Establishing trust and value with your prospective customers is what will help you development long term business relationships and revenue streams that will become primary assets which can help ensure profitability regardless of less than hoped for economic conditions.

This is the first part of our 15 part blog series geared to helping you start your first online business.

If you’ve always wanted to start a profitable online business but have no idea where to start, this series is definitely for you.

The Targeted Traffic Solutions team has seen hundreds of brilliant ideas for online properties and profitable businesses, but for one reason or another they were not able to get off the ground, we figured it was time to give a little back to the people..

If you fall into any of the categories below, you owe yourself this opportunity, all it’s going to take is your time, willingness to learn and ability to take action. We’re not charging anything for this incredible A-Z blueprint and powerful content, so let’s get started shall we…

Top XX Reason’s For Not Being Able To Get Your Idea On The Ground & Online Where it Belongs…

• You have zero idea on how to run a business.
• You have absolutely no idea how to create a website.
• CSS, XHTMl, PHP, AJAX, JQUERY all sound like things your doctors say’s you need to eat.
• Umm you don’t have a lot of money to invest
• You just learned that computers can create graphics, designs and logo’s
• You have no clue on what to create your website about
• SalesCopy and Web Content Copy are two phrases that make you wonder why they just don’t call it “writing” like normal people…
• You don’t know where or even how to start ?
• You are sick of reading hyped up infomercial promises that you just know are scams and wont work.
• You Still think Google is actually the Internet.

Truthfully this list could go on for pages, but those were the top things that popped into my head over the last thirty seconds or so…

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way let me outline some important reasons that you absolutely need to start your business online…

Incredibly Low Start up Costs

In comparison to starting a traditional offline business or even worse a franchise of some kind ( I cringe at the thought ) You can literally have a fully functional (albeit basic) online property up, ready to take orders for as little as a few hundred dollars. An important distinction needs to be understood which is that you are creating a business and it’s will take time, work and effort if you are hoping to achieve anything…

Various Skills Required

The bottom-line is you are going to need to either learn, or have someone utilize the necessary technology to achieve your goals.

• Niche Selection
• Online Market Research and Discovery
• Webdesign
• Website Usability
• Graphics and or Video Element Creation
• Split Testing
• Conversion Optimization
• Email Marketing
• Server Technology
• Computer Language Programming
• Secure Payment Integration
• Traffic Generation
• Search Engine Optimization
• Paid Search Marketing
• Social Media Optimization
• Product Testing and Development
• and So on and So on….

Now before you through your hands up in the air and give up, you can still succeed quickly without knowing any of that if you have even a modest budget to invest… Even if your dead broke wondering if you could learn to stomach the taste of cat food, you can make this work, that is as long as you don’t actually try and eat cat food…

None of the above needs to be learned in a single day, in fact most successful online entrepreneurs have spent years learning, and still spend a lot of time learning new skills all the time…

If there were a few things that you really need to succeed without understanding any of the above they would be as follows:

A desire to succeed and provide a better life for you and those you care about…

An ability to commit yourself to spending even a few hours a week learning and putting the steps we give you into action…

Some basic time management skills, The more you can put into this the better and quicker the results will be…

Understanding that building a profitable online business if NOT some get rich quick scheme…

Even if you think this must be BullShi#, You allow yourself to “Suspend Your Disbelief” (Thanks Frank…) and give it a shot… I mean lets be honest all you have to lose is the opportunity to better yourself, the absolute worst case scenario is that 3 months from now you’ll be in the exact same chair doing the exact same thing your doing right now…

An International Audience with Endless Marketing Options and Possibilities…

Being able to laser target the online population and provide an offer that earns you serious money without ever having to actually meet, speak or talk to anyone is an incredible feeling… While it may seem impossible to you right now, actually checking your daily email to determine your online earrings and having the funds immediately forwarded to your bank is a pretty cool thing to be doing whether your at home stuck in a blizzard or the beaches of Belize sipping on something slushy…

I really could go on for pages, but I will save it for future posts, if you seriously ready to change your life once and for all you really need to do the following:

Bookmark this page and check back regularly, Most posts will go up late evening Pacific Standard Time (I’m in Vancouver)

Up above at the right hand corner joining our free online newsletter, giving you instant access to the most powerful online strategies to get that business of yours off the ground.. Did I Mention It Was Free…

Decide right now that you deserve the opportunity to succeed…

The next post will focus on the nuts and bolts of registering your first domain name and getting your Web Server / Online Hosting Account all sorted out. With the countless selection of companies all trying to earn your business we break down the complex and make it easy and painless. The importance of choosing the right webhost is critical for a multitude of SEO and usability issues and trust me not all hosting companies are treated equal; you certainly do not always get what you pay for or what’s been promised to you.

I hope to see you back shortly…

Regards

Marc M

Its critical in 2011 to understand the importance of both incoming link valuation & metrics in addition to the value of your current written on page content and XHTML elements. Many pro level SEO and Search Marketing pro’s will not always agree on which factors matter most, you need to look at your own site and market to best understand what is working and whats not. The fact is each market of the web has potentially different ranking factors which are often determined by the level of current and projected competition within that vertical.

Regardless of whats being talked about in your favorite forum, you will need to go through a set of trial and error on your own domain to determine whats good for your domains keyword rankings and whats not. Sticking to the guidelines issued by the major search engines will help you deal with common algo updates that can wreak havoc on sites that utilize black hat strategies, often getting them banned from the index altogether.

On Page SEO Ranking Elements Checklist for Beginners

On Page Content Style Functions Vs External CSS Files

CSS is your friend when it comes to the presentation of your html content and seo, avoid inline styling like the plague. Avoid using JavaScript & images for drop down menus; make your navigation as simple as possible. If you have a web developer that is still stuck in the dark ages make sure any scripting you use is hosted in an external file, it absolutely should not be inline within your HTML.

Meta Description Tag

Currently the meta tags will not be helpful for any type of rankings, and the keyword meta tag is completely useless, but the description tag will be used for the text site summary read by browsers, which is the key to quality CTR from the SERPS to your site. The most important thing to keep in mind is that stuffing keywords into any meta tag will be viewed as a negative, and will damage ranking valuations. Never utilize a keyword that has no relevance to your page, again while these tags wont help you rank, they will hurt if you use them the wrong way.

If your wondering why they don’t help with rankings any longer the answer if simple, people abused the feature and Google modified their ranking algorithim. Now with all of that said there are perhaps other low tier search engines that may still utilize the tags for everything from discovery to rankings, just understand that Google, Yahoo and Bing do not.

Heading XHTML Tag

Using keywords in your H1 tags can be beneficial. You can use H2 and H3 tags for keywords. These tags allow search engines to get more from your site. Using the tags in an expected order such as H1, H2, H3, etc is what will benefit your site the most. To wrap up proper use of these tags will help your sites seo value, but remember the opposite is also true.

Page Load Times and Content Compression

Countless site and WCMS systems use a compression format known as GZIP as an effective method of compression the size of your pages content, which will often help boost your sites load speed, this is obviously of benefit to both the search engines and your human visitors. The way this often helps your page load faster is with a reduced number of server calls for each element on your webpage. It should be of no surprise that faster loading pages and therefore sites will keep both the search engine and human visitors happy.

KEI in Modern Rankings

Keyword density is an old way of evaluating content that has less and less value today. Common sense should prevail here, if your still stuffing everything including the kitchen sink into your content you are running an uphill battle with the engines that you will lose. Make sure you don’t overdo placement of targeted keywords. The search engines have never made public the rules for keyword usage but its common knowledge in SEO circles that two percent should be the absolute maximum, and that would be for a larger written piece of content.

HTML Alt Image Tags

Your image can’t be read by search engine bots just yet so you need to tell them what this image is all about. The proper usage of the img alt keyword tag can be helpful for universal rankings and of course image search verticals, just don’t over do it and make sure your text actually describes whats on screen or your looking for a serious headache. As stated, the img alt tag is no silver bullet for rankings, but it needs to be there for accessibility for those visually impaired, don’t stuff keywords and you should be fine.

Fresh Content Creation and Uploading To Your Web Server

You need to be adding fresh content your website on a frequent basis to help build domain strength and authority. Bots are always crawling the web, they have an index of every single time your site has been crawled, having a site with content that never updates is not going to do a lot to help your potential keyword rankings and traffic levels. Frequent content publishing to your website or blog is not required to ensure bots come back to your site, but it ensures they value your site as providing new quality content, which is a big part of the ranking equation. Write your content for readers and stick to a posting schedule if possible. You may come across spammy methods of auto content creation such as plug-ins, tools or even services that do nothing more than steal content from other sites and then try and publish it on yours, this trick is of zero value to your site or your sites visitors.

Old Content 301 Linking Value

When developing your domain structure you are able to use either “yourdomain.com” or “www.yourdomain.com”. Several people within the industry feel strongly that “yourdomain.com”  Because they feel it works better for ranking purposes than “www.yourdomain.com”.  I personally always use the www, register it within Webmaster Tools and ensure that either a cano or 301 is in place to handle the other.

Rel No Follow Tags For Outbound Links

Linking to your own content should not require a no=follow meta tag, previous methods of utilizing the tag for page rank funneling has not worked for several years therefore its sole purpose is to safe guard your sites trust when linking out to unknown content. It’s usually a good idea to always utilize the no follow tag when linking out to content that’s trust and value factors are unknown. When linking out to another site or third party sites that are trusted and relevant there tends to be very little risk of incurring any kind of penalty or issue. But if you link to spam-link-farms from your site then sure it will hurt your site.

SiteMap in XML

If you’re using WordPress, Drupal or Joomla then you have a lot of plug-ins for generating xml sitemaps. Other content management platforms have their own ways of adding sitemaps. If your using a simple static HTML site, you are able to quickly create a XML sitemap and submit it to the engines or use one of countless sites that can do it for you. Many CMS platforms such as WordPress will auto build your sitemap when any content is added and automatically ping the search engine spiders to let them know about the new content whens it been published.

Robots.txt

The advent of the Robots.txt file allows you to control what content within your website is both indexed and crawled by the search engines, but keep in mind if you make a mistake with this file you could block the search engines from crawling your entire site, which would essentially block your site from the search engines.

On page and Off Page Search Engine Optimization

As promised at the end of the last post, we are going to take a brief stab at two of the most important factors in any serious website development project, that is if you want to be ranked well within the search engines for your keyword terms or keyword phrases.

Now once again the purpose of Search Engine Optimization is to have your website and the pages of your website, blog, etc rank and rank well for the keyword terms you have selected… ( I can only hope after doing the correct keyword research )….

Now why do you want free organic search engine traffic you ask ??? Well if you really did just ask yourself that question I emplore you to find the largest object next to you and beat yourself over the head with it… Perhaps a bit over the top but honestly if you don’t know the answer to that why are you even reading this blog ????

Speaking of that I will in a later post be getting to some far more in depth topics that include such topics as “waste of bandwidth”.

On Page Search Optimization and On Page SEO factors

On Page SEO is the process of which we optimize the page content, layout, structure and priority of a webpage to rank as high as possible for a particular keyword, keywords or keyword phrase.

This is the starting point to most quality sites and the goal of correct on page seo-optimization should be marrying the benefits of usability for the human user and crawability for the search engine spiders so that it can easily, without doubt or hesitation index your page and your human visitors land on a page that they were expecting ( surprises are bad for humans and a high bounce rate is a pretty good indicator of the kind of job you are currently doing. )

On page optimization is carried out by several different factor that honestly base around very high quality and laser targeted keyword research. I am absolutely amazed by the shear number of people I come across on a weekly basis that are able to completely screw up the keyword research and analysis of their web properties and then wonder why the results that are being seen are far below what they had hoped for or been promised by a sub standard Search Engine Optimization Services Company or Agency.

Let me make one thing completely clear to everyone if you screw up or half ass your keyword research your website, blog, etc will never reach anywhere near the potential you could and you are more than likely leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table.

Your page should be created completely using XHTML and CSS with as little non semantic code as possible.

As for the content of your webpage it is absolutely critical that your page is corrected tagged and labeled from top to bottom.

This includes simple factors such as a friendly URL string, keyword rich ( within reason folks ) page title, Solid Headings throughout the copy and a balance of core, phrase, long tail and LSI / LSA friendly keywords.

As some of you already know I run a SEO agency and the number of inquiries we get a week from customers asking us to simply perform SEO on their site is astounding.

What is more frustrating to not only us as the SEO provider but to the potential customer is the fact that they have no idea what SEO really involves or what it takes to rank well. A perfect example would be a potential customer I turned away last week, they had a product review website for some clickbank products and had requested that we ” just optimize their site to be at the number one position in Google” …..

Now while this is certainly not impossible; it’s not easy either. The customer did not want us to change the layout or theme of the site in anyway and wanted to see major results in 2 weeks for something like $5000 or so…

The site was created maybe 5 years ago with nothing but table after nested table after nested table, every img alt tagged was spammed to… well you get the idea.

Some people are never going to learn the value of doing things the correct way and if you want to do real business and make real money online all I can tell you is Google is not only the judge they are also the jury and executioner…

I have a client call to get to so next time I will be going over a few aspects of off page SEO which really has everything to do with your Google page rank and the most important part of your websites success as we not only exit the maturity phase of web 2.0 but have the shores or web 3.0 in our sight.

In the internet world today’s current search engines have the ability to crawl, index and rank an incredible range of content that includes webpages, websites, text documents, images and even video.

Search engine’s while never disclosing their actual processing capacity have proven that they’re in fact able to crawl, analyze, index and rank content at truly break neck speeds, and speeds that are increasing in velocity every single day.

The term search engine refers to proprietary software using an algorithmic engine to search a database or index of information using queries which are keywords or keywords phrases inputed by a user.

You type a query into that little search box and your expectation is that the most relevant and personally useful piece of information within the particular engines index will be returned to you nearly instantaneously.

Now for 99.999999% of every single person that searches for a topic on Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other engine the results are all that matter.

The average user has absolutely no clue what level of technical and engineering expertise, intellectual & financial capital has been required and will continue to be required to power the back end architecture that enables the search engines to provide you with service in the first place.

The real test of a search engines usefulness comes down to one simple question.

Did you get what you expected on your screen after you pressed search ?

While this of course is a valued expectation of the user it’s often the most overlooked and least understood concept behind the entire field of not only search engine optimization but internet and search marketing.

User intent, the major search engines have spent billions of dollars utilizing some of the brightest minds in the world on intensely technical fields such as information retrieval (IR), computer programming, and algorithmic evaluation to deliver you just that “Your Intent”.

Search engines are used billions of times per day world wide for the sole purpose of providing high quality relevant and more often than not free information to a user on demand.

Search engines are able to retrieve relevant data based on the keyword or keyword phrase keyed into its search query box, and they accomplish it in less than a blink of an eye.

So what is a search engine?

A search engine is nothing more than one of the most critical advancements in modern history.

An efficient and robust search engine such as todays version of Google is the cornerstone of human evolution which is based on not only knowledge, but the unlimited commutative knowledge of man-kind which can be shared instantaneously by anyone for any reason with a cost structure borne by the end user as close to an actual cost of zero as is possible based on accepted economic measurements.

In fact one could argue without much protest that the knowledge transfer obtained by the typical end user in relation to the time spent and ease at which that knowledge was obtained would end with a net gain to the end user while providing net loss to the information’s provider, which in this case would be Google.

If you take a step back in your mind and dig a bit deeper into the enormity of the profound importance of the previous paragraph, one can easily conclude the following…

As the raw cpu processing power, cost of digital storage capacity and velocity of bandwidth augments while the cost structure and pricing models of each of these three core components continue to fall more end users will directly benefit with more accurate information retrieved faster and more cheaply by the same proportional ratio.

Therefore one can safely assume that not only are search engines here to stay they will rapidly become an ever increasing part of our digital lives. As more technology becomes cheaper & faster, more users will adopt that technology by the same ratio.

A key aspect of this basic economic formula that is often ignored are benefits that effect both the end user and search engines equally. These are actually on the computer hardware side of the equation. While in the first world countries we have thrived primarily on an expectation of excess, the rest of the world has progressed lets say some what more modestly.

Now I have no need to delve into the perceived deeper wrongs and rights of man kind and in fact myself can easily be branded in that category when compared to a uneducated villager living in one of literally millions of back water slums the world over.

The first world has produced and is literally continuing to produce and absolutely mind boggling number of computers. The first worlds model of commerce has made it imperative to not only strive for the best but own and possess the best. Upgrading to the newest model of notebook computer every year because of its toted advancement in any number of technical specification in addition to absolutely perfected marketing strategies is a clear and fairly common display of the western economic and cultural mindset in full effect.

While I really cant say that I’am impervious to the western infliction, typing this content out in my home office on the newest unibody macbook pro, sitting on a incredibly expensive top grain leather reclining sofa while networked to my MacPro which is attached attached to multiple 30” apple cinema displays.

Now I am not trying to come off as some sort of jerk, what I am trying to prove is a point. My current CPU load on my macbook pros processor is maybe 1% of its full processing potential, my other 99% that was marketed to me as the absolute must have upgrade will more than likely only be used for very specific programs and deal with specific processes that will never be utilized by the general public, which in fact this macbook pro is now heavily marketed too.

Therefore the task I’m doing right this very second would quite easily be handled on a computer that could easily be 5 or more years old, in fact it would be highly unlikely that i would even be able to notice any performance difference what so ever if typing this out on a 5 year old machine.

Doing your typical search on any of the major search engines puts the same kind of low level stress load and demand on your computing hardware, in fact it can be argued that with the power of today’s computer processors the demand put on a machine by simply typing out text or and email is hardly worth even measuring.

So what’s the point of all of this ?

Well the point is that in this global village we call home more and more people are able to obtain computer equipment that can easily serve their modest needs, which will primarily be based on having access to the world wide web and the knowledge and opportunity contained within it. To a greater extent these new users will be able to increase not only the quantity but quality of the information found online.

The used computer and to an even greater degree used mobile handset and smartphone market is literally exploding the world over.

With cheaper and easier access to communication networks both fiber optic and wireless, massive numbers of relatively isolated populations are getting not only a glimpse but a detailed view of the outside world.

For me at least the most profound and important aspect of all of this information is simple, when the rest of the world finally does get access to the communication networks that we take for granted every day, how will they find what they’re looking for ?

The answer is simple….

By typing keywords into a search engine just like you and I…..