Everyone who owns a website knows the importance of search engines for drawing traffic. Getting your website rated consistently high on a search engine requires meeting several qualifications over a long term period. Although many search engine optimization services promise results through directory submissions or spun articles that are rewritten using a program, real success requires something called Organic SEO. Just like a plant, a websites reputation in the eye’s of a search engine must grow too. Cheating or using illicit methods to promote your website can cause a short term enhancement in your website’s ranking, but it risks possible blacklisting of the site and is no means for growth.
Naturally growing your websites search engine ranking requires time, commitment, and a solid internet presence. Rankings are driven by three things, how often your website is visited, the content which your website has, and links to your website from other places on the web. Your websites content is what drives visits and linking, so be sure to focus directly on quality content.
If you are considering using a search engine optimization service to enhance your r rankings then only use providers that focus on quality content and web promotion. Avoid those who offer questionably cheap services that don’t focus on long-term improvement.
Consider also actively participating in forum discussions. By creating an active presence under a forum that relates to your website you can often draw interested people who will spend more time on your website than search engine traffic. These people will often be return visitors who will actively use and promote your website.
Another way to establish your authority in a certain topic is to run an active blog. Blogs serve as a medium to bring visitors from others websites to you, and vice-verse for your website. By engaging in this mutual traffic process you are allowing other blog owners to post your links where they feel appropriate. By being a part of the blogging network you are dipping your toe into almost every blog related to your topic.

By naturally growing a website through tried and true methods you can ensure that traffic steadily increases to your website. Even if your website doesn’t draw traffic immediately its better to wait than bring in a small amount of traffic with illicit methods. Now that you know the difference between negative and positive SEO methods it is up to you to achieve the goal.

Forum posting is a tricky endeavor – if it weren’t, you probably wouldn’t be here reading an article about it. But it serves some great functions, including back linking to your site (which is great for your web site’s ranking in the search engines), showing potential visitors what you’ve produced (and hopefully turning them into your dedicated readers and customers), and the best of all… Forum posting allows others to comment on what they like and don’t like about your site.

Obviously, putting a link back to your site (or back linking, as it’s called in the “Interweb Biz”) is a great way to increase the number of links that search engine spiders can crawl on – which is not only good for getting you indexed and attaining higher page rankings. Obviously, the more links you have to your site, the more likelihood you’ll have people actually visiting your site.

On the Internet, politeness is not the all but guaranteed basic nicety it is in the real world. In fact, people can be downright harsh, since you don’t know who they are, where they live, or whether you can beat them up if they hurt your feelings. If you go on a forum and ask, “How’s my site?” be prepared for the occasional person to spend a couple of paragraphs disrespecting everything from your font size, to your color scheme… and if you’re really lucky, they might actually stop ranting and raving long enough to actually read a little of your site.

But since most impressions are formed within seconds, do not expect a genuine content assessment during a thrashing session – and if you get it, be sure to thank the person for ripping your pride to shreds and telling it like it is.

In the case of people who actually care about quality content, they’ll respect you if you can take your lumps and move forward (including actually applying some of their suggestions). And in the case of trolls (people who go around saying harsh things to others, just to get a rise out of the attacked parties and feel smugly superior), thanking them for their attempt to anger you is a high tech way to “kill ‘em with kindness.”

So don’t be shy in those forums. Get your forum posting going, and see how many ways it can help your site grow better.

Everyone who owns a website knows the importance of search engines for drawing traffic. Getting your website rated consistently high on a search engine requires meeting several qualifications over a long term period. Although many search engine optimization services promise results through directory submissions or spun articles that are rewritten using a program, real success requires something called Organic SEO. Just like a plant, a websites reputation in the eye’s of a search engine must grow too. Cheating or using illicit methods to promote your website can cause a short term enhancement in your website’s ranking, but it risks possible blacklisting of the site and is no means for growth.
Naturally growing your websites search engine ranking requires time, commitment, and a solid internet presence. Rankings are driven by three things, how often your website is visited, the content which your website has, and links to your website from other places on the web. Your websites content is what drives visits and linking, so be sure to focus directly on quality content.
If you are considering using a search engine optimization service to enhance your r rankings then only use providers that focus on quality content and web promotion. Avoid those who offer questionably cheap services that don’t focus on long-term improvement.
Consider also actively participating in forum discussions. By creating an active presence under a forum that relates to your website you can often draw interested people who will spend more time on your website than search engine traffic. These people will often be return visitors who will actively use and promote your website.
Another way to establish your authority in a certain topic is to run an active blog. Blogs serve as a medium to bring visitors from others websites to you, and vice-verse for your website. By engaging in this mutual traffic process you are allowing other blog owners to post your links where they feel appropriate. By being a part of the blogging network you are dipping your toe into almost every blog related to your topic.

Pay per click can be an excellent idea for drawing traffic to your site – especially when you have a decent budget, and you know where your target audience likes to surf already. By using careful PPC management, you can grow substantially faster than through mere SEO operations alone.

A lot of content sites allow you to simply arrange to pay a fixed price per click, instead of the more complicated bidding system that search engines often employ. This allows you to set up your banner on someone else’s site (where there are hopefully tons of people who want to see your content) – then when someone clicks your link, you pay a set price to the owner of the other site.

Of course, PPC management is tricky, and getting the best deal for your money involves several important bits of knowledge, which we’ll discuss below.

1. You have absolutely got to know your target audience. While unscrupulous web developers and petty competitors have committed link fraud to the point where there are often software controls in place to prevent such exploitation… there is no software that will cause your link to be clicked if you place it on an inappropriate site. If you write about sail boats, your link most likely won’t get you much traffic on a site about 16^th century French castles.

2. You also need to know, not only who your target visitors are, but what they respond to. People with an ironic bent might enjoy a simple line like “Click this freakin’ link!” Others, on the other hand, might enjoy a short value proposition such as, “Click here for some great deals on organic cheese!” You should also keep in mind that often a picture doubles the impact of what you’re saying (and sometimes it magnifies your impact beyond what can easily be expressed in language). In the case of erotica, for instance, talking about what the lovely ladies do to one another is great – but if your link features the lovely ladies doing something interesting with one another… the impact expands to a level approaching bursting. No puns intended, of course.

Perhaps a picture is worth a thousand clicks?

3. Keep in mind that a click is not an opt-in, and it is not a sale. One of the saddest parts of PPC management is that you must constantly allow for mere visitors, who won’t add much value to your site – maybe they’ll join your list, and maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll take up your offerings, and mayhap they won’t.

PPC management is an art form – but it can be mastered, with dedicated practice.

These days, more than a quarter of all the people who own a cell phone have used it to go online at some point. That’s a very useful statistic if you’ve only been thinking about people who go online using computers, as mobile website design is growing more gigantic (and potentially profitable) every day. So if your website design isn’t WAP friendly (and if you don’t know what WAP is, you really need to brush up), you could be missing out on millions of potential customers.

These days, everybody’s on the go – even a laptop can still be too big and clunky to hump around. But in the modern world, a lot of people would never dare to be out in public without their cell phone. So designing for these phones isn’t just optional anymore – it’s something you need to start into, if you want to keep your existing audience – and grow your audience by letting existing readers show your amazing content to their friends (who can then immediately look you up, and bookmark you for future visiting).

Since mobile friendly web content is so important, let’s review some important facets of making your web site mobile phone friendly:

*Your web site needs to be coded in either XHTML or XML. If you’re not familiar with these types of coding, you’d better get familiar with ‘em, as it’s a software thing that isn’t going away.

*Character encoding should be UTF-8, again for complex software reasons. Just remember that UTF-8 is important (and either learn it, or find someone who knows it), and you should be fine with making the switch to WAP.

*Obviously, mobile phones have substantially smaller screen sizes than their more probably desk bound cohorts. The largest screen sizes on the market are around 640 x 480 pixels (which hasn’t been industry standard on desktops since the early 90s), while the average is more along the lines of 120 square pixels. Needless to say, huge fonts and massive graphics are a real turn-off when seeing all of one requires a lot of scrolling.

*Don’t expect people to enter lots of text. Instead, give them lists of options, or get creative with buttons of some sort.

*Don’t create huge pages. It’s a bad idea to go over 20 kilobytes, as that typically includes either images, or LOTS of text (which most phone surfers aren’t going to read through, anyway)

Website SEO is a complicated business to get into. For one thing, this isn’t like the old days, when one could just plop down some meta tags and call their SEO done for the day. Nowadays, there’s a long, drawn out thought process you have to go through, if you want your site to find your target audience.

Just remember, you do NOT want everyone – you want the right people. The wrong people will try to twist your site into something it isn’t, and all you’ll probably end up doing is diluting your message. And a watered-down message will make your core audience roll their eyes and move on.

But there is a way, not only to get rid of the people who aren’t really into your message, and to (hopefully) attract people who want to read what you have to say (and maybe even get deeper into the subject). Content is the most natural SEO there is. Let’s take a look at the process:

1. Determine what you want to say.

At the end of the day, this is still your web site we’re talking about. And while gathering feedback and taking good advice are excellent tactics… you’re still the ultimate decision maker, and the primary voice of your site. Literally, what you say goes. So don’t be surprised if you say something and it offends or upsets some people – those people probably don’t want to hear any of your message, so they’ll probably not like most of what you say.

2. Determine who your audience is.

You’ll discover early on that there are several kinds of site rats (people who spend time going through a site) – for one, there are the kind who say nothing. Then there are the kind of people who post tons of kindly feedback and comments. And then, or course, there are your critics… and having critics is good, because how you deal with adversity says a lot about who you are. Answer the question, “Who am I writing for?”

3. Get started!

As Yogi Berra might have said, “It ain’t written ‘til you write it.” The first part of any kind of SEO is producing actual content. That means regular blog posting, press releases, writing articles. Get out your name and your opinions, and you will most likely begin to garner some response.

Just keep plugging away at it – sooner or later, you will get cataloged. And if you’ve got a clear enough picture of who you’re writing to, you should attract them as well.

Alright everybody, repeat after me and replace the big underscore with your name: “Hi, I’m _________, and I’m broke.” It’s nothing to be ashamed of, and I hear that cardboard boxes are an economical and well-insulated living space that reduces needlessly-used landfill space. Alright, you’re probably not that broke, if you’re motivated enough to go online and seek out the 411 on how to build a successful web site. But if I were a betting person, I’d be willing to put this month’s take-home that you’re not as rich as you want to be.

And that’s why you want something besides Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.   There’s nothing wrong with PPC, but if you’re like a lot of early-career Internet marketers, your budget just might not allow something that complex. Not to mention that it’s entirely possible you haven’t been able to find your niche yet – and never forget, you NEED a niche. Even massive global corporations don’t pretend they can do everything. And you’re not a massive global corporation, are you?  Maybe you should try a more affordable SEO strategy.

So you want to optimize your site so that search engines can find it, and so potential customers can find your wonderful information (and opt into your e-mailing list), but you don’t want to hire one of those scammy slickster types, who’ll just install a program that’ll “trick” search engines into indexing you well. Good, maybe you’re a legitimate businessperson – there just aren’t enough of those online these days. Or maybe you’re just too broke to take the “easy way out.”

There’s a very inexpensive process you must go through, in order to “naturally” optimize a site:

1. Figure out whom you’re speaking to.

If you’re targeting the parents of small children, discussions of indie bands and the local rave scene might fall on deaf ears. However, discussions of special museum exhibits, and lessons on how to deal with unacceptable behavior in a firm but non-harmful fashion, could garner you a great deal of respect (and a list of people who’ll open your e-mails most every time!).

2. Figure out what you intend to say.

If all you do is a constant marketing pitch, you’ll probably get one or two chances… and if you send these weekly, within a month you’ll have a list consisting of Spam folders and family members too polite to opt out. A far better approach is to actually PROVIDE VALUE, through great information. And if you do that 9 times out of 10 (with a little plug at the bottom, “if you’d like to learn more…”), your marketing message will be received as “more of a good thing,” instead of “another sales pitch.”

3. Make sure your site is congruent with your message and audience.

As many wise people have said, knowing is not enough – you must apply this knowledge, or it sits uselessly in your mind. Does your site connect with the emotions of your target audience? Are you saying something they’ll actually listen to? Are you sure? Pay attention to your SEO efforts, and tweak them when necessary — you’ll reach your goals.

Ed Magedson and Rip-off report have continually dodged the bullet and laughed at the legal system and any sense of consequences that they might have to pay for their actions Says Web Wise Media a Victim of Anonymous Complaints from their competitors. Ripoff Report has been able to hide behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and they have settled out of court when it appeared they were about to finally lose. Mr. Magedson has even chosen at times to not show up in court at all, like he did against Alyon Technologies, surrendering a default judgment in the millions which will never be enforced. This man and his company which has slandered and extorted so many legitimate businesses seem to be untouchable. That is, they were up until now.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO) of 1970 was put in place to help federal law enforcement agencies prosecute gangland and mafia bosses for the actions of those who were underneath them in the chain of command. The rationale in passing it was to help the FBI get to bosses who rarely came near the scene of the actual crime.

Ed Magedson’s history as an individual petty thief and check bouncer is well documented along with his arrest and prison record. In his new profession as a supposed “white knight” against corporate America he has done incredible damage to hard working individuals who up until now have had no recourse against him. The CDA prevents you from suing a company on the internet for content posted by its users. It does not however protect someone like Magedson who allegedly but not proven yet initiates and often authors the content himself. In a number of cases that are pending right now, the protection of the CDA has been ruled out by the court and RICO charges have been filed.

Edward Magedson owns RipOffReport.com, Badbusinessbureau.com, and Xcentric Ventures. All of them, plus Ed personally, have cases pending against them with RICO charges attached to them. GW Equity vs. Xcentric in Texas and Otis vs. Magedson in Nebraska seem to be the strongest against them right now. Another case, Igia vs. Xcentric in New York was placed in default by the Court when Mr. Magedson didn’t show up in December of 2007. That case included a RICO charge and a defamation claim.

The clock seems to be ticking and time will hopefully soon run out on Ed Magdeson and Rip-off Report. The plaintiffs in these cases and government prosecutors are now looking at these instances of slander and libel as more than simply civil matters. There are allegations of extortion, blackmail, and outright deception in almost every instance reported. The RICO statutes put some teeth into any new judgments that will be made against Magedson, Rip-off Report or any other company he attempts to put together. According to official documentation he has never had to pay a dime in reparations to anyone, although there are instances of out of court settlements where the details are not made public.  He’s managed to escape so far but his time is just about up.

SOURCE:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-lawsuit

http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/children-america-inc-v-magedson

http://www.reportsripoff.com/lawsuits.php

Ed Magedson, CEO of Rip-off Report, seems to walk away unscathed every time despite a number of lawsuits and criminal charges that have been filed against him. How is this possible asking one of their Victims Web Wise Media? Reading his website it is clear even without looking at the history that this is a slander site. How can they get away with it and why aren’t more people suing to take them down?

The answer is simple. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) states that, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” In other words, Magedson is not responsible for anything that the users of his site post on his site. Therefore, he cannot be sued for liable. Unless …

There have been a number of complaints that Ed Magedson is initiating the content that is being published at Rip-off Report. The following two cases are still pending against Mr. Magedson and each of them alleges that he created the content on his site about the plaintiffs or somehow coerced or bribed others into doing it.

• Children of America v. Magedson—Filed February 2007 in Maricopa County Superior Court in Arizona under case number CV 2007-003720. The Court ruled that Children of America might have a claim against Rip-off Report because Ed Magdeson created complaints and titles to complaints.
• Whitney Information Network v. Xcentric—Filed January 27, 2004 in Florida’s Middle District Court under case number 2:2004cv00047. This case states that Magedson solicited reports designed to harass businesses.

These are only two of the dozens of cases that have been filed against Rip-off Report, described by many as the “National Enquirer” of the Internet. What set these two cases apart from the others are the strength of the evidence and the inability of the defendants using CDA Section 230 in their defense. If the court rules that Mr. Magedson is responsible for the content he will be liable for slander and have to pay damages determined by the court.

There have been other cases where Mr. Magedson has reached this point and settled the case with the plaintiff. Unfortunately in a settlement the amounts or terms are not disclosed and liability is never officially determined. A good example of this would be:

• Hy Cite v. Badbusinessbureau.com—Filed December 11, 2004 in Arizona District Court under case number 2:2004cv02856. The plaintiff amended their complaint to include defamation, RICO Act claims, and trademark infringement. The trademark claims were dismissed, but the Court determined that the RICO Act claims and the claims that Magedson authored defamatory statements went forward. The case was settled in May of 2007.

So far, the High Cite case is the closest that Ed Magdeson has come to facing justice for what is clearly immoral, unethical, and illegal acts of slander and liable that he commits against legitimate businesses whose only fault is making money that he can extort from them. The RICO statutes that are being seen in cases against Magdeson bring a whole different dimension to the penalty phase of the decisions. RICO allows plaintiffs to sue for three times what their actual damages were and could open the door for criminal charges against Magdeson and Rip-off Report.

SOURCE:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-anatomy-of-a-ripoff-report-lawsuit

http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/children-america-inc-v-magedson

http://www.reportsripoff.com/lawsuits.php

There are a lot of places online where a person can spout off on any topic that motivates their minds and keystrokes. And people will blog about very nearly anything, from different ways to tie shoelaces, to 30-year-old video games (both honorable and lovely topics, in my opinion).

But one thing separates the whiny people from the silent ones – the same thing which separates the berserk crusaders from those who wallow in quiet desperation. It’s just one tiny detail, which ripples out permanently from some people, and remains bottled up within others. The single, solitary difference between one group and another is that one group says nothing, while the other group actually posts in its blogs!

I wish there was an alternative to doing something in this life, but that’s a perfect world in which we do not live. To be heard, you must speak, and to be read, you must write. There’s a reason most weddings feature a moment of tension when the pastor asks anyone who has a reason to stop the proceedings to “speak now, or forever hold your peace.” Those who don’t say anything, will not be heard.

Of course, there are a few technical details beyond just opening up a new blog entry and ventilating some “diarrhea of the keyboard.” Obviously, reasonable punctuation, spelling and grammar will add to your credibility, allowing your potential readers to see you as something more than a “village idiot” type, ranting away like a subway vagrant at any unfortunate passers-by within earshot. But it goes deeper than basic language skills.

You need a plan, if you intend to accomplish anything with your blog posting. And part of that plan involves making regular entries – consider Prime Time TV. Would anyone watch their favorite shows if they only came on every few months… and went off the air for a year or so because the network “didn’t feel like” showing them? Of course not! Consistent blogging might be even more important than intelligent blogging – with enough passion, a barely-coherent message still carries weight.

A lot of people turn their blogs into profit-making machines, by using affiliate marketing principles, garnering advertisers, and through selling their own products and services. So get into blog posting — it could change your life.