A friend of mine recently lost his job. He was smart enough to see the writing on the wall and make some plans before his employer went under, but it has still had a major impact on his economic well being. As we watch the news stories of companies getting multibillion dollar bailouts so that their CEO’s can fuel up their private jets, others are suffering.

So how can we make a difference? Well we can use whatever expertise and services or products we provide to help others. We are going on the “Teach a man to Fish” principle, so let’s go fishing everyone!

This (In) Complete Startup Internet Marketing Guide is my way of doing just this. The guide is not meant to be a comprehensive internet marketing manual, instead it is meant to teach real people the hands on how to’s of internet marketing. For example you will learn how to pick a valuable domain name, or how to find targeted keywords for a website, or how to get free search engine traffic.

Over the coming months I invite you to contribute, share and help build this resource and your own internet business through this blog. I will provide the framework and your comments, tips, articles and twitter posts will provide the life to this project. Let’s jump right in and start the step by step notes on building your business online. We are going to assume that you have no current site and start with the basics.

Pick A Topic Or Niche

In the early days of the Internet you could just pick some major industry or topic and start your website. Those days are over. Now you have to think niche to be successful. I recommend you pick something you are interested in and will enjoy researching and writing about. There are some market based numbers to consider; mainly you need something that has a large enough market appeal that you can make money yet is small enough that you won’t be competing with tons of highly successful businesses already on the web. You can target the top markets but make it your own, find your own niche.

Here we go. Pick a topic that is general and that you are interested or at least willing spend a lot of time researching and writing about. I suggest something such as a hobby, maybe extreme sports or deep sea fishing if you are so inclined.

Keyword Research For The Search Engines

Now you need to do some research to figure out the exact area within the niche you should focus on. There are many ways to learn how to pick good keywords for your Internet marketing.

Rules For Target Search Engine Keywords

1. The longer the keyword phrase the fewer number of searches and the less competition.

2. Pick a topic that has a total of at least 10,000 searches per month across the main keywords you target.

3. Find 1-3 top keywords, 5-8 medium targets and up to 20 total in your target basket.

4. You want to pick terms, at least for your basket of keywords that have high search volume and low competition.

You may want to take a minute to review this list of keyword tools. Let’s keep it easy and go with one tool that we are going to use throughout our marketing efforts. Download and install this SEO Toolbar for FireFox from SEO Book. This keyword tool will save you a ton of time in the long run. In general I am not a big fan of plug-ins but I have to give it to www.SEOBook.com they have done a great job with this one.

Once you have the tool bar set up, go to the keyword entry box on the right and input your most basic keyword phrase for your topic or niche. For example let’s put in “deep sea fishing”. You can customize which windows and tools will open but let’s leave it on the default ones.

Three pages should open:

1. SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

Take a look at the Overall Daily Est result for “deep sea fishing” it shows 270 (as of July 12, 2009). This means there are about 270 searches per day across the search engines for the exact phrase of deep sea fishing. This is not bad for a 3 word phrase. Keep in mind although you may be targeting and writing about deep sea fishing, you will also have a basket of keyword that you target in addition to this one term.

2. Google Adwords: Traffic Estimator

On this page you want to take a look at the PPC value for your main target phrase. Keep in mind this is just an estimate and it is for people who want to pay Google for the keyword not what Google will pay its publishers who get clicks for the term. A publisher is what you will be called when you run advertising for other companies on your web site. You want to find keywords that cost a minimum of about $1.00 per click. In this case our phrase is estimated to cost from $.64 to $1.05 for advertisers.

3. Google AdWords: Keyword Tool

This is where you measure SEO Book’s keyword estimator tool vs Google’s. Local Monthly Search Volume is estimated at 368,000 and Global Monthly Search Volume is estimated at 201,000 searches. As you can see there are plenty of searches on this term. You should also check out the Advertiser Competition bars, in our case the main term (“deep sea fishing”) is competitive.

As you can see there are some significant differences between the tools and their estimates. Don’t worry too much about this right now, basically this is the reason you need to use more than one tool.

It is a good idea to download all the information you just researched if you think you found your main target keyword, if not rinse and repeat. In addition to a single topic or niche phrase you need to pick 5-8 top target related keywords to use as categories and a total of about 20 keywords to use in articles and long-term comprehensive marketing efforts. The top 5-8 keywords should follow the guidelines above, while the additional keywords to fill out your 20, can be ones you think are important, relevant or of interest to you.

Pick Your Domain

This will become your brand. Most search marketing experts estimate that the domain name has about a 20% impact on your ability to garner relevant search engine traffic. For sites in less competitive niches you may be able to get significant share of search traffic once you begin your marketing efforts, if you have selected a good domain name.

Rules for Selecting a Domain name:

1-9. These rules are covered well on SEOmoz. You can pretty much ignore rules 9-11. Rule 9 is generally correct, but for some strong keyword domains, up to two hyphens may work well. In other words if the keywords are very high volume and the hyphen version is available, you can consider it along with other options.

10. Keep domain names as short as possible. #6 in the SEOmoz article but worth repeating.

11. Put the most important words first. This usually means put the keyword with the highest volume of searches in the beginning of the domain.

12. If you can’t find what you are looking for try adding location words or popular keywords. For example if “deepseafishing.com” is not available, it is probably better to buy something like “floridadeepseafishing.com” rather than unrelated like “deepseafishingtoday.com”.

It may be easiest to register your domain at your hosting company. If you plan on purchasing a lot of domains you can get a bulk registration account at a place like GoDaddy.com.

Hosting

There are many options for hosting. For the purpose of this Internet Marketing Guide we will provide two suggestions that we have experience with.

Proper Hosting

This green web hosting company provides 1-click Word Press Blog install. Also I have a deal set up with them to provide their clients free microsites for use with this guide. Maybe most important this company has the capability to put each domain on a separate ip address by request. We are going to recommend you start a few sites on different niches later so you can see which ones work best. They also provide cPanel. I have secured a special deal because of their mention here, use promo code: InternetMarketing.

Host Gator

They provide good hosting for a good price and have all the basic tools you would expect including cPanel Administration so you can manage your account on a very detailed level. When you are ready to build multiple sites they have a specialized SEO Hosting Service that some may find useful. I have had issues where the shared server is overloaded and slow. Overall, they are generally dependable.

(In) Complete Start-Up Internet Marketing Guide – Post 1 of ? (many)

Gideon Rubin is the CEO at Simply Ideas LLC and also serves as an advisor for several start-up websites including branded URL shortener 9mp.com and Twitter introduction engine, Twitroduce.com. Follow him on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

It sounds like this new tool from OnDialog will move the development of optimized landing pages from the IT department to the marketing department. With tools in the marketplace like Omniture’s (formerly Offermatica) Test & Target and Google’s Web site Optimization there are some heavy hitters that OnDialog will have to compete with. The Beta launched this week so let’s keep an eye on this and see if the competition will come out with some similar tools to allow the marketer to get new landing pages up and running without much technical skill.

The purpose of this blog is to shrink down their “protocol” aka, instructions, to a short and sweet version with commentary.

These instructions are intended for sites with less than 50,000 web pages.

You will be creating and/or editing three files.

1. sitemap_index.xml
2. sitemap.xml
3. robots.txt

All of these files will be located in your website’s root directory. This is generally the same place that all of your public Internet files are located (commonly referred to as ‘public_html’).

First, we will create our sitemap_index.xml file.

The proper formatting for this file is as follows:

<sitemapindex xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9  http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/siteindex.xsd”>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.your-website-domain.com/sitemap.xml</loc>
<lastmod>2009-02-23</lastmod>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>

The above example is referred to as a Sitemap Index. The purpose of this is to allow you to include multiple sitemaps for your website. This is useful for websites who would like to utilize multiple sitemaps, such as a video sitemap, or any other type of sitemap.

Open up your favorite html editor and paste the above into the editor (I prefer Dreamweaver PC & MAC and TextMate MAC). Make sure to change “www.your-website-domain.com” to your own website domain.

Once you have done this, save the file as “sitemap_index.xml“.

Now you are ready to create your sitemap.xml file.

The formatting for this file is as follows:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.your-website-domain.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.your-website-domain.com/contact.php</loc>
<lastmod>2009-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.6</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

You will notice that there are two <url></url> values in the above code. This indicates there are two URL’s in this sitemap. One has a priority of .8, and the other has a priority of .6. The higher the priority the more importance the search engine will put into the URL (it is rumored and common belief in the industry that this has no affect on SERPS).

Duplicate the values between the <url></url> tags (changing the appropriate information) until all of your website pages have been included in this file. This can also be auto-generated via a programming script.

Save this file as “sitemap.xml“.

Now create a “robots.txt” file, which is a simple textfile.

You can use notepad (PC) or TextEdit (MAC) for this.

If your website already has a robots.txt, than you will simply need to add the following line to your file.

Sitemap: http://www.your-website-domain.com/sitemap_index.xml

Not sure if you already have a robots.txt file? Type this into your website browser: http://www.your-website-domain.com/robots.txt

If you do not receive a 404 error from your website, than you do have a robots.txt file.

The above code tells the search engines where your sitemap index file is located. From there, they will pull all of your sitemaps in one shot.

The last step is an optional step for those who are familiar with file compression.

Search engines allow you to compress your large sitemap files with GZIP. The command to gzip is simple, in terminal (MAC), type “gzip sitemap.xml” from the directory the sitemap is in. For windows users here is GZIP.

This will create sitemap.xml.gz, a compressed version of your sitemap. You must change the sitemap_index.xml file to the new sitemap file name. This change will be from “sitemap.xml” to “sitemap.xml.gz”.

The obvious benefit to this is less bandwidth usage when search engine spiders download your sitemap. For one of my websites, I compressed a 7MB file down to 400KB using GZIP.

Once you have done this, upload your files to the “public_html” folder, and you are all done!

To verify that they are there, you may check via a website browser for these files:

http://www.your-website-domain.com/robots.txt
http://www.your-website-domain.com/sitemap_index.xml
http://www.your-website-domain.com/sitemap.xml

One of the things that I always preach when it comes to SEO, is to step back, and look at it from a common sense standpoint.

If three of your sites are using the same exact shared IP, and they are linking to each other, it is conceivable that “someone” or “something” could program an algorithm to decrease the value of links if they are on the same IP. Take that a step further, and if the sites are on the same IP range (1-255) than the same thing could potentially apply.

This is where the Class C IP Range comes into play.

If you use the same host for multiple sites, I suggest using this simple tool to check whether your sites are on the same Class C IP. You could potentially be losing link authority due to this.

http://www.webrankinfo.com/english/tools/class-c-checker.php

It is generally cheap to purchase a static IP. Our host, http://www.properhosting.com offers us IP’s for $1. However, a “reason” must be given as to why the IP is needed. Generally they are only distributed for SSL connections. Contact your host for more information about obtaining a static IP for your website.

Here is the Class C IP explained:

An IP has 4 sets of numbers ranging between (0-255).

Example: 74.54.139.178

The CLASS C IP is: 74.54.139

It is the 3rd subset.

So if the following sites have these IP addresses:

SITE A 74.54.139.178

SITE B 74.54.139.43

They have the same CLASS C IP.

If I owned both SITE A and SITE B I would request a different “CLASS C IP” from my webhosting company. They will know exactly what you mean when you make this request, chances are this isn’t the first time they have heard this request.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I will respond to them.

After experiencing the pain of manually managing over 800 unique DRTV URLs for an Education campaign I came to the conclusion that there must be a better way. There wasn’t, so we built one. We now have the ability to manage, track and SEO optimize hundreds of unique urls with our specialized software. It allows the marketer to not only build these sites easily but also push updates and manage all the pieces end to end without much technical knowledge. Best of all it helps drive highly targeted search visitors to your offer to they convert.

Has anyone else found helpful tools for the convergence of DRTV with online media?

A great place to start is analyzing their traffic at http://www.compete.com. The nice thing about this website is it gives you the ability to compare your website with multiple competitors giving you a side by side analyzation.

This graph displays a plethora of information. A few things this graph shows are, visitor trends, top search keywords, sub domains, trusted domains, visitor engagement, and velocity of growth.

This report is a great way to quickly view trends of your site as compared to your top competitors.

Compete.com

Our own organization uses this chart to determine whether a competitor has launched a major campaign, and if they have, we may choose to compete against their particular campaign or to reduce our spend in a related campaign.

Quantcast.com is another Gem that can help you analyze your website.

I won’t get into HOW quantcast.com has the data that they have, but there is definately some potential privacy issues with the information they obtain through ISP’s. But since that is not the topic of this particular blog, I will digress!

Here is an example of a single report generated by quantcast.com for one of our websites:

Quantcast

The thing that surprises me about this report is because we have not placed the Quantcast tracking software on our website. It just calculated that information through its own sources. “Its own sources” is apparently hundreds of ISP’s throughout the nation.

They do offer a piece of tracking software that can be placed on your website that will most likely improve the accuracy of these statistics.

It should be noted that we did not opt into Quantcast.com so that it would track our website.

Do you know what your website looks like without any images at all? For the most of us, this is probably a pretty ugly picture.

When people refer to the “look” of a website, they are referring to styles and images. None of these are present when a search engine spider crawls your website.

Do you know what your home page looks like to a search engine spider? No? I suspect many people don’t.

Since you’re reading this, I am going to show you how a search engine spider sees our home page:

As compared to how it is generally viewed through a web browser:

As you can see, there is a big difference.

So, if you would like to see how your website looks to a search engine spider I suggest you checkout http://www.seo-browser.com.

This site will give you a look at your website through the eyes of a search engine spider. It will also show you information about your headers which will allow you to optimize based off of the recommendations given.

Keep in mind that the spider will read your page from top to bottom, so the order of appearance for elements on your page will affect the value placed on the content of your website.

If you’re wondering why the descriptions that show up in the search engine provide no value to your listing, it may be because of images that are pushing certain content above the content you would like to show on your search engine listings.

In conclusion, it is always a good idea to view the top 10 pages of your site that you are trying to distribute page rank to in order to see how the content is being viewed by a search engine spider.

I found a few neat tools on this list.

The auto form fillers help out tremendously when submitting your site to directories.

They also mention http://www.marketleap.com as well, which has always been a fantastic first step when link building and analyzing your website.

I have been reviewing some tools for an SEO project we are working on and thought I would share some of my initial findings. Our current need for this project is a tool that allows you to pull keywords via an API. A lot of my personal experience has been working with tools more along the lines of Hitwise (closer to Enterprise solution and $70K/yr last time I checked). In this case we don’t have that type of budget, who does nowadays?

Let’s start with the free tools first:

Here are some general SEO resource sites you should take a look at-

Name: UITEST

Purpose: End to end help in building and optimizing your website.

URL: http://uitest.com/en/analysis

When to use: Well it is a robust enough list that you can use these tools form the site planning stages all the way through to optimization and marketing, really the full life-cycle.

Price: Free

Keyword research tools-

Name: SEOBOOK

Purpose: This keyword suggestion tool is good for finding related search results to terms you want to target. It also provides semantically related phrases and has a handy CSV export option. Of course it’s bid prices are very useful if you want to target either high paying terms for targeting traffic or which terms you want to bid on in your ppc campaign.

URL: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook

When to use: Useful when launching a new site or when you just need some new ideas for targeting new keywords in order to optimize and existing site.

Price: Free

Name: WordTracker

Purpose: Find 100 related keywords to your search term of interest and get an estimate of their daily traffic volume.

URL: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

When to use: Anytime you need some quick info about related search terms.

Price: Free

Name: SEOCHAT

Purpose: Keyword suggestion tool for Google. Helps find relevant and popular related terms. Seems to be having some problems lately based on a Google Algorithm change.

URL: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-suggestions-google

When to use: When you need a quick tool to find Google related results.

Price: Free

Name: Trellian

Purpose: Keyword discovery and multi-search engine benchmarking during keyword list build. Useful for building out multi-search engine lists and industry lists.

URL: www.keyworddiscovery.com

When to use: Useful for a new site during the first month of optimization, nice to have for 2 months (ongoing support)

Price: $69.95/month or $599.40/year

Name: Keyword Country

Purpose: Keyword discovery and competition benchmarking during site review of existing sites. This is a good tool for those people focused more on content development and who need help on how to choose anchor text. It is also useful for finding keywords with high Click Though Rates to predict results for Key Performance Indicators. The tool provides the ability to review competitor keywords and search engines that they competition is using. Keyword Country also shows number of pages on competitor’s sites using certain keywords so you can target content for future development.

URL: www.keywordcountry.com

When to use: Nice to have for content suggestions component during first 90 days. If you are a content heavy site then you may want this ongoing.

Price: $99 for 3 month

Name: WORDZe

Purpose: You may want to use this during keyword discovery phase when building a target keyword list as well as during link building strategy development. This tool can be useful to compare how your keyword optimization strategies might work across countries. Provides information on how hard it is to rank in top 10 for particular keywords as well as demographic data on users searching for top keywords (relevancy) . Also provides link rankings and suggested authority sites to submit links to as well as city by city breakdowns and industry analysis. This tool is helpful for seasonality review and optimization adjustments by time of year.

URL: www.wordze.com

When to use: Critical for first month, nice to have for remainder (ongoing support)

Price: $45/month

Name: Keyword Domination

Purpose: Useful for keyword discovery while building a target keyword list and comparing that list across languages. This resource has an enhanced international suggestion tool. This tool is useful for keyword suggestions that are imbedded in content and long-tail keywords that might not show up in other tools.

URL: www.keyworddomination.com

When to use: Nice to have for international component during first 30 days of an internationally relevant project.

Price: $97/month

I hope this is useful. Please let me know if you have any keyword building or targeting tool favorites of your own. Oh, and if you find a good tool that has an API for keyword suggestions and/or one that provides bid prices on Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask.com please let me know.

Unfortunately on  more than one occasion I have lost those links.  Whether to a computer reformat or improperly managing my bookmarks, I always seem to lose the links that matter most.

Well, delicious.com all but solved that problem.

However, that is not a secret, most people are familiar with Delicious and how you can save your bookmarks to a remote location where you will always have them (assuming Delicious’ servers never crash and lose your data).

But what you didn’t know is how valuable a search of “seo”, “sem”, “search engine optimization”, or “search engine marketing” can be on this website.

Go ahead, give it a try… you’ll thank me later. Click the image below to get there fast.

SEO search on Delicious