In the SEO pie, backlinks take up many slices of importance.  As the primary method in which Google differentiated the quality of its search results from its competitions in the early dotcom days, backlinks are particularly utilized by Google to determine the legitimacy, relevancy, and authority of a particular website.

How can you, dedicated webmaster and business owner, improve the strength of your website’s backlinks?   Before you embark upon your link building campaign, keep in mind that quality should always be first and foremost.  For example, a dozen quality backlinks are much stronger for your SEO endeavors than thousands of PR 0 or PR 1 links.

With that said, there are three legitimate strategies that you can utilize to enhance the strength of your backlinks.

Befriend the Social Networks

Web 2.0 has been a godsend for link building campaigns.  Each time an article or blog post on your website gets submitted to the social networks, you enjoy a backlink to your website.  The more people that vote, “Digg” or “Stumbleupon” your content, the stronger the results for both your traffic and SEO efforts.

However, with so many webmasters and publishers submitting content to the social networks, how can your website rise to the top – or rather, the front page of social networks?   The answer lies within the catchphrase “linkbait.”  There is no fishing or phishing involved in this strategy, but only interesting, catchy content that will garner the short attention spans of the average social network user.  Have your freelance SEO writer compose a piece that is controversial, highly resourceful, creative, or funny to increase the chances of sitting on the front page of the social networks.

Be Generous with Your Knowledge

If you have niche experience or unique knowledge, then sharing your wisdom can reap rewards for your SEO efforts.  You can publish a white paper, “how to” article series, or a report that others can download for free.  Bloggers and publishers in your industry will be keen to offer value to their readers – meaning that they are looking to link to interesting, unique information.

Even if writing is not your forte, you can convey a list of ideas to your freelance writer, who can compose the prose that will garner you the industry backlinks you seek.

Lean on the Traditional Article Directories

Last but not least, the traditional article directories are still a reliable source of generating backlinks to your website.  While there are literally thousands of article directories today, submitting your content to ones that have high Page Ranks will build powerful one-way backlinks to your website.  Remember to hyperlink your important keywords in the resources box to maximize the SEO impact of article directory submissions, rather than simply listing the URL.

By taking advantage of these legitimate strategies, you can indeed have your SEO cake and eat it too!

There is only one element that drives forth the revenue growth of your online business: traffic.

The volume of your traffic is the difference between life and death for your website. Unfortunately, with the skyrocketing rates of PPC, generating niche, targeted traffic to your website is no longer easy or economically feasible.

However, you can harness the power of traffic by befriending a superhero strategy – one that generates free, targeted traffic to your website. Here to save your website’s day are the humble, yet powerful, articles. Publishing targeted articles can drive exponential traffic to your website, making this SEO superhero your business’ most cost-effective, potent friend.

The adage “content is king” still reigns true, and publishing SEO articles is the ultimate way to build your online kingdom.

Increase your SERPs

Consistently publishing unique articles is the most important element to increasing your standings in the search engines – which is the key to capturing targeted traffic. With nearly 85% of all online business transactions initiated via a search engine, tapping into this powerful source of traffic is critical to unleashing the potential of your business.

When you regularly add new articles to your website, the search engine bots will return to your website frequently to crawl the new information. In turn, your relevant, fresh content will contribute to building your SERPs. When you are publishing new articles on your website, keep in mind the following SEO strategies:

• Utilize a 3% – 5% keyword density ratio for your top keywords. However, it is still important to ensure that your content reads well, and the keywords should be naturally and seamlessly included.
• Incorporate your keywords into your meta-tags, including the title and description.
• If you use images in your articles, ensure that the file name, title, and image description include your keywords.

Keep in mind that a high natural listing on the search engines is invaluable to attracting traffic. According to consumer research, 70% – 80% of users prefer to click on a natural listing, as opposed to sponsored ads.

Grow your valuable back links

A relevant, quality article should be shared with the world – while you simultaneously build the back links that increase your SERPs. Websites, blogs, and article directories all crave fresh content, and if you submit a well-written, valuable article, others will publish your content – giving you a valuable back link. The number of back links to your website plays a large role in your search engine rankings, and articles are a great way to obtain link partners.

Attract natural, targeted traffic

The entire purpose of increasing your SERPs is to drive in more traffic to your website. In addition to increasing your SEO, articles also naturally attract direct traffic. When you share and publish your articles with other websites, blogs, and directories, you automatically obtain free exposure.

A valuable, insightful, and helpful article will attract readers, who will be compelled to learn more directly at your website. In addition, the authoritative information you have shared with the reader builds your company’s credibility and legitimacy, which are important in converting traffic into monetized customers.

When you capitalize upon the power of writing articles, your website benefits comprehensively – not only from direct traffic and exposure, but from the long-term value of higher search engine page rankings.

What you wear to work is a key indicator of what image you will evoke in the work place. The latest trends for men and women suggest that dressing more casually or “dressing down” is now the norm. No longer does a basic, well-tailored suit and expensive tie meet the requirements necessary to achieve a look that generates confidence. The creative, casual environment popularized by the Silicon Valley is a great example of this shift. Indeed, business casual is now the new business formal.

The problem is in the definition of “business casual,” which is often very misunderstood. Business casual can be interpreted in various ways, and this gives a person the opportunity to make big mistakes in the image he or she evokes.

Biggest Mistakes Men Make

If you decide to wear jeans and a Grateful Dead t-shirt to your techno-savvy work place, it can give others the impression that you have very little ambition. If you think that a polo shirt and khaki pants are the true definition of casual, think again. The key to dressing business casual is to evoke the appearance that you have already achieved a superior position within your work environment. However, this is easier said than done, but there are certain image “secrets” you can utilize to maximize your appearance with business casual.

Foolproof Guidelines for Male Business Casual

The best guidelines to follow and achieve an impressive “business casual” are:

• Well pressed, long sleeved, button down collared shirts
• Well pressed, dark, solid-colored slacks
• A plain belt with a simply styled buckle
• Dark colored socks that stay in place
• Nicely maintained leather shoes (Yes, people still NOTICE YOUR SHOES)

The image you project is an external indicator of how much you value yourself, and how seriously you wish to be taken by other people. By keeping this in mind, you can make the appropriate wardrobe choices. A clean and neat appearance will always give a positive impression to clients, managers, and co-workers.

Women and the “Business Casual” Concept

For women in the work place, there is a fine line between “business casual” or “dressing down” and “business faux pas.” The image that a woman projects can directly influence how well clients and managers listen to her. She should be able to find comfortable casual clothing that looks crisp, but she must not wear anything that is too short, too tight or has a bare midriff. Work out clothing, sandals, or athletic shoes just do not represent a good image in an office setting. If you have doubts about what you are wearing, it is probably not appropriate.

The prevalence of fashion in the workplace has given women a larger selection of apparel when it comes to business casual. However, there is indeed a fine line between dressing business casual and being too fashion forward. Remember, you can always inject your own style into your business casual wardrobe, but it is critical to maintain your professional presence.

Infallible Guidelines for Women’s Business Casual

• Casual dresses and pencil skirts
• Neatly pressed slacks with boot cut legs in basic colors such as black, beige or white
• Nicely fitting sweaters or blazers
• Cotton shirts that button, with long or short sleeves
• Low or medium heeled pumps, flats or peep-toed shoes
• Scarves in quiet colors
• Moderate amounts of jewelry

If you are ambitious and want to succeed in your career, you can dress comfortably and still look great! It is possible to be stylish, professional, and well groomed with a few basic wardrobe choices and an appropriate amount of your own personal style.

Your blog can be a very powerful marketing tool when you take the necessary, yet easy, steps to ensure that it is search engine optimized. Search engines place a high importance on blogs because of its frequently updated active content. Hypothetically, the search engine is essentially fueled by the need to find new, relevant content, and therefore, blogs fundamentally provide that fresh content. You can turn your blog into a powerful force when you implement several SEO steps.

Frequent Entries

In order to receive favorable rankings from the search engines, it is important to maintain frequent blog entries and specialize on your topic. Ideally, you should post daily, or at least five times per week. The more relevant, high-quality entries you post, the more the search engines will like you. Case in point: Google has a specific “Freshbot” to crawl for new content.

Most importantly, when you have developed a pattern of regular posting, the Googlebot and other crawlers will visit your site more. The frequency the Googlebot will visit your site depends upon how frequently you change it; thus, the more you update your site, the more the Googlebot will drop in to see you. Thus, you can use your blog as an opportunity to have the Googlebot crawl your other links and sub-domains (make sure you add permanent links on the side of your blog to enjoy this benefit).

Fresh Content

As it has been emphasized in the past, content is king! For SEO purposes, as well as engaging your readers, it is important that the content you have on your website is fresh and original. Google scans for duplicate content, and if they find it, they will penalize your page rank. Therefore, make sure your content is not duplicated! There are content provider services available that will re-write content for you at a mere two cents per word. If you desire SEO for your blog, two cents is a worthy investment.

Use RSS Feeds and Ping!

Not only is it easy to create and manage RSS feeds for your blog, but it will bring you better SEO as well. When you post a new entry and have it pinged, this adds to the speed in which your pages get indexed. You can ping sites such as FeedBurner, Technocrati, OnlyWire, PingOMatic, and Pingoat to inform them that you have a new posting on your blog. In addition, you can actually ping blogsearch.google.com directly for even faster indexing. PingOMatic provides a service that helps you rapidly choose who you want to ping.

Optimizing The Details

Although your blog may only have a few relevant pages (such as home, archives, etc.), you can still take measures to optimize your blog.

Think carefully about the keywords of the title of your blog, as it gets archived and can greatly increase your SEO for search terms.

In addition, it is important to add new keyword tags and categories whenever you create a new entry. It is easier for the search engines to find your blog when you have directory structures and tags for them to digest.

There are other places on your blog where you can place SEO keywords:

• Posting titles
• Page titles
• In the beginning of each post, as well as throughout (as long as it does not overload the text or negatively alter the article’s conversational flow)
• Heading tags
• Image tags
• Outbound links
• And of course, meta tags

When you take the easy steps to give the search engine bots what they want, your blog becomes a very powerful SEO tool!

The English language is not necessarily the easiest to understand linguistically. There are more rules, clauses, modifiers, and exceptions than any other popular language. So, it’s no surprise that many people have a problem with duplicate words (words that sound the same but don’t mean the same thing).

There, their, and they’re are prime examples. All three of these words, when spoken aloud, sound the same. To someone who hasn’t taken many years of formal English education, they may also appear to be spelled the same. However, as you know, that is not the case.

There refers to a place. For example, “I went over there”.

Their refers to possession or ownership. For example, “that is their car”.

They’re is a different way to say “they are”. For example, “they’re going to mall after lunch”.

This gets even more complicated when you have two words that sound the same as well as being spelled the same. For example:

Dove is referring to a type of bird. For example, “the dove flew overhead”.

Dove is a plural version of “dive”. For example, “I dove into the lake”.

Post can be referring to making a comment on an internet forum. For example, “I regret making that post on WickedFire”.

A Post is something, usually man made, portruding from the ground. For example, “it took me an hour to dig a hole big enough for that stupid post to go into”.

Spring is a season. For example, “It sure is raining a lot this spring”.

A Spring is a coil, usually made of metal. For example, “a spring in my mattress keeps poking me in the ribs”.

“Dove” can mean two different things depending on the context that it is being used in, even though it is spelled the same in both situations. The same can be said for the other examples I used. However, there a many words that are examples of this.

Proper grammar can be a hard thing to learn for someone where english is their second language. It is also difficult for most native English speakers, so be sure to double check your writing to ensure that everything makes grammatical sense. One of the biggest complaints among teachers is that many people don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re. So, if nothing else, at least remember those three!

Article written for, posted, and indexed on www.wickedfire.com

This article is going to give some pointers on increasing your conversion through what’s known as a “passive sale”, “soft close”, or “passive close” in the sales industry. Though internet marketing is nothing like offline sales, there are certain elements of the traditional sales process that you can replicate online with great success.

Step One: Identifying Yourself as NOT a Salesman

No one likes to be “sold”. When someone feels as if they were just “sold” on a product or service they are much more likely to experience buyers remorse, and if the product/service offers a refund policy they may even take advantage of it. Obviously, this is not good for your profit margins.Now, you want to create a persona for yourself that is both true, yet untrue at the same time. For example, if you were selling lawn care products, you may want to label yourself as a “Route Coordinator” as opposed to a salesman. This does a few things for you:

1. It removes the “sales” feeling and image. This will make the buyer more likely to purchase, opt-in, or continue with the sales process.
2. It gives you extra credibility, even if you don’t actually deserve it. The fact remains that you’re still a salesmen, but the customer doesn’t need (or want) to know that.Going back to our Route Coordinator example, you are still a salesmen (selling new lawn care contracts), but the customer sees you as doing the company and them a valuable service (perhaps offering a discount if they help you fill your route). You still get the sale, and the customer is less likely to feel “sold”.
3. The customer will become more receptive as they are not in their “sales mode”, and are much more likely to actually listen to you. When you walk into a Best Buy and you are approached by a sales rep, what is the first reaction that you have? 99% of people immediately respond with “Just looking”, and some even leave. This is because they know that you are going to try and sell them something if you are the sales rep. Approaching them more passively, and saying something as simple as “Those are really fantastic TV’s, but I wouldn’t buy it right now. It’s a bit overpriced” opens the lines of communication, and creates a common ground between you and the consumer: they don’t want to pay too much, and you want to sell them something. If you can get them listening to you, that’s the first step.
   

We can apply those three points to internet marketing through our online tone and overall “feel” of our sales copy. When I am writing (for myself or for my clients) I try to emulate how I speak. I ask myself questions, such as “how would I react to this?” or “how would I want to be approached?” when I am writing.This style of writing is called “empathetic writing”. Writing this way keeps your prose fluid, and your sales copy will sound less like a sales copy as a result. Trust me, that’s a good thing.

Step Two: Building Up to a Soft Close

Obviously the point of your sales copy is to create your desired result, be it a lead generation or an actual sale. You see this most often in the form of a hard close, or “asking for the sale”. Now, I’m not saying that asking for the sale is a bad thing, but for many products and many personality types it may result in a lower conversion rate.This is when empathetic writing pays off the most. Read the two statements about lawn care below. Which one would you be more apt to continue the sales process for?

1. “… and you’ll find noticeable results within just a few weeks! Order now and we’ll even take 15% off of the final price since there’s less overhead from this website! We’ll send our applicators out just two days after your purchase! Click here to order”.

1. “… our results are noticeable after just a few weeks and, because of our lower overhead, cost less than ever before. Visitors from this website are offered a full 15% off as a way to say “thanks for trying us out”. Please be sure to send us pictures from before and after our treatments so that we can add you to our growling list of satisfied customers. Click here to book your first application.”

Now, both statements are saying the exact same thing, yet one places more emphasis on “ordering” and one places emphasis on consumer satisfaction and booking the application. One sounds more like a sales pitch than the other.In practical sales experience, the second statement has been shown to perform better- in some cases, quite dramatically so. How can you use this type of sales writing to your advantage?

• Never use immediate action words or phrases, such as “buy now”, “order now”, “purchase now”, etc. Now, obviously you should be testing what works for you.Instead, use phrases like “book your application today”, “download your product instantly”, “purchase here for express shipping”, etc.

• Place your emphasis on the benefits, and not the deal. For a lot of products the consumer could care less about the cost (so long as they’re fair). Instead, focus on the benefit and hint at why they should act now.Instead of “purchase your bottle today” or “buy now to get 15% off”, try phrases like “same day shipping when ordered from this website” or “we offer new clients a 15% discount as a way of saying “welcome to our family”, etc.”

• Be positive, but not too positive. Coming off like your product is the best thing since sliced bread will deter sales as people will know something is up.

• Anticipate objections and handle them during the sales process. If you know that a customer might feel uneasy about ordering an expensive watch online, ease their worries by reassuring them that it’s a quick, painless, and efficient way to do it. For example, “We understand that purchasing a high end time piece online for the first time can be a worrying experience riddled with uncertainty. That is why we do everything that we can to make the process as quick and painless as possible, and our list of satisfied customers shows it. If you need to contact us for any reason, please call us at XXXXXX or e-mail us at XXXXX. As always, we offer XXXXX warranty and XXXX technical support.”

Step Three: Creating the Close ItselfSome people need the “click here to buy” button. Others will see it and bail. So, how can you create an efficient close that will capture both those customers?Simple- create the soft close. By this point in your sales copy you should have already:

• Identified yourself and explained what you are and what the product is.

• Visualized and identified any major objections.

• Built up the foundations for the soft close.

• Clearly stated the benefits or value.

The soft close is all about delivery. You still want them to buy, and if they are at this point in your sales copy they probably want to buy anyway. The trick is to make them complete the process without them being conscious of having been part of any sales process at all.For example:

1. “Our applicators are given their new orders every morning. Click here to book your first application. Please be sure to have any sprinkler systems put away and that you make a note of any plants or other parts of your lawn that may be damaged by our process. Our applicators will be there within 48 hours.”

1. “Our usual process, from application booking to the actual application itself is less than 48 hours. Click here to book your application. Please make a note of the date and time that you have requested. You will receive a confirmation phone call from one of our route coordinators confirming your appointment date and time.”

Both of those deliver what you want: the customer orders, yet it doesn’t actually say “buy me!’.Compare those statements with something like:

• “Purchase your lawn package today. Our applicators will be by within 48 hours of your purchase date. Please make any special requests known to our service department.”

Though there is nothing “wrong” with that close, it’s still asking for the sale. A hard close asks for the sale. A soft close assumes it.

Conclusion

It can take quite a bit of practice to develop a suitable “soft close” sales copy, so be sure to test, test, and test some more! Please keep in mind that not all products are suitable for a soft close, so make sure that the product you are promoting or selling is one that may benefit from it.

Paraphrasing is a great way to relay information from one source to the next without having to memorize the message word for word. You paraphrase every day whether you are aware of it or not- it’s the minds way to making messages understandable. However, when it comes to formal or business communication you need to be sure that you do it properly when you put your thoughts down onto paper. This avoids any possible legal complications that could result from improper paraphrasing.

What is Paraphrasing?
This is when you reword another person’s statement or argument. When paraphrasing academically it is required to be about the same length as the original, but outside of academic pursuits there are no specific requirements like that.

An Example
Your boss looked quite angry with you. “I know that you’re very busy and that you need to take time to yourself, but that doesn’t mean that you should put the needs of this company second! If you keep slipping up I’m going to have to take administrative measures to correct the problem.”

After she was done talking, you looked at her and said “So, if I keep making mistakes I’m going to get fired?”

Properly citing any materials or authors referenced avoids accountability being placed on you. Essentially, it keeps you out of trouble (look, I paraphrased right there).

How to Paraphrase a Written Document
A few guidelines to follow when paraphrasing another person’s text:

• Change everything. This means sentence structure as well as the wording. This avoids any plagiarism issues that may arise.
• Always give the original author credit. This is done via a source citation or a bibliography.
• If you directly quote someone be sure to use quotation marks and an introduction statement.
  • Example: According to Mr. Martel, you should always “………”

• Make sure to format the paraphrase according to the style that you are required to do so. If you are writing an essay that needs to be formatted to MLA style, for example, you need to make sure that you’ve cited the original author or speaker correctly. A quick search online should net you the information you’re looking for.

Always be sure to give the original author credit. I cannot stress this enough. Failure to do so could create a copyright violation, and I doubt that the original author (or their lawyers) would appreciate you taking credit for his work.