The HBE News Ticker

You may have heard already about how having duplicate content on your website is a big no-no in the eyes of Google, as well as some other search engine. If you haven’t, here’s a quick lesson: Duplicate content is exactly what it sounds like - the exact same content is on a page on your website as is on other websites across the internet.

Google’s rules about this are meant to keep webmasters from stealing content from other sites, which is great, and that will get your site banned pretty quickly, but duplicate content can also come from articles that are published legitimately on a number of websites.

So it’s problematic for a lot of people, especially when Google is always so vague with their rules. But now they’ve posted some information about how to avoid getting penalized for duplicate content.

Here’s a link to the post:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

Hopefully, that will clear things up a little.

Mark
http://www.homebusinessendeavors.com/

Here are some websites that you can use to make sure that your emails aren’t getting blacklisted (in other words, marked as spam) by some of the email systems out there, which means that your messages are getting sent to junk mail folders. You don’t want that.

What you want is for your domains to be whitelisted so that your emails get through to inboxes.

These aren’t free tools like in some of the previous posts, but they’re good services that you might want to look into.

http://www.blacklistmonitor.com/ will be able to tell you if any of your domains have been blacklisted. It’s a paid subscription site, but they have a free trial.

http://www.habeas.com/ will audit your email practices and see if you qualify to be included in their “Habeas Safelist for Senders”. If you do qualify, then you’ll be whitelisted in about 5 million email systems.

http://www.goodmailsystems.com/ works in much the same way as Habeas. They make sure you use proper emailing practices, and if you do then they’ll get you whitelisted.

That’s all for now.

Mark
http://www.homebusinessendeavors.com

This has been around for a while and you may have already seen it, but just incase, watch out for any emails from PayPal telling you that you need to update your membership information.

Usually they will look legitimate with the same design and logos used by PayPal, and there will be a link that you can click on to go to the page where you can update your credit card or bank account.

Don’t ever click on that link. PayPal will never send you an email with that type of link in it. They always suggest you go to your account by typing the URL into your browser and logging in that way.

Here’s where it gets really slick: since a lot of people know about this scam, the scammers have started adding a section that says something about how PayPal is very careful with their security, and how you should watch out for fake emails that aren’t really from PayPal, which kinda makes them seem legit. Slick and scary.

So the lesson is this: log in to PayPal through the normal means and check your personal information that way. Don’t click on any links in any emails that want you to update your accounts. You’ll regret it.

Stay safe

By the way, if you are starting to add video to your website, then it’s probably a good idea for you to add a video sitemap for search engine optimization purposes. Google has a spot in their help center that tells you how, why and whatever.

Here’s a link to Google’s info:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80472

Most web hosts provide you with site statistics as part of their service, but few of them offer stats as complete as Google does.  And none of them besides Google can be set up to work with your Adwords account to optimize your pay-per-click campaigns.

First of all, you should be analyzing your site stats regularly so that you can see what works best with your sales copy, graphics, audio, video, whatever you have on your website. And so you can see what pages people are visting, what pages they’re leaving your site from, what pages they’re staying on longer, what pages have better bounce rates, and so on.

Secondly, even if you have a great site stats tool, you should look into Google Analytics anyway because of the extra features.

You can add goal tracking to your analytics, so that you can see how many conversions you’re getting. You can link it to your Adwords account, and tell Google what position you want to be listed at based on how well you’re converting at each position. That’s right, it will tell you how many conversions you’re getting at each position that your site is listed at in Adwords. Which is awesome. Take advantage of it.

You just need to add a small bit of code to each web page that you want to track. You can get it through your Adwords account, or at http://www.google.com/analytics 

If you’ve started making your own videos for your website, and you want to distribute them online to the various social media sites (which you should - to get inbound links), then you might want to try out Tube Mogul. It’s free and it’ll take care of the submission process for you, rather than having to go to each site separately and submitting each video separately, which will take forever.

It’s functions are limited in some ways, and that’s why I prefer Traffic Geyser. Traffic Geyser has more features and submits to more websites, and it’s interface it way better, but Tube Mogul is free and good for anyone who’s just starting out.

Check out Tube Mogul here: http://www.tubemogul.com

Microsoft has created this pretty cool new free tool that you can use with your pay-per-click campaigns, or your search engine optimization, or even your market research. The webpage is called Detecting Online Commercial Intention. Here’s a link:

http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/oci.aspx

Put your URL or your keywords in there and see what comes up. The tool will tell you just how well they register as something an internet user might search for with the intention to buy.

So, for example, if someone searches for “buy rollerblades”, then they will have a high commercial intent. If they search for simply “rollerblades”, then not necessarily.

It’s a good tool to help you monetize your website. Check it out.

You can use Google alerts as a way to stay up to date with the news in your industry, which isn’t always easy to do on your own. Google alerts will send you regular email updates about any topic you choose.

It’s also a good way to get ideas for content or see what your competitors are up to.

Google alerts can save you a lot of time with this type of research.

Here’s a link: http://www.google.com/alerts

Take a look at Quantcast: http://www.quantcast.com/

It’s a website that does some site analysis for you. They can tell you specific things about your site visitors, such as their age, gender, income, education and so on.

This information will be helpful to you as market research, so you can figure how to more accurately gear your website towards your visitors, and hopefully increase conversions.

Check it out. Once again, it’s free, so why not?

Take a look at Optiview: http://www.optiview.com/

It’ll test your website for you to see how fast it loads up, and make some recommendations for fixing any slow-loading problems. A faster loading site means visitors are more likely to stay and look around.

Honestly, how long do you stay on a site that takes forever to show up in your browser? My guess is you leave immediately, just like everyone else.

So use optiview to help you fix any problems with your site. Plus, its free, so why not?