Myspace, Internet Marketing Secrets, Money, Earnings, Search Engine Optimization

What’s a poor webmaster to do? Web 2.0 changes the whole ballgame. It not only places the Internet user squarely in the middle of things, but it gives that user the means and power to create and manipulate data. Web 2.0 dramatically changes how we view and use the web. Actually, in many respects, it creates a whole new Internet.

What Is Web 2.0?

Just what exactly is Web 2.0? What does it mean? Is there a precise definition that all webmasters can get their heads around and understand? Not really, many believe Web 2.0 is just another one of those contrived buzzwords, signifying mostly marketing hype!

However, perhaps the simple definition can be found in the word “you”! Time magazine probably summed it up best by making reference to the “you” in user generated content. Web 2.0 is basically all the platforms that give us this brave new user-powered interactive Internet, generally referred to as ‘social media’.

Web 2.0 can be seen or manifested in such sites as YouTube, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Digg, Squidoo… Web 2.0 uses scripting languages such as Python, Perl PHP, RSS… to construct interactive platforms that websites can use to create all this user-generated content.

Many refer to these evolving formats and scripting platforms under the name AJAX and no this does not refer to the popular cleaning agent under your kitchen sink! This AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScr?­pt and XML) comes from Google and takes web based interactive programs such as Google Maps, something that’s usually associated with desktop applications, but is now being applied on the web. If you have used Google Earth, you will realize how powerful and revolutionary these new applications can be, not to mention, they are a whole lot of fun.

Many point to Tim O’Reilly, the constant innovator of many technological changes on the web. O’Reilly has been at the forefront in discussions and conferences on the nature and substance of the ‘meme’ open source platforms dominating the new social media.

How all this new media plays out is anyone’s guess, but all webmasters should optimize their sites for this new Web 2.0 and take full advantage of all the SEO possibilities presented by this brave new Internet.

Here are a few SEO suggestions you can try:

1. RSS/Blogging: You must place a blog and RSS feed on all your sites. This is a fairly simple procedure to do with fr?«e server-based programs such as WordPress. Having a blog and RSS feed will place your site into the whole tagging process. Each category you create in your blog will be seen as a tag by such sites as Technorati. RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and your RSS feeds will get your content distributed across the web. A simple and easy way to tap into the new Web 2.0 universe.

2. Create some Google Juice!: Join as many of these highly interactive sites as you can: MySpace, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Digg, Wikipedia … my favorite is Squidoo, where you can create Lenses on different topics that interest you. User driven content that’s utilized by all the major social media sites. Of course, link back to your sites in your posts and creations in these user-created content havens and watch your PR ratings go way up.

3. Use Interactive Scr?­pts: Place interactive JavaScr?­pts and platforms on your own sites. Have membership forums, polls, blogs, feedback forms, user-contributions… to build unique content driven sites. Become the spider!

4. Tagging (Folksonomy): Be constantly aware of the tags (keywords) you’re creating with your blogs and sites. This can have a very beneficial effect on your traff?­c and rankings. Closely relate these tags to the content on your sites and build higher rankings in all the major search engines.

5. The Long Tail: Especially important for affil?­ate marketers, you need to cover special niches where there is less competition and content. These narrow niches make up a large portion of the whole vast web, creating content in these unique areas will get your site included in the search engines a lot quicker and keep them there a lot longer.

6. Holistic Web 2.0: Be constantly vigilant in placing your sites in the whole ‘Interactive Game’, building links and partnerships with the important YouHubs: MySpace, Del.icio.us, YouTube, Digg, Squidoo… the more connections you have, the more your own sites will prosper.

Be The Spider!

No doubt, Web 2.0 will play an ever increasing role in the development and evolution of the web. Make sure your sites are optimized and in the ‘You’ game. Create blogs, RSS feeds, interactive forums, membership areas, user-generated content and truly make your sites interactive havens in their own right. Just remember to tag everything and your sites will reap the benefits of this new Web 2.0 generated SEO gold rush.

When you walk into a sporting goods store, does the salesperson immediately assume that you play hockey? Of course not. In fact, he’d probably never make a sale if he greeted every customer with “Hi! We’ve got some great ice skates in just your size. Would you like to see a pair?”

On the other hand, the one-size-fits-all sales pitch — “Hello, may I help you?” — doesn’t exactly entice shoppers to break out the old wallet either.

Instead, the really good salespeople are trained to discover details about the customer before trying to pitch a particular item. A question like, “Hi, how are you? What sport do you play?” is a great opening line. It gets the customer to focus on a general topic, and then persuades him or her to narrow down the choices. And a focused customer is a buyer, not a browser.

What does this have to do with your online sales? Plenty. Especially if you’d like to increase your conversion by 50 percent or more.

You see, if you focus just on increasing traffic without increasing your profit per visitor, well, you’re missing out on more money. Or more e-mail opt-ins. Or whatever it is that you do to monetize your site. Fewer clicks and more sales should always be the goal. You’ll improve those two metrics when your site successfully gets visitors to focus right away on the homepage and then proceed directly to checkout.

That’s where the “situational sell” can be your super-cybersalesperson. On a website, you can give visitors a few choices that best describe their situation, and entice them to click on the description that puts them into a specific segment of the market.

The situational sell is a way to pitch products and information strictly from the customer’s point of view. If you’re selling sports merchandise online, you would want to get customers to click on their favorite team right away, and then choose the item they want to buy. After all, a New York Yankees fan isn’t interested in looking at merchandise from the Arizona Cardinals. If you’re selling real estate, you could ask visitors if they’re buying a starter home, a vacation home, or just looking to remortgage an existing home. Think of the situational sell as pre-qualifying your visitors, before they get a chance to wander aimlessly through your site. If you pre-qualify them, you can funnel them through the sales process a lot faster.

One traffic school website who tried this tactic ended up increasing its email opt-ins by a whopping 60 percent! How did they do it? Instead of simply listing the names of the courses it offers, the website asks visitors what type of driver they are, literally. On the site you’ll see 3 boxes in a row in the main body area. Each box contains a unique headline, a photo to illustrate the idea, and a description of services within the category.

Box #1 contains the headline “New Driver?” and includes a picture of teenagers laughing and hanging out in a school parking lot. Box #2 carries the headline “Too Many Tickets?” and includes a picture of a driver getting a ticket. Finally, Box #3 has the headline “Trying to pass the state exam?” along with a picture of a recent immigrant holding paperwork.

Under the headlines, a series of links appear. This is also a great place to include your top-tier keywords. Once a visitor clicks on one of those links, he or she is guided to a page specifically geared to sell products or services to their demographic.

The beauty in setting up a ‘situational sell’ website is that it’s a very flexible way to market one type of product to a wide selection of site visitors.

If you’re selling e-books or informational products, there will be different features or advantages that you’ll want to highlight, depending on the visitor. By segmenting your visitors first on your homepage, you can funnel them to specialized pitches.

The situational sell sounds logical because it is logical. But in the day-to-day minutia of maintaining a website, the big details sometimes get lost in the shuffle. Take a fresh look at your homepage and give your visitors a fresh perspective. Try the situational sell. It will make your visitors comfortable, they’ll feel as if you already understand their point of view, and you’ll most likely be rewarded with higher conversions.

While just about everyone agrees that informed key phrase selection is at the core of effective SEO (search engine optimization), many are surprised to find out that the self-same information also guides them to writing more effective sales copy.

How does researching key phrases help the quality of your sales copy? Because, by selecting the correct key phrases and building your copy around them, you’ll be answering the questions that are being asked by your potential customers.

To understand what I mean, think of why people use search engines in the first place – they’re looking for information and/or considering buying something. Every search has, at its core, a request or a question.

Connecting to your audience

Great sales copy connects with the reader. It has to. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t try to haul the reader round 180 degrees to a completely different viewpoint – it’ll lose them somewhere on the way. Instead, it has real empathy.

By following the discipline of building your copy around appropriate key phrases, you can ensure your Web site content dovetails perfectly with people’s expectations and really answers their questions.

If you’re selling holidays in Italy, for example, and someone types ‘weekends in Venice’ into Google, your optimized copy about weekends in Venice would almost certainly appeal more to your visitor than general copy selling weekends in Italy or about cruises that take in Venice.

And if it appeals more, you’re likely to sell more.

As an aside, it’s hardly surprising that most sites find they get better conversions from Organic optimization than from buying clicks from an online advertising system such as Google Adwords. Unless you’re very disciplined in matching the key phrases you’re buying, your ad text and your target pages, you’re almost certainly going to end up with a looser fit between the searcher’s needs and the site content you’re offering them.

How do your customers really think?

As a writer, I find key phrases are a fantastic guide to how customers actually think. For example, when was the last time you used the word ‘cheap’ in copy? It’s one of these abhorrent words that we must never use – corporate guidelines inevitably insist on ‘cost-effective’ or ‘good value’ or something; most copywriting gurus habitually warn us away from such words.

The problem is, for most of us, that’s how our customers think. Real people seldom use ‘good value’ or ‘high value’ or ‘competitively priced’. Time after time, our research shows people looking for ‘cheap’ and ‘low price’. Again, while you may argue that this may show people just looking for a bargain, I’d say it’s part of a larger and more important picture.

Key phrase research shows what kind of language is appropriate to our customers. If people are really looking for ‘low-cost flights’ – and they may be, given the number of times the phrase is used in the media – then we know that we can safely use that phrase in our communications. If people aren’t using it, then let’s use the expression they identify with.

If you sell large clothing, for example, you may habitually describe your clothing as ‘outsize’. I’d bet many more searches use the word ‘large’ or ‘big’. Use your industry jargon, and you may be running the risk of alienating your customers

Are you up to using everyday language?

The lesson we’ve learned time after time is that people really do use simple everyday language – and that goes for B2B as well as B2C transactions. And, to appeal to them, we should use simple everyday language, too.

But before you embrace a term like ‘cheap car hire’, make sure ‘cheap’ fits with your business and your business planning. Are you really happy to be seen as ‘cheap’? Are you ready to fight tooth and claw with your market’s most ruthless price-cutters? Do you even want customers who are looking for the cheapest?

You must be really clear why you’re choosing each and every key phrase and its implications for your business. And writing powerful copy without some of the familiar props of the copywriter’s trade is a challenge in itself. But that’s another piece entirely.

Applying key phrase research can so easily give you an unfair advantage. Make sure you seize the opportunity with both hands.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, wrote an illuminating book called Weaving the Web that I recommend all Web professionals read. Among the many profound ideas expressed are two concepts relevant here. One is the Semantic Web, which is explained as “The Web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it.” Metadata is the term used for data about data. Most Web pages today have embedded in the html code metadata that gives information about the Web page. Eventually, this information will become much more robust, allowing more intelligent searches to become a reality.

The Semantic Web may have the potential to help make the Internet an entity in its own right. Parallel processing, the connecting of computers to make super computers, has been in existence for some time now. In fact, that’s how the human brain operates, by conducting many operations at the same time.

The other fascinating idea Berners-Lee expressed in this landmark book is that his original idea for the Web involved much more of a two-way exchange of information. His original vision for the Web was one of collaboration. He wanted people to be able to post information to the Web as easily as it was to view information. Unfortunately, the latter has been embraced more readily by the general population.

But now we see the emergence of “Web 2.0″, a fairly new term that describes an innovative type of website that is built on the participation of its users. Blogs, wikis Podcasts and social networks all fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella. Today we are finally achieving what Berners-Lee had in mind all along. With websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Squidoo, and Digg, non-technical users can now post information and contribute to the Web as easily as they can access it. The Web of the future will embrace this concept even more, causing its speed of growth to eclipse today’s rate.

It’s not difficult to see that the Web could be a vast parallel processing farm, that given enough artificial intelligence programming, the infusion of Semantic Web systems, and the constant additions from billions of intelligent beings (namely humans), it could have the potential of becoming something of a unified intelligence, a data sphere that surrounds the planet and is more powerful that the sum of its parts.

This concept of technology’s exponential growth turning onto something we cannot even imagine with the possibility of the Web becoming sentient is not new. Vernor Vinge, a retired Professor of Mathematics at San Diego State University, a computer scientist and a science fiction author, wrote about the Singularity in a 1993 essay.

A super-intelligence emerging out of the Web was also written about by Kevin Kelly in Wired Magazine in August 2005 and also published on KurzweilAI.com.
“. . . we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
This planet-sized computer is comparable in complexity to a human brain. Both the brain and the Web have hundreds of billions of neurons (or Web pages). Each biological neuron sprouts synaptic links to thousands of other neurons, while each Web page branches into dozens of hyperlinks. That adds up to a trillion “synapses” between the static pages on the Web. The human brain has about 100 times that number-but brains are not doubling in size every few years. The Machine [the Web of the future] is.”

An online search will yield many examples of bizarre concepts that existed only in science fiction later becoming reality. The Web is something that Earth has nev?«r seen before. It not only has the potential to connect everyone, but it can also extend every brain and grow exponentially. It may take a lot longer than anyone thinks, but eventually the Web of our future will be immensely different and much more powerful than anyone can possibly imagine today.

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A woman switches on a tiny wireless chip that has been surgically implanted behind her ear, which then synchs up with the Web wherever she is in the world. The simple thought of logging on to the Internet triggers the system to turn on and connect to the Web. She could be on a bus or at the beach and from all outward appearances she’s just staring off into space. But she sees a three dimensional artificial world before her that she can manipulate any way she chooses by mere thought alone.
By looking at the trends of today we can begin to develop a image of what the Web of the future will look like. I believe the Web will improve and grow in a way that will dwarf its present existence and will improve and enrich everyone’s lives way beyond what we can imagine today. The Net will become as integrated into everyone’s everyday lives as much as, and even more so, than the television or telephone (in developed nations first, then everywhere). Television, communications and the Internet will merge.

The Web will become increasingly realistic, interactive, and three dimensional. Two dimensional displays will evolve into three dimensional displays. And the Web will probably incorporate more than just the two senses of seeing and hearing. It will first be incorporated into all other electronics found in household appliances, copy machines, automobiles, and anything else with a microchip. Then it will be integrated directly into our brains.

I also envisage this new Web creating an unimaginably sophisticated data sphere that surrounds and envelops the world like a warm electronic blanket, connecting everyone and everything. And it may some day become an autonomous and sentient entity in its own right that we may even come to depend on for life itself.

When a person switches on his wireless Web chip and connects with the Net, he’ll be looking at and interacting with the Web of the future. He’ll manipulate objects, cl?­ck on links, download information, and communicate with anyone by simply thinking it. In fact, when he navigates to a grocery store to b??y food, for instance, he’ll be able to “pick them up”, “feel them” and even “smell” the food he wants to b??y just by thinking the appropriate thoughts.

In the future, Web-based software agents will constantly build dynamic lists and instructions to help people in personal and professional activities. These software agents are subroutines, or small programs, which may be part of a responsive ‘Internet Operating System’ that serves humanity, or possibly even destroy it. Programs may become responsible for doing some of the basic thinking that we get stuck routinely doing today. Additionally, it may be responsible for storing a percentage of our memories as well.

The Web has already become something we rely on for memory, and that reliance will only grow. We’d rather look something up on Google two or three times instead of trying to remember it initially. And eventually, we’ll come to rely on the Web for memories and immediate information so that it will seem like we are missing a part of our own brain when not “jacked in” to the Net, to borrow a phrase from science fiction writer William Gibson. The Net will be such a part of our existence that we may even feel profound separation and isolation when not connected.

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