Are you using title tags on your images?

If not, you should be.

Title tags are important for a number of reasons:

- Think of title tags as the image equivalent of a link’s "anchor text". When the image is linked, it tells the search engines the same thing link would. This is compared to using the "alt" tags, which just describes the image.

- It’s content. The search engines read the title tags, which can help you rank for those terms.

I’ll show you what I mean:

Recently we added 3 images to our home page on MyWeddingFavors.com with the following title tags:

"Chat with Other Brides on our Blog!"
"View Some of Our Best Selling Favors & Gifts"
"Wedding Tips & More from MyWeddingFavors.TV"

Here’s what happened in less than a week:

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Keyword Phrase: "chat with other brides"

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Keyword Phrase: "wedding tips & more"

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Keyword Phrase: "best selling favors"

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Keyword Phrase: "best selling wedding favors"

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Keep in mind, MyWeddingFavors.com gets spidered very frequently, and we were already ranking for "best selling wedding favors", however we didn’t have 2 pages listed for that phrase. The other phrases we did not show up for.

Also, these aren’t highly competitive terms - but the point is Google obviously is recognizing the title tags of our images and it boosted our rankings for the terms included in the title tags.

The more pages Google is ranking, the better - whether it’s for a competitive term or not. It can only help us overall.

Here’s an example of what the code looks like with title tags added:

<img src="http://www.yourdomain.com/imagename.jpg" alt="keyword phrase" title="keyword phrase">

Also, when you have title tags on your images and place your mouse cursor over an image, it will display what the image is about in both IE and Firefox. Only adding "Alt" text to your images will give you the same effect in IE, however Alt text is not shown in Firefox.

One last thing about title tags: add them to your links as well. Most people don’t do this. Text to speech readers read the title attributes out loud, so blind people can still know what the page being linked to is about. This also helps you conform to the latest W3 standards, which is ideal from the search engines point of view. Although this may not make a huge change in your rankings, the search engines will notice if you’re doing all of the little things, and you may get a slight boost because of it. Every little bit helps!

Here’s what a title tag looks like in a link:

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” title=”keyword phrase”>Link Text </a>

So be sure to use title tags. It’s extremely simple to add, it can’t hurt you, and you may start ranking for more keyword phrases just by making this small change.

Missed a Stomper Newsletter? Well you’re in luck!

Due to popular demand, I’ve added a Stomper Newsletter Archive where you can view all of the newsletters for the last few months. All new newsletters will also be posted here a few days after they are sent out.

The link to the archive is in the left navigation below the opt-in box, or you can click here to view the archives.

Just got a video ipod, and the first thing I downloaded was, ironically, not a video. It was Joe Vitale’s lecture last Sunday on “Attracting Wealth” with some of the principles from his best-selling book, The Attractor Factor.

He mentioned it on his blog post today

One of his points seems to mesh with my own experiences and others I talk to who are actively involved with internet marketing, technology, or building online businesses.

Money likes speed.

Sometimes, to keep ahead of the competition and get ahead, you just have to move…FAST.

One of my favorite quotes is from Mario Andretti:

“If things are totally under control, you’re not moving fast enough.”

Just keep moving forward. As the direct marketers say: Fail early and fail often.

But get the lead out.
And by the way, does anyone know where to get some videos for a non-Apple “ipod”?

I’ll tell you one thing, I wish I had the video of the stage hynotist show from Armand Morin’s Big Seminar in Atlanta this weekend. It was hysterical. When people say, “That’s fake,” believe me, they wouldn’t fake that. Tracy Childers shaking his booty with the rest of the group…it was hilarious.

If you didn’t make it to Armand’s event (you missed a lot) Stu McLaren is doing a teleseminar with his notes from the entire event. You may want to check it out (it’s free).

I had a chance to talk to the hypnotist, Dr. Scott Lewis, he’s getting into internet marketing himself and is a very cool guy. He does a show on Monday nights at the Riviera in Las Vegas.

I’ll be speaking at Carl Galletti’s *7th* Internet Marketing 4 Day SuperConference in Las Vegas, June 1-4, and I’m thinking of staying over and doing a private seminar that Monday to do some small group internet business coaching and then we can all go to his show Monday night. More on that later.

Last month, March 2006, was our very first month with over $1 million in sales ($1.3 or so). Just when we were celebrating busting the million month mark, along comes this MarketingSherpa case study on JC Penney, which hit $1 *B*illion in online sales in 2005.

Before you say, “Yeah sure, that’s JC Penney; doesn’t apply to my online store,” read this case study. And of course, if you’re not already subscribed to all the Marketing Sherpa, you’re really missing out. And I’m not just saying that because Anne Holland, the editor/founder, is a friend.
After you read it, come back here and leave a comment. My biggest takeway: many of us are oversimplifying things when we look at conversion simply as customers divided by unique visitors. Many people shop for awhile (pre-Christmas, pre-wedding, etc.) and just looking at each day’s sales over the number of visitors that day may be, literally, selling yourself short.

Read the case study and think about how much money you plan to spend on paid search. If you’re only looking at the conversion rate tracked in Google’s AdWords conversion tracker, you may be doing better than you think.

And you may be able to spend more, profitably, and build your customer base that much faster.

Read, think, and come back and share a pithy comment.

Don’t worry, Part IV of the blogging e-course is still coming soon. But I wanted to call your attention to a couple cool things that came across the radar today.

- Rethinking Online Conversion Rates

For those of you interested in selling online, Marketing Sherpa had a great case study about online conversion today based on experience and advice of JC Penney.com — they sold $1 Billion online last year so you may want to hear what they have to say
Warning: It might make you rethink how you’ve been thinking about conversion. (second post at bradfallon.com)

- Big Seminar Wrap Up

If you missed Armand Morin’s Big Seminar in Atlanta this weekend, you missed a lot. It’s one of the really great events. I connected with some old friends and met a ton of great marketers I didn’t know before.

Stu McClaren who was there is going to do a free teleseminar and pass along all his notes and and what got out of this event. (first post at bradfallon.com).

(Great idea, Stu!)

I don’t know any successful online marketer that doesn’t think that one of the KEYS to online success is to go to these live events and hang out (mostly outside the official ’sessions’) with other people doing the same thing.

Thing about how much volume your business does this year — and how much you want it to do next year. Now figure out what percentage of your gross revenues you want to spend on your education and don’t be afraid to step it up in ‘06.

E-commerce is just getting started and now is the best time ever to get great at Traffic and Conversion.

But most of us just don’t invest in ourselves enough.

Or we’re too busy working IN our business that we can’t step back and work ON our business.

Perfect example — one of my buddies is Mike Filsaime, one of the biggest internet marketing teachers of the last year who came out of obscurity to be a top ranked speaker at all the biggest events. He does extremely well online and his Butterfly Marketing system is one of the most successful programs this year.

We met at John Childers boot camp that we both bought at the Big Seminar last year. Yes, the $5,000 seemed like a lot at the time, but if you’re willing to apply what you learned, like Mike was, it’s a drop in the bucket.

(I’m just glad I met him before he was famous and he still talks to me!
As a direct result of attending that event, and from the relationships he’s made at others like it, Mike has gone from zero to hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales in a matter of months.

If you really want to take your business to the next level, there’s nothing like getting on a plane and going to a live event with a bunch of other like-minded business owners and entrepreneurs.

Stay tuned — I’ll be letting you know where I’ll be this year and I hope we can hang out. The best marketing ideas occur somewhere between two and three beers in the pubs after the conferrence events!
Hint: Andy Jenkins and I have something amazing planned that’s going to blow away the entire internet marketing community. I just got him a plane ticket — he’s flying down to my office in Atlanta next week for two days with my entire creative department, and the countdown will begin . . .

Talk soon,

Brad Fallon
www.bradfallon.com

3012 Adriatic Court
Norcross, GA 30071

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In this week’s issue:

1. Testing for fun and profit — get some recognition!

2. Part Three of our Four-Part Blogging Course

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Hey Gang,

The last two weeks has been very busy — we increased our office size by a third, hired a bunch of new people, and I had meetings in Miami and Phoenix.

It was also our very first month ever with over $1 million in sales — yay! (Gotta work hard now before the twins come in July!
The next few months are going to be great for those of you who like to go to live conferences and events. There are a bunch of good ones coming up — some I’m speaking at and some I’m attending, like the Marketing Sherpa email marketing conference in Chicago in April http://www.sherpastore.com/Email-Summit.html.

I’ll be teaching at the China trip in April and the Ken McCarthy’s System Seminar in May. And I’m doing a very private two day workshop in my office in Atlanta the first or second weekend in June.

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If I had to pick out two main things that all website owners should constantly be improving, it would be:

(1) Traffic

(2) Conversion

Let’s say you spend all your time working on getting good rankings in the search engines, running your pay-per-click campaigns, getting links, and other things to bring more traffic to your site. Those are all great ideas . . . but if you aren’t trying to increase your conversion, you are missing out on some easy money.

In fact, doubling your conversion can be far easier than doubling your traffic! Increasing your conversion can be as simple as changing your headline, or trying a new image.

We are always trying new things on MyWeddingFavors.com, because even an increase of a fraction of 1% can mean huge increases in profits.

Think about what an increase in conversion would mean to your website. Let’s say you are converting at 0.5%. If you test even just a few new things, raising up to a 1% conversion rate is definitely doable. That may not seem like a lot, but think about it. Just by testing, you’ve just doubled your income!

And what’s the best part about working on your conversion rate?

It’s free!

It costs nothing but time to swap out an image or a new headline. Yes, there is software out there that you can buy, or services you can subscribe to that will do the testing and tracking for you. But if you’re just starting out or have a tight budget, you can track it yourself.

What I want to know is this . . . how many of you are constantly testing new things to help increase your conversion?

New headlines, different images, moving something up or down, adding a security icon, different text, etc. What have you tried, what worked, what didn’t?

So how about this . . . do you want to get some free publicity and a link to your site from the home page of bradfallon.com?

Then send me your thoughts on different things you’ve tried and the results you got. Email me at testing@bradfallon.com with any data you want to share. Include some screenshots and stats of what you tried and the results you achieved because of it. I’ll take a couple of the best examples and post the case studies on my blog next week.

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Welcome to Part Three of our Blogging Course. In this edition, we’re going to talk about how to amp up your blog’s search rankings - and how to monetize your blog!

After all, what’s the point of writing a blog if no one can ever find it and if it doesn’t improve your bottom line, right?

Let’s talk first about SEO.

The same basic SEO rules apply just as much in the blogosphere as they do on other websites. Bare minimum, you should always:

Use good keyword-rich title tags.
Use ‘h1′, ‘h2′ and so on for section headers.
Pay particular attention to how others link to you.

This third point is very important. As you know by now, how someone links to you is almost as crucial as getting them to link to you at all. A link that displays the phrase ‘Wedding Favors’ is far more relevant and rank-enriching for my wedding favors site, then say, ‘Click here!’ Why? Because no one is searching for ‘Click here!’ but plenty of people are searching for ‘wedding favors.’ And Google puts far more weight

So if someone wants to link to your blog, see if they would mind making the link display a worthwhile keyword phrase to you. (They may not want to, but then again - they may. Never hurts to ask, and it definitely could help.)

There are other SEO ‘tricks’ that can help improve your search engine ranking. Like breaking your blogs up into two parts. The key here is to write a teaser entry, and then - and here’s the smart part - use the ‘to read more, click here’ link as an opportunity to reiterate the title of your blog article. You get twice the keyword action by repeating the title.

While you’re at it, you want to try to get a keyword or two into the actual name of your blog, if you can.

But blogging in general is so SEO-friendly, anyway, for many reasons. They constantly are adding fresh content, they’re easy for engines to crawl, they’re easy to get linked (if you are writing good stuff, that is) and they’re easy to maintain a slow, steady growth pattern.

Make your Blog make Money

The more I teach, and learn, about blogs the more I realize what a super-hero of a tool they are. They can not only boost traffic and sales and your relationship with your customers - but they can make money in and of themselves!

In order to do this, you have to make some choices. There are people who don’t like the idea of trying to get visitors to their blog only to send them away via Adsense Ads.

But then there are those who like the idea of the extra money. And when you hear of people making thousands of dollars a week with Adsense, can you blame them?

In the business blogging telecourse I did with Dave Taylor, there were a TON of good ideas for monetizing a blog. Now that the course is done we are going to be offering it on CD pretty soon — stay tuned.

Pay Per Click

Google’s AdSense program is one of the most popular PPC program. You can really customize what your Adsense ads look like, choosing between text or graphical and you can even place up to three ad ‘units’ on your blog. But I’m pretty adamant in my advice of NOT using Adsense’s default color scheme. By making your ad look more like the rest of your site, readers are that much less likely to skip over it, and actually click on it!

Textual Links Alone

Some sites will pay a lot of money to get plugged in with high PR sites. There’s a service called AdZaar which matches these companies with your site. If you have a site that’s PR6 or higher, you can make some nice $ from this service.

Text-Link-Ads.com does the same thing, but I’ve personally not used this service. I usually sell my own links with no middleman.

And finally, there are the two A’s of monetizing your blog. Affiliates and Ads in RSS Fees. By now, you probably have a good idea of what an affiliate is and how affiliate programs work. If affiliate programs are interesting to you — Commission Junction is one of the best places to start — or you can go straight to some of the smaller networks — including all of my own affiliate programs at www.smartmarketingaffiliates.com.

And did you know you can now drop AdSense ads into your RSS feed of your weblog? It’s called ‘AdSense for Feeds’. There’s another service called Pheedo, which shows some very nice statistics in your reports. I can’t personally vouch for putting ads in RSS feeds, but you can check it out.

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That’s it for this week. Keep an eye your inbox for the next edition (and last part of the blogging e-course) and as always . . .

Keep on Stomping!

Brad Fallon
Chief Stomper

www.BradFallon.com