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Friday, November 1, 2002

PORTAL PARTNER PRESS November 2002


=======November 15, 2002===========
From: Robert Massa
Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 4:55 PM

Subject: PPP 11-15-02

YOU'RE WASTING YOUR LINK POPULARITY
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The information contained within this email is for the information, education and enjoyment of advertisers and inventory partners of the PR Ad Network only. It is exclusive and strictly confidential.
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In This Issue
Your wasting your link popularity if you don't optimize your sites!!!
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We have a staff meeting every morning with Ronda, Kathi and myself, to discuss our advertisers, our inventory partners and of course google. In addition, once a week, Ronda and I go over specific advertiser's accounts. We check for movement with PR and placements. We check the backward links and all of their movements.
We go to your website and evaluate the optimization techniques. We make sure you kids aren't trying to start your own little link farm, we make sure you're not hoping hidden text is your brass ring. Basically, we're just looking to keep everyone legit and do our best to see that everyone gets what they were expecting with this network thing. We look at a lot of things on a lot of sites.
Out of all this evaluating, one thing is VERY clear. Most of you don't fully understand how to get the most from your text ads. We are seeing far too many sites with no keywords where they need to be and too many keywords where they don't need to be.
I've spoken with most of you personally and I've always told you all that link popularity is the single most important factor in placing well, but it's not the ONLY factor. You've seen for yourself, sites with a lower PR on top of sites with a hgiher PR on some keywords. That right there tells you that if all it took was PR, eveyone would buy themselves a couple of 8's and we'd all be rich. Well, we're not all rich and it's still a competitive ballgame out there and you are my customers so naturally, I want YOU to win.
I'm going to tell you some of the basics today that you really need to do in order to get the most return possible from your link popularity. This is by no means a comprehensive course in SEO. There is as much to learn about SEO as you want to spend the time learning it. The more you learn, the better your chances of winning the placement wars, but my goal is to help you gain more for your money faster and allow you to focus on your business. Here we go.
#1. Target keywords that make you sales, not just the ones you think are going to just get you traffic. Far too many times clients insist they want a keyword phrase like travel when all they offer is vacation rentals in yellowstone.
Never forget, hits cost you money. Sales make you money.
#2. Make sure your target keyword is in your title tag.
#3. Make your title tag short, to the point and a hot button.
Never forget that the title tag is just about the only thing you can control. Make sure it is one that "sells"
#4. Use your target keyword in your description tag once. No need to repeat it.
#5. Don't worry about keyword density too much. Just use your keywords jsut like you were talking to a customer on the sales floor. You wouldn't mention your product 20 times in a one minute conversation would you? If you did, you'd sound pretty stupid. It sounds pretty stupid on web pages too.
#6. Use your keywords toward the top of the page in a heading tag.
#7. Use keywords in your link titles.
#8. Remember that your text ads are anchor text but don't jsut repeat keywords. It is an ad. aMake it sell.
#9. Keep your target keyword list very short. One way to look at it is this.
Every search service on the planet wants to bring back what it feels like is the MOST relevant site for any specfic keyword search. Fishing trips is not the same as fishing camps to a spider, so by trying to capture first page for both terms you are actually having to reduce the relevancy for at least one of them.
#10. If you want more keywords on top, build more domains. Just remember that it's a VERY good idea to use different, anonymous servers, with a unique IP address. Preferably different class C's. Remember that order pages and secure pages don't get spidered so a good way to do it is to put an order here button on the site that goers to a secure page and then link THAT page to any other order form you want. This eleminates the worry of duplicate content. Don't duplicate content but you can certainly use a lot of the stuff from the other domain to keep the look, feel and navigation branded, and cut down on the time used to develop content.
While I'm on this subject, I want to point out a misconception. I know it is a misconception because I've proven it over and over. Content is king.
It is only king when it needs to be king. If you're selling toilet plunger, no one, including search engines, really care about 15 pages about the history of plungers. On the other hand if your target keyword is DNA, you are going to need a little content. Se what I mean? You need as much content as you need to make sales, get traffic and place in the SERPS, in that order.
And most important of all

BUILD YOUR LINK POPULARITY
Buy it, rent it, trade for it or beg for it, but build it! Remember, a PR 8 is worth a whole lot of PR 4's so always go for as big a one as you can get. Naturally, I recommend not exchanging links. I recommend doing whatever you need to do to get as much for as little as possible and then sell your own ads. The exchanging part is where we all get into trouble.
I know it sounds like a lot of work. The sad fact is, it is a lot of work. No one said this was going to be easy. I have just given some of you the million dollar secret. Make the changes I suggested and your income will increase dramatically. For others, I have told you nothing of any value because it sounds like to much effort. Regardless of how you see it, you need to realize that if you don't take it, someone else will.
If it's more work than you want to do, call me. I have an anonymous server with 12 class C's. I can build you a domain for as little as $689. I can get you all the page rank you want. If you do the work, I'm happy to tell you how for free. If you want someone else to do the work, I'm one of the best and I'm cheap.
Whether you do it yourself or have someone else do it for you, if you want to win, do it!
See You at the Top
Bob
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Publisher -- Bob Massa 
bobking@searchking.com