The following is a technique that I have seen put into place before by some SEO experts who have decided to use their skills to promote an e-commerce site of their own creation.

The idea behind the technique is to design an e-commerce site, from the ground up, with SEO in mind. The page would then be optimized, using both on-page and off-page factors to rank at or near the top of the search results for a competitive keyword, preferably one that is generating significant amounts of traffic.

The magic of this technique comes when the major search engines do their periodic algorithm update. These updates happen fairly often, and when they do, they tend to shift search engine rankings. The expert’s strategy here, is to create another version of her site in order to stay on top of the rankings.

This next version of the site will usually be quite similar to the original, with some subtle changes thrown in, so as to prevent the technique from being obvious. For instance the company name will most likely be changed, as might the logo, color scheme, and of course the domain.

In employing such a technique our expert is leveraging two things. First, she is leveraging her highly specialized knowledge of the SEO industry to stay one step ahead of the competition. Secondly she is leveraging all the systems she has developed to run her first business, such as inventory, fulfillment, shipping, site design, etc, on each of her clone businesses.

In terms of the “trust” issue that often comes into play when customers make e-commerce decisions, the expert has several cards she can play to make her site more trust worthy. First, she can split test different design layouts to see which produces the most favorable bounce rate. If the user leaves the site as soon as they land, because they think the site design is shoddy, that of course, is not likely to help business.

Second, she can sign up for different  online security services such as VeriSign, Hacker Safe and split test the effect on conversion rate of adding “badges” for some of these sites. Third, she could split test offering different customer service options and once again check the effect these options have on the site’s conversion rate.

As for the decision making process involved in e-commerce decisions, the expert in this case has some factors working in their favor. First off, the traffic to such sites would most likely be highly targeted. Since the visitor searched for a particular term and then landed on the expert’s site, they are most likely interested in whatever niche the site is associated with, even if not all of them are interested in buying anything at the moment.

Secondly even if such a page did not have the benefit of being able to follow up with customers through an RSS feed or an  email list, they can still make up for relatively low conversion rates if the traffic from whatever keyword they are targeting his large enough.

This model has seemed to have worked for some in the past, which of course is no guarantee that it will work in the future. I share it because it is an example of an unorthodox strategy for gaining an edge in online business and I hope it inspires others with some good ideas they can apply to their own online businesses.

We here at Feedback Secrets are obviously fans of the practice of accidental SEO. The question for some however, is where exactly to begin this process. There are two different ways to start out with accidental SEO.

The first method is to just start writing content for your site and see what positive results you get. Then based on those positive results you can test similar keyphrases and track the results.

The second method is to start your accidental SEO traffic flow with some good old fashioned research. Since most of the business owners who read Feedback Secrets are in the early stages of their online business development, I usually suggest starting with a free keyword tracking tool.

A personal favorite of mine is the free keyword tracking tool at WordTracker.com. You can use this tool to narrow down a list of keyphrases in your niche that have the magic SEO combination of a lot of daily searches mixed with a low relative number of competing websites.

Looking at the free tool at Word Tracker, you can get an estimate for the daily traffic for the keyphrases that you are interested in. Then you can visit Google and check to see how many competing websites there are which rank for the same term. You can do this by typing in your keyphrase and then clicking on the search button.

In the upper right hand side of the search results page on Google it will tell you how many competing websites Google recognizes as being indexed for that keyword.

Starting with this highly honed list of keywords you can start producing content for your site. After you produce your first wave of content based around your list, you will begin to see results in your site’s analytics tracking software as to which of these keyphrases are performing well for your site.

You have to keep in mind that just about every site has its own unique SEO architecture and therefore its own unique fingerprint as to which terms will naturally rank well for that site. The idea behind accidental SEO is to capitalize on your site’s natural advantages and therefore profit without spending an arm and a leg on your SEO efforts.

For those not familiar with the term, Accidental SEO refers to the practice of producing content pages for your site and discovering from your site’s stat tracking software, what terms your site naturally ranks well for.

Once you know which terms you rank well for, you can produce more content pages based around these keyphrases to exploit your site’s natural advantages. The great thing about accidental SEO is that with it, you do not need to be a SEO expert in order to increase your search engine traffic.

If you are trying to market your website as an expert authority in a particular niche, then optimizing using accidental SEO means paying attention not only to the traffic you are receiving, but also how long that organic search engine traffic is staying on your site.

You might have a page on your site that has been bringing your site a significant amount of traffic but with a low average time-on-site.

The problem with a low time-on-site is that it usually means these visitors are bouncing off of your page as soon as they hit. Chances are that they are not clicking on any ads, not signing up for your newsletter, and most importantly not surfing the other pages on your site.

If you are trying to market your site as an expert authority in your niche, then it is essential to build your average number of pages-per-visit as high as possible.

One option you have is to try to edit your page in such a way that you improve time-on-site and the average number of pages-per-visit. The other option is to look not only at the amount of traffic you receive for particular keywords but also how long that traffic stays on your site.

Once you have found these winning combinations you can produce content that should increase the amount of quality traffic coming into your site.

Obviously if you are interested in building up search engine traffic to your site, it’s a great idea to find up and coming trends that are related to your niche. Once you have identified such trends, it’s in your interest to write a lot of content for your site, in relation to that particular trend. Whether you have a blog or a static page site, the more pages of content relating to trend based keywords, the better.

Positioning your self in this way can lead to great rewards as the trend matures and eventually peaks. This trend based strategy will mean that you get double your moneys worth when it comes to residual traffic. You’ll get the traffic from your content, multiplied by the increase interest across the net for information on that particular trend.

Right now, Twitter, may well be the up and coming SEO trend to watch out for. If you look at all the internet marketing related blogs across the net, right now there is an incredible amount of posts being written on the subject of Twitter.

Add to that the fact that more and more main stream corporations, political candidates, and casual users are flocking to the site, and you may also come to the conclusion that Twitter is a bubble that has not yet peaked.

It would be nice if we were all SEO gurus, you know the type that has henchmen working for him, testing different theories to unearth the secrets of the algorithm’s latest black box. No this is not comic book time, there are experts out there that are really awesome at SEO, and entrepreneurs pay these experts awesome money for there insight and opinions.

This is all well and good if you already make a ton of money from your online business and you have gobs of it lying around to re-invest. But what if you are just starting out and don’t have access to the tips and tricks that the elite have lying at their fingertips?

The rest of us have what some have come to call, Accidental SEO. (more…)

I recently heard the term “Social Media Equity” for the first time in a recent post entitled ”The Benefits of Social Media Aggregators and Lifestreaming: A Look at Friendfeed” written by Maki of DoshDosh.com. I have to say that I like this term a lot. The virtual world has become a fascinating place and its financial impact is beginning to rival that of the physical world.

Take the term “digital real estate”, which some use to refer to virtual properties in online games like Second Life. According to the article “Is there real money in online real estate?” by MSN Real Estate correspondent Christopher Solomon, Ailin Graef may be making around $150,000 per year from her digital real estate empire.

When speaking of digital real estate, it is important of course not to confuse it with “virtual real estate”, which is a term that some use to refer to web domains. Domain names have potential cash value or equity based on several factors which might include how clever the domain name is, the amount of incoming traffic, any pre-existing name recognition, or similarity to a popular pre-existing domain.

For about $10 a year you can sit on a domain name without the need for any hosting in the hopes that someone will come along someday and buy it. Starting at about $5 a month you can ad hosting to your domain and change your online prospects dramatically.

With virtual real estate, as with physical, it’s not just the address that is important in determining value, you also have to look at the size of the property. With hosting you can add as many pages to your site as you want, with each and every page that you add your SEO presence grows, and as it grows so does your site’s value.

All of this suggests that the equity of the virtual world has very real value in terms of real dollars and cents. What is great about this is the nature of the barriers to entry in the online world.

At Feedback Secrets, we believe that if an opportunity has no barriers to entry then it is not a very good one. There are definitely barriers to building your online equity; however they are barriers of desire as opposed to barriers of circumstance.

For example, if you wanted to get started with investment properties or flipping houses but you had $100 in the bank and no job, you would most likely be out of luck. The barriers to entry, when it comes to virtual equity are the willingness to work hard, be creative, and potentially risk your time.

Tags: social networking, social media, virtual real estate

The big name celebs of the online business world have at least one really powerful advantage in common, it’s called leverage.

When you have 300,000 people on your email list, that’s leverage. When you are one of the biggest names in internet marketing, and people will “ohhh” and “ahhh” at your every word, then you have leverage. When you have a strong network of associates that will promote your products for you in the form of “conversations” on online forums, you have, you guessed it… leverage.

The list goes on and on, but no matter how you slice it, the big names all have leverage working on their side.

This of course is all well and good if you are top dog, but what if you are currently a small name, or even worse what if you are relatively unknown in your field? What do you have working for you in the early stages of your online business?

If you are just starting out online please realize that you do have something very powerful, that will potentially work in your favor, and it is yours for the taking if you choose to use it.

The powerful “ace up your sleeve” that I am referring to is frequency. Consider those two or three functions that are the most important part of your business, it could be writing posts to your blog, writing articles for article marketing, creating content for your static site, or building your presence on some social networking site.

Consider for example article marketing. Each and every article that you write will have a monetary value, so the more articles you write, the more money you will make. When it comes to the static site that you market with your articles, every new page of content you create brings with it increased SEO dominance. The greater your SEO presence on the web, the more you will be able to see which SEO strategies are working and which should be dropped.

Put simply, with increased frequency, comes increased efficiency! Therefore, the frequency with which you produce in these core areas of your online business may well be the difference between stupendous success and lackluster results.

Tags: online business, internet marketing, make money online

If you have been involved in internet marketing for any length of time, you have probably experienced some form of content theft. While an exact definition of what constitutes “content theft” may be tricky to pin down, most people sense that something is not right when they feel that something has been stolen from them.

The term “symbiotic marketing” refers to a situation involving two parties where an marketing action taken by at least one party benefits both parties. This can be seen in a blog comment, where the commenter contributes to the discussion and in return receives a link back to his site, in Twitter profiles where marketers promote the content of others as well as their own, or in a host of other forms whether on social networking sites, forums, or elsewhere.

If the above mentioned examples constitute examples of symbiotic marketing what then should we call the unauthorized copying of content for the intention of profit? Perhaps we should call it Parasitic Marketing, since by design it intends to leach value from its host.

Presented in this way the battle between symbiotic marketing and parasitic marketing seems very clear cut, very black and white. This is the way that I have viewed the unauthorized use of content for quite some time. Recently however I have begun to consider that this issue might have more shades of gray then I initially considered.

Is it possible that someone could use your content in an unauthorized manner yet cause you to receive some unintended benefit?

I think that I may have come across at least one such example. Consider blogs that are made up almost exclusively of headlines and excerpts taken from other blogs in a particular niche. The owners of these blogs do little in terms of generating there own content, but instead use the content of others and reap the rewards in terms of SEO traffic.

One unintentional benefit that may occur in such a case is that the content producing blog receives and increase in its Technorati authority due to the link from the content copying blog.

I am not saying that this is a fantastic gain for the content producing blog, or that the unauthorized use of content is a good thing, and I am in no way advocating the unauthorized use of content. Obviously, in studying any possible benefits it is important to remember that there are downsides to the unauthorized use of content.

The motivation behind this post comes from my interest in studying causes, effects, and even side effects in business. Closer examination of these causes and effects give me ideas, and ideas I have learned have value.

I don’t know of many examples of this effect but if you have come across an example where the unauthorized use of content has benefited you, and you would like to share, feel free to let us know by means of email or blog comment.

Tags: Content Theft, Technorati, Internet Marketing, Symbiotic Marketing

A backlink is a one-way inbound link from another website to your own. The algorithms that determine the search rankings for the major search engines are in a constant state of change and therefore the value of each attribute of a website as it relates to the rankings is also in flux. In recent history however backlinks have been one of the most important factors to the algorithms and to this day they continue to be an essential part of search engine optimization.

Article Marketing is perhaps one of the potent methods of backlink building available to the online entrepreneur just starting out. The way this works is that the sight owner either writes his own articles or pays someone to write articles for him. These articles then get posted on Article Directory sites. The standard practice is for the Article Directory site to allow a single backlink to be included, usually at the bottom of each article. There many Article Directories out there, but I would suggest that you start with EzineArticles.com.

Blog Commenting is another way for you to build backlinks to your site. Most blogs allow comments to be left by readers on a portion of their posts. It’s usually the case that the comment form allows you to submit a URL (web address) with your comment. In addition to a URL the comment form usually also asks for a name. Chances are that whatever you put in for a name will become a hyperlink for the URL that you entered. More…

In our post, “How to Make a Dollar Online”, we mentioned using “article marketing and SEO” as a technique to drive traffic to a website. That post was all about Squidoo Lenses however the above mentioned technique would work for any type of website regardless of it was a blog, static page, mini-page, “lens” etc.

The first step in using article marketing to improve your search engine optimization is to find a profitable niche. If your main method of monetizing traffic is some form of Pay-Per-Click advertising, such as Google AdSense then the first factor you should consider is how much each keyword pays per-click on average.

The problem is that there is usually a good deal of search engine competition for the highest paying keywords. If you are using a method such as blog commenting, then competition on the search engines doesn’t really affect you. If however you are planning to use SEO to drive traffic to your site, then search engine competition is a huge factor. More…