Thought you all would be interested in this piece of news: Google’s Matt Cutts has announced they are working on a search penalty for sites that are “over-optimized”. Google doesn’t always preemptively announce upcoming changes so when it happens it’s worth paying attention to…and behind the scenes Google has been trying to make its Googlebots smarter so that websites that are too SEO are knocked down a peg; Google says it is making these changes in order to “level the playing field”.

I highly suggest you read the article and listen to the transcription. Apparently we can expect to see changes in search results in the next few weeks and months.

Does this mean you shouldn’t optimize your website? No! You absolutely should still use SEO. You’d be crazy not to. However, you will definitely fare better with these changes if you can contribute unique, relevant, and thoughtful content on your website(s), blog(s), etc. If the content is great, SEO is not going to hurt the page ranking. If the content is only mediocre but the SEO is top-notch, this upcoming change may force these kinds of websites to fall in the search rankings in favor of websites with better content.

So take a good, hard look at your websites: are they optimized? Excellent (if not, definitely optimize it, you will get more traffic)! Do your websites contribute meaningful content (a good thing), or is every single sentence optimized to the hilt (not such a good thing)? If you answered yes to the second part of that last question, it’s time to rewrite some of your content before these Google changes kick in!

If you have used Google’s Image search recently, you may have noticed that the images enlarge in size as your mouse scrolls over it.

This is a convenient (but not exactly groundbreaking) development for Google Images. In the past, the image sizes were so tiny that it was necessary to click on each and every image to clearly see the picture….but now simply mousing over the picture suffices.

The bigger change is that Google now includes image results on its main search page if  certain keywords like “photos”, “pictures”, or “images” are searched. In addition to the normal search results, there is now a grid of related images at the very top of the page. Tag your photos using optimized and relevant keywords to try to break in to these top image search results! If a person clicks on your image, they will be escorted to your page. This is just one more way to try and direct traffic to your website.

If you don’t see this change on Google yet, fret not – it may not have been released in your country yet. Google did promise that it would be rolled-out worldwide by the end of the month though, so keep an eye out for it!

You probably already know what YouTube is (if not, welcome to the internet!) but you may not know the benefits YouTube videos provide for your internet marketing endeavors. There are plenty of other video services but YouTube is free, intuitive to use, immensely popular, and ranks highly on Google search results.

You don’t need to be a professional to make a quality YouTube video. A short and witty video describing your product or website can go a long way; a video that is highly engaging (even if it’s unrelated to your product per se) can also attract traffic to your website if you include your website’s url in the video or in the meta data and tags.

YouTube indexes its videos much like Google, so the concepts of SEO for Google apply to YouTube as well. In short, this means your video should have: a good title (with great keywords), a thorough description that utilizes relevant keywords, and fill in all of the meta data and tags accurately. Filling in all of these fields are very important: when the Google bots are crawling all over your website, they will not see the video but they will see the text you use to describe your video. Use this to your advantage by using highly searched keywords that will increase your page rank!

Once you make a video and post it onto YouTube, let the world know about it! For example, write about the video on your blog – either by writing a blog post about how you made the video or by merely including the link to the video. You can also include the video’s link in your emails, make a posting on Facebook and twitter about it, and submit it to social bookmarking sites. Another great way to increase your video’s popularity is to make even more videos and linking newer videos to older videos and your website!

There is, of course, the chance that your video becomes wildly popular on YouTube (David After Dentist, anyone? Surely you know Keyboard Cat? Or how about the recently spotted Double Rainbow?) This scenario also presents a unique opportunity to make money. Not only will your video drive traffic to your website or product, but YouTube may invite you into its exclusive partner program, which synchs massively popular videos with related ads and gives a portion of the revenue to the owner of the video. No one is exactly sure what the formula is to get invited into YouTube’s partner program, but the amount page views and the “virality” of the video are certainly factors.

Having said all of this, we now have a YouTube channel with a couple videos (more coming soon). We have noticed that some people who use Micro Niche Finder and/or The Ultimate PLR Article Software have been putting up their own user-created content on YouTube, which we think is great! Many of them even have links to their other videos, their affiliate pages, or their own websites, which are great examples of using YouTube videos to increase sales, traffic, and improve SEO. If you make a YouTube video, feel free to let us know about it! Who knows – it may even get featured on our Facebook fan page or in an email!

Google recently announced that it is now factoring in site speed to its super important search ranking algorithm. This is not a wholly unexpected announcement since Google is in the business of delivering fast and accurate results to queries; as most of us know from personal experience, nothing puts a damper on a searchers mood than a page that takes seemingly eons to load.

Indeed, we have become so accustomed to fast results that slowness has become exaggerated and frustrating – so much so that tests have proven that people will abandon a slow-loading page in favor of another page that loads quicker. Google realizes that this is a reality and has calculated it into its algorithm, so now site speed is an issue for SEO.

Although site speed is now part of the equation, it’s not the most major aspect of successful SEO. Page relevance, backlinks, and such are still more important but site speed could be the difference between being ranked on the first page of search results or being stuck on the second page of search results.

To learn more about Google’s new approach to site speed read this official Google blog post. They also include various free tools that you can use to analyze the speed of your own website!

A website company called Wix has developed a simple and (mostly) intuitive way for users to build flash websites and widgets for FREE. This company is a few years old and not yet as well known as it should be, but the potential for this website becoming an important resource for bloggers and internet marketers alike is tremendous.

Some marketers and bloggers have no need or desire to use Flash and that’s perfectly fine. Yet there are many other who wish they could utilize the effects Flash can provide but either don’t know how to go about writing the codes OR don’t want to pay the money to someone else who does know how to write flash codes. Wix allows its users to be their own flash designer for free (although you can always upgrade to more premium accounts, which obviously offers more benefits). You can use Wix to create not only websites, but also MySpace Layouts (admittedly, not many people use MySpace anymore – but for musicians with music on their MySpace page this could be a fantastic way to add pizzazz), widgets, blogs, newsletters, banners, flyers…the list goes on and on.

Wix is initially slightly overwhelming – although it is to a large degree intuitive it does take a bit of playing around with it to fully appreciate all the effects and options at your disposal. There are thousands of free customizable templates for you to use, and once you pick the theme or template you desire you are automatically taken to a wix editor.

This wix editor is impressive and offers a myriad of features you can add to customize your page. For instance, you can add pictures, videos, and music in addition to adding various widgets including RSS, paypal, Google Maps, comments, and contact forms. You can add shapes, give your webpage animations, and introduce visual effects for user behavior. Naturally you can change colors and texts (and there is a wide variety of unique fonts – I happen to like the “pez” font). You can modify or eliminate menus and headliners, and for particular objects on a page you can rotate, resize, and rearrange to your hearts content.

There is so much more you can do using wix – I’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg. The best way to learn more about wix and all of its incredible features is to explore it yourself.

Wix is also very important for another reason -Wix websites are fully compatible with search engines! Traditional Flash is not SEO compatible, but because Wix has developed a new way to create content (a hybrid of HTML and Flash – even though the Wix editor relies on Flash, there’s no need to create codes) you’ll be able to use Wix-created websites or widgets for effective promotions and optimizations. For websites this is a HUMONGOUS development, but for widget purposes (such as Facebook widgets) the SEO benefit is not relevant.

I was playing around with the Wix features and decided to post my results into a quickie website (this took maybe ten minutes to make). I’m not great at creating flash codes so if I had to do this the traditional way this would have taken me FOREVER.

Okay, forever is perhaps a slight exaggeration, but the fact that this little website only took ten minutes to make (and that’s including ‘mess around’ time to figure out the features) really shows how easy it is to make a professional-looking website or widget quickly. My “mess-around” website with its minimal effects is only the bare bones of a potential website…and with more time and focus it is absolutely possible to make a stunning and SEO compatible website!

I will explore Wix further (and perhaps you will too) and as I discover more about Wix I will share the findings in future posts.

Originally a social-networking site that started in a Harvard dorm room, Facebook’s popularity spread throughout universities and colleges throughout North America. Whereas it was originally available only to college students, Facebook became so popular that it eventually allowed non-college students to join. As of writing this blog post, there are approximately 400 million people in the world that have a Facebook account – and the numbers keep growing (225 million of those 400 million are from last year alone). The astounding, nay, meteoric rise of Facebook has interesting implications for internet marketers.

An increasing amount of people now peruse the internet based either on their friend’s recommendations or their friends recent activities, ushering in a new way of social media optimization called “friend-casting”. The principles behind friend-casting are simple and to explain the process I will use a recent and personal example.

I was on facebook perhaps two weeks ago when a friend whom I know and trust recommended checking out a website with the tagline “putting this in the nursery” (she’s having a baby soon). It was a link to a website that sold wall stickers – adorable ones for children, might I add – and since I have a family member who recently announced that she’s pregnant (good thing they don’t live by each other or I’d have to question the drinking water) and I had a flash of inspiration. Voila! I have found the perfect gift for the inevitable baby shower! This website made a sale (I bought ’Woodland Animals’ wall stickers, in case you were wondering) because my friend posted a link on facebook.

Friend + Link + Facebook = Social Media Optimization (via “friend-casting”)

Think of your own facebook experiences. How often have you clicked on links your friends recommended? How many times have you posted a link, photo, or a video and had someone “like” it, let alone comment on it? How frequently have you commented or “liked” something one of your friends posted? This is friend-casting, and it’s powerful. Friend-casting is the e-version equivalent of “word of mouth” advertising! So important is friend-casting on Facebook that it is considered the premier way to achieve great social media optimization.

Consider this: According to web measurement firm Compete Inc., for the first time ever Facebook directs more traffic to major websites (on caliber with yahoo and msn) than Google. More traffic than Google! I’ll let that sink in…and for other types of websites, Facebook is among the top sources for directing traffic, with Google still being in the lead. Google is still king – no question about it – but ignore Facebook at your own peril. In the same vein, Search Engine Optimization is definitely still important, but Social Media Optimization is too effective to disregard.

Furthermore, a large portion of a person’s web session is dedicated to their destination, with only a small amount of time actually dedicated to the search (statistically speaking – which may or may not be true for you). The amount of time people spend on Facebook has grown too, which effectively means more people are spending more time on the internet with Facebook as their destination.

From an internet marketing point of view, the immediate implications for this development is to start advertising on Facebook in order to reach a wider demographic and drive traffic to your business. For smaller-scale enterprises, this could mean simply sharing links in your status updates or posting the occasional note. It can also mean utilizing a mix of features, such as advertising on facebook, starting a group or a fanpage (ahem…have you joined ours yet?), linking your notes to your blog, linking your twitter and facebook accounts, updating your status with information relevant to your business, and the list goes on!

Remember my friend that told me about the wall stickers I mentioned a few paragraphs above? Well, she is woefully ignorant about affiliate marketing – but you’re not! To toe the FTC line you would have to mention you are an affiliate near the link, but you can absolutely tout your affiliate website or product on facebook via status updates, a note, etc. Your friends will see it on their Facebook feed and by the sheer virtue of being friends on facebook your suggestions will resonate with them and be influential, which could translate into increased traffic and sales!

Social Media Optimization, primarily through Facebook, is one of the new internet marketing 2.0 strategies (“interwebz” marketing if you REALLY want to be 2.0 about it). It’s a constantly evolving field, but if recent developments are any indication, Social Media Optimization will be a vital component of internet marketing for a long time to come.

Micro Niche Finder does a great job at helping you find hot potential niches, but we have noticed that there are some theme keywords that people use when they are in a buying mood. While any keyword could be a money making keyword, some words are more indicative of purchasing than others.

For example, localized keywords tend to fare well. Instead of a keyword like “living room furniture”, “Living room furniture in Chicago” will do well. Someone who adds a localized keyword is hungry for a product – be it informational, which you could cover via an article or blog leading to your product – or a tangible product, one that can be purchased. It doesn’t have to localized on a city level…county, state, even country in some cases works (ex: “Beer Steins from Germany”).

Another kind of keyword that does well is brand names…but this is a fine line to walk. Generally, with brand names, your domain name cannot include the brand name within it because the parent company owns the brand name. So, www.childrensnikeshoes.com would probably NOT be a good idea, because “nike shoes” are included in the domain name and Nike has every legal right to either make you shut down the website or hand over the domain name to them. But if you optimize the keywords “childrens nike shoes” on your website, the brand name keywords (nike shoes) will bring traffic to your website. While Nike serves well for this theoretical example, it probably wouldn’t work as well in the real world without dedicating a lot of time and resources to overcome the stiff competition. Fret not, there are an innumerable amount of brand names to choose from! Furthermore, someone searching for a specific brand name has most likely already decided that they wish to make a purchase, so all you need to focus on is positioning yourself high in the rankings!

Keywords the denote a bargain tend to do well too…examples being “cheap” , “discount”, “sale”, etc. Keywords that highlight uniqueness also do well too, examples being “antique”, “unique”, “special”, etc.

On the other hand, words like “free” generally mean the person isn’t looking to make a purchase, otherwise they never would have included “free” in their search terms. However, free is a great segue to other purchasable goods – maybe the person is looking for a free ebook, which you provide, and then you upsell them either by getting their names on your mailing lists or by offering them a related product at a good price, for instance.

Remember, these are just tidbits of interesting info we’ve picked up along the way, nothing set in stone. The best bet to conquering a niche is to take into account all the factors and data that Micro Niche Finder conveniently organizes for you.

Have you ever wondered how users interact with a list of search results? In the world of internet marketing and SEO we know some aspects of a webpage are important (page rank, title, keywords) mostly through repeated, real experiences and intuition. A study from Cornell University gives scientific facts and figures to support tenets of SEO that we (as in, internet marketers) already knew to be true.

Before delving into what Cornell’s study reveals, it should be noted that this study was done with a limited amount of participants (26 people in total) so the results should not be taken as an immutable law. This study, besides being interesting, is really just a foundation for more scientific analysis to come.

Let’s pretend we are looking up the term “Moroccan furniture”. The Google result will be as such:

Moroccan Furniture - Search Results

This is the entire first page of the search results. The Cornell study illustrates what users will do when presented with the information provided by the first page. They developed a “heatmap” that shows what links were most likely to get clicked and what links people would spend the longest amount of time on. Here is their sample:

Heatmap

The heatmap shows that on average, more than half (56%) of all people will click on the first link, and these people will spend more than a quarter of their allotted time on that website. For internet marketers this is important to know! The next tier, still hot but not on “fire” so to speak, only gets a click through rate of about 13%! That is a tremendous difference in the sheer volume of clicks and visitors, but once clicked through, the link in the second tier still retains visitors for almost as long as the top ranked (25% as opposed to 28%). As the heatmap goes down the list, the percentage of people who click on a link and the amount of time spent on that link decreases with each tier.

If we combine the principle of the heatmap to our Google query about Moroccan furniture, the result would be thus:

Moroccan Furniture - Search Results Combined With Heatmap

According to this study, the higher ranked your website, the more visitors you will receive and the longer they will spend perusing the website. This is certainly a good rule to follow, but understand there are variations. For example, I personally have a “root for the underdog” mentality so I’m more likely than most to give the lower ranked links a fair try. Another example of a variation: sometimes the title on link number 3 is more compelling than the (better optimized) title found in link number 1, so the third link will receive more visitors than would be typical of other examples. There are many variations so don’t fret if your website isn’t the top ranked search result!

Also, this study did not take into account the “Shopping Results” and so its effects on the heatmap are not known. This is also why in the above example there are no colors surrounding it.

Interesting things gleamed from the heatmap – the top two links get more than half the traffic. Position number 7 actually gets the lowest amount of clicks (check the Cornell Google heatmap – .36% of all people clicked on 7^th place link, but 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th place links all received more clicks – 2.91%, 1.45%, and 2.55% respectively). Why is the 7^th place link receiving so few visitors compared to the rest of the page? Well, the answer is unclear for certain, but it seems like because it is located right at the point where users must scroll down to see the rest of the results it gets lost in the shuffle. In fact, only one person out of the study even clicked the 7^th place link. If this holds true after more tests, it will be safe to say that although  being on the first page of Google is great, being the 7^th link is not so good after all!

The 7^th position is even more interesting when you take into account the scanning process, as illustrated in this map

Scan Results

The black line in the middle denotes the rank of the link. So for link #1, the black line is that place value…that’s why there is no gray bar above it, because nothing can be ranked above #1. This is also the same reason why link #10 has no gray bar beneath it – because nothing is ranked lower than #10 on the first page. #10 has a high gray bar above it because all links are ranked above it. Understand?

So when looking at this graph, it becomes clear that being ranked #7 is not entirely beneficial. The first 5 listings are clicked after browsing through 1 to 2.68 listings above and below it, while the 7th listing is clicked after the entire page is examined! This is probably due to the need of the user to scan down and #7 getting lost in the shuffle. You can also see that the number of listings scanned above the clicked result is much bigger than the number of listings below. This indicates that users browse the list from top to bottom, but this is something internet marketers have been fairly confident about for a long time – I don’t know anyone who scans search results from bottom to top.

While this is an interesting study, it’s not concrete so don’t fret if you are ranked the (un)lucky #7 in the search results. While it’s definitely best to be ranked really high (as in, first or second) on the search results, there are all sorts of variables that come into effect that will determine how successful your website is, no matter where you are ranked.

The entire findings are available at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/tj/publications/granka_etal_04a.pdf

We are excited to introduce The Niche Informant, a new subscription service that is very useful in its own right but is especially dominant when used in conjunction with Micro Niche Finder.

Internet marketing is tricky largely in part to the overabundance of misinformation found on the internet. Through our years of being the premier niche research service, we have learned what works (and what doesn’t), some shortcuts (and how to make the ‘longcuts’ not seem so tedious), and most importantly we know what’s worth focusing our energy on and what to let take care of itself.
Without elaborating too much, The Niche Informant offers:

• - 20 profitable niches delivered to you monthly.
• - At least 3 top-notch search engine optimized PLR articles that you can use to create high ranking websites for each niche.
• - Keyword research done by the leading expert in niche research.
• - Competitor analysis to make sure that every niche will be easy and fast to dominate.
• - A list of the highest-paying affiliates in each niche so you don’t have to scour the internet.

Since this is still a new service, it is temporarily being offered for the firesale price of $4.95 for the first 30 day trial subscription. If you love the service (and most do) there is a nominal monthly fee of only $29.99. It’s still a bargain price for the services you will be receiving, but you can try it out for a month for under five dollars to see if it’s right for you first!

If your interest is piqued, click on the following link to learn more about The Niche Informant !

If you want a comprehensive understanding of how Micro Niche Finder works, read through more of the blog postings on this website. However, the following list is a condensed version of the guideline to help you pick a niche!

Market Guidelines:

1.) Exact Search Count:  2000+

2.) Exact Phrase Match <= 30,000

3.) SOC color not red.

4.) If it’s related to a consumer product that can be purchased:
     OCI > 50%

Once again, the best way to use Micro Niche Finder to your advantage is to truly understand how it works and how its features utilize information. This type of information is found throughout this blog, but the list above should definitely help!