The theory behind the Six Degrees of Separation is that all people on earth can be connected together in as little as six steps.
The concept was made fun in the 1990’s, with the creation of The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (oracleofbacon.org) – which is a website that documents how nearly all actors in Hollywood can be connected to Kevin Bacon through no more than six people. I played with the site earlier today and the Hollywood actors and actresses I tested all connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps… That was interesting. Even Lucille Ball connected to Kevin Bacon in only two steps.
Now, I know what you might be thinking at this juncture… That sounds fun and interesting, but what does that have to do with Internet Marketing?
Great question.
Undertakers and Wedding Planners know something that most people do not realize. With a few exceptions like Michael Jackson and Billy Mayes, most people will only have up to 300 people attend their wake or wedding. As a result, the average undertaker and wedding planner will only bring 300 chairs to the festivities.
That’s neat… But what does this have to do with Internet Marketing?
Great question.
If you really have 300 friends and you can tell them about your business, and your 300 friends share your business message with their 300 friends, then in very short order, you will have communicated your business’ sales message to 90,000 people!

If you’ve listed products on eBay without a photo and successfully sold them – don’t be fooled into thinking you don’t need a photo. You would almost certainly have got more bidders, and therefore probably a higher selling price, with a photo.
If your eBay listing doesn’t have a photo and your competitor does, you will lose out. If you don’t have a photo, potential buyers will be sceptical or suspicious. They will think that you either don’t really have the item for sale or you have got something to hide, i.e. it’s not in very good condition. Without a photo, your listing will not look professional which will damage your business image.
Your listing MUST have a good quality digital photo of your item. If you are selling new products, the manufacturer or your supplier may have photos that you can use. But you must check that you are allowed to use them. Otherwise you could be prosecuted, or at least have your listing removed. Also, if you use the manufacturer’s photo, all your competitors may be using the same photo, so your listing won’t stand out.
Often, when people are just selling stuff from around the house, they will use any old snapshot of the item and you can see all sorts of domestic mess in the background. This is not good enough if you want to run a successful and profitable business on eBay. A good photo will increase the perceived value of your item and attract higher bids. A poor photo will cheapen your item.

What is Google Image Search?
Google has a dedicated version of its search engine called Image Search which helps find images. Claiming to be the most comprehensive image search facility on the web, it has billions of images from websites already within its index. When searching for images, you can tailor the search for various sizes and choose a specific type of image you’re looking for, such as a photo, clipart or head shot.
When clicking on a image, the image will load as a preview in one frame, whilst showing the website the image is from in a frame below. This gives you the option of visiting the website or enlarging the image to full size. Google Image Search is popular. It actually gets more traffic than Yahoo, Window Live Search and Ask Jeeves.
Why is Google Image Search Important To Me? As mentioned, Google Image Search gets more traffic than supposed major search engines in the UK, typically getting more visits than websites such as Amazon and MySpace (Source: Hitwise). This means Google Image Search is a potential source for traffic to your site, and although perhaps not as targeted as conventional search, implies that people are actively searching for what you offer.

At the end of the year, many businesses start to think about redesigning their tired old website to breathe some new life into it. You may even be in the midst of a website redesign right now. If so, the first thing is to make sure you hire a design and development company that knows how to build the infrastructure of the website in a search engine crawler–friendly manner.
Beyond that, you need to address a number of additional SEO tactics before you get too deep into your redesign. The reason you need to keep SEO front and center during this time is twofold: so that you do not lose your previous traffic, but also so that you can gain additional targeted search engine visitors when the new site goes live.
Here are 6 SEO redesign secrets your developer may not know…ignore them at your own peril!
1. Creating Your SEO’d Site Architecture
Search engines look explicitly at how all your pages are linked together in order to determine their place within the site. Pages that are linked from every other page will be given more weight than those that are only linked from a few others. This is all considered a form of internal link popularity, or in Google language, internal PageRank.
Recommendation: During your redesign, don’t bury too deeply within the site any content that was previously bringing targeted search engine traffic. Ensure that any informational content that will be focused on the more competitive keyword phrases (for example, product and service pages) is high up in your site hierarchy.

Internet marketers using article marketing as a traffic building strategy have a new tool in their arsenal. GoArticles.com, one of the Net’s largest article directories, has joined forces with Content Crooner.
12/23/09 (Castro Valley, CA)— Combine the distribution reach and power of a leading article distribution platform with the credibility and readership of one of the Net’s largest article directories, and what do you get?
More exposure, in all the right places, according to Kenneth Vogt, CEO of Content Crooner.
“GoArticles is the perfect partner for us in this venture,” explains Vogt. “Our authors are looking for widespread syndication, which we provide with our article distribution service. They also want deep exposure into particular niches, which is exactly what GoArticles offers through this new feature placement.”
The partnership allows Content Crooner’s clients to not only post their articles into the GoArticles.com directory at no cost, but to purchase additional feature placement in specific categories. This feature placement puts their articles front and center to the site’s visitors who are looking for fresh content on specific topics.

Better known as “Media FLAIR”, audio and video adds an impressive touch of professionalism to your business that makes all other attempts to increase conversions pale by comparison.
We’ll delve into more of the proper implementation of “FLAIR”. This is of paramount importance because even though adding flair can potentially improve the performance of your website more than any other change, if done poorly or incorrectly it can significantly hurt your conversions.
Have you ever been to a website that looked great and offered a useful product then… all of a sudden a crackly and static filled recording of the site creator’s voice blasts through your speakers and startles the daylights out of you? It’s not a fun experience is it? When this happens, the visitor gets a negative taste in his/her mouth about the entire experience and that clearly will not encourage them to make a purchase.
The same goes with video. A video should compliment the site by adding an engaging and multidimensional aspect to an otherwise one dimensional website. The video should set off buying triggers in the prospect and create positive emotions. The video should be fun and informative. It should be easy on the ears and the eyes. Videos that are hard to see, hear or understand will only defeat the purpose of increasing conversions. In many cases you’re better off not putting up a video at all if the quality is poor.

I started thinking recently about how our custoemrs respond to the prices we set for our products and how they put a value on that.
Price is not the major factor in selling, but what I am talking about is how you describe your pricing structure to your customers. You may not know it, but we all have an internal ‘measuring stick’ for how we interact with each other when buying and selling.
A great example of this is in the Alfred Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill who is mistaken for a CIA agent and at one point in the film he is in an auction house surrounded by the ‘bad guys’ who are waiting to grab him.
To avoid capture Thornhill draws attention to himself by bidding in the auction, but with a difference. When the bidding on one item reaches $2250 Thornhill counters with $1500 and when the auctioneer reprimands him then changes his bid and shouts out $1200!
The auction crowd, not used to such unruly behaviour, are clearly agitated and Thornhill gets what he was after when the auctioneer summons the police who escort him off the premises right past the waiting bad guys to safety!
A clever move and funny in the film as Thornhill breaks every psychological rule about how we negotiate price and value with each other. Unlike Thornhill most of us are looking for, and are motivated to find, a good deal when buying.

Social media optimization (SMO) is an essential ingredient within your SEO campaigns. Years ago, social networking sites were little more than an oddity. Today, several of them have received enormous ranking authority from the top search engines. If you are not leveraging them to increase your exposure and communicate with your niche audience, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors. In this article, we’ll describe the influence that social media optimization is currently having on search marketing. We’ll also give you the rules of engagement for executing an effective SMO campaign. We’ll explain what SEO social media is, and the advantage of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.
The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing
Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffic. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search engine marketing.

Cutting Rank: Improper Domain Name Redirects
Let’s face it, compiling a list of this type is always subjective. Trying to figure out what to include and what to leave off can have you second-guessing yourself, more than a few times.
But in the end, being only human, you do the best you can, and let the readers judge for themselves. Anyway, I present to you my listing of “The 10 Biggest SEO Myths Exposed.”
1. Search Engine Optimization will put you on the first page of Google.
This is without question the biggest SEO myth floating around the Internet today. Here’s the truth: SEO is a tool – nothing more. And any tool is only as good as the person using it. That’s why some people have success with SEO, and others don’t.
Can SEO help get your website on Google’s first page? If the person doing the optimizing is competent, sure, it can help. But it’s far from guaranteed.
Here’s why: There are far too many variables that are involved in the ranking of a website – not the least of which are the age of the domain, relevancy and quantity of quantity of content, number and quality of inbound links, competition, and of course Google’s ever-changing algorithms.
2. Getting on the first page of Google will guarantee your success.
This is false. Let me tell you something: Getting on the first page of Google guarantees absolutely nothing!

The point of a brand is to create an instantaneous association in people’s minds. The Nike ’swoosh’ brings to mind footwear, athleticism, and Michael Jordan. The Toyota ‘bull’ logo evokes images of compact cars, foreign business competition, and new ways of doing things. The name Budweiser reminds us of everything from the actual beer to those clever talking frogs, and the ‘wassup!’ advertisements.
These are cases of successful, memorable branding. Michael Jordan is retired from professional sports, the frogs haven’t been on television in years, and wassup has almost faded from day to day use in the American pop culture vocabulary. However, every one of these elements remains identifiable, and mentioning them to most people will get the typical, ‘oh yeah!’ response to memories of clever marketing, cementing the image of the brand in the viewers’ minds.
Branding is the creation of these memories. However, recollections of a product being indisputably linked with a particular name, image, or slogan can be a double-edged sword.