So you want your visitors to have the option to enlarge a certain picture that you have on your website?  Creating a lightbox is super easy and can create a long lasting effect that will heighten user experience and can help generate sales.

 

Step 1- figure out which of your photos you would like to experiment and learn this process with.  This can be within an individual page or within the snippet zones.  You can also upload an image into the spot where you want it to go now.

 

 

Step 2-Highlight your image (This means just click on it so that those boxes appear around the edges) and then right click.   Here you will want to do a couple of things.

 

 

A-Set your Image Alignment so that the words are aligned to the left.

B- Set your image margins so there is a little space between the Right and Bottom of the picture.  (I prefer Right=5 and depending on the look of the page; Bottom=3)

 

 

 

C- Copy your Image Source.  Make sure you grab  all of the information from the box: Image Src.

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3- Double check that your image still has the sizing boxes around the edges.  Click on the Hyperlink Manager button and paste your Image Src information into the url box.

 

 

Step 4- Switch your WYSIWYG editor into html view and find the very first part of  your code.  It should look something like this:

<a href=”/Websites/6/674/Website/Files/capsign.jpg”XXXX ><img style=”float: left;

We want to put:    rel=”lightbox”       in place of the XXXX

So you will end up with code that looks like this:

<a href=”/Websites/6/674/Website/Files/capsign.jpg” rel=”lightbox”><img style=”float: left…

 

 

 

 

Now,  if you are new- try not to get frustrated!  There are several steps here and even though they can seem intimidating, everything is quite simple and you aren’t going to hurt anything!  With all of that being said, any issues that do arise can be handled exceptionally well from our wonderful support team!

 

 

 

 

White, Black and Gray SEO

Starting out with your SEO efforts you can see just how many options you have when it comes to techniques and strategies.  You may keep seeing white and black hat SEO being mentioned around the web.  There is also gray hat SEO which I will go over in a bit.

White Hat Efforts are as angelic as they sound.

W.H. SEO stays within the guidelines that are the internet marketing world’s ethical standards.   These best practices are views from the search engines that do all of the ranking and the professional in I.M. who know what is ethical and then what is down right tricky; which is black hat.

Black hat SEO do not fall within any of these guidelines.  I like to think of B.H. has the slimy guy in the corner that has spent 10 years learning how to make “sub conscious suggestions” to you and then manipulating your actions and feelings.  Just kinda tricky, which we are all exposed to most of our lives.

Now, black hat techniques are successful, they do work.  They will work until a search engine finds out what has been done and will de-rank your site or worse; sue you.  Manipulating redirecting links, inserting clear font keywords into your content so that extreme keyword density is achieved, and thousands other ways to climb the SERP will get you far; until you get caught!

Since our industry is so rapid at changing, what specific techniques that are considered black hat can change on a daily, if not hourly basis.  New techniques are always being tried and when there is more success with new way, old ways get tossed to the curb.

It is even possible for older black hat techniques to be so widely used, they become white and common practice means of SEO.  Gray hat techniques are  exactly what they sound like.  They don’t technically abuse the rules of search engines but then again, they don’t seem to be the most honest way to go about SEO either.

Always, choose what is best for you and your website.  Honesty will always go far; but if you have to push the limits make sure you are completely educated on the possible repercussions.

 

Are you overwhelmed by how much competition is out on the internet?  When I first started looking into website building I would look at Google’s results number of 4.5 million or more and my heart would stop.  Don’t let a results number keep you from playing the game!  You can win (especially with NTB!)

A little hard work, quality time spent training yourself and proper and strategic moves are normally all it takes to not only rock in the website world, but monetize in the internet world!  Don’t you want it know what it feels like to beat Oprah.com in search ranking?   It’s sweet!

Now, I wouldn’t plan to beat Lance Armstrong on a bike without learning how to ride a bike, read his training log, and trains myself; would you?  Internet Marketing is similar; however, in this world you can beat Armstrong!  Your training will be a little different, your strategies will have different motives and most importantly you will work smarter- not harder.

I will not convince or promote an idea of; you will get this right away.  You will get this, you will win at this and you will have to put effort forth to accomplish success.

The first part of the equation is training.  Now, NTB’s training is amazing; four years in computer sciences and you might understand the internet; but you will not understand internet marketing, niche marketing and the traffic accumulation model at all.  Training is key, and I have wrote before on my favorite internet marketing blogs.  These are amazing resources that will keep you up to date.

Becoming active in the internet marketing company is a fabulous step in the right direction.  Learning about Social media, and how it can help your SEO efforts and bring in free traffic is another area to become very familiar with.

Starting out, just building a website can be overwhelming.  This is why it is so important to find a safe and reliable and trusting company that will help you with all of this.  Welcome!

It has been disputed that search engines don’t count internal linking; however, why not take a look at anything that might help?  So, to optimize your site with inter linking your pages you will want to put each other’s links on each other’s pages.  Sounds confusing?  It can be!

 

While getting other sites to link back to your website is not always directly in your control, with inter linking each and every link comes from a trusted and powerful website, yours!

This will help in the long run when the spiders take a look at your site and pages.

 

4 tips to think of when you are inter linking your pages:

Anchor Texts:  You should make your anchor texts fairly short and to the point.  While including action statements to your visitor is always considered a smart move in the conversion way of thinking, avoid the generic, “Click Here” option.

It is a good idea to make your keywords throughout your page the anchor for your hyperlinks.

 

Using Links semi-sparlingly.  Since we are always stating; Use a ratio of 3-4 keywords to every 500 words in an article; this should keep you away from going hyperlink crazy within your content.

 

Do Not Ignore your additional pages.  If you spend all of your time focusing on your homepage, optimizing for your home page and keyword decking out your homepage, you are losing a great opportunity to boost your supporting pages up the SERPs.

 

After you have taken all of these tips into consideration you can go ahead and start linking your pages.  It is always best to link the supporting pages of websites back to the main page of its subject minded homepage.  The closer a page is to a homepage, the more relevant and important the search engines are going to presume this page is.

So you want to write a great meta description?  There is a post on Google Webmaster Central Blog that outlines the basic dos and don’ts of the descriptions tags.  While the idea of your meta description tag actually affecting your site’s results ranking is still up in the air.  Everyone can agree that a great description tag has the ability to have more visitors click on your website.

 

 

 

Google suggests

• Putting up unique meta description for each one of your pages.
• Include information about the content that could not effectively be in the title.
• Use punctuation sparingly.
• Represent the content of your page truthfully with your description.

 

Using 100% unique content is always going to be the way to go.  This includes description tags as well.  Do not use the same description of all of the pages on your site.  Does each one of your pages cover the exact same topic?  That doesn’t look like a comprehensive site to any search engine.

Information that you couldn’t fit in the title is a great place to start with this tag.  If you are selling a product or several, this might be a place to give key information about your product. e.g. “Make: Mercedes   Model: G 500 AMG   Year: 2008  Price: $55,000.”  Try and take a step back and realize what information you think potential visitors want to know.

Always write using simple and descriptive words.  Try and stay away from too much punctuation.  If you are giving information about a book, colons, comas, parenthesis, italicized font, apostrophes; all of these can make the eyes “work” much harder to see the actual words and summary of what your page is offering

Writing your keywords over and over again is a very old trick.  This was done trying to persuade search engines pull these pages to the top of results.  This is an old trick and really no longer works.  I would even say this would hurt your ranking.  Spending more time and writing a descriptive tag will get you more click throughs and happier visitors.

These tips come straight from Google, so I find it best to follow what they preach.  There is always going to be a sneaky way or new trick that webmasters are going to try; however, I like to stay honest.  I think this will always keep me in good search engine standings with happier visitors.

I can’t tell you exactly when some of my sites basically died from Panda, and I can’t tell you for sure that is why my traffic sizzled up and burnt into a crisp life-less chip on the ground of Google’s “Crappy Sites Cell.”  I am really ticked off that a small, beautifully designed formerly well preforming site is now dead!  I could use four letter adjectives all day long; however, I don’t think that will get me back in the rankings.  So I am going to roll up my sleeves and take a look at what might have been the reason for my demise.

Panda explained

To put it simply, Panda is an algorithm that studies the ratings that humans give to website.  Panda watches and learns their dislikes and then employs its own formula to knock out sites that have the same characteristics that the humans ranked low.  Because Panda enforces a site wide penalty, if a percentage of your pages fall below “acceptable” your entire site will suffer.  So what are some obvious characteristics that are human-disliked?

Huge Template Footprint

We all know the sites; I see a lot of them by clicking on articles from Yahoo, the sites that have 10-15% original content above the fold.  Dodge that Adsense ad, manage to figure out which “X” to choose to close that pop-up ad that made it through, get all the way over to the scroll bar without touching anything- and bam! You get to see some words written by someone!  NTB is setup so that this does not happen with your site, unless you spend extra time repositioning the templates, so I am good on this.

 

Empty Page

Have you ever chosen a website, with a very impressive “authority site” name only to discover that all of the thousands of pages are basically empty except for a few links?  Frustrating, but this isn’t my issue either.

 

Overlapping and Repetitive Pages

Okay, this one might have me.  I am not the most pro-active about my content.  I focus mainly on just getting some up and making sure it is related.  Some writers believe that this is the issue.  Panda makes this mistake; having several articles or pages covering the same topic means: Content Farm.  I am going to readjust my pages to include some more not so highly related pages.  I will always believe that they more quality content I have, the better so this will be a win-win.

 

High Ad Ratio

I am going to included Adsense and Affiliate ads in this category.  No one really likes ads, I suppose they are just as annoying on the internet as they are on the TV or radio.  This is where we get to the conundrum; we want conversions, we want traffic.  Panda hates ads, Adsense wants ads everywhere.  How are we going to find a happy medium?

I am going to take a look and see which of my ad boxes are lowest preforming.  These will then be easy to take out and hopefully my users experience will grow (along with my ranking.)

 

These reasons and possibly a high bounce rate will affect a lot of websites, if not now, then soon.  I will be working tirelessly to get my bounce rate down on ALL of my pages and to fix some of the above issues that I think burnt my little site like the sun hitting an ant on Mercury in July.

Search Engine Optimization is one of my favorite parts of website building.  I think my enjoyment might stem from the fact that I like to do tasks that I know will further my sites along.  I know every time I post on a blog, especially a popular SEO blog, my backlink will be found fairly quickly and my sites will either gain foundation for being first position, or it will be on my way up the results latter.

So what are my favorite internet marketing blogs?

First off, my favorite- Shoemoney.  Shoe blogs about all different aspects of the affiliate world and he is proud to post that he writes over 90% of the posts himself.    When I first found his site, I was pretty excited that he was from Nebraska.  I grew up in rural Oklahoma, so I automatically felt a kinship.  (Of course we would get a long, 7 ½ hours away practically the same neighborhood!)

The rotating pictures of half-dressed girls threw me for a while; but that is easy to become blind to after a while.  Overall, Shoemoney is funny and is loaded with great information.  It is definitely a good read, exceptional backlinking potential, and he throws Giveaways and Prizes on a regular basis.  What is there not to love?

 

Now for the most relevant and insightful information;  Search Engine Land is the place you will want to go.  They have great posts on a daily basis that offers so much information about SEO and the internet community as a whole.  Most of the authors are “guest authors” and I say guest because they write for SEL; but they usually have their own blog.  Every post I have seen here has been pretty intellectual and well written, including this one by Greg Sterling.  This blog certainly gets its reader involved in every aspect of the internet game!

David Naylor is a great read from across the sea.  His site is up-to-date with everything Google and Search Engine.  His blog is certainly focused around SEO and getting organic search ranking.  About more than half of his posts are done by his employees who seem to have acquired his intellect and humor into their writing.  This is a visually and mentally stimulating publication that provides great knowledge about SEO.

Those are my favorites, other good ones to check out are SEOmoz, Copyblogger and  Entrepreneurs Journey.  Do you have a favorite Internet Marketing blog?  How about any type of blog that is a must daily read?

I was reading up on one of my favorite Internet Marketing blogs, Shoemoney and noticed a post about the new Click Bank requirements.  I have been seeing emails come through my account recently from Click Bank but haven’t paid much attention.  As always, Shoe did a great job at breaking down their new requirements in non-legal English.

I expect that all vendors have are already aware of these new requirements- and if they are not, well their product has been pulled as of midnight last night with the possibility that their account has been terminated.  As for us- Affiliates- we might have overlooked all of the emails assuming it didn’t apply to us.  So first thing first; sign onto your Click Bank account and make sure all of your vendors are still up and running!  Secondly, make sure your sites meet the new standards required for affiliates.  Here are their new guidelines.

The most noticeable stipulation, False Scarcity has become pretty popular in the I.M. world.  It is one of the basic motivational marketing maneuvers that we, as a society are well aware of and also fall prey to.  Why must they feel the need to make this a requirement for affiliates to follow?  I agree; it is fairly obnoxious to see “ONLY 3 LEFT, NO MORE BEING MADE!”  However, are the FTC and legal eagles really going to force us to dumb down everything?  I will reference the movie, Idiocracy.  I am afraid this movie has a point… There are several readers on Shoe’s blog that left comments describing how disgusted they are about Click Bank having to force people to be ethical.  My bleeding heart agrees; but not entirely…

I give myself quite the grin when I see the “Box Tops for Schools” being promoted with middle aged, average looking mother talking about how much she loves her children, wants to make sure they perform well in school and help support that school; which she does by giving them Betty Crocker Brownies?!?  I mean come on, huge corporations can use so much psychological play to convince parents that brownies will help their children- by showing love AND helping out the school?  Why aren’t their programs like, “Bring in an apple core…”  I just think it is a little annoying that we can’t use “Almost out of Stock” but it is fine to shove sugared preservatives down an un-knowing child by pulling on a stressed out parent’s heart.

Perhaps this is a complicated example; however, it is quite clear through my eyes.  I’m glad Click Bank is establishing some new rules of conduct for it’s vendors, it can get pretty sticky with the tricks that some companies (especially online) pull.   I am definitely not an impressive and established vendor or affiliate in the Click Bank world so I appreciate their concern for consumers.  I just hope that this doesn’t make it even more difficult for newer internet marketers.

Google has been hounded this year with users and critics saying that Google’s results are filled with more and more scraper sites.  Earlier this year Google posted in its blog that while they don’t believe their results are any lessor quality, but did promise new efforts to fight spam and in particular scrapper sites.

Two days ago Matt Cutts, of the search quality group within Google, posted on his Twitter that users could help bust blog scrappers by filling out a Google Doc form with information including the exact search phrase where a scrapping problem is prevalent.  When you go to fill out the form, Google explains that they may be using the data you provide to test and improve their algorithms.

While Google has called on its users help before, the internet world is paying close attention due to the high influx of scraper sites becoming more and more of a problem. In January an algorithm change was announced with Cutts explaining that slightly over 2% of queries change in some way.  In the last eight months webmasters have posted all over Google’s help forum with subjects and anger claiming that they scraper issue had gotten worse.

Since Cutts is asking for user input and specifically targeting scraper sites I am expecting another algorithm change within the next year.  Every time I hear of a new algorithm my heart jumps just a beat.  I experienced no negative effects and a couple placement jumps for my websites during the last change.  I have had a couple people ask me to compare NTB to other quick website building softwares and I try to include confidence in quality sites for my answer.

Making money online requires spending money online, I can’t imagine would it would be like to pay for a program only to be struck with a paralyzing fear that I could lose all of my income.

I was ready a blog post on www.brianshall.com and he was extremely adamant in what seems to be his “holy war” against Google.  He makes several claims how Google has used the “monopoly-like” power in the internet world to take out competitors and branch out into almost every sector of the internet.  I am a little inspired by his David and Goliath desire to take down Google, but I see more benefit in following the rules and profiting than, being too consumed to see the bigger picture.  Now, however you feel about Google, keep in mind; if they feel they can actually compete with Facebook with their Google+, then they really must have some power.  I for one would rather play inside the money making playground no matter how un-fair it might seem at times.

So we can be encompassed with what we aren’t getting from Google (e.g. fair ranking while abiding by their laws) or we can play their game.  One of my favorite sayings from back home (rural Oklahoma) is: “If you can’t take a couple kicks, then stay out of the cattle shoot.”  No matter which way you look at it, Google will bring you more traffic than any other search engine.  You had better put on your steel-toe boots because you might have to walk through some crap to be able to reap some rewards.

Playing with Google:

Niche Traffic Builder is setup so that any site that is built already has some SEO basics.  I have tried a couple different strategies within NTB and I have found that my sites that are within the top 3 results have:

1)      Great unique written content

2)      LOTS of great unique written content

3)      A video about my keyword and solutions to fix the problem

4)      (Generally) subject related images.

I like to think that the written content, videos and images are Google’s way of acknowledge that everyone has their preferred way of learning?  Me; I’m a visual and kinesthetic learner so if I am trying to replicate something I prefer watching how-to videos and doing that task at the same time.

Where do I get all of these forms of content?  Well, our content writers with Niche Traffic Builder have always been fabulous with my requests, timely and good at following my instructions.

Youtube has helped me tremendously with their “Embed” code. (This can easily be placed throughout your site by using the WYSIWYG editor and clicking on the html view, then pasting the embed code.)

As for images, this can get tricky- as you know copyright images are illegal to take without the owner’s consent.  I have several photographer friends that express on a continual basis how frustrating it is when their images are stolen.  So you have a couple options in this area; you can “steal” the images, take your own pictures, or use some stock photographs.

I feel like content is the strongest attribute to my website’s ranking.  I have also written about On-Site and Off-Site SEO on an earlier blog post: “Ideas for On-Site and Off-Site SEO”