We just want to take a moment to wish everyone a wonderful holiday. We've decided to scale back a bit during the holidays so our next useful post :o) will be on Jan. 3rd. We hope during this season you take some time out to spend with your family and friends.

We had talkes some earlier about upselling and cross selling on your site - the following article gives a nice explanation along with ten tips on making it work (or making it work better).

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/customer_relations/article.php/3448341

Have a great weekend.

How is search engine marketing doing? How is it growing. You can find details and a nice report on the following link.

http://www.sempo.org/research/sem-trends-2004.php

The barrel is pretty full today so we'll give you some wrap up thoughts tomorrow and then talk some more about links next week.

One of the things we need to make sure of before we work on contacting links is to make sure we have our own site in order. Today we'll talk about our links page -

Some people speculate that it is better to name the resources page something other than links.htm. They suggest using something like resources.htm. That however is up to you - if your site has been around a while and your page has some good page rank then don't change it.

Make sure that the links page is linked to every page in your site.
Once you get more than 20 links or so on the page make sure to subdivide that page into individual category pages. Then you want to make sure these individual category page are listed on your site map.

On the links page make sure that you have instructions and requirements for how people can contact you for a link - include html code that they can cut / copy / paste. List the types of links your looking for and one's that you won't accept.

Make sure to include specific steps on how to contact you. As you get questions from potential link partners make sure to list those questions/answers in a mini faq.

Till tomorrow take care.
Tim

One thing about links before we go further is can links to your site penalize you... let's thing about this for a moment. If bad sites linking to you could penalize you then your competitors would all be putting your links on bad sites. You have no control over who links to you ... only who you link to. We'll discuss this further as we go along on how to choose a site that would be a good link.

A good article discusses this on SEO Chat -

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Link-Trading-Help/Can-You-Get-Penalized-for-Inbound-Links-to-Your-Site/

The rest of the week we'll talk about choosing sites you want to link with.

Tim

Hope you enjoyed your weekend and got all your shopping done. This week we'll continue talking about links and how to do them. Till tomorrow we hope you enjoy your Monday.

Hope you enjoyed your week. We're going on a shopping adventure today and hopefully it will all be finished by the time we hit the check out counter. I found this article pretty interesting in my inbox this morning - eight ways to not optimize your site. Some good reading.

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Eight-worst-search-optimization-techniques/

Have a good weekend.

Tim

One thing I think many people forget about during the link process is keeping track. It's pretty easy to do -

1) Create a spreadsheet.
2) Across the top list the following - Site - Link page - Page rank - Contact info - Contacted - Link up - Recontact - Recip link - check link.

Site - Name / URL of the site.
Link page - Where their links page is.
Page rank - Page rank of the links page.
Contact info - How to contact them / Form or email address.
Contacted - Date you contacted them.
Link up - Date you put their link on your site.
Recontact - Date you recontacted them.
Recip link - Date your link is on their site.
Link page - Where your link is located on their site.
check link - Every month or two make sure your link is still on their site.

We'll continue or discussion on this next week.

See you tomorrow.

So on with some talk of getting links - first before we talk about anything you need to decide how you are going to get other sites to link with you.

Let's pretend for a moment that you sell socks online.

Your main keywords are:

black socks
white socks
mens socks
ugly socks

So you need to create some links / link text for each of those keywords - the MAIN thing to remember is that we want those keywords in the link text and in the descriptive text. Another thing is that you do not have to point that page to the index page on your site - after you have a good pagerank on the front page - 5 or 6 - you can start working on targetting individual pages.

So a link for black socks would look something like this -

Black Socks - Black socks and more can be found at My Ugly Socks.

Then create the links for the other keywords. Now when you are seeking links rotate them. More tomorrow on links.

Tim

I know I mentioned we were going to be talking some about links - but in reading my email this morning I came across some instructions on creating a Christmas greeting / Movie. You might find it interesting as well.

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.asp?g=msoffice&seqNum=107

Hope you enjoy it as well.

Hope you had a wonderful weekend. Just a reminder we'll be talking this week a bit about links and link strategies. If you aren't subscribed to our newsletter make sure that you check it out on the web.

Have a good one.
Tim

Couple of articles of note -

Explorer loses more market share -
http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox34.html

And there is some talk of a Google link dampening change - I think we'll discuss a little more about links in next weeks discussion.

http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/New-Links-Does-Google-Use-a-Dampening-Filter/

So make sure to read it and next week starting on Tuesday we'll talk more about it.
Till then have a wonderful weekend.

The federal government is offering a free credit report every year. You can find details at the following site -
https://www.annualcreditreport.com/

It's on a rollout schedule based on where you live.