Proposal

[Martin Francom]

One of the important marketing statigies that a programmer must do is to be able to get your product in front of potential customers.  This is not always the easiest thing to do when you have a low advertisng budget. Being on the first or second page when doing a Google search for the most likely search key words for your product is essential to success.

For instance I just did a Google for "PowerBasic Tools"  and the top listing on the first page was for "FireFly Software"  At first I thought wow, Paul is really on top of things.  Then I clicked the link it took me to:
    Informavores.com/Firefly-Software     

Oops, this is not helpful for Paul.

I would like to propose that we PB/FF3 customers work to gether to help improve our search placement.  One thing that we can do is have a links page on our web site to each others website.  How many links from our sites that point to your site is on criteria that is use by search engines in determining ranking.

Would other FF3 customers be willing to put a link page on your website which links would point to other PB/FF customers web sites?

Paul, would you be willing to put a links page on your website?

I would be willing to build and maintain the links page and attach a copy of the links page here.  All you would need to to is copy the links page to your web site and place a link at the top of your main page to link to the link page. 

If you are willing to do this, please add a message here as to how you would like your link to be.   I suggest using the best key word for your web site and your main page URL.

   

[Paul Squires]

Hi Marty,

I may not disclose this much but I do have a fair amount of experience with Google/Yahoo/Bing placement optimization. One of the sites my friend and I started in March went to the first page of Google in about a month (it was a baby nursery site that we since moved away from).

I invested in a program called Market Samurai which greatly helped track keywords, competition and search engine rankings. An excellent product that I highly recommend to anyone interested in internet marketing.

Now that the new FireFly website is up and running I will start to optimize it for search engine traffic. Here is a couple of nuggets of information that I learned about optimization:

- Links are good, but it depends on the type of link. Reciprocal links used to be a big deal but Google realizes that they are used to manipulate rankings so they have MUCH less weight than they used to say 5 or 6 years ago.

- One way links are better. Part of an internet marketing group that I belong to has a product called 3WayLink Blueprint. The system is automated and generates a "gradually" growing link page on your site that points to other sites belonging to the system. These links all link forward rather than forward and backward. The links are also relevant in that you are only linking to sites in the same general industry as you are.

- Social media sites (the Web 2.0 stuff) is huge right now for creating better rankings.

- Blog postings and do follow links are very good.

- Getting your links on high PR (Page Rank) sites is a sure fire way to boost your rankings. I bought a package that had hundreds of PR5 to PR7 sites and explained how to set yourself up on each one with a link back to your product. It made a huge (and fast) difference to the rankings of the baby site.  (PlanetSquires is a PR3 website)

- Article Marketing and submitting them to ezine sites.

- Video and images generate a good response from Google. Google wants to give the "best user experience" to the searcher. That's why they present visual results higher than just sites with "words".

- Squidoo

- EDU links. If you can get links from an EDU domain then that is golden to Google.

A nice little experiment would be to guage where the PlanetSquires site is now and then do a month or two of gradual link building (it has to be gradual or Google will "sandbox" you), and then see where the rankings end. With the PlanetSquires forums now closed then I wonder if that would affect the Google rankings because the spiders would not be able to access the forum content.

Oh, and I do have a links page: 
http://www.planetsquires.com/links.htm

I applaude you for taking the initiative to help boost the visibility of FireFly. I appreciate everyone doing a part in helping FireFly dominate the world.