LotusJump Blog

Millions of businesses throughout the world rely heavily on traffic generated through the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!,  Bing) to generate traffic and sales, which is why the latest Google Panda(monium) update has led to chaos around the web. The update, designed to improve the overall search quality for users, was said to have affected over 12% of website rankings. This figure could be on the rise as newer (but smaller) updates seem to be released monthly.

• Original Content - High-quality, unique content has been (and always will be) the way to go when publishing content on a website. One of the biggest reasons sites were penalized was due to a lack of original, unique content. Spend the necessary time to ensure you don’t violate this website “code of conduct” and strive to have at least 500 words of content on your homepage, as well as the rest of your product/service sub-pages. If you are using content that is found on a different site, be sure to link to it and give credit to the source.
• Relevance - This one may sound like a “no-brainer” but you’d be surprised at how many sites there are that don’t match up the title tags/header tags with the content on the page. For example, if your site has a product page about dog food, make sure that the title tags, meta description, and headline tags contain the words “dog food” (hopefully a little more descriptive than that) in them.
• Backlink Profile -Search engines still rely heavily on a website’s link profile to determine how well the keywords rank. Strive to build a diverse backlink profile - don’t try and build all of your links from the same type of source. If you need help finding relevant places to build links, there are a few quality SEO softwares out there that can help. Also strive to integrate social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) into your business since any mentions of your brand via these mediums can lead to positive outcomes.
• Keyword Density/Variation - Don’t try and abuse or manipulate the system by spamming your keywords throughout your site’s content - search engines grow smarter by the minute and can almost always detect this. Instead, shoot to use your keyword (in different variations) about 2% of the total content. So if you are targeting a search term such as “weight loss pill”, use phrases such as “pill that can assist in weight loss” or “losing weight is a problem we all face. Fortunately, there are pills…”.
• Professionalism - Or in other words, make sure that the written content is grammatically correct without any misspellings, sentence fragments, or run-on sentences. To ensure that your site maintains a high level of professionalism, consider having 2-3 people read over each page of content to check for any of these errors. Yes, search engines can detect grammatical errors and may have an adverse effect on your keyword rankings.
• User-friendliness - Is your site easy to read and navigate, and does it offer insightful information (or helpful links)? High bounce rates are suspected to have a negative effect on rankings, so be sure to provide engaging content that will keep the user on the page for as long as possible with a desire to visit other pages of your site. Broken links are never a good thing. Be sure to update or 301 redirect them to their respective pages.

Keep in mind that having just 1 bad or irrelevant page of content can negatively impact the other pages of your site. Don’t get careless! Take some time to give your website a thorough review or get help from a professional SEO company and make sure you are keeping up to date with the latest SEO practices.

LotusJump is currently seeking partnerships with businesses related, but not limited to online marketing & PR, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), web hosting, web design, content generation, social media marketing,  SEO tools, bloggers, and more. LotusJump is an affordable web-based  SEO service that shows users how and where to build relevant back-links, which will help improve the overall search engine rankings for their chosen keywords. Find out how you can become a LotusJump partner or affiliate and start generating a lucrative residual income today!

For those of you out there who consider yourselves deal-hunters, we now have some new price-saving options for our LotusJump Pro and Basic accounts. Instead of paying the normal monthly fee, users now have the option of pre-paying for either 6 months or a year, which can lead to a savings of  up to 25% off the regular cost. See the links below to learn more:

LotusJump Pro account - Discount pricing

LotusJump Basic account - Discount pricing

For many e-commerce companies (including us!) it can be difficult and extremely frustrating trying to rank on the first page of Google for our targeted keywords. SEO can take time (months, even years) depending on how fierce the competition is, as well as many other factors that determine where exactly a site will rank in the search engine results pages (SERPS). To help increase the odds in how favorably Google lists our site, here are some SEO techniques (from the SEO experts) that you should consider doing:

1) Content - Make sure the homepage of your website has content (not just images or flash) that contains your targeted keyword(s). Aim to have at least 500 words of unique content, preferably more. Be sure not to keyword spam in the content and a good rule of thumb is to use keywords (and keyword variations) between 1-2% of the total content. Here’s an example to help clarify: If you have 500 words of content on your homepage, don’t use your keywords (and keyword variations) more than 5-10 times.

2) Title Tags - The title tags are very important when it comes to having Google determine what your website and content are all about. It’s extremely criticalto use your most valued keyword(s) in your title tags. A good rule of thumb to follow is to only use your top 2-3 keywords on your homepage title tags. Anything more may be considered spammy and could dilute any link juice allocated towards the keyword rankings. We also recommend that each page of your website have different title tags, and that the title tags relate to the content written. (For those of you who aren’t sure what the title tags are, look at the very top of your computer screen and examine the words written on the dark blue bar - those are your title tags)

3) Article Tasks - The article and content tasks listed in your LotusJump SEO software accounts are the most important tasks - so don’t ignore those! Freshly written articles that are unique and catchy not only help improve your overall SEO keyword rankings, they can also drive direct traffic to your site, especially if the article goes viral. The easiest way to capture a large audience of readers for your articles  is to write about something that is either funny, helpful, controversial, or causes fear, while relating to your product or services. Sure sex sells, but it can also be quite distracting to readers since it won’t relate to the product or service at hand.

4) Link Exchanges - If you have business partners who own websites, it would be a good idea to ask them to link to your website, preferably with 1 of your keywords as anchor text. This can provide a nice boost to your keyword rankings, especially if they provide a link to you on the homepage of their site. You can offer to do the same for them to help increase their likelihood of doing so.

5) Blog - If your business still doesn’t have a company blog, now would be a good time to get one. By creating a company blog, you can generate a new source of traffic and easily direct them to your company’s website. The nice thing about this type of online traffic is that it should be highly qualified, which should translate into higher conversion rates. Aside from providing an additional stream of visitors, blogs can also help improve keyword rankings through fresh content and imbedding links throughout the content.

* If anyone has their own suggestions or methods for improving keywords rankings, feel free to share them in the comments.

Some LotusJump users have asked questions such as “Are certain task types are more important than others?” or “Should I focus my efforts on any single task?”. While such a questions are hard to answer with precision,  generally it’s best to mix things up and do a little bit of everything, that way you can monitor your incoming traffic (with Google Analytics) and see which techniques are bringing in greater amounts of traffic. [However, as a side note, this does not mean that because a certain link on a page is not bringing in traffic that it does not serve a purpose. Some links do not directly bring in traffic, but they can still help boost website visitors indirectly by helping to improve your keyword rankings in search engines]. So, with that being said, here are some reasons as to why you should balance your SEO tasks and put in time for each of the following tasks:

1) Content/Article Tasks - As the popular search marketing saying goes - “Content is king!” - so it’s extremely important that you dedicate time to creating new content that appeals to readers. The article/content generation tasks generally provide greater benefit (than other task types) to your search engine rankings, assuming that you can write a quality article that is unique and grammatically correct. Search engines love fresh content and since most article submission sites give writers the ability to choose customized anchor text (with a link back to your website), it makes this a win/win situation. Yes, articles can be painful to write and do take some time, but the value they provide for your website and search engine rankings is far too great to pass over.

2) Buzz Tasks - Buzz tasks are great tasks to work on because they direct you to blogs that are talking about your products/services in real time (almost). Aside from leaving a relevant comment with a link to your site on these blogs, you also have the opportunity to interact with the blog owner and potentially develop a relationship that could lead to bigger and better things, such as a guest post or even sidebar link. You’d be surprised as to how many bloggers out there that are willing to help people out, granted you show them some respect/praise and add value to their site.

3) Q&A Tasks - The Q&A tasks are probably one of the best tasks that can lead to conversions. People have questions about certain products & services and if you can point them in the right direction and offer them some useful advice, they are usually more inclined to make a purchase or, at the very least, investigate what your company has to offer. Since most Q&A tasks are time-sensitive, be sure to stay on top of these and answer them as soon as you can, especially if it’s to prevent other competitors from stealing potential clients.

4) Social Profile Tasks - Social media tasks are very important in these latter time since this is the new direction taken by modern day communication. More and more people are getting involved on sites like Facebook, Linked-In, etc. and there are just too many eyeballs to pass up by not creating things such as a company Facebook page. Social profile tasks may not provide the best SEO juice, but they do help promote branding and can even go viral, particularly with comical material or generous giveaways.

5) Directories - Directory tasks are nice because they hardly take any time to complete and some of the more prominent directories (such as Yahoo’s & BotW) can help boost search engine rankings. Even though there aren’t a lot of people who use directories nowadays, they are still worth spending a few minutes to knock them out and help increase your online visibility.

We’re on a roll over here at LotusJump. Last week our developers published reporting features, and this week I get to announce that we’ll be releasing new LotusJump task types!

That’s right…we’ll be adding to our current arsenal of Buzz, Content, Directory, Q&A and Competitive tasks. All this development work is just part of our commitment to provide the best DIY internet marketing tool on the planet. Please feel free to let us know how we’re doing via comment, or by sending an email to support [at] lotusjump [dot] com!

You LotusJumpers have  spoken and we’ve listened…time for some reporting features!

We’re excited to announce that our development team has begun developing a few simple reporting tools to help you track your LotusJump progress. Stay tuned for updates!

A few members of the LotusJump team got to go to Vegas for the Affiliate Summit West, which turned out to be a pretty awesome event. IMHO, one of the cooler stories to come out of it was a charity auction held by Jeremy Schoemaker (aka “Shoemoney”).

Leading up to the summit, Shoemoney offered to wear the t-shirt of the highest-bidding company, and donate the proceeds to charity. Since he’s “kind of a big deal” in the online community, he netted $5,200.00 for the winning bid. On his blog, Jeremy relates:

“The winning bidder, Train Signal, emailed me and said they had allocated $10,000.00 for this and would like to donate the full amount.

So at Affiliate Summit west I will present a check to the Affiliate Marketers Give Back, who’s chosen charity is Fighting Breast Cancer, on behalf of Train Signal for the amount of 10,000.00!!!!”

Well, during the “meet market” portion of the summit,  I got to meet Jeremy and snap a pic with the man and 10k t-shirt. Without further ado:

Pretty cool gesture on both Shoemoney and Train Signal’s part…it’s nice to see the big guys giving back!

We at LotusJump are pleased to announce that Google has finally updated its PageRank toolbar to register LotusJump.com at a PageRank of 4 (up from it’s “new website” status of zero!). The LotusJump blog has also improved to a PageRank of 3.

In case you’re wondering, PageRank is what Google uses to determine the importance of a web page. It’s one of the many factors used to decide which pages appear in search results and where.

Want to see the PageRank of your website? Try downloading and enabling PageRank with the Google Toolbar. To improve your PageRank, we’d suggest two general approaches:

1. Create content on your site that’s so good/informative that people will want to link to it naturally
2. Use LotusJump to find and build relevant backlinks to your website

These steps will help you improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and help you establish a successful online presence!