Platform Bed Press Release in Action
2006-09-06 18:40:00
As we know, when promoting a new site, writing an article is an cost-effective way to spread out the word. In an article, you need to raise a question and concern to your audiences and then provide a solution to the question. Most often, the solution you provided is a link back to your site or product and you articulate how your site or product can help them solve the question in real life.Similar to writing an article, writing a press release is also a great way to advertise your site. Unlike writing an article, press release must be "newsworthy", which means it must generate interests to the media. Additionally, it should answer "what", "when", "where", "why" and "how".To get more exposure to BestPlatform
Beds.com, I decided to write a press release and with the help from my Wholesale Furniture Brokers, it goes live today. You can view the press release at Platform Bed
Press
Release
Online. I attached a screen shot for your convenience.In the google, yahoo and msn news section, th
Read more: Action
, Press Release
SEO Blog: A Google PR and Backlink Update
2006-07-22 20:59:00
As many of you have seen, Google
did a PR update in July and a lot sites and pages therefore have experienced ups and downs of PR. Sadly, the PR of this blog dropped and I think the reason is because i am hosting this blog on blogger.com. A lot of discussions have been around talking about all the advantages and disadvantages of having blog on your own domain, i will not get into that topic here. What I care about is the PR of bestplatformbeds.com which has been boosted to 4, which is a pretty good PR for a site that has only been online for about 4 months. Other than the PR update, Google also updated the backlinks. If you do a link: www.domain.com you should see something different. I have seen updated backlinks to my site: Platform Beds Shopping Guide counted by Google. A lot of people complained about the fact Google does not show as many as backlinks as it is shown on Yahoo and MSN. Google does put more weight on the quality of your backlinks and the age of your backlinks. You als
Read more: SEO
, Backlink
, Update
Place BuzzBooster on Your Site
2006-07-18 18:31:00
Whenever you start a blog, you should marry your blog to feeds . To let other people know immediately whenever you updated your blog and keep your readers become returning audiences, a feed would be the best solution at least for now. If you have a site or another domain, integrating blog to your site is a great way to promote your blog especially your blog is relevant to the topic of your site. You may even get returning audiences if they become interested in your blog.I just found this great feature in feedburner called "buzzbooster". In general, BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed's content as go-anywhere HTML and you for your convenience, it gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates. By filling variables, you can have full control over how many blog headlines you want to display on your page. As you update your blog, the content on your page will also get updated. You can view how that blog looks like on my site at Platform Bed Blog, and I also t
Read more: Place
Back To The First Page of MSN
2006-07-14 17:24:00
I don't think any of you would have noticed that the rank of the primary keyword Best Platform Bed was targetingï¼"platform bed" dropped to the 3rd page on MSN(I did not expect to get ranked well on Google, since there is a "sandbox" there). At that time, I reanalyzed the title, meta tags and keyword density of the top 10 sites on MSN and accordingly, I optimized my site again based on this analysis. However, the ranking remained the same and I started to get frustrated. I was telling myself to be "cool" and "let it go". What behind this "cool" is the fact that I am telling myself do not over optimize the site, which is to say that don't always change stuff like title, meta description, keyword density... these onpage factors whenever you see your site got dropped. Give the SE some time to pick up the changes and pray if you like....Now, my site gets back to the first page on MSN if you do a search for the keyword "platform bed" on MSN. http://search.sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx?
Read more: First
Look Beyond SERP on Yahoo
2006-06-28 20:16:00
Today, right after Google, Yahoo
is one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month and that's why webmasters are all trying their best to get a high ranking on Yahoo. Let's look beyond SERP, other than organic search, there are some other ways you can promote your business on Yahoo. * Mobile Site Submission * Podcast Submission * Yahoo Directory Submission * Media RSS Feeds * Yahoo AnswersMobile Site SubmissionThe code for creating a mobile web sites is either xHTML, WML, or cHTML. As there are way more cell phones today than computers, it is a good idea to prepare your web site to be easily viewable on cell phones. Thus, people can view your web as long as they carry their cell phones.To get your mobile site indexed by Yahoo, enter the URL on their submission page. Only the top-level page is needed, the Yahoo Crawler will explore the rest of your site from there.Podcast SubmissionAccording to Information Week, podcast users are expected to reac
SEO Marketing: Add Del.icio.us to your blog/Site
2006-06-22 17:30:00
Have you ever heard of Del.icio.us? If you did, are you taking advantage of that?The following are excerpt from del.icio.us/about"What is del.icio.us?"del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's. Usedel.icio.us to: Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web. Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues. Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy. Add this to your site and if someone likes your content, he or she can save this to his or her favorite item. This works kinda like a RSS feed. What makes it more exciting is that once someone add it to his or her favorite, the tag will appear on the homepage of del.icio.us and if someone else there find the tag appealing, he or she can save it to his or her favorite. Thus, it is a great way for you to acquire one-wa
Read more: SEO
, Marketing
Marketing SEO: 10 Ways to Promote Your Blog
2006-06-20 21:23:00
Yesterday, I read a newsletter talking about promoting your blogs. It shows 10 blog tools that can help you market your blog. Personally, I think it is very helpful and I believe that you probably have known most of them. But there maybe always something you never thought of, so let us take a look:10 Essential Blogging ToolsBy John Jantsch (c) 2006Feed ReaderThe best way to learn about blogs and blogging is to read, or at least scan, lots of blogs. One of the wonders of blogs is that you can have every new post from every blog you want to read delivered to your desktop or to online location via RSS, so you can easily read and scan the posts of many blogs in a very short time. Newsgator is a good online choice for feed reading and also has a version that integrates with Outlook. I use a frëe online service known as Bloglines.Subscriber CenterYou need to make it easy for your blog visitors to subscribe to your blog's RSS feed - so they can read your blog in their favorite feed reade
Read more: SEO
, Marketing
, Promote
Platform Bed Forum Goes Live
2006-06-15 20:59:00
After implementing some basic SEO techniques and with a high ranking on MSN, The traffic to www.bestplatformbeds.com has dramatically increased over the past two months. Therefore, I decide to take my site to another level by allowing a more open and easy interaction with my audiences. The easiest way for facilitating the interaction with my audiences i s to build a forum where the audiences can hang around and post any questions they have about platform bed. In this way, audiences can help each other and they can easily share their experiences with each other. In the forum, i also included a section just for platform bed manufacturer such as Lifestyle Solutions and Rizzon Furniture so that online shoppers will be informed quickly if there is any new styles available from the manufacturers.To view my forum, please visit : Platform
Bed Forum
This is a snapshot of my forum:
Read more: Platform Bed
Online Marketing - Submit Your Video and Put On Your Site
2006-06-08 18:03:00
Other than some traditional online marketing techniques we have seen over the past 10 years, such as on page & off page optimization for top rankings, press release, PPC and online blogging, we are seeing more and more people adopt "multimedia" to get more exposure and response to their business and products.Besides your favorite site for submitting the video and pod cast, you should definitely submit your video to Google and Yahoo. Additionally, you can get a code that you can simply put on your page and show the video on your site. Since the video is not on your server, so you do not need to worry about the possibility of slowing down your site. By adding a video and especially if a third party can be present and tell people about all the "cool" stuff of your business, you will be able to gain a lot more credibility than just putting plain text on the site.Below is my sponsor's (as you probably already know - Wholesale Furniture Brokers) first TV commercial and I copy the video code
Read more: Marketing
, Submit
, Online Marketing
Running Contest to Promote Your Site
2006-06-01 18:01:00
Bestplatformbeds.com's sponsor - Wholesale Furniture Brokers starts its official $3000 grand prize contest today in hope of generating more traffic. As we know, there are many forms of online marketing tactics such as online blogging (what I am doing now), search engine optimization, ppc ads and even word of mouth. But some other forms of marketing can also be effective depends on the type of your online business and how you implement the strategy. Personally, I have never experimented tactics like sweepstakes, affiliate programs or contest to promote my site. So it will be interesting to see how they run it and promote this contest and what kind of result they will get. I am sure I will be able to learn something from this contest. They have issued a press release and you can take a look if you are interested. If you want to know more details about the contest or you want to learn something from this type of marketing, you can visit their contest page.
Read more: Promote
, Contest
Write PR to Increase the Exposure of Bestplatformbeds.com
2006-05-26 19:49:00
If managed properly, PR can be a great way to bring more free traffic to your site. Thus, I decided to write a PR for my site http://www.bestplatformbeds.com/. But what do I mean when I mentioned "if managed properly"? Well, what I meant is that you need to know how to write a good PR and then promote it properly.A press release is targeted toward journalists and reporters. It is not promotional in the least and provides facts about a product/service/event/topic. It should answer the reporter's question, "Why would my readers care about what you're saying?" Generally speaking, the purpose is to have the reporter use your release as-is, have him/her pull a quote from your release for a feature article they are writing or have them contact you for an interview.In my press release, I answered questions such as the intention of creating the site, why platform bed have gained popularity in North America… etc. The following is the press release I wrote for http://www.bestplatformbeds
Read more: Write
, Exposure
SEO for Google
2006-05-07 08:13:00
Continuing from our last two lessons - SEO
for MSN and SEO for Yahoo, I am going talk about SEO for Google
today.Google, as probably all of you already know, I don't even need to mention that Google is currently the largest of all the search engines It is estimated that Google is responsible for 42.7% of all online searches in March of 2006. For this reason people tend to view Google as the engine to rank on.So again, based on my experience, observation and research the major factors include:BacklinksAgeContentHow it fares in the resultsBacklinksMore than on either Yahoo or MSN, backlinks are of special importance to Google. More importantly, Google's methods for calculating the weight of backlinks is very different than either of the other two engines. As I've noted before, if you do a search "link:www.yourdomain.com" on 3 different search engines, most likely, you will find that Google count the least backlinks. Probably you've already heard that Google only count your backlinks
SEO for Yahoo
2006-05-01 00:36:00
Last time, we've talked SEO
for MSN. Today, Let's take a look at Yahoo
, which is considered as the second largest search engine right after Google (Which I will talk about in my next lesson).The algorithm of Yahoo is based on Inktomi that Yahoo purchased in 2002 as part of their plan to stop serving Google results to search queries. The major ranking factor for Yahoo include:Keyword DensitySite StructureAging DelayLink PopularityKeyword DensityAs noted in the article on MSN, it would be unwise to specify a keyword density for you to target on your website. You may want to use some SEO tools to find out about an average value of keyword density for the sites ranked in the top 10 places in Yahoo. As far as I am concerned, to rank well on Yahoo, you should have a relatively higher keyowrd desity than the situation you want to optimize for Google. But again, keep in mind, always put your audience in the first place, don't just put keyword there to increase the density where it does not
SEO for MSN
2006-04-23 03:54:00
Well, Let's hear some good news. I found that my site www.bestplatformbeds.com get ranked pretty well on MSN for the major keywords I was targeting - "platform bed" and "platform beds". But when I did a search on Yahoo and Google, It ranked probably somewhere around 150. So what is all the fuss about? Let's see explorer how these 3 search engines determine the ranking a site and the differences of the algorithm. (Based on my observation and my search)MSN:On site: the quality of contentthe internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together)the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrasesTitle, headings and meta tagskeyword densityThe quality of the content referring to the attractiveness of your content both to search engines and your audiences. If you content is unique, of great value to your audiences (attractive to your audience), have at least 200 words, and have your targeted keywords stressed(at
Read more: SEO
SEO Vs Usability - All about Content
2006-04-09 01:04:00
In the old days, we've learned all the tricks for SEO
, such as include keyword in your h1 or h2, bold, italic your keyowrd, have a proper keyword density on your page. But, have you ever thought that what if some of the things you do does not make too much sense to your audiances? In that case, do you still want to keep them to make search engine happy? In my opinion, content should be created that is intented to make your audiance happy, not search engines. Keep in mind, if your audiance like it, finally search engine will like it too!Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Usually, you may think of having a content that is no less than 200 words. Search engines may have problems to find out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, and ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings. In my website, http://www.bestplatformbeds.com On most of my page
Read more: Usability
, Content
Platform Bed Shopping Guide is Out of Sandbox
2006-12-09 19:31:00
Well, all the hard work starts to pay off. I have found that the traffic to my site Platform
Bed Shopping
Guide
got tripped during the last few weeks. What's all about that?By using Google Analytics, I found 80% of the traffic is from Google search! Isn't that amazing? Specifically, I found that the key word "platform bed" and "platform beds" ranked #13 and #15 respectively. I used to have these key words ranked well on MSN and Yahoo, but I value the ranking much more when it is on Google simply it is so much harder to get ranked well on Google than on Yahoo and MSN.So here I would like to take this chance to tell all the web masters that, keep working on your on-page and off-page optimization and do not give up simply because you did not see a boost of the ranking. If you keep adding fresh and quality content and building quality inbound links to your site, I promise that some day you will see your site get recognized by Google. Once Google recognize your site, sooner or la
Read more: Sandbox
, Platform Bed
SEO no-no: Things you should avoid
1970-01-01 00:59:59
There was times when people trying to trick the search engines and it worked for a while. But these old tatics that worked well before should never be used today. I am going to talk the strategies that you should stay away from.some on page strategies:hidden textalt image spammingmeta tag stuffingother than on page strategies you should avoid, there are some off page optmization strategies that you should avoid:Don't exchange links with a site that has "farm links".Don't use outbound link to site that is penalized by google.Link exchange with a site that irrelevant to your site will not help you but may harm you.
Read more: SEO
SEO Lesson: Use a CSS-driven Design
1970-01-01 00:59:59
Guess what!! Just a few 1 week ago, my site bestplatform beds.com only have 1 page indexed by Google but when I check it today, I have 29 pages indexed now!! I am so happy and I know that I should thank for the CSS design. When I first started my platform beds site, I used java script for creating my lovely top navigation buttons. Sure it really looks nice and attracting with all the rollover effect. With a bunch of java scritp there, poor Google bots can not find all my sub pages. So I decided to use CSS to redesign my navigation system. After redesigning with CSS, I am still be able to create the same stunning effect but more importantly, it makes all my sub pages "visible" to search engines.Just a slight change can really makes a big difference. You can see my new CSS-driven site: Platform Bed
Read more: SEO
SEO-lesson: Should I Change My URL?
1970-01-01 00:59:59
Yesterday, I just came across an article talking about optimizing onpage factors. One of the factors the article mentioned about is the way naming your URL. When I created my site 2 months ago, for consistence, i used all underscores for my subpages; for example, for my platform bed store page, i named it bestplatformbeds.com/platform_bed_store.php But according to that article, hypen is better than underscore becasue most search engines treat hypen as space, so to search engine, a hypen will be like "platform bed store". Unless you are targeting the keyword "platform_bed_store" then it is better to use underscore in your url. Just when I want to change my URL and use 301 redirect for my pages, I got some other advice from the forum that changing URLs should only, only, only be done for a really, really, really good reason and in my case it will be like SEO
suicide. URL has a minimum effect on your ranking, if any at all! Just want to share with whoever considering change the URL
Read more: lesson
, Change
SEO lesson- Don't follow SEO Content Optimization
1970-01-01 00:59:59
When talking about SEO
, alsmot every one knows what should he/she do to create a title, keyword, description and page content that is SEO-driven. We know the the common tricks such as using keywords, using H1 headings, or using bold font to stress your keywords. However, when constructing our page content, what we should focus on is our targeted audiance instead of search engine. If you get too obbsessed with SEO, you may tend to place and stress your keywords in places even though it does not make much sense to do so. In one word, our content should be sales-driven or customer focused instead of SEO-driven. Some gereral guidelines you should follow when creating your page content:Know your targeted audiance, always!If possible , make emotional appealPlace keyword where it make sense to your audianceMake it flow!Spell out the benefits instead of just listing features of your productsAs search engines getting more and more smart, they won't just simply look at how many times does you
Read more: lesson
, Content
, Optimization
SEO Lesson-Quality Inbound Links
1970-01-01 00:59:59
What is inbound links? It is the link that points to your site from another site. Google and other search engines will take quality inbound links into account when determining how imporatnt or relevant your site is to a specific keyword you are targeting. The more inbound links you have, your site will be more valuable to search engines.However, be careful, these links need to be "quality" inbound links. What do we mean by quality here. A site might provide quality inbound links to you if it meets the following criterion:1. The page is well designed and is informative2. It has a decent PR3. It is relevant to the content on your page4. The links that provided from his site must not be far from its home page level5. You are in control of how your link can be displayed, otherwise, they may make your link "invisible" to search engines.As with inbound links, we also have the concept "outbound" links, it is not as important as inbound links to search engines, but I will talk about it tomoro
Read more: SEO
, Quality
Where to put the keyword "platform bed"?
1970-01-01 00:59:59
Yesterday, I talked about how to find your approriate keyword. Now it is the time to place the keyword. So for my site Bestplatformbeds.com, where would I put the keyword "platform bed"? Generally, there are 3 places where we can put the keyword. First, I will put "platform bed" on my page title, this is one of the places that search engine gets clue what your site is about. Second, and obviously, I will put the keyword in my meta keywords, 10-15 will be an approriate amount. Third, I will put in meta description. In meta description, try to write the most concise and keyword-heavy sentence that describe the site, and it usually should be less than 30 words. Other than the above 3 common place, URL can be another place you should target on. For example, if I have a page for platform bed design(actually I do), I will name the URL http://bestplatformbeds.com/platform-bed-design
1970-01-01 00:59:59
Create Navigation Systems that Search Engines Can Read
1970-01-01 00:59:59
When building your navigation system, make sure search engines can "read" it. Sometimes, what we want to do is to use rollover effects or flash buttons to make make it looks fancy and "high-class". However, if you create your navigation system in that way, it will be invisible to search engines. Because usually these techniques requires the use of Java script, which is something that seach engine robot will ignore. If you do want to use Java scripts to create some eye-catching effects, then follow some tips below:1. Make sure you have the text link appear on some other places in the same page2. Don't throw all your Java script into one page, make an external file to store the script, and use php code point to the files that contain the Java scripts. (I also have a blog talking about php)3.When you use images as buttons, make sure write the corresponding alt tag for imageIn some other cases, you may want to block search engine robots crawling your page when you have a page that is und
Read more: Search
, Systems
, Navigation
SEO Lesson-Manage your dynamic page URL
1970-01-01 00:59:59
What does people mean when refering to "dynamic web page"?? It is not about something "dynamic" as we might think, such as rotating image, some flash. Here, "dynamic" simply means the web page is connected with a database and some other language other than html is required, such as php and asp. Since we are talking about SEO
, we will not get into detail thses server-side language.Now, suppose my url looks like this:http://www.bestpaltformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php ---this is fine to any search engineshttp://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed.php?png=2---This is still ok, at least with some of the search engineshttp://www.bestplatformbeds.com/platformbed/retrobed?&ID=2234=CAD&=ID_97Now, this kind of URL will cause me some trouble. A lot of parameters are contained in this URL. Thus, this page may not get indexed by Google or even if it get indexed, it would not get ranked in the top 30. So how can we get it fixed?1. Modify URL so they does not look like they a
Read more: Manage
How important is a good night's sleep to people?
2007-03-23 20:46:00
A few days ago, I read an article on cnn.com - "Is a good night's sleep worth $50,000?" that I think I should share with all my audiences here. First of all, I was really stunned by the fact that mattress is actually costing more than cars and college tuitions. Vividus bed, which was produced by the Swedish manufacturer Hastens, cost approximately $50,000. Can you imagine that? I am wondering what is the mark-up on this incredibly priced mattress? Is it 100%, 200% or even more than that....?Not surprisingly, since people
are valuing more towards a good night's sleep, the market value of the wholesale mattress industry has increased nearly 40 percent, climbing to $6.4 billion in 2005, according to the trade group International Sleep Products Association. The luxury market makes up much of the trend here. Premium-priced mattresses, which costs more than $1,000 -- represents 21 percent of sales in 2005.The driving force of the supply has always been the demand. The higher demand to the
Bedding Industry: One in Three of the Households Don't Buy
2007-03-30 19:53:00
The article "buying gap data reveal big bedding opportunity" reported by FurnitureToday shows that the bedding has the third highest buy-shop ratio of 71%.What does that mean? 71% of people who shop for bedding actually bought the item. This does look like a good number to most of the marketers. However, if we look at the other side of the story, there are 29% of people who just walked away. An estimated of 4.8 billion was lost last year in the bedding category.That does represent an opportunity to the bedding industry. Before we start thinking about how the marketers can further bump the ratio up a bit, let us take a look at the main reasons that caused the "walk away without action taken":Many consumers are confused by the shopping experience. They see beds have very similar components but offer only slight differencesThey see beds that are almost the same with a large price gapThey walk away for more choices, but at the end, they decide to delay the purchaseWe should wait to see how
Read more: Bedding
, Three
It is time to move this blog
2007-08-17 00:59:00
Well, I've had this blog for over a year I have decided that it is time to move this blog. For those of you who'd be still interested in the news of bestplatformbeds.com. you can check platform bed blog here. For those of you who would like to keep updated on SEO news and techniques. You are welcome to look at my new SEO blog here. I will keep it updated regularly and all suggestions are welcome.
External Links influcing the search engine ranking
2007-08-27 23:02:00
Seeing so many subscribers still interested blog, i have decided to keep posting here. So welcome come back and let us learn more together. I am going to talk about the external factors can influence the search engine rankings of a web site today:-Quantity, quality, and relevance of inbound links- Link churn- Link acquisition rate- Link anchor text and surrounding copy- Reciprocal links- Number of links on a page- Semantic relationships among links on a page- IP addresses of cross-linked sites-TLD of domain name for a link- Link location- Web standards compliance- Detrimental “red-flag” factorsQuantity of Inbound LinksA site with many inbound links is likely to be relevant because many people voted for it by placing the link on their sites. There are some caveats here with regard to whether the links are detected to be part of an artificial link scheme, and quality is also a concern as explained in the next section. However, more is generally better.Quality of Inbound LinksA popu
Read more: External
External Factors for Search Ranking Position
2007-08-30 00:14:00
Reciprocal LinksA long time ago, webmasters used to trade links strategically to achieve radical improvements in rankings. This created an artificial number of self-serving votes. Over time, search engines became wiser and they devalued such reciprocal links. In response, search engine marketers created link-exchanging schemes with multiple parties to avoid detection. Modern search engines can detect such simple subterfuge as well. That is not to say that reciprocal linking is bad, but it should be balanced by several one-way links as well. The combination of the two models something more natural-looking and will result in higher ranking.Number of Links on a PageA link on a page with few outbound links is generally worth more than a link on a page with many outbound links. This concept is also implied by the formula for Google’s PageRank.Semantic Relationship among Links on a PageA search engine may assume that a page with many links to pages that are not semantically related is a li
Read more: External
, Search
, Ranking
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