Thrive Learning Institute - SEO Tips

The Value of Linking

Thrive Learning Institute teaches that essentially, all of marketing on the internet comes down to one thing: Inbound Links. These are links that people can click on to come to your website from some other place, like another site, a directory, an article, a search engine, or even an email. There are three ways that links are important:

Direct clicking - If a visitor to another website sees that there's a link to your site, there's an opportunity for them to click through to you. It then stands to reason that the more links you have out on the net pointing to you, the more traffic they'll send. An addition benefit is that this traffic gets directly to your site, bypassing the search engines completely.

Search engine ranking - Search engines, especially Google, check to see how many other sites and other pages are linking to yours. They equate this with importance and popularity, and if you have a lot of links, you'll get ranked higher. Getting lots of quality links is called "Off-site SEO".

Search engine indexing - Search engines have programs (called, "spiders", "crawlers", and "robots") that regularly scour the internet, looking for more sites to add to their listings, and looking to update the listings of the sites they already have. The more and better links you have coming to your site, the faster you'll get added to the search engines, and the more often your site will be updated in their listings.

Stay tuned for more SEO tips from Thrive Learning Institute.

How To "Sitemap" - Thrive Learning Institute

For a website to be seen, it must be visible. That's about as simple as we can put it. In order to make sure people get to your website, it has have a good search engine ranking. If no one has any way of knowing that your website exists, how can you expect your site to succeed?

Now there are a lot of tips, tricks, and tools that you can use to make sure your website and web pages are visible. One of these tools is the Sitemap. So, what is a Sitemap, why does it help, and when is it useful?

What is a Sitemap?
Let me speak a foreign language here for a few seconds: A Sitemap is an HTML or XML file submitted to the search engines that includes the URL links for every single page and sub-page or your website and store. This allows web crawlers to find these sub-pages more easily.

In English: A Sitemap is essentially a list of all of the pages of your website. This will include your main pages (like your home page, about us page, contact us page, or anything else you have) as well as your store pages (and the individual products inside of your store). It has to be created in a certain "web code" format -- either XML or HTML.

This means, that in addition to everything else a Sitemap is, it is also pretty difficult to make. No worries, Thats why Thrive Learning Institute is here.

Why use a Sitemap?
So, if a Sitemap is a complicated piece of website code (which you probably don't know how to make off of the top of your head), then why bother using one? What are the benefits of having a Sitemap?

Well, there are several reasons, but it all boils down to one thing: It helps Google find and read pages that it wouldn't normally find or read.

So, what are those pages? To a list a few types of pages that are hard to read:

• A page made in Flash or Javascript. Pages made in Flash or Javascript usually have some sort of "moving pictures" in them. As a result, though, the pages become "hard for Google to understand."
• A database. If you have a large database -- let's say a list of all of the professional football players that have played in the last thirty years, their statistics, and their teams -- it will make your website, and specifically your sub-pages, very difficult for Google to find and understand.
• A very large website. If you are running a multi-national corporation, your web-page may have 3000 pages. Google's crawler will "give up" before it reads all of them.
• If your site doesn't have very good "internal links" (in other words, if you have a page that you want people to find, but you don't have a link to it in your website), Google may never find that page.
• Your website is brand new and doesn't have links from any other websites. Google may not even realize your site exists, at least not for a while.
  

So, if your website falls into one of those categories, a Sitemap can be useful.

When should I use a Sitemap?

Since most of you who are reading this probably don't have a 3000 page website, a complex database, or a flash website, we'll focus on the last two "problems" that a Sitemap helps resolve.

First, if you don't have very good internal links, should you use a Sitemap? If this is a case, a Sitemap can help resolve this problem and help Google like you more. However, the far simpler solution is simply to put in good internal links.

Second, if you don't have links from other websites and are brand new, should you use a Sitemap? If this is the case, of course a Sitemap will let Google know you exist. Again, though, the simpler solution is to submit your website to the search engines, to directories, and/or to social bookmarking sites. Since this takes a lot less effort, it's usually the better solution.

With that being said, let me clarify: a Sitemap will never hurt your search engine ranking. Its benefits are relatively insignificant in the instances mentioned above, and may well not be worth your time. However, if you have the time for it, it certainly won't hurt either.

How do I make my sitemap?

So, you've decided your site deserves a Sitemap. Now we're to the complicated part. Making your Sitemap.

I won't go over the full directions in this blog, but generally speaking, you have two options.

Option #1: Use a Generator.
There are a lot of free XML generators on the web (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ for instance). However, many of these will not actually find all of your website pages. Most of them are restricted in many of the same ways Google's crawler is restricted. Also, don't give your e-mail address to any generator site. I promise, they will sell it.
This option is fast, easy, and much less effective.

Option #2: Build a Full Version
Click HERE for Google's tool. They provide step-by-step directions on how to download their software, create your Sitemap, and submit it to them. This is quite complicated and very time consuming, and to those of you who have never used website code, it will also be pretty confusing. However you'll learn a lot from the process. Thrive Learning Institute recommends this option.
This option is difficult and can be confusing but far more thorough.


In Conclusion:
Is a Sitemap a good thing? Absolutely.
Is it easy to make a Sitemap? Absolutely not.
Is it worth it to make a Sitemap? Not Always.

For our clients, the only case where we recommend a Sitemap, is when your site is an e-commerce site that has a few hundred products or more. In this case the benefit is usually worth the investment, but in many other cases it simply isn't.


For more information on ways Thrive Learning Institute can help your online business achieve its goals, simply visit www.thriveli.com. Learn how to make money offline by marketing online with Thrive Learning Institute

Simple SEO Tips - Thrive Learning Institute

Here are a few tips and simple rules from Thrive Learning Institute you should follow to improve easily your rankings in the different search engines. Nothing new and nothing very complex but good tips that work straight from the knowledge base of Thrive Learning Institute.

So, I hope you enjoy reading this little "SEO Beginner Guide" and I hope it helps you grow your traffic.

Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques and strategies to optimize websites for the search engines and get better rankings on the search results of those engines.

There are a few more abbreviations and terms you should now if you start learning SEO, among others:

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages.

Anchor text: Text used as a link.

Backlink: Any link pointing to your web site. Also called Inbound link.

One-way link: When a site or page has a link to your site, and your doesn't have any link back to it.

Keywords density: Relation of a keyword to the other words in a web page element. For example, the web page title <>This is just an example for a web page title< / title > has a keyword density of 20% because 7 out of 35 characters in this title make the word "example".

Outbound link: Any link on your page pointing to another site.

So, let's start working on it right away!

Tip 1 - Anchor text
When you create a link to another page or another site of yours, don't just use "click here" or "go" as the anchor text. Basically, don't do this:

To join our online HTML training, < href="001.html">click here< /a>.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our < href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training.

Try also to use these keywords in the name of the HTML file.
Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. (anchor text)
"click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

Tip 2 - Backlinks
Spend time to contact other webmasters who have a site about the same subject as yours and exchange text links.
Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonims and variations.
Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.

Tip 3 - Pages title
Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page.

Tip 4 - Content
Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.

< src="html-training.jpg" alt="HTML Training">

Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

< name="description" content="...">
< name="keywords" content="...">


Tip 5 - Content Actualization
You have nice content? Plenty of backlinks and optimized pages? Great, but don't start sleeping on it.
Update your content as often as possible. Add pages, articles, news... Grow your site.

Tip 6 - Web Hosting
Make sure your site loads fast and your hosting is good. A slow web site is no good.

Tip 7 - Clean HTML code
Try to have your HTML code as clean as possible. And try to reduce it a maximum. You should have a lot of text content and a bit of HTML code, not the contrary.

Tip 8 - Directories
Do not forget to post your web site to all the Internet directories related to your subject. These links are better than links exchanges as usually, directories do not require a link back to their site. These one-way links have a very good value for search engines.
Also submit it to DMOZ directory. It will probably take a few months to get your sited indexed, but the backlinks you will get there are worth gold.

Tip 9 - HTML tags H1, H2, B, U...
Use the headers tags for your titles and subtitles, search engine will give more importance to those texts.

<>HTML Training< /h1>

The look of these tags is not so nice but you can use CSS to redefine it.

h1 { color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }


Tip 10 - Domain name
The keywords used in the domain name have great importance for some search engines, such as Google. If possible, register a domain name with your target keywords.

A domain name like http://www.buy-flowers.com has good chances to get ranked well on "buy flowers" with a bit of SEO and appropriate content.

You can also try subdomains for your most important sections. Subdomains will usually get indexed much faster than the sub-pages and directories.
Taking our example, you could create http://roses.buy-flowers.com, http://tulips.buy-flowers.com, ... generating a kind of "mini-site" for each.

Tip 11 - Inbound/Outbound links
Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too much outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.

Tip 12 - Experiment!
Try new things. Play with the keywords density, your site structure, HTML tags and elements.
Some techniques work good with Google, not for Yahoo or MSN and vice-versa. And moreover, the search engine algorithms are changing all the time! Some old strategy might not work anymore but suddenly work great for one of them.

Well, that's it for today! I think that covers most of the SEO Basics you need to know to start optimizing your site. Thrive Learning Institute thanks you for for reading!

The SEO Success Pyramid

Matt Mcgee over at smallbusinessSEM.com recently wrote a column on the SEO success Pyramid.

I really liked the article because he explained in real terms that building a website isnt about making a ton of money really quickly. Its about building something worthwhile through hard work and proven principles, just like Thrive Learning Institute teaches. There are 5 levels of the pyramid culminating creating that all coveted “Trust”.

Commitment

this is a no-brainer but is such a hang up for so many. Your success is directly connected to your commitment to a project or a goal . This is true in every facet of life whether it be relationships, sport, business or spirituality. Anything worthwhile wont come to yo in a flash of undisciplined genius. Its often the steady and persistent that produce the greatest value and in fact produce the most imminent of geniuses. Commit yourself for the long run. Its worth it.

Planning

You can get far with a deep commitment to success however if you just work hard and have no plan or direction then all that work will no doubt dissolve to nothing. Set clear goals. Picture the perfect day, then break down all the steps necessary to getting there. Create several plans of action and prioritize them. Then get to work . You planning will pay off in the end as it steers all that horsepower you have toward the desired goal.


Product/Service

There is no substitute for quality. Tricky salesman ship might fool customers into buying something useless for a while but people aren't stupid and soon enough you'll find yourself out of business and out of money. Create or provide something that people need. This is the surest way to guarantee staying power.


Education/Information

In this industry access to education and information regarding the intricacies and nuances that are evolving are essential to creating a successful SEO strategy. Yesterdays success strategy could be wildly different from today's because of a new piece of software a new policy or a new up and coming competitor. You need access to high quality information so you don't get left behind in the stone ages of may 2009.


Patience

Patience is perhaps the most important quality to possess in the field of search engine marketing simply because it just takes time for the best strategies to take hold and start working their magic. There are no quick fixes or paths to instant success. There are some exceptions but they are just that, exceptions. So hunker down and get to work. Thrive Learning Institute guarantee's you'll see abundant success, just be patient.

Start Small, Dream Big

Its good to be ambitious in business. You're rewarded handsomely for it however you must have the right perspective if you're actually going to realize your ambitions. Thrive Learning Institute provides the experience and knowledge to focus those ambitions into simple, actionable tasks.

When starting an online business its never a good idea to target the broad, general terms like “health care”, or “Beauty”. There's way too much competition and unless you can wait around for 10 years all the while posting amazing content daily you will never get ranked in the search engines. You must start small if you're going to see any degree of success within a reasonable amount of time.

Select a low competition, usually long-tail, keyword phrase within the subject you want your niche in and then work to get to the top of the search engine. The process of getting to the top of the search results is pretty long and involved. Thrive can walk you through the detailed, step by step process of discovering capitalizing on, and ranking first for these keywords.

Once you've achieved the top ranking for your first keyword, choose a related keyword with the same level of competition and difficulty and repeat. Now you have two strong holds in a niche. Keep repeating the process and you'll eventually be able to start competing for those highly competitive keywords. You'll begin to dominate the market and when you dominate a market you have a fat wallet.

An example:

recently, after doing some research, found a potentially profitable keyword, “DJ speakers”. So I decided to throw up a niche site all about how to find the right DJ speakers, with videos and other related material all optimized for DJ speakers. Soon enough I'll be in the top spot when people search for that keyword and I'm already set up to begin optimizing for other keywords with related pages in my site. The next step might be “how to become a DJ” or maybe I'll just expand into the broader “DJ equipment.

So remember start small, be patient and in time you'll get that authority site you've dreamed of. Milk before meat my friends, milk before meat. Thrive Learning Institute will help you get the meat faster:)

A brief explanation of web analytics

Web analytics is the objective tracking, collection, measurement, reporting, and analysis of quantitative internet data to optimize websites and web marketing initiatives. (You'll want to pick up Avinash Kaushiks Web Analytics: An Hour a Day) Thrive Learning Institute teaches how to set up, analyze and make profitable decisions from your web analytics.

Web analytics should be the lens that all business owners view the success or failure of their business and the basis for strategic decisions and tactics. They'll be able to set realistic goals by analyzing what has and hasn't worked in the past and be gather information and trends across all their marketing campaigns to discover which strategies are having the greatest impact on their customers and therefore determine which areas of the company are thriving and which could use a little more work.

For example, businesses can determine what is attainable in their future by evaluating past successes and failures. Also, by analyzing trends across marketing channels, marketers can learn which strategies have the most impact on their consumers, and therefore determine which areas of the company are thriving and which need improvement

The history of web analytics is miniscule compared to the massive tomes that grace our libraries about various subjects that have dramatically effected the human race. However, while the field is still very small,Web analytics is having a huge impact on the world of internet marketing and is making many people very, very rich. I'll give you a very brief explanation of how It's birth.

In the beginning navigating the internet was very straight forward. Type in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and a file with links and text would be 'served' to you by a server and that was it.

Servers record their transactions in what is called a log file. Some clever person realized that these files could be read by a program to provide data on the popularity of the website. He subsequently wrote that program and thus we see the birth of Web Analytics.

These logs were capturing data on not only page hits (the number of times people accessed a websites files) but also file name, time, referrer (the website making the request) IP address, browser identification, operating system and so on. So things began to get interesting cause you got to learn about where these hits were coming from and each hit became unique.

Soon enough business people and marketers began to get interested in this information but it was unfortunately all Greek to them … or php. So another sneaky person built a program that would automatically sort out the information in the log files to produce basic metrics. The first true commercial log analyzer was released by IPRO in 1994.

The last 15 years has been a trend of gathering more useful data and making it easier for the common webmaster to analyze and from said analysis make profitable decisions.

what serious business owner wouldn't want to know what marketing techniques are actually working and which are not?

For a more comprehensive and in depth look at web analytics and how the everyday internet entrepreneur can use it effectively check out Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik.
Or sign up with Thrive Learning Institute for one on one coaching on any online business subject you want.

Tip of the Week: How to Target Your Market Niche

Okay, so you have your website set up and you have been getting traffic for a few weeks but hardly anyone is making a purchase, what do you do? Starting a business is not as easy as it appears in a textbook or from watching your neighbor make a lot of money out of their garage. Anyone who has marketed a business or a product for a business knows that a company needs to specify their target market in order to optimize on marketing efforts.

Think of your product, determine what niche it falls into and then decide what demographic and psychographic are a part of that niche market. Once you have done this, you can research that particular group and design a marketing plan structured around their needs and wants.

For example, a company specializing in camping equipment is going to want to post articles about camping and possibly create a blog focused on camping and other outdoor activities to draw in their target market.

Narrowing your marketing strategy will help you better focus your marketing efforts in directions that will be most beneficial to your organization. You will also want to include emotional and product images on your site as well as putting your logo in a prominent location to help with business recognition. As always if you have any questions or concerns about this subject give Thrive Learning Institute a call

Tip of the Week: Search Engine Optimization

When it comes to SEO, keep your expectations realistic. One expectation that is initially set too high by many companies is the SEO time frame. Please realize that, realistically your SEO efforts could take months or even a year to see big rewards from your efforts. You also need to make sure that the people you work with understand how much improvements mean in SEO. Since it's a never-ending battle to stay in the top of the search engines, it's important to always be involved.

Once you have realistic expectations, you can start to examine and determine the real results of your SEO efforts. A couple main ways of examining where you stand with various search engines are to search for yourself, and to analyze the statistics on the web through programs like Google Analytics. It is very easy to see the initial rankings of your SEO efforts. Simply go to Google.com, for example, and type in your company's name. Where do you fall? An additional way to scope out where you stand apposed to the competition is to seek out web statistics which will benefit your company and give you a realistic sampling of where you stand as a company.

Tip of the Week: How to Submit to Organic Search Engines

It is important to register your website with various search engines. In this post, we will explain how to register with MSN, Yahoo and Google. Over-submitting to any search engine may cause the search engine to kick your website out of any future searches so be careful how often you register your sites with the same search engine.

To register with MSN, put your address in quotes in the search box ("your address here") and run a search for it. When no site is found, assuming your site is not currently registered, MSN will bring up a page saying so. Click on the option "send this address to us" and then fill out the form provided by posting your URL and then click submit URL. To register with Yahoo, scroll down to the bottom of the Yahoo homepage and click on "suggest a site", then click on "submit your site for free". Put your URL under submit a website or web page and then click submit URL. To register with Google, simply go to www.google.com/addurl and fill in the information specified.

After submission, search engine crawlers should come to your site within a month to make sure that you have the right meta tags, keyword saturation, etc. Make sure you optimize your site for the search engines. Do not expect your site to immediately come up in searches; it takes time.

Tip of the Week: Internet Security

Every company needs to pay attention to how secure their computers and private files really are. Failing to protect and secure your computers is a liability. Hackers can hack into your system and steal customer or personal information; you are responsible for what is done with that information. Also, a lot of people do not know that it is possible for people to access your computer to send out spam email, attack other computers, or store unwanted files such as pornography on your computer without your knowledge. For this reason, it is very important to secure your computer.

ninety eight percent of all computers have some sort of spyware on them. Spyware itself is not so bad; it is a tool that a lot of advertisers use but hackers will sometimes piggyback on spyware to hack into your files. Identity theft is also a big problem. One in twenty Americans will suffer from identity theft this year. There are five hundred new viruses each day that can come against outdated software...update! That's why large companies have a large IT department.

Since our clients run small businesses, we suggest using Invisus Computer Security. This system offers IT professionals who can actually remote access your computer in the event of infection. Invisus will act as the IT department for your business. They offer security scans that can be downloaded. We recommend downloading and running the program to see if your computer is secure and if your computer security software needs to be updated. Scan your computer on a regular basis as there are always new viruses.

How frequently should I update my site?

Whether you have a blog or a website, you will want to update it semi-frequently. The main reasons for this are that Google and other search engines will declare a website "dead" once it has been unchanged for too long.

There are different schools of thought on exactly how often you should update your site, but research has shown that updating your site once per week in some way helps to increase your search engine ranking.

However, they have also found that updating your website once every three weeks is almost as effective in helping your search engine optimization.

So, what is the best thing to do? Well, opinions differ, but generally speaking, as long as you're making some minor updates about once every three weeks, you should be fine. This can mean adding or removing an image, changing text slightly, or anything similar. Don't change your site too drastically! Remember, you want to be able to keep track of your successes and failures, and know how you're progressing. We'll discuss that more in a future entry.

To learn more about how a quality coaching company can help your business succeed, simply visit www.thriveli.com.

Link Baiting - Link Building Made Easy

Out of all the ways to get inbound links pointing at your site link baiting is one of the easiest. Link baiting is essentially a viral marketing technique where you publish something on your site or in your blog that will get people talking and cause them to link back to your site.

The beauty of link baiting is that the only work that you have to do is make something worth talking about. From there the rest of the work is done by visitors to your site or blog. If they see something worth talking about they are going to go to other forums, blogs, video sites, social bookmarking sites etc.. and tell everyone they know about this great information or tool that they just found at this site and they will link to your site.

Over the next few blog posts we will talk about some different things you can do to start link baiting on your own sites.

Link Trading Slang

Throughout the next few posts we will cover several different link building techniques. Link building is still one of the best ways to get your site ranking higher in the search results. We will kick it off by listing some of the Slang terms associated with Link Trading:

• Surf-n-Swap- This is a term that summarizes the overall process of basic link trading, in that you surf the net looking for partners, and swap links with them by sending an email request.

• Link Poaching- A strategy for finding link trade partners. Link Poaching involves using a variety of techniques (listed below) for finding which websites are trading with your competitors and requesting link trades with them. The theory here is that since they are already trading links with your competitor they are probably very likely to be willing to trade with you too.

• Dead Link- A term for a link that points to nowhere. Occasionally when you trade links, a particular site with whom you have traded a link will cease to exist for a variety of reasons, but the link on your website is still there. Clicking on it now generates an error. You should check for dead links periodically-maybe once or twice a year.