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The Best Investment I Ever Made In My MLM Business
By action | March 18, 2009
I can still recall the first day I joined my first mlm company. I was over-joyed at receiving my very own web site and I was convinced that “if you build it they will come!” Boy was I wrong!
I had this preconceived notion that the business would build itself, simply because I had a web site. I quickly realized that this would not be the case. Nobody was visiting my site, except for myself!
You see, there are a number of problems with company provided self-replicated mlm websites. Let’s examine a couple of these, and then determine possible solutions.
The biggest problem faced by a mlm company provided replicated web site is that it is identical to every other distributor’s website in your mlm company. For this reason, it appears as duplicate content to search engines. As a consequence search engines only rank one or two sites highly, and the rest are demoted to internet oblivion!
Search engines despise duplicate content. So with everyone in your mlm business having the same website, very few of your fellow distributors will rank well in the search engines. Search engines are vital when it comes to getting traffic to your mlm website. So you want to do everything your can to make sure that you’re positioned well in each search engine.
The first thing you need to do is get a domain name, and start designing your website. Now some of you may already be cringing in your seats. But let me assure you that getting a website together is not as hard or as costly as it may seem. There are several simple and cost-efficient ways to get you up and running.
Here is a link to the site I use, you cannot beat the price:
Free Domain With $6.95 Hosting Package
Having your own domain name will allow you to build a relationship with your visitors. Since they approach you, they’ll be ready to listen to you as you tell them about your product and/or your business opportunity.
The main advantage to having your own domain is that it works on autopilot. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Even if you move to a different MLM company your website address (domain) stays the same. I cannot tell you how much time and money I have spent over the years developing and promoting an mlm replicated website only to see the mlm company change website address, go out of business or my interest changes and I decide to promote something different (normally more profitable).
Do yourself a favor and get your domain name NOW! This will be the best investment you make in 2009!
Here are some in-depth suggestions on how to make your website the very best it can be! Please be aware that a lot of these suggestions use techno-mumbo-jumbo. Don’t let these suggestions intimidate you. Feel free to post comments here if you have any questions.
- Check for canonical domain issue: do the www and non-www version of the homepage go to the same url? If not, then look at www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/ for an understanding of how duplicate content should resolve to a single page. If php site, then mod_rewrite. If asp, then isapi_rewrite. If you’re giving a SEO presentation, talk about permanent (say 301 to sound fancy) redirects. We need server access to fix this
- Dynamic looking urls: Closely related to the above issue on url rewrite, the site should not pass parameters in the url. For example, mysite.com/?page_id=34§ion=2&session_id=123abc is no good. Question marks and equal signs in the url mean that parameters are being passed. Instead, the url should look like mysite.com/large_blue_widgets—that is more descriptive from a user standpoint, plus helps robots index more easily. That is a static looking url, but could be dynamically generated. A common problem for most “mlm auto-generated” downline pages is that they pass parameters. This is bad for getting your webpage indexed in the search engines.
- Look for text versus images/flash across site: Do a control-A (select all) on the homepage. Is it just a gigantic image or a big flash video? Search engines cannot read images or flash—they read text. Is the navigation images, instead of text? How much text is on the homepage—at least a few sentences about what the business does? When you right click on images and see properties, is the alt-text blank, instead of filled with a few good keywords? Is the phone number in text and large in the upper corner.
- Unique page titles: Starting from the homepage, do they have page titles that are just a few words long (65 characters or less, if possible) and begin with their most important terms? The important terms are what we deem to be both relevant and high search volume. Do not start the page title with the name of the site unless it’s a strong brand. Make sure each page title is reflective of what that particular page is about.
- Sitemaps: There should be a link to “sitemap” on the home page—and that sitemap should have links with anchor text (the words highlighted in bold) that are key search terms. For example, “mlm business” is terrible, while “[your company name]” is relevant. You should also be able to grab mydomain.com/sitemap.xml. See more at http://www.sitemaps.org/, where you can learn to use Google Webmaster Central to tell Google what pages you want crawled, plus check for errors.
- Run SEO reports: Put in your URL url at seomoz.com/page-strength. This site gives you a couple dozen SEO metrics, which you can paste into a report and highlight as red (bad) and green (good).
- Run PPC competitor reports: Go to Spyfu.com and do a few searches. Put in a few keywords that you think are important to your site, plus the site url itself. If you’re looking at a keyword, it will come back with who is buying it on PPC, what it costs, how many clicks are available, and what terms are related. If you’re looking at a url, it will tell you what terms (if any) they are buying on Google, what terms they rank naturally on, and who are related competitors.
- Source code: Do a view > page source from your browser, starting from the home page. Do a find (control F) for H1 and see if any come up. If so, are you using keywords that folks are searching for? H1 tags carry more weight than regular text, but are not as strong as the page title. Do you see frames on the site (look for “frame”)—perhaps 1 out of 15 sites you see will be just one page with the rest of the content inside a frame. Thus, search engines see only 1 page. At the top of the page, do you see a meta description with good keywords woven into a sentence? The meta description should mimic ad copy you’d have in AdWords.
- Validation: Go to validator.w3.org and put in your url. Like the other tools, it will return usually a few dozen errors with explanations. Usually, you’ll see tons of missing attributes, which can mostly be ignored.
- seoquake.com: Another great Firefox browser plug-in to show you Google PR, pages indexed by Google, pages indexed by Yahoo, backlinks (how many sites link to you), age of site, and Alexa rank (popularity). As you browse sites, it’s handy to see these stats. Glaring problems are if there are less than a few dozen pages in the Google index, less than a few dozen backlinks, Google PR of n/a on many pages (especially bad if true on the homepage), and Alexa rank of greater than 500,000 (lower is better), which means almost no traffic.
- Run SEOmoz report: Go to seomoz.org/trifecta via our login and put in your url. It will bring back ranking factors and suggestions—it is perhaps the easiest and most powerful of the 10 steps here. The overall percentage score means little.
I look forward to seeing you at the top of the search engines.
J.R. Jackson
Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
2 Responses to “The Best Investment I Ever Made In My MLM Business”
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April 12th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
Hello,
Can i get a one small picture from your blog?
Have a nice day
AlexAxe
August 25th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
Finally, someone who takes all the BS and mystery out of what should go into a website!