One of the most overrated factors in the world of search engine optimization is the value of pagerank. According to most expert articles about SEO, a site’s page ranking holds great importance especially when one wants to make a lot of money online. It is because your page rank entails not just your popularity as a website following a certain niche, but as your site’s substance and functionality in catering to your audience’s needs.

There are many views and opinions that revolve around the value of pagerank. While a lot of people rely on their pagerank to track the performance of their business, some experts meanwhile say that PR is just one of those SEO myths that only help boost competition among different websites. But how exactly important is your site’s page ranking? Yahoo Answers has some points which you have to consider:

Traditionally, it is the pagerank that plays a big part in establishing the overall value of a website. All websites start from PR 0, and eventually rise to the top, i.e. PR 10. The increase of your page rank depends on how well you market your site in your chosen niche, and be gaining more incoming traffic to your site. You can get more traffic by following the different SEO techniques such as link building, keyword optimization and the like. If you have an ecommerce website, then tracking your stats and pageranks greatly important since you need more clients to serve and support your business.

However, the internet business has grown and ceased to be a popularity contest, and these days you no longer need to have a popular site just to incur profit. You can find some insights in Yahoo Answers that stress the value of a site’s functionality and target, organic traffic, as they are the ones that bring in more money to your site. In this light, you don’t actually need big traffic, as long as your visitors sign up and subscribe to your site’s goods and services.

There are also some sites that don’t do well with high PR. Rather than helping them succeed in the business, they only get lower profits due to the random traffic they receive. Unless they cater to general masses and are supported by sponsors (and can afford to be free sites), these sites would only lose more income, since users would only visit their page and not do anything of monetary value. This can be an SEO myth for some people, but there are actually isolated cases that prove true to this kind of occurrence in the internet business.

In ecommerce meanwhile, page ranking is always included in one’s site statistics. This kind of site needs high page rankings in order to be known in the business, as it not only needs subscribers as well as partnerships with other business sites. If you want to put up an ecommerce site then you should be able to understand the technicalities of page ranking, as people still rely on this factor with regards to tracking the performance of their sites.

The value of page ranking can be an SEO myth for some experts in the online business, but still a lot rely on PR in evaluating their sites. Yahoo Answers has a lot more differing opinions about this subject, so why not go and check them out to gain a better understanding of the value of PR.

Should you be selling a product or a service?

The Internet is primarily used to communicate, entertain, educate and research. It is thus no wonder that nonperishable, information-intensive products – including computers and software, books, travel, consumer electronics, magazine subscriptions – are the most popular online products at present. Content-rich sites, subscription-based sites to advertiser-supported sites focusing on a wide range of topics, have been sprouting all over the Internet. The Google Adword Recommended SEO

Services such as hotel reservation, air travel and investments have successfully translated themselves to the Internet.

Unique services such as Online driving schools have been prospering. Some states in the US have set up online payment sites for Government services. Residents of a state can log on to a common site to pay all bills and other expenses, such as parking tickets to the local/County courts.

However, all kinds of services cannot be run entirely on the Internet. The Internet is less effective when face-to-face selling is needed to close a deal. The Internet can give lots of preliminary information that’s useful in setting the scene for the closing. But the actual closing takes place offline – i.e., not on the Internet.

Products can also be marketed and sold successfully on the Internet. The kinds of products and services that sell best on the Internet are those that take advantage of the convenience of the Net. Remember that convenience is the primary reason why consumers flock to the Internet in the first place. People can shop any hour of the day at any site. They can avoid crowded stores, irritating sales clerks, and even avoid pickpockets.

Offbeat or unusual products and services often attract online attention and sell strongly. You would generally not try to sell items people can get at the corner store. Thus, few toothbrushes are sold on the Net; the same thing with daily food and beverage purchases. But special cheeses, rare cigars, Turkish plates, long-aged wines, even diamonds, can and do sell on the Net.

Most products sold by catalog and mail order also sell well on the Net. However, people tend to buy only those products that could be shipped at a reasonable price. Higher shipping costs diminish the price competitiveness of online products and turns-off a lot of potential buyers. In fact, high shipping costs is the primary factor that discourages people from buying online more than any other single reason. An Ernst and Young report shows that 53 percent of online shoppers are concerned with shipping costs that are too high, compared to only 19 percent who are concerned with credit cards being stolen.

As an online merchant, you have to work out the advantages as well as disadvantages of selling either products or services. However, in the recent past, online services have known to flourish. Nevertheless, if you chose to sell products you need to rethink your product offering if the total costs of the product and the shipping are higher than what is offered elsewhere. Free the Google Adword Recommended SEO

Here are 3 great free tips for using Wordtracker if you are a member and if want to speed up your keyword and phrase research.

Tip Number 1: Stop thinking about keywords alone

It’s true that you are going to discover important keyword phrases in the end result, but don’t start by going in exploring for specific keywords that are already pre-programmed into your mind because you *THINK* they are most important or you may just spend your time seeing only what everyone else sees. When you are exploring or when you’re in “exploration mode” you want to discover the big windows of opportunity that most people hardly EVER see. Stop guessing and look at more than the first bit of data that makes the most sense.

Tip Number 2: Stop putting yourself under pressure.

When exploring Wordtracker’s keyword and phrase research data, you need to stop putting your research up against the clock and stop feeling like you need to be extremely logical. Release yourself from stress and treat it more like a mission of exploration. If you remove the pressure it will often make room for you to think much more creatively.

Allowing ourselves to be creative when exploring human behavior can open up huge rifts that might otherwise and often go completely undiscovered. Hang on to your hat, because as you allow yourself the liberty to be creative and reduce all of the usual stresses of a client’s expectation of high performance, there is new liberty to observe things that you might have ordinarily missed.

Tip Number 3: Explore every notion that naturally comes into your mind.

Allow yourself to focus on “how people dialog with you.” Think back to any conversations you’ve had recently with a customer. Can you recall that conversation? What did they say to you and how did they say it?

What did they ask you and how did they ask it. Let these ideas begin to come into your mind through a natural creative progression from one thought to the next.

Think about this next time you are doing keyword and phrase research …

We are often not logical when we are in a creative state. Exploring true keyword data is one action in life where it actually pays not to be so formulated and logical. It takes practice, but once you are on a roll you won’t need me or anyone else to tell you that you’re finding especially and useful results. Before we get too deep in practice, I want you try the following short exercise to demonstrate something to you.

Quick Exercise: Let’s demonstrate how your own creative mind works.
(You won’t get anything out of this, unless you actually try it yourself)

In three minutes see how many objects you can sketch out on a piece of paper, in which “a circle” is the main element within the design. Just use a few lines on the circles on the page to identify your ideas, which might start with maybe a wheel, a tire, a steering wheel, and so on.

Notice how your mind leaps from category to category.
Is it always logical? No.

For example, your exercise might start with a wheel, a tire, and a steering wheel; and then move into another new category, like a speedometer, a watch, and a clock; and then to still other items like a doughnut, a cookie, and a pizza; then make another leap to a plate, a saucer, an orange, a basketball, a pill, and so on.

Now this is a most natural response when we are being creative.

If our minds worked logically, we would exhaust every category and list hundreds of types of wheels before we moved on to clocks, and then list dozens of clocks. But instead, notice that our minds bound forward. In some small way this illustrates the leaps which have measured our progress. But recognizing that this is naturally the way the mind works, I encourage you to give yourself permission to explore Wordtracker in the same fashion.

Let your mind be free to observe landmarks along the way and then dig into those landmarks to reveal several levels of search behavior beyond what others are seeing.

You might ask yourself, but why are others not seeing what you will see? The answer is very simple. Their minds are pre-loaded, pre-programmed, and totally fixed on a “keyword hunt” for the keywords they are convinced are important. They do not understand the value of exploring what an audience of searchers truly want. I call this limitation the “keyword hunt” mindset.

Don’t go into doing Wordtracker keyword and phrase research with a pre-established list of keywords that are subconsciously stored in your mind, but instead, go into Wordtracker with a clean slate. Learn how to let the tool sort all of the best data and then reveal the best windows of opportunity based on searches within the last 90 days.

What are backlinks? This may sound strange if you are new when it comes to online business. However, to those who have been doing online or home based businesses, backlinks are considered to be the most important tool in online advertising. The use of backlinks is not only an advantage for online entrepreneurs, but is also preferred because it costs nothing. Just a little research and effort in updating and you would instantly gain more attention from interested buyers. To know what are backlinks, you would have to read ebooks being sold in various websites or read free articles that you would find online. This task may seem tedious to you so in simple terms, backlinks are actually website URLs posted in different other websites online as a way of advertising. Comments placed in online journals and blogs with URLs leading to a site of the comment’s author is already considered a backlink. Even content posted in various networking websites could be used to have backlinks. Ultimately, you can take advantage of popular video or audio hosting sites like Youtube and Digg by posting them relating to your business products and services. Just make sure to regularly make updates and comments regarding the viewers’ concerns to continuously up its popularity in the rankings.

By using backlinks in the most popular websites, not only are you able to get more attention from the other members of those websites, but you are also able to make your website more popular in the search engines. The three biggest search engines in the online world, Yahoo, Google and MSN are the most helpful when it comes to reaching out to interested buyers. Since most buyers resort to search engines for their needs, having search engine high rankings would really make your website more profitable. The three major search engines only recognize backlinks from reputable websites so be sure to continue posting content and commenting on the other postings and adding backlinks to convince search engines that your website is worthy of a higher rank due to high web traffic.

If you are still in newbie marketing, you are probably not familiar with the websites that could help you with your rankings. You could solve this problem by simply searching the backlinks of businesses in the same field. To find out where your competitors post their backlinks, use the search engines and then start posting content on the very same websites. You have to remember that since your just starting, no one knows about your existence yet. You can deal with this by making sure that you are serious in advertising. Post loads of articles and videos and regularly make updates. This way, you would not have to wait long for your popularity to rise.

There are thousands of other tips and information on what are backlinks. Take the extra step in finding more about what are backlinks and how to get them and take advantage of them for your website’s benefit. All the information you need to learn about backlinks can be found online, besides, it would not be as complicated as you think.

Your IP Address is Your Email Identity.

A critical factor for the in-house marketer is the ability that you gain domain control and management. Your domain is a critical piece of the email communications puzzle. If somebody reports you as a spammer, they report your IP address, thus it is critical to avoid sharing IP’s with strangers and to manage IP’s effectively. Your email server should have the ability to use various IP addresses for various purposes. For new list signups, or optin’s, the IP address used should be a different address than those used to send email to long time list recipients. This ensures that the IP address used to send emails to long-term recipients is much less likely to be blacklisted as spam. This also empowers list managers with the ability to hold clean, or backup, IP addresses.

When you use an ESP you are likely sharing IP addresses with multiple, maybe thousands, of list managers. Many of whom are not concerned with keeping the ESP’s IP addresses from becoming blacklisted as spam. Some list management firms offer the ability to use separate IP addresses, however the cost is typically quite high. Your status as a valid sender of email is critical to your ability to deliver email messages. Also, to protect your reputation, email server technology should empower managers with the ability to easily implement popular identification protocols**.

List Hygiene: Keeping it clean

1) Email Capture
There are various ways to validate email addresses. In addition to the time of capture many list mangers run validity checks on a recurring basis. Example: A Web browser placing an order with XYZ Company accidentally types “.con” rather than “.com.” A validation tool will inform the individual that email addresses cannot end with “.con” and the address is not valid. In addition, a validator will go one step further and ensure that the URL in the email address can actually receive email. This is not an exact science, but if it prevents losing a list recipient forever and ensures one less email bounce to a recipient Email provider then your reputation is better protected.

Bounce Processing
Removing bounced email addresses from your list will ensure that your status as a valid sender of email is protected. Sending to non-existent addresses is a clear signal that you are a spammer and should be avoided. Many list systems do not allow for easy management of bounce data. There are thousands of different bounce types and most email servers do not allow the proper parsing of bounce data. Many times a soft bounce occurs since the email recipient’s inbox is full. Without proper bounce data processing this legitimate email recipient might be removed from your list.

A hard bounce is caused when the recipient server reports that the user does not exist and is almost always, sometimes automatically, removed from the list. Newer email server technology empowers marketers with the ability to interact with challenge bounces. These are bounces caused by spam systems that require a manual interaction in order to prove you are not a spammer. Existing email server technologies do not allow the ability to process this recipient and they will likely be lost. There are almost three thousand (3,000) defined bounce formats and your email server, or ESP, should have the ability to identify all types of bounced email.