PayPal - A Common Question

Here is another question I get often, so I'll share the answer here. The question is basically, "how do I put a PayPal button on my site?":

1. You have to have a Pay Pal account.
2. You have to specifically identify each item or service you want to sell, along with it's price.

3. You have to generate a Buy Now button inside your PayPal account - generate one button for each item. Go to "Merchant Services" tab, then click the link that says "Buy Now buttons" on the right side of the page.

4. Follow the instructions to describe your item, the price, and the button style. I suggest you click the link that says "choose a different button" and select the one that says "PayPal Buy Now". I think it's better to have the PayPal name on the button, but that's just a personal preference.

5. After you create the button, you have to cut-and-paste the code they give you - exactly as-is - into your web page.

6. You have to decide where on your site you want to put this button (or buttons), and what descriptive text should go next to each button you create.

Some HTML formatting will be necessary to make the button(s) look nice, but these are the basic steps.

Google Rankings - A Common Question

Here is an excerpt from an email I recently sent to a client, talking about Google rankings. I share it here because I often get asked whether it is a good idea to buy software or services that promise to "submit your site to 10,000 search engines" or "raise your search engine rankings" for you. My response is always the same: Don't. Most of these unsolicited claims are worthless, and some are downright unethical in their tactics, which can actually get your site rankings lowered or can even get your site blackballed by Google.

First, there is absolutely no value in having your site on 10,000 search engines. The goal is to be highly ranked on the top 5 search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Excite, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Ask!, etc. – I know there are more than 5 listed here, but the "top 5" list fluctuates periodically. Regardless, Google and Yahoo! remain consistently at the top). For all intents and purposes, nobody uses the other 9995 search engines, so being on them is useless.

Second, raising your rankings – and keeping them high – requires thought and effort on your part, and there is no getting around it. Google openly tells people how to improve their rankings – it's never been a secret. It is in Google's best interest to get people to play by the rules. Here is the page to read: http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The #1 thing that raises site rankings is letigimate inbound links TO your site FROM other sites. Google assumes (rightly) that: The higher the number of legitimate inbound links to your site (from other sites), the more your site is being referenced as a source of valuable information by others, so the more important your site must be - consequently, they will raise your rankings.

But the keyword here is legitimate. Software that promises to "raise your search engine rankings" will do things like put your site onto link farms. Link farms are web sites created solely to list hundreds of links ... the idea is, if you pay someone to put your site onto several dozen link farms, Google will see that you have several dozen inbound links to your site and will raise your rankings, right? Wrong! The problem is, Google knows about link farms and considers them to be cheating – they will actually punish your rankings if you put your site onto a link farm. Who will tell you that? Well, Google will, if you read their policies. But these "buy our software and raise your rankings" companies sure won't tell you. Inbound links to your site must be legitimate and relevant – that means they must come from other sites that have some related business or topic. The outbound links that I create from www.BlacksDesign.com to my clients' sites are considered legitimate and relevant by the search engines, because I am the web designer - Google can detect that there is a relevant relationship between us, so my links to my clients' sites helps their rankings.

(A side note: You know those Links pages that many of us have on our web sites? Well, offering your customers a page full of helpful links is a nice thing to do, and I encourage it. However, don't be fooled into thinking that this is helping your rankings. Looking at it solely from Google's perspective, when you have a Links page, you are helping the people you link to, but not yourself, because you are providing an outbound link from your site to theirs, which signals to Google that you think they are important. That will help raise their rankings, but do any of those sites have inbound links back to you? THAT is the key to raising your rankings.)

The point is, there is no software I know of that will do the top 3 things you must do to raise your site rankings:

1. Figure out which sites are legitimate and/or relevant to your business, then contact the site owners to see if they are willing to create "reciprocal" links (meaning: you create a link to them if they will create a link to you).

2. List the keywords you think people will use to find you on Google, then plant those keywords repeatedly throughout your site's content, especially on the front page.

3. Change your site's content around a little every 6 months or so - Google knows how old and stale your content is, and will lower your rankings accordingly.

No software can do these things for you - that's why these spam claims are pretty much all bogus. To raise your site rankings, there simply is no substitute for putting in a little personal time and effort.