Ann Stewart, net entrepreneur and author, offers you information about state-of-the-art free, affordable and profitable internet business and products. Whether you’re a newbie or savvy networker, All Yours Now invites you to tap into the inspiring and informative newsletter here: http://allyoursnow.com.

Promotion methods

There are lots of different ways to promote your site, in this article we will look at the pros and cons of some of the different methods of website promotion. We will cover:

• Online Advertising
• Offline Advertising
• Link Exchanges
• Purchased Links
• Articles
• Directories
• Search Engine Submission
• Forum / Email Signatures

Online Advertising
There are lots of different methods of online advertising, PPC (pay per click) is the most easy to manage model, as you only pay for the visitors you get. Let’s say I run a flower website, and I convert roughly 1 in 10 visitors into a buyer, also my average order converts to $10 profit. Then if I pay 50 cents/click, that is $5 for each order. So even though I am paying 50 cents for each visitor from my PPC ads, my business is still profitable as on ever 10 PPC visitors I make $5 profit. ($10 profit – $5 PPC costs)

To find out more about internet advertising, I suggest you read this article: http://www.affiliatesrated.com/article.php?article=cpm_cpc_or_cpa

Offline Advertising
You can advertise your website with flyers, in magazines, on billboards, on television and on the radio. Although it is harder to monitor how profitable your advert is, it is important not to forget that these adverts can be just as effective as internet campaigns and often more effective. For example if I run a website selling bike parts, and advert in a cycling specialist magazine would be the perfect way to target my advert to my chosen audience.

Link Exchanges
These can be very beneficial, but only in certain situations. For example, if I run an internet shop selling PCs, and my friend has an internet shop which sells PC games, then a link exchange could be mutually beneficial. My visitors who are buying a new PC might decide to buy some new games from his site, and his visitors who are buying new game might decide it is time for a new PC so they can play the latest games and buy one from me.

Link exchanges are no longer of any real benefit from a search engine point of view, and so should only be used with the intention of getting more visitors, and not for getting higher search rankings.

Purchased links
There has been an increasing trend in purchasing links from other websites. This is because the benefit here is two-fold. Firstly, assuming the website is targeting the same market as your site, then you get a new stream of targeted visitors. Secondly, search engines see the one-way link as a vote of confidence in your site, so you can get a search engine boost. You will need to weight up the cost of the link with whether or not you think you will get a significant boost to traffic as a result.

Articles
As should be clear by now, I am a keen advocate of articles as an excellent means of website promotion. Firstly, by publishing them on your site first, you get unique website content for your site. Secondly, then by submitting it to an articles directory other webmasters will post the article on their site providing you with tons of one-way links back to your site. Although the glory days of articles are over, they are currently an under-rated method of promotion, so if you are a good writer, and have knowledge about topics related to your site which others might not know, get writing!

Directories
Directories have really frustrated me. Time and again I have submitted my sites to directories and I have only been disappointed. Firstly, it often takes ages to submit your listing, and once submitted, your listing may take ages to be accepted. Also, the benefit of directories has been hyped up, hardly anybody tries to use a directory to find what they are looking for, they use search engines. Some promote the idea that search engines use directories in calculating rankings, especially the ODP, as far as I can tell the ODP is pretty much dead with a backlog of 1000s of site submissions and editor submissions and is old news. So are directories. Conclusion: don’t waste your time on them.

Search Engine Submission
Search engine submission is the process of going to the search engine and telling them about your website by hand. I would recommend doing this for msn, yahoo and google but only when you first launch your site and they don’t yet know about it. If your site has been around for a few days and has some links from other sites indexed by these engines, this won’t be necessary as your site will already be indexed by these engines. The other search engines aren’t worth your time or effort, they will make it their business to find your site so don’t waste your time on them.

Forum / Email Signatures
Why don’t more people do this? It’s such a simple method of promotion, and it’s free! All you do is put a link to your site in your forum signature and that could mean hundreds or thousands of new links to your site depending on how often you chat in forums. With the email signatures, lets say I send a funny email to a friend, and they forward it to all their friends, all of a sudden lots more people could find out about my site. Don’t overlook this promotion gem!

Conclusion
I bet you hadn’t thought of all these different ways to promote your site! And even if you had, I’m sure you learnt something new. I hope that the article has helped you find new ways to promote your site. To find out more about promoting your website I suggest you look at http://www.affiliatesrated.com/affiliate_tips.php

Written by: Benjamin Wigoder

About the Author:
Benjamin Wigoder is a website designer, programmer and entrepeneur. He has been using affiliate programs for years and his new (affiliate programs directory) allows webmasters to see affiliate programs rated and reviewed as well as categorized to make choosing suitable programs easy.

Because of the ease of distribution and the potential for unique web traffic, you can use this technique to improve your online marketing efforts. The key to using RSS as a successful marketing tool is to have useful content that engages and informs your intended audience. No one will want to read boring or useless information, and they certainly won’t want to pass it on to others. Use the following tips to make your content sizzle so that your target market will keep coming back for more.

Articles for RSS

When you write articles for use in RSS feeds, put yourself in the shoes of your intended audience members. As a busy professional, do you want to read long articles with large blocks of text, or would you rather read short how-to articles and checklists? Write your articles to be long enough to provide at least one important piece of information, but short enough to capture the attention of even the busiest professional.

Consider breaking longer articles into one article series. Instead of writing one 2,000 word article, you can write ten 200-word articles that are more likely to be read. These shorter articles are also perfect for submission to online newsletters and e-zines. In addition to considering length, consider the topics you can write about.

Make sure that your articles are appropriate for your intended audience in terms of subject matter and depth. A beginner audience will get discouraged with overly technical articles and an advanced audience will not want to read simple tips and how-to articles.

RSS Press Releases

Press releases can easily be distributed with RSS, much like other types of content. Your press releases need to be targeted and contain information that presents your business in the best light. You can send press releases out for many reasons including changes in ownership, special events, charitable donations, the addition of new staff members, and an increase in the number of products and services you provide.

If you write just one press release a week, you can see a startling improvement in your web site traffic due to all the one-way links your submission efforts can generate. Using press releases is also a great way to encourage other people to post your information on their web sites.

RSS Blog Postings

Blogs are one of the most effective internet marketing tools currently available. They’re also relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain. Blogs allow you to post information about your company, optimize your web site for the search engines, and have customers leave comments so that your web site becomes interactive. When you write blog postings that will be used for RSS, keep the same principles of article writing in mind. Shorter posts are better because people can read them in between major projects or when they want to take a quick break from their work.

You should also be sure to write for your intended audience. Don’t overly promote your business in your postings. Instead, give people information and resources that they can use and they’ll be encouraged to keep visiting your web site. This can help you build solid customer relationships and improve your sales conversion rate.

RSS Content

There are many other types of content that can be used to promote your business through RSS. You can turn all of your knowledge into tip sheets, special reports, question and answer listings, and almost any other type of content that can be used with RSS. Keep in mind the rules for writing content for a target audience and you can successfully use your content to develop your web traffic and help to improve your sales conversion rate.

Setting Up an RSS Feed

Setting up an RSS feed requires a small investment of your time that can help you see a phenomenal return. If you want to set up your own RSS feed, you’ll need to have a server, a database with descriptions of your content, and the ability to use scripting. If you’re not able to use scripting or you don’t have a server or database set up, you can hire a freelancer to do the technical work for you so you can concentrate on finding ways to make your content available all over the Web.

Once you have everything ready to go, you can find an aggregate, or RSS publisher, to submit your content to for syndication. Many of these aggregates are available and allow you to submit your site under a specific category.

Categorizing Your Feed

When you submit your content to an aggregate, you need to make sure you submit it under the right category. This helps you to make sure your intended audience can access your information.

If you own a sporting goods business and accidentally categorize your content under a home furnishings category, people will wonder why your content is listed and will not be interested in visiting your web site. Review your content and make a list of categories that it might fit into. If you are a freelance writer, you can categorize your content under small business, home business, marketing, web content, search engine optimization, or publishing depending on the type of writing you do.

The important thing is not to pigeon-hole your content into one category. If your content can be used by many different audiences, submit to several aggregates under different categories to see the best return on your investment.

Written by: Khemal Dole

About the Author:
Khemal Dole owns and operates http://www.PaychecksDirect.com, a completely FREE service which helps many first-timers and even experts find their perfect Work At Home job. Visit www.paychecksdirect.com right now and see for yourself why so many are flocking to his site.