Internet Marketing Smarts.com

Google has a universal search engine now. Basically what this means is depending on the search you conduct you’ll find websites, videos, news articles and images all mixed in the search results. Prior to this they separated the results by type. Universal search makes for a better experience for the users. But more importantly means it’s more ways for you to rank. We’ll focus on images for now.

Most people know the value of performing search engine optimization on a web page. Some people have wised up and gone beyond text and even started creating keyword optimized videos to help their rankings. But not many people are optimizing their images which is your golden opportunity.

Now I’ll be honest the images don’t come up a lot in the regular search results. But some do and the fact is more than ever people are using the image search feature on Google to find pictures related to searches. And no it’s not just naughty pictures, you pervert. There are a lot of people doing searches for products that they want to buy or are thinking about buying. When they do a search they often click on the image results like you do for a regular search. And guess what? Google often just links directly to the page that the image is on! What that translates into, is more targeted traffic to your website. It’s highly targeted because if someone is searching for a specific product image, it’s probably because they are in the latter stages of research and are ready to buy.

The Advantages of Ranking Using Images

1. Additional traffic you would have never received.
2. Less competition. Most website owners aren’t thinking about optimizing their images. They’re barely thinking about optimizing their pages. So that means you won’t have to worry about fighting them off like you do with PPC or even regular search engine optimization.
3. It’s easier to rank high in image searches than it is for regular web page searches.  Because it’s under the radar you can easily optimize tons of images.

How To Optimize Images That Rank Well

Step 1: Be descriptive and name your images using the keywords they represent. If you have an image of a Sprint Palm Treo 700p. Then don’t name the image cellphone. Name it exactly what it is. The more keywords that really describe the image, the better chances of coming up in Google’s image search results at the top and possibly the regular search results as well. If you really want to take it up a notch you may want to do some keyword research using Word Tracker’s free tool.

Step 2.  Get a Google Webmaster account. Don’t worry it’s free.

Step 3. Submit A Sitemap.

Step 4. Verify you own the site.

Step 5. Enable the Image search feature.

The last step is very important. This will help Google easily find your images which should help them rank faster than having Google hunting them down on the worldwide web.

If you follow these steps you can take advantage of a back door way of getting more traffic to your site. It won’t be a lot but every little bit counts especially when it is highly targeted traffic of people in the right mind set ready to buy! By the way if you think I’m full of crap about this (and I’m highly offended that you might feel that way.) check out where Google admits to this.

Don’t say I never gave you anything! Cheers.

For any business it’s extremely important to look for ways to keep up with your competitors and if you’re smart staying ahead of them. There are several ways to conduct business market research. You can send spies to their store fronts or websites to snoop around. But that takes time and energy that your spies employees could be using to make you more money.

You could sign up for your competitors newsletter or mailing list. That’s actually very cost effective but if your competitor isn’t active in those fronts then it really serves you no purpose. Or if they’re smart they’ll boot your ass off their list!

Competitive Analysis

Why not hire the biggest and best aggregator of data on the earth today, My friend and yours, Google.com! (more…)

Another day and yet another internet marketing report making its way around the internet with outrageous claims. Well at least it’s free so I won’t have to go through the trouble of requesting a refund from clickbank or buying it from my own affiliate link. (Don’t front,  I know you do that too!)

Search Engine Myths Exposed is a new FREE report by Jonathan Leger who I would rate as a very underrated but extremely competent Online Marketer. He doesn’t get much shine like some of the big name "gurus" …excuse me, I had to control myself from hurling because that term is thrown around so freely that it literally sickens me. But I digress. Jon is a solid guy in my opinion. He’s like the internet marketer’s marketer. So I tend not to delete emails sent by him. Jon is anti-guru and judging by the first pages of his new report Search Engine Myths Exposed, he makes it very clear why!

I’m always skeptical reading these internet marketing reports or even just giving up my email address to get them because we all know we’re going to be marketed to. But I’m more inlined to do so with Jon Leger because I’ve actually seen results from his other programs like 3waylinks which has helped me secure top 20 rankings for several keywords. So I’m more apt to read a report from him because he has proven to me that he understands SEO.

So now that’s out of the way, let’s discuss this report.

Jon basically discusses 7 Myths and tries to debunk or verify each one. He does a good job of trying to provide verifiable proof when possible This is pretty much unheard of for most Gurus who can photoshop a fake earnings check, or get a friend to provide a fake testimonial on their sales page. Shame on you if you’ve done that! So let’s go through each of the myths and see if they ring a bell for you.

Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All.
I won’t lie, as much as I understand Google’s algorithms and practice white hat tactics, they do scare the bejesus out of me. I can’t get over that big brother is watching type of feeling. In any event, Jon makes some obvious observations here so it wasn’t an  "A Ha!" moment for me. Newbies might find his conclusion comforting and Black Hat Seo Practitioners will probably yawn at this section.

Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content.
Now this one was long but interesting reading. I was a bit torn about his conclusions. He did ultimately back up his verdict with some solid examples. (more…)