Keys To Wealth Creation

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

[workwithmichaelknox]

ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?

robots

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Should I Create A Website?

Websites have become a necessity to almost everyone. People always want to follow the latest thing, be it in fashion, sports, that kind of thing. Companies, businesses, individuals, even young adults have created personal websites with their respective purposes, be it for profit, or for entertainment. What one must consider, however, before creating a website, are the factors in which must be put to thought before doing so, such as the cost, maintenance, use, web host and so forth. Firstly, associating with the cost, we must always try to find an affordable host, not spending too much, nor too little. Regarding the efficiency and server/web host reliability, there are many cases of web hosts not providing the service they had assured other people, some had even shut down and were nowhere to be seen. A cheap host does not exactly symbolize a credible reliability rating, but we must always look for value for money deals. Keep this note in mind, as if you would like a long-lasting website, this would be the first thing to look for. Next, would hiring a professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple websites, we could always pick up the coding, or even use programs, as it is relatively simple. If the website also acts as a portal for businesses, security would definitely be the issue here. However, when it comes to more complex coding, and when you want it to do a tad more than just providing information, hiring help in doing so would be the best way. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key factor in assuring a quality website. Yet again, planning is the key to success, in everything we do. If creating one would boost sales or promote positive implications to oneself, then by all means, go ahead and do what’s best.

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How Search Engines Work

The good news about the Internet and its most visible component, the World Wide Web, is that there are hundreds of millions of pages available, waiting to present information on an amazing variety of topics. The bad news about the Internet is that there are hundreds of millions of pages available, most of them titled according to the whim of their author, almost all of them sitting on servers with cryptic names. When you need to know about a particular subject, how do you know which pages to read? If you’re like most people, you visit an Internet search engine.

Internet search engines are special sites on the Web that are designed to help people find information stored on other sites. There are differences in the ways various search engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:

 They search the Internet — or select pieces of the Internet — based on important words.

 They keep an index of the words they find, and where they find them.

 They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.

Early search engines held an index of a few hundred thousand pages and documents, and received maybe one or two thousand inquiries each day. Today, a top search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day. In this article, we’ll tell you how these major tasks are performed, and how Internet search engines put the pieces together in order to let you find the information you need on the Web.

Web Crawling

When most people talk about Internet search engines, they really mean World Wide Web search engines. Before the Web became the most visible part of the Internet, there were already search engines in place to help people find information on the Net. Programs with names like “gopher” and “Archie” kept indexes of files stored on servers connected to the Internet, and dramatically reduced the amount of time required to find programs and documents. In the late 1980s, getting serious value from the Internet meant knowing how to use gopher, Archie, Veronica and the rest.

Today, most Internet users limit their searches to the Web, so we’ll limit this article to search engines that focus on the contents of Web pages.

Before a search engine can tell you where a file or document is, it must be found. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a search engine employs special software robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites. When a spider is building its lists, the process is called Web crawling. (There are some disadvantages to calling part of the Internet the World Wide Web — a large set of arachnid-centric names for tools is one of them.) In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a search engine’s spiders have to look at a lot of pages.

How does any spider start its travels over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily usedservers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.

Google began as an academic search engine. In the paper that describes how the system was built, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page give an example of how quickly their spiders can work. They built their initial system to use multiple spiders, usually three at one time. Each spider could keep about 300 connections to Web pages open at a time. At its peak performance, using four spiders, their system could crawl over 100 pages per second, generating around 600 kilobytes of data each second.

Keeping everything running quickly meant building a system to feed necessary information to the spiders. The early Google system had a server dedicated to providing URLs to the spiders. Rather than depending on an Internet service provider for the domain name server (DNS) that translates a server’s name into an address, Google had its own DNS, in order to keep delays to a minimum.

When the Google spider looked at an HTML page, it took note of two things:

 The words within the page

 Where the words were found

Words occurring in the title, subtitles, meta tags and other positions of relative importance were noted for special consideration during a subsequent user search. The Google spider was built to index every significant word on a page, leaving out the articles “a,” “an” and “the.” Other spiders take different approaches.

These different approaches usually attempt to make the spider operate faster, allow users to search more efficiently, or both. For example, some spiders will keep track of the words in the title, sub-headings and links, along with the 100 most frequently used words on the page and each word in the first 20 lines of text. Lycos is said to use this approach to spidering the Web.

Other systems, such as AltaVista, go in the other direction, indexing every single word on a page, including “a,” “an,” “the” and other “insignificant” words. The push to completeness in this approach is matched by other systems in the attention given to the unseen portion of the Web page, the meta tags.  Learn more about meta tags on the next page.

Meta Tags

Meta tags allow the owner of a page to specify key words and concepts under which the page will be indexed. This can be helpful, especially in cases in which the words on the page might have double or triple meanings — the meta tags can guide the search engine in choosing which of the several possible meanings for these words is correct. There is, however, a danger in over-reliance on meta tags, because a careless or unscrupulous page owner might add meta tags that fit very popular topics but have nothing to do with the actual contents of the page. To protect against this, spiders will correlate meta tags with page content, rejecting the meta tags that don’t match the words on the page.

All of this assumes that the owner of a page actually wants it to be included in the results of a search engine’s activities. Many times, the page’s owner doesn’t want it showing up on a major search engine, or doesn’t want the activity of a spider accessing the page. Consider, for example, a game that builds new, active pages each time sections of the page are displayed or new links are followed. If a Web spider accesses one of these pages, and begins following all of the links for new pages, the game could mistake the activity for a high-speed human player and spin out of control. To avoid situations like this, the robot exclusion protocol was developed. This protocol, implemented in the meta-tag section at the beginning of a Web page, tells a spider to leave the page alone — to neither index the words on the page nor try to follow its links.

Building the Index

Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages (and we should note that this is a task that is never actually completed — the constantly changing nature of the Web means that the spiders are always crawling), the search engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful. There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:

 The information stored with the data

 The method by which the information is indexed

In the simplest case, a search engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.

To make for more useful results, most search engines store more than just the word and URL. An engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the meta tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial search engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different search engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.

Regardless of the precise combination of additional pieces of information stored by a search engine, the data will be encoded to save storage space. For example, the original Google paper describes using 2bytes, of 8 bits each, to store information on weighting — whether the word was capitalized, its font size, position, and other information to help in ranking the hit. Each factor might take up 2 or 3 bits within the 2-byte grouping (8 bits = 1 byte). As a result, a great deal of information can be stored in a very compact form. After the information is compacted, it’s ready for indexing.

An index has a single purpose: It allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word. The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table’s effectiveness.

In English, there are some letters that begin many words, while others begin fewer. You’ll find, for example, that the “M” section of the dictionary is much thicker than the “X” section. This inequity means that finding a word beginning with a very “popular” letter could take much longer than finding a word that begins with a less popular one. Hashing evens out the difference, and reduces the average time it takes to find an entry. It also separates the index from the actual entry. The hash table contains the hashed number along with a pointer to the actual data, which can be sorted in whichever way allows it to be stored most efficiently. The combination of efficient indexing and effective storage makes it possible to get results quickly, even when the user creates a complicated search.

Building a Search

Searching through an index involves a user building aquery and submitting it through the search engine. The query can be quite simple, a single word at minimum. Building a more complex query requires the use of Boolean operators that allow you to refine and extend the terms of the search.

The Boolean operators most often seen are:

AND - All the terms joined by “AND” must appear in the pages or documents. Some search engines substitute the operator “+” for the word AND.

OR - At least one of the terms joined by “OR” must appear in the pages or documents.

NOT - The term or terms following “NOT” must not appear in the pages or documents. Some search engines substitute the operator “-” for the word NOT.

FOLLOWED BY - One of the terms must be directly followed by the other.

NEAR - One of the terms must be within a specified number of words of the other.

Quotation Marks - The words between the quotation marks are treated as a phrase, and that phrase must be found within the document or file.

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Is SEO Really Worth It? Here’s A Way To Tell

Before we get started, we need to set a few general definitions and assumptions based off what we will be discussing.

We will assume that you know that SEO is not a free service. Unlike the some directories where there is a direct dollar cost for getting listed in certain sections, SEO has no such direct cost. You “buy” listing in certain search engine results by augmenting your site’s code, properly structuring your site , Writing a ton of relevant and original content in the form of articles, video, images, etc and getting outside sites to link to this content.

You have three ways to accomplish this:

Do it yourself

Dedicate some of your company’s resources to doing it

Pay someone else to do it for you

The first two cases carry with them an substantial opportunity cost; that is to say, if you or your staff is dedicating the time to do the tasks listed above, that is time they could be spending doing other things. Both of course are valid options granted that, first, you have the skill set and, second, that SEO Marketing provides more value than the projects that would be forgone by reallocating your resources.

If neither you nor your company don’t have the skills or are dedicated to more valuable aspects of the business, your only chose is the pay someone else to do it for you. Again, there are two choices as follows:

You could hire staff (full-time or part-time) with the necessary skills. This, of course, could mean stuff that goes above and beyond salary such as unemployment insurance, new equipment, more office space, money spent on training, and so forth.

You could contract with a professional agency, such as us (*wink, wink) to handle the campaign and the project.

Well then, our next assumption is that you choose that last option.

This option also happens to be the easiest to analyze because it has a straight-forward cost.

So what is that cost?

Realistically speaking, if you talk to 10 different SEO agencies, you’ll get completely different answers.

But here is how we will estimate cost:

We talk to you to build an ideal customer profile. What we’re looking for is to understand your target audience better. How old are they? Where do they live? What are they into?

We get a list of competitors from you.

We take this information and use it to approximate some key phrases. Upon starting the campaign, we conduct exhaustive, week-long research to pinpoint the best key phrases, but to get a price for our client, we use the customer profile and competition to get a more manageable subset.

The key phrases chosen are what your target audience is using to find you. For example, if you’re a contractor, you don’t want to be listed in the floral section of some directories. The same applies with SEO. You need to appear for the right targeted searches. So with these key phrases at our disposal, we do research to see how prevalent the competition is on these key phrases and where you currently stand against the key phrases. If your key phrase is “home improvement consultation,” and you’re a new company, you’re going to have a lot of work to do because a lot of other companies are using that key phrase for that listing. On the other hand, if you use a low-demand key phrase or are an established company, you may already rank relatively high for that key phrase and our work is much easier.

Based upon this information, we have a pretty good idea how much time and effort we will need to plan to help you reach your goal, which brings us to our final assumption.

Your goal is to get ranked as highly as possible for key phrases that are relevant to your brand message(s), product(s) or service(s)

The effort in this case refers to:

How much content we will have to produce

What level of quality the content will need to be

How much research we’ll have to do to find “underlying” key phrases

How closely we will have to analyze trends and reports

How many links we will have to generate back to your site

How large of a Social Media campaign we will have to generate to spread your content

We have this part down to a science. We know how much it costs us to produce 100 articles or varying length and quality. We know the man hours required for key phrase and analytics research. We know the direct and indirect costs that go into generating your links. We know the direct and indirect costs of boosting your Twitter following to 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 followers.

Now we’re ready to give you a price.

For this exercise, let’s assume your a small to medium sized business in your niche. For number’s sake, we’ll say the cost of a three month Marketing campaign to rank you for your key phrases will be $5,000.(it’ll be MUCH less than that)

Your job is to decide: Is SEO Really Worth It?. That is to say, you need to ask yourself, will undertaking this project add value to your company?

If the answer to that question is ‘yes’ — even if by $1, you should fund the project. If the answer is ‘no’ then no matter what, you should turn down our offer.

But how can this question be answered?

Let’s start with the easy stuff first.

We know from experience, that on average SEO projects that last three months with no on-going maintenance have produced cash inflows for about two years.

We also know that this is a small risk investment. Not to be too braggadocious, but we are extremely good at what we do. Granted people actually want what you have to offer, we’re able to provide positive return on the investment in a rather quick fashion.

United States Treasury Bills historically have the lowest risk of any investment. The mean real interest rate of US treasury bills during the 20th century was 0.9%.

We’re good, but we’re not that good. So, depending on what your product, service or message is, there will be slight difference here, but it’s generally in the 4 to 8% range.

We can also figure out about how much more of the percentage of traffic you can expect from ranking on the front page of Google for your key phrases.

It looks something like this:

We can also use our research tools to find out how many people per month/per year search for your key phrase.

For numbers sake say that there are 1,000 searches for your key phrase, which you rank somewhere on the front page of Google for.

There are 10 spots so that means there is about a 10% chance, that the person searching will click through to your site.

That is the equivalent of 100 pre-qualified prospects.

We will that one new customer is worth $100 net and your conversion rate is 10%. That means you’ll be getting 10 new clients a month for a total net profit of $1,000.00 a month or $12,000.00 per year in the first year.

SEO is a compliment to companies of all sizes and in all fields business, the early adopeter stage of SEO has passed and it is in in its early majority stage. The time make the decision on whether SEO is the right option for you is now so that you can maximize the benefits and profits of this undertaking.

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A Few Marketing Tips That Will Help You With Your Business

It took me years to recognize that strategy based too heavily on superior product was not good enough, and I’m still working, I have to admit, on the critical decision of when to change the plan. So I’d like to save you some of the trouble I previously experienced, and suggest that the following listed are 3 truths that you should know. 

1. Great marketing beats great product.  

This is the grim truth. The full form of this statement is that stellar marketing for mediocre product will almost always beat mediocre marketing of stellar product.

Want proof? look a few of the real winners of this century: they are all marketing driven. Amazon.com, Facebook, Zappos? That’s nothing more than great marketing, they took an idea, product, or service that was already being undertaken by another company and they revolutionized it. 

Apple perhaps, with its “extremely great” products? I would have to argue that Apple’s design as well as Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s success story is certainly more marketing genius than innovative product. There were several MP3 players before the iPod, multifunctional smart phones before iPhone, and tablet computers before the iPad, however, the marketing strategy apple used was unparalleled by any other company before it . 

2. Real people beat real money.

The world is changing at an incredibly fast rate. Big companies spend tons money on big ads in big media outlets, however, people prefer local, authentic and real people. Lots of Davids beat the Goliaths.  People want focused, segmented and local, and they want to identify with an individual in a personal manner and be seen as a person rather than just another number.  

 People care about the company’s story, and the people that contributed to that company’s story.” I believe that. I would argue that Apple’s success feels a lot like Steve Jobs’ success, and Amazon.com is Jeff Bezos’, and Zappos is Tony Hsieh’s. And then there’s Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. There are several examples of this. 

Guess who’s winning in the new world; Facebook, Twitter, and others like them? The real winners are smaller companies run by individuals who share their authentic selves and utilize these larger companies to legitimize their businesses. 3. Consistency beats brilliance.

The full form of this one is: better a sub-par marketing plan which is consistently applied over several years than a series of brilliant strategies, each with a few months tenure, each contradicting its predecessor. 

That’s another one, like the first one here, that I call sad but true. If you define marketing like I do, getting people to know, like and trust you, then you have to realize that it takes being the same you – whether that’s a personalized company you or a larger company brand – over a long period of time. Every time you reinvent your brand, you start back at zero and negate all that you have done before whether it be good or bad. A lot of people might not know this but 10 years ago before Steve Jobs took over Apple it was 90 days from going bankrupt.

Of Course, in real-world marketing you can not keep doing something that isn’t working just because it’s in your plan. But, on the contrary, with any normal marketing strategy you as well as your whole team may be bored stiff with a marketing strategy long before it begins to make a significant impact on those people you want to reach. You need to give it some time, and you need to stick with it until it’s just not working, not just until you’re bored with its implementation. 

Its unrealistic to expect to hit the bullseye with every arrow. But you have to keep trying until you do.