Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media.
However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they are crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.
Regardless of the media you choose, nothing will ever happen if you don't attract the attention of prospective buyers. This is one of the very basic tenets of successful marketing. On the internet, this concept is evaluated by the traffic that you receive on your web site. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much traffic you get, and only part of it is the actual content of your web site. There are two ways you can get attention in any media: you can earn it or you can buy it.
All the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) show up two different types of results when a customer uses them.
The most relevant results based on the search algorithms used by the engine are called 'free' or 'organic' since they are the natural result of running a search.
The second type of result are actually paid advertisements, and they can be very difficult to distinguish from the results that are actually relevant to you query.
It is important to keep in mind that no matter how good the engine, the results are still hit or miss. It is a computer program sorting web pages based on mathematical formulae, not live people helping you select the best results, so as a person hoping to be indexed, you must be willing to put the time and effort into checking how you rank on the major engines and tuning your word choice to optimize that. If you can't make it onto the first (or second at the very least) page of results, your traffic will drop dramatically! Most people don't bother to wade through the hits on the pages after that. Even second-page ranking will hurt your ability to attract new users.
One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics.
Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.
Any approach to publicizing your website or portal must begin with the aim of grabbing attention of the web surfers and internet addicts. To grab attention, you must deliver your message to surfers on websites they frequently visit. You can publicize your website by doing the hard work yourself or by availing expert help, or a mix of both.
Doing it yourself means you will have to commit your time, energy and money. It might sound daunting but ultimately proves to be cheaper as well. Availing expert help can get your results without eating your time. To set the cash registers ringing, it is suggested that you develop your own mix of both ways suited to your own needs and resources.
Signs It's Time To Redesign Your Website By Erin Ferree (c) 2007
Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you'll end up investing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you're finished and it's time for the site to go live. What a relief!
Many business owners go through this same process. By the time the process is finished, many entrepreneurs are very glad that it's over - and don't want to do it again anytime soon.
Unfortunately, websites don't last forever. Even if you plan your site to work for the current vision for your business, you can't accurately account for the entire future of your business.
Eventually you'll have to make some changes to your website. Some of these changes can be accomplished with simple maintenance, and by making updates to your site. But there's only so far that patching and revising your current site can go. If your site is particularly outdated, or if it's not working well for you, it's probably time to consider a full-scale site redesign.
Some signs that it's time to redesign your site include:
Your Business Has Changed or Grown
If your business is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your website to reflect that. If you've only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your current website. But, if you've changed your business direction, decided to offer new products or services, or if your company has grown significantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Reconsider how the changes to your business should be reflected or addressed in the structure, design and strategy behind your website.
Your Site Looks Like It Was Designed in 1995
Some signs of an outdated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graphics, old-style "framed" coding, where the site is divided up into panes that load separately, little animated cartoon clip-art throughout the site, and text created as images instead of in HTML. Having any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your business, making you look 'behind the times'. It can also make you look like you don't care enough about your business or about technological advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping your company's website looking modern will increase its credibility.
The Information on Your Site Isn't User-Friendly
If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly get questions on your site text from visitors, re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help to fix these problems. If you've been adding to your site over time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, restructuring your navigation could be another pressing reason to redesign your site. You want visitors to be able to easily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the information you have within a few clicks. Laying out your site to make that possible can make your visitor's experience on your site a lot easier.
You Apologize for the Site When Referencing It or Handing Out Your Business Cards
Your site should be a source of pride. It should offer your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of information about your business. And, if you have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else on your site, it makes you look unprepared and unprofessional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is in good shape too.
You're Not Getting Good Results in the Search Engines
Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.
It's Not Bringing in inquiries and Helping You to Make Sales
If your site was designed long ago, then there's a good chance that it was designed as "brochureware". This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very common a few years ago, when websites were new. But recently businesses have realized that a website can do a lot more than just impersonate your brochure - it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your business easier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the following when you redesign your site:
- Calls to action to encourage your visitors to take specific actions - like purchasing something, contacting you, or signing up for a newsletter.
- Forms, scripts, or programs to make your business easier - like contact forms, project estimating tools, and an autoresponder email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Including a shopping cart or Paypal buttons on your site can also help you to make more sales without any additional work.
- Downloadable information packets, articles, questionnaires and white papers can answer a prospect's questions about your products or services and help them to move closer to buying. And, if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other contact information, it can help you to grow your prospect list as well. These are just a few of the functions that your site can perform for your business. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you increase your business, look at the other sites that you visit and note the functions they perform.
Your Site is Costing You a Fortune to Update
If you're racking up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot to go, it might be time to consider a whole site redesign. Make a list of everything that you want to do on your site and consult a web designer about redesigning your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have extensive changes to make to your site, it can be less expensive to just start over.
If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can't maintain it yourself, redesigning and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Having the ability to make changes and update your own text will let you make revisions quickly, at no cost. And you can play with your site and make revisions to see what will work best for your business and clients.
If your site has any of the problems mentioned here, it's time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will differ depending on the problems and issues that your site has - you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the problems that your site has so that you won't have to redesign again any time soon! ================================================================ Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, "Design a Website That Works", will walk you through all of the questions that you need to answer in order to create the best possible website. http://www.elf-design.com/ http://www.elf-design.com/ products-webWorkbook.html ================================================================
Somewhere out in cyberspace an unknown or known associate, competitor or just plain slanderously natured individual has written a particularly damning or negative article/blog about yourself or your business and posted it on the internet.
So what happens next? The nature of the beast is that the major search engines will index and crawl all of the content on the internet regardless of whether it is good content, relevant or controversial. The next thing you know when Googling your name up comes the offending article or blog on the first page of search engine results.
Annoying is an 'understatement'. This type of negative publicity has the potential to damage your business reputation and your ability to attract new clients. The bígger problem is that unless the negative article or entry is removed from the site it is posted on it will remain index-able and searchable by the major search engines for as long as the content exists and this could equate to a number of years.
First up, don't panic there are a number of positive SEO remedies that you can employ to counteract the slanderous attempts of these individuals and their effect on the search engines. Unfortunately with the Internet there is limited recourse by a targeted individual or business to defend their reputation especially when articles are written by so called 'consumer advocates' or vigilantes doing the public a 'service' yet able to post anything on their websites regardless of the dire effects it may have on the targeted individual involved and their business.
SEO Remedies to tackle negative internet publicity...
Step 1 - If the article or blog is genuinely slanderous and has no truth or merit, then approach the website owner posting the entry and ask for it to be removed. Legal representation and legal advice may be necessary to protect your business. A well written letter from your lawyer or a threat of legal action may be enough impetus to persuade the website owner to remove the post. However, be aware that if unsuccessful, it may encourage the author of such articles to focus more attention on you so it may be more prudent to try steps 2 to 5 first.
Step 2 - Examine the keywords within the offending article to see what is being picked up by the search engines. This will normally be your name and/or business name. This is easy to find by clicking on the 'cached' entry next to the search engine listing. The keywords indexed by the search engine will be highlighted on the cached page and show you exactly what the search engine is indexing and crawling from the article or blog. These keywords (name or business name or both) will be the focus of your SEO Band-Aid treatment. To push the negative listing off the first page of results on Google and Yahoo you will need to create as many new listings as possible on the Internet to be picked up by the major search engines.
Step 3 - Start with 'free classified ad' listings and post your new ads under the category of business services. Include your name and business name in the body of the free classified ad plus a relevant keyword title specific to your industry or business service provision. Free classified ad listings will show up on search engine results within the first week of posting them on the internet. Complete as many free classified ads as possible and post them for the longest duration possible.
Step 4 - Write some free articles on your area of business or industry expertise remembering to include an eye catching title and your name and business name in the content of the article and author bio. Post these articles on your website and on free article submission sites; the more the better. Make sure you allow your free articles to be syndicated for content to other sites. This improves the opportunities for your article being listed on several internet sites which has a domino effect, boosting your search engine rankings and the positive listings picked up by the major search engines. If this still does not remedy the problem, then proceed to Step 5.
Step 5 - Create as many free directory listings on the internet as possible under your applicable service or product category. Use the same title and keyword text as your free classified ads remembering to mention your business name and name if possible. You can manually find free directories by performing searches on Google and Yahoo or alternatively use a directory submitting tool such as 'Submiteaze' which is reasonably priced.
The results from employing these SEO strategies may be instantaneous unless the offending article or post has been prevalent in the search engine listings for a number of years (2 or more). You can then expect the recovery process to take up to 6 months of concentrated SEO effort to bump this listing off the first page of results on Google and Yahoo.
If all else fails...
Employ Step 1 and, if that fails, then lets hope in the very near future that just like 'sp@m', slanderous material posted on the internet becomes a reportable offence to the major search engines, government bodies and consumer watch dogs. And, that the consequences for engaging in such underhanded practices results in a site being dropped from the search engines and classified as a 'bad neighborhood site', plus a monetary fine of such magnitude as to deter the practice. If a site can't be indexed or is banned by the search engines, then it effectively becomes 'voiceless' and the power to publicly affect an individual's livelihood or a business's profits, growth and sales is then vastly diminished. Noting, that a banned site would still have the opportuníty to remove any offensive or slanderous material and then reapply to be indexed by the search engines.
It may be argued that the search engines are not responsible for this problem. Well as the most influential body on the internet with the most power to help, who else are we to turn to? The print and television media are unable to publicly slander an individual or business without facing retribution via legal action and a public outcry, so why should the Internet be free of the same accountability?
About The Author Rosemary Donald is an SEO Consultant with Rank1 Website Marketing and author of the SEO ebook 'Insider Secrets of Rank1 Websites' available for $29.95AU. Rosemary is a regular contributor to online article sites on the topics of SEO, website marketing, ecommerce, search engine marketing and small business development. Rosemary Donald is also a successful online trader of top ranking site SabuJewellery.com.
Most webmasters go totally “gaga” for top 10 rankings in Google. And for good reason, Google is the most dominant search engine on the net and will deliver the largest amount of traffíc.
More importantly, those same webmasters will also inform you, getting top 10 rankings in Google often means your site will prove profitable. Mainly because obtaining targeted traffíc is usually your first obstacle in creating a viable online business.
In other words, if you get top ten listings in Google for good searchable keywords, it is almost impossible not to earn money. Read more here.. .Adsense : 10 Steps To Top 10 Rankings In Google
When followed, the guide will prove to be quite a valuable web design resource. From the inexperienced to the experienced, this guide has something for everyone.
The Process of Great Web Design
Just to make sure we are all on the same page, lets begin with the basic definition for "web design". According to Wikipedia, web design is:
"a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface".
Ever since the beginning of search engines there has been the discussion of key wording. Obviously your web page has to be about something and you want the search engine to reflect that in its results. In the early days of search engines you could put words or phrases anywhere on a page and show up in the results. People who just wanted traffíc would get a líst of the most popular used keywords and just put them on a page. The page could have been about toilets but show up in search results about Hollywood celebrities. In those days finding what you wanted was a daunting task. So the search engines started looking at natural language. Each year they have become more sophisticated about how they look at natural language.
The first thing they did was to stop looking at keyword meta tags. Too often people were putting keywords in that did not match their page. Next they started punishing people for putting strings of key words together, such as "baseball baseball baseball". Next they paid attention to whether or not they were used in a sentence. Then they started evaluating the content of the page to see what it was about. By this time they were getting really accurate in their search results. But as long as there are search engines people will try to fool them. For the last couple of years search engine optimization people have promoted keyword stuffing. This is where you put the keyword in the text as often as you can fit it in.
A new generation of natural language algorithms has been developed by the major search engines to combat this. Now for the first time we are hearing the use of the term natural language. Now search engines look at the way that a term is used. They compare the use of the term in the context of how it is used. This example is a little extreme, but we have all seen pages written like this.
"I bought baseball cards for my friend the baseball card lover. He was so happy to get the baseball cards and he looked at baseball cards. Then he showed these baseball cards to all his friends that had baseball cards."
This is an example of how the term baseball card was used outside of natural language. In natural language you would not refer to your friend as the baseball card lover. In later uses you would have used the term "them" to describe the baseball cards. The sentence would look like "He was so happy to get them that he took the time to look at each one". It is still important to get your keywords or keyword phrases on the page regularly. Care needs to be given on how they are used. It is important to have them in complete sentences and not in an abnormal place in the context of a paragraph. Here are some guidelines you might consider. No one knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use and they all have different ones. But, you can presume that they are based on the natural use of language so the following recommendations are based on basic grammar and the normal use of language. Here are some examples of natural use of key words.
1. It is natural to have your keywords in your title and description meta tags. These tell what your page is about and your page should be about the same thing as your keywords are.
2. It is natural to have your keywords in your heading tags. Heading tags should be used as chapter headings to different sections of a page.
3. It is natural to have your keywords in the first sentence.
4. It can be natural to have your keywords appear once in most paragraphs.
5. It can be natural to have your keywords appear more than once in a paragraph but not every paragraph. You need to make sure that it fits well and does not sound like it was just stuck in there.
Here are some examples of non-natural uses of keywords.
1. It is not natural to have your key words more than once in your title or description.
2. It is not natural to have your key words show up more than once in a sentence. There are times that this could be natural, but it would probably be better to make it into two sentences.
3. It is not natural for the same sentence to appear in several different paragraphs.
4. In a short paragraph, it is not natural for your keywords to show up more than twice. In a paragraph over 6 sentences long this may not hold true. (I publish health related web pages and read hundreds of health articles a month. There are times that I will see a term used 3 times in a long paragraph and almost nevër in a short one.
5. It is not natural to have keywords used back to back in a sentence. It is not typical to have one sentence end in a word and the next sentence to begin with it.
6. It is not natural to have every sentence begin with the same word or phrase.
Following these guidelines may help you with search engine positioning and it will definitely make your page more enjoyable for your visitors.
About The Author Article by Rusty Ford, Editor Arthritis-Symptom.com
Millions of websites online can be placed in their own special category of "Deserted Town". The only life you can find there are those of the webmasters who created them. This is because they get very few, if any, targeted visitors. For these website owners, there are simple techniques they can use to increase website traffic.
Read on and I will give you five ways to increase website traffic to your website. These aren't hidden secrets and they won't give you millions of hits per month for just $ 9.99. (I'm sure you know what I mean). However they are effective and using them will increase website traffic to your website. And the visitors that you get will be more profitable because they will be targeted.
Have you used Google Analytics? If you have your own website, this is a cool tracking utility that you must have cause I am also using it. Here’s 4 Great Reasons to use Google Analytics by Sasch Mayer Having used a large number of web site visitor trackers over the years, I first approached Google Analytics some time ago, with the somewhat jaded attitude of someone who’s ’seen it all’ or at least ’seen most of it’. What could possibly make this particular utility stand out in such a large crowd of competitors? But first… What is Google Analytics? Analytics is Google’s very own visitor tracking utility, allowing webmasters to keep tabs on traffic to their site, including visitor numbers, traffic sources, visitor behaviour & trends, times spent on the site and a host of other information gathered via two pieces of JavaScript embedded in the source-code. Read more >> 4 Great Reasons to use Google Analytics
If you want to have a successful Internet business, you need to have a good understanding of the surfing habits of your readers—and more specifically, how they find information on a major search engine.
Studies show that 85% of users rely on major search engine to find info. The most popular major search engine is the Google search engine. When they look for information on a major search engine, they type certain key words or phrases. You need to find the phrase that will lead them to you.
Almost half of all Internet surfers type several words when they look for information on a major search engine. They have learned that with the millions of websites listed on a major search engine, using key phrases rather than words will narrow down the search of that major search engine.
For example, someone who is researching on scrapbooking on a major search engine will probably key in “scrapbooking clubs”, “scrapbooking contests” or even “free scrapbooking fonts”. If you want to be on the top results of the major search engine, you need to contain these key phrases.
There are many companies that can give you a list of the most popular queries made on each major search engine. However, bear in mind that you don’t want to use a key phrase that is being used by several websites, as that means you will be competing with all of them for good search engine placement.
Do a little research to find out how people will look for information related to your product, and how they would post this question on a major search engine. You should also consider a key word’s common misspellings (e.g. scrap booking) as even the best major search engine will see it as a separate topic.
You should also submit your site to more than one major search engine. Studies show that 77% use several major search engine to research.
Plus the different major search engine have unique techniques for indexing sites, so your ranking on one major search engine will be different from your ranking on another major search engine.
About The Author
To learn more about how to claim $50 in FREE Advertising, plus easily earn Pay-Per-Click money to promote your Web site(s), go to http://www.bigdaddypays.com/payperclick
Steve pavis tries to be at the cutting edge of new concepts that are profitable for the small to medium size business, who need all the help they can get. Go see http://stevepavis.com
This article will show you 10 easy ways to get more targeted traffic to your website. Use as many of these techniques as possible to improve your website traffic. And be sure to track all of your different traffic campaigns so you’ll know which ones are working the best. Then you can concentrate most of your efforts on the ones that make you the most money. So let’s get started.
1) ‘Pay Per Click Search Engines’ - This is one of the fastest ways to get targeted traffic. Just set up an account with some of the top PPC search engines and start bidding on keywords related to your product. Use the keyword suggestion tools that the search engines provide to make it easy to build your keyword list. Make a long list of targeted keywords so you can take advantage of the least expensive ones. Then write a killer ad with an attention grabbing headline and start driving traffic to your website.
2) ‘Search Engines’ - To get the free traffic from the search engines you will want to get ranked as high as possible. So here are a few tips that should be helpful: Have lots of links to other sites, use the best keywords for your targeted market on your website/sales page and choose your domain name wisely.
3) ‘Write Articles’ - Do you want to get a ton of free traffic to your website? Just start writing articles and submit them to related ezines. Always make sure your articles are filled with quality content. And you can include your bylines at the bottom of all articles. Then whenever someone reads your article they will be exposed to a link to your website.
4) ‘Solo Ads in Ezines’ - Solo ads should also be a good way to send traffic to your site. Find ezines that are related to your market and place ads with them. A solo ad is someone sending your ad to their list without any other ads. And the people reading your ad will feel it comes recommended from the ezine owner. To search for ezines in your related market just use your favorite search engine and enter: “ezines ________”. Fill in the blank with your related market. Plus you can do a search for the top rated websites in your related market and then contact them to see if they accept solo ads in their ezines.
5) ‘Classified Ads in Ezines’ - Now this will be very similar to solo ads but should be a lot cheaper because of the smaller ad space. And classified ads will be sent out with other ads and other content. But use the same strategies as described in solo ads to generate traffic. The secret here is to have a good ad with a great headline to make readers click on your link. The better your ad is then the more money you’ll make. Another thing to mention is if your ads are making you money then keep running them. But you will also want to run split test to try to improve your ads.
6) ‘Ads to AOL Customers’ - You could send ads to the 20 million people using AOL to collect even more traffic. Just use the same techniques as in ‘Classified Ads in Ezines’. Again for best results try to create irresistible ads. Here is the link to start placing AOL classified ads: http://www.classifieds.aol.com
7) ‘Banner Ads’ - You may want to invest in some banner ads for even more traffic. If you use a word banner ad, then it can be written similar to a classified ad. Some banner ads are cost per impression and others are cost per click. With the cost per click banner ad you only pay when someone visits your site, which may be better. 500 impressions don’t really mean anything if no one visits your website. But 500 clicks on your banner ad mean 500 people to your site.
8) ‘Linking to Websites’ - Another way to get targeted traffic to your website is by linking to other sites. Only link to reputable sites that you would want to recommend to your good customers. Search for high traffic websites that are related to yours and then try to get them to link to your site. Collect information about these sites so you can send them an email later. In your email compliment them on their site and explain how linking to your site will benefit them. Tell them their customers will be interested in the information on your website. If they don’t agree to link to your site then try exchanging links with them. Also start an affiliate program it’s the ultimate linking system.
9) ‘Viral Marketing’ - You can also create lots of website traffic using viral marketing. Create or buy a product that is valuable and has permanent links back to your websites. Then sell or give this product away and then let your customers sell it or give it away. You will have a viral product that can spread all over the internet like a virus and all those links will keep sending prospects back to your websites.
10) ‘Joint Ventures’ - Joint ventures are a great way to get target traffic fast. When you do a JV with someone you can promote each other’s product to your lists. Both JVs will make sales and increase their customer lists almost overnight. Once you start developing JVs you can use the results from the first one to promote the next one. And the more JVs you have the more sales you’ll make.
Remember don’t forget to test everything you do to find out what works the best for your products.
What do you think about traffic? In reality, busy traffic is undesirable and not beneficial to a society. However, on the other hand, in the world of internet, traffic is a good thing. As we all know, traffic is a very valuable asset to a website, epecially the one with Google Adsense Ads inside. Without traffic, you won't have clicks; without clicks, you won't have any revenue. Do you know how large the traffic volume is for those really "big" site? They can even have more than 300 clicks per day for their sites. It is quite extraordinary to a newbie of Adsense.
As time goes on, more and more webmasters begin to realize the importance of traffic to their sites. The amount of traffic generated by a given site is perhaps the most important predictor of the amount of AdSense revenue it generates. Therefore, to me, traffic is KING!! Even with the importance of factors such as proper formatting and placement of ads, no site can succeed without a sufficient number of visitors checking out the ads being offered.
For illustration purposes, let us look at a website that is receiving 100 visitors per day (it is quite difficult to achieve for some new Gsensers). Let's assume that the size gets an average of 10 cents per click, with a CTR of 5%. This means that of those 100 visitors, only 50 will click the ad (the 5% figure is a pretty realistic standard). That means that an average day's earnings would be a mere half a dollar, with an average monthly take of only $15 or so. These measly earnings may not even be enough to cover the hosting fees for the site.In order to earn even $60 per month, it would be necessary to quadruple the number of daily visitors, increase the click through rate, or both. You can see, therefore, why it is so important to constantly strive to drive more and more traffic through your virtual doors.
There are of course a number of strategies to increase web traffic, and most webmasters will have heard the term SEO, or search engine optimization. SEO techniques use a combination of targeted content rich in popular keywords, links from other sites and other methods to drive traffic and increase search engine rankings. Search engine rankings can be vital to website traffic, of course, since most people use some sort of search engine to find the information they need on a variety of subjects. Pay per click advertising, or PPC, is another popular way to build traffic to a site.
While this strategy can be very effective, it can also be quite costly, so it is important to carefully read the fine print of the agreement before signing up. Apart from that, you need to be very careful to those paid-to-surf, pard-to-click and auto-surf programs. Google can detect these programs very effectively, and in f act, many webmasters were being banned by Google just because they enrolled these programs. So, be careful to void these sorts of programs.
Hope this post can give you a brief introduction on how importance the traffic is to a site. If you have any enquiries, please kindly leave me a comment.
With so many blogs being created every day, it’s a mystery to many bloggers how to make their blog stand out. There are many types of blogs or purposes for blogs and a certain number of tactics are applicable to just about all of them, so here is a “short” list of tips for marketing and optimizing a blog:
Decide on a stand alone domain name www.myblog.com or directory of existing site www.mysite.com/blog. Sub domain is also an option blog.mysite.com. Avoid hosted services that do not allow you to use your own domain name!
Obtain and install customizable blog software - WordPress and Moveable Type are my favorites.
Customize blog look and feel templates - aka design.
Research keywords and develop a glossary - Keyword Discovery, WordTracker, SitePoint, SEOBook Keyword Research.
Optimize the blog:
Template optimization - RSS subscription options, social bookmark links, HTML code, Unique title tags, URLs, Sitemap
Add helper plugins specific to WordPress or MT
Create keyword rich categories (reference your keyword glossary)
Enable automatic trackback and ping functionality.
Create Feedburner Pro account and enable feed tracking.
Setup Google acount for Sitemap, validate and prep for future submission.
Identify authoritative blogs, web sites and hubs for outbound resource links and blogroll.
Format archived posts, related posts.
Enable statistics for tracking - Performancing, Google Analytics, ClickTracks.
Submit RSS feed and Blog URL to prominent RSS and Blog directories / search engines.
Engage in an ongoing link building campaign.
If podcast or video content are available, submit to Podcast and Vlog directories.
Submit blog url to paid directories with categories for blogs - Yahoo, BOTW, bCentral, WOW, JoeAnt.
Optimize and distribute a press release announcing blog.
Request feedback or reviews of your blog in relevant forums, discussion threads. If you have a resourceful post that will help others, point to it.
Research and comment on relevant industry related blogs and blogs with significant centers of influence.
Post regularly. If it’s a news oriented blog, 3-5 times per day. If it’s an authoritative blog, 3-5 times per week, but each post must be unique and high value.
Monitor inbound links, traffic, comments and mentions of your blog - Google Alerts, Technorati, Blogpulse, Yahoo News, Ask Blogs and Feeds.
Always respond to comments on your blog and when you detect a mention of your blog on another blog, thank that blogger in the comments of the post.
Make contact with related bloggers on AND offline if possible.
When making blog posts always cite the source with a link and don’t be afraid to mention popular bloggers by name. Use keywords in the blog post title, in the body of the post and use anchor text when you link to previous posts you’ve made.
Use social networking services, forums and discussion threads to connect with other bloggers. If they like your stuff, they will link to you.
Remember when web sites were a new concept and the sage advice to print your web address everywhere you print your phone number? The same advice applies for your blog.
Of course if you don’t want to do it yourself, you can always have a blog consultant do these things (and more) for you, but I realize that there are quite a few personal bloggers as well as small business bloggers looking for this kind of information. I hope it’s helpful.
1. Save time and money using ad submitters. You will reach a larger part of your target audience far more quickly than by manually submitting your ad.
2. Create a good first impression. You will not be able to sell very many products if your visitors think your web site looks unprofessional.
3. Stop procrastinating and start finishing all your business tasks. Do one at a time. Do not get caught up thinking that you can never get them all done.
4. Develop a relationship with all your visitors and customers. Tell them how much you appreciate them visiting your web site or buying your product.
5. Hire a business coach to help improve yourself and business. They could help increase your sales, motivate you, balance your workload, etc.
6. Stay away from being too comfortable with your income or life. You should always be making new goals for yourself and developing new sales ideas.
7. Stay away from becoming a workaholic. Your mind needs time away from your business life. This will help your brain think clearly while working.
8. Create and follow short/long term goals for your business. The short goals can create early success and the long term goals can create future success.
9. Look for different ways to prove your business and products to your audience. You could collect testimonials, hold surveys, do scientific tests, etc.
10. Try new business ideas and strategies. Do not be afraid of changing what you're doing. You could try out technology, advertising, marketing, etc.
Quote of the Day:
"Those things that hurt, instruct." -- Ben Franklin
As most SEOs know, MSN loves the subdomains. You can make hundreds of keyworded subdomains and MSN will think quite highly of the pages. Same goes for blogspot and other blogs– they do very well on MSN and sometimes on Yahoo. Now Google and the new BigDaddy crawler is showing an even more idiotic preference when indexing and ranking subdomains.
Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google. And they are ranking, too. That particular domain has an Alexa ranking of under 7,000. Another domain owned by the same person, t1ps2see.com, has between 1.7 and 2.4 billion indexed pages and an Alexa ranking of under 2,000… after 4 weeks. Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking?
Inspired by his work, I present, The Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Billions of Pages Indexed by Google:
•Register a meaningless domain consisting of numbers, letters, and secret symbols. Heck, register a hundred of them.
•Setup a server to manage all of your domains and subdomains. It will need to be beefy as you will be serving a lot of traffic in a few days.
•Buy as many article databases as you can. Topic doesn’t matter. You might want to search and replace some i’s and 0’s for corresponding ASCII codes to help you avoid duplicate content.
•Create or buy a common scraper script. You’ll need it to respond with different articles based on what keyword is hit, effectively serving up new content for each subdomain. It should respond to any subdomain query. Your server should be setup to allow all subdomains to be redirected to your main page; there your script sorts out what content to serve. Effectively allowing you to create an infinite number of subdomains with unique content. Now the trick this guy is using involves subdomains of subdomains. So you create a “topical” subdomain such as music.3hid9gw.org and then on that subdomain you create your actual pages of additional sub-subdomains, like: 2152.music.3hid9gw.org. Because each subdomain and each sub-subdomain is considered a new site by Google, you can get past the “1 page indexed per site” delay for new domains. If you don’t get this part, hire someone… according to the Alexa traceback, it looks like Argentina has the right people for the job.
•Launch your blog comment spam attack. Link to some of your subdomains which are also interlinked.
•Wait a few weeks… then sit back and enjoy your billions of indexed pages. Be sure to put 3 Adsense or YPN blocks on each page.
Thanks to Nintendo at DP for pointing out how extensive this network of subdomain spam has become. If there is enough interest shown, I’ll work up a script that would do this and post it for free so we can all enjoy the benefits of subdomain indexing.
If you are initiating Search Engine Optimization of your website, you probably have done some study about SEO techniques through forums and articles. You may have somewhat worked out a roadmap of how to proceed with the site optimization process. While you may be clear on ‘what to do’, it would also help to understand ‘what not to do’. Very often, SEO professionals miss out these critical aspects of optimization rendering all their site optimization work ‘useless’. Here are the 10 most avoidable situations while you are carrying out SEO for your website.
Optimizing for the wrong keywords: The biggest sin anyone can make in a SEO campaign is to choose the wrong keywords to optimize your site with. If your Site is ranking high for a keyword that is not being searched for then even a very high ranking cannot bring you any traffic. On the other hand, if you are ranking high with wrong keywords then you would get you traffic but will not convert into transactions.
Spamming:
Search Engines are getting smarter by the day. Over a period of time Search Engines have evolved from “Ignoring” spam to a point where they now 'penalize' websites for using spam techniques. Following are the prominent Search engine spam techniques you should avoid.
Hidden text:
Hidden text is using the same color text on your page as the background color. In order to get a higher keyword density, webmasters sometimes add a lot of keywords as hidden text because they are not visible to the human viewer but can be read by the search engine crawlers in the source code of the page. Most search engines can now detect which pages use such techniques and ignore or ban such sites.
Doorway pages:
A doorway page is a web page designed for search engines so as to rank well for specific keyword phrases and redirect a user to a different page on visit. This is called “bait & switch” technique. These pages usually rely on frequent repetition of the keyword phrase, and try to "trick" search engines into ranking them well. Most search engines can now detect techniques such as “Meta Refresh” and penalize such sites. If you've used doorway pages on your website and it is still not penalized, you stand a good chance to come out clean by deleting these pages immediately.
Doorway domains / multiple domains with same content:
This technique uses URL-redirection meant to display another web address for the same web page or several domains show same content. In a typical example, the user types in a web address such as www.new-blue-widget.com but the URL is redirected to www.widget.com. Alternately, both these websites show identical content in the hope that one or the other may rank high in the search engine result pages (SERP). Most of the time the same party registers these domains. Many people also use ‘disposable’ domain names in sending out email spam so as to protect their main domains. Search engines can easily detect these techniques.
Duplicate content:
Many site owners try to increase their content base by creating multiple pages of the same content either on the same site or copying the same site over several domains they may own. Search engines avoid cluttering their index with duplicate content and penalize sites, which do excessive content duplication in order to ‘trick’ their algorithms.
Cloaking:
Cloaking is a technique of serving keyword-stuffed spam pages to search engine spiders by detecting their IP address, while serving totally different pages to human visitors. This is different than geo-targeting where you may show different content to different visitors based on their region or language. The search engines can differentiate between the two and might penalize your site if you are attempting to ‘trick’ them. If you want to avoid any penalties, the thumb rule is to show the same content to search engines that you show to the visitors.
Keyword spam:
Keyword spam is a technique to stuff lots of keywords all over the page – in the Title tag, Meta tags, Anchor texts, Alt Attributes etc., in an attempt to increase keyword density or accommodate large number of keywords on the same page. This not only results in the page text to sound stupid to your readers, but you also lose the ‘theme’ of the page. Search engines rate pages as per ‘themes’ and credit pages, which have content, classified in nicely laid out ‘themes’. For best results, one should always focus on optimizing a page with 2-3 themed keywords rather than trying to optimize with lots of keywords. Over-optimized pages with keyword spam may invite search engine penalties.
Excessive HTML markup:
It is common knowledge that search engines give more credit to text marked as Headline or other attributes like making the text bold, underlined, colored, italicized etc. In an attempt to improve importance of the text, many webmasters do an excessive HTML markup of their page content and hide the ugly display behind a craftily made CSS. Search engines have a fair idea of a balanced markup and penalize sites, which do excessive HTML markup in an attempt to ‘trick’ their algorithms.
Creating search engine roadblocks:
If you are developing a website, it helps to know of ways you can prevent creating search engine roadblocks. Your SEO efforts may not get results if your site structure is such that search engines find it difficult to index your site easily. Following are some of the problem areas which create a hurdle in your site indexing -
Having Flash-based site:
Sites built in Flash may have a greater aesthetic impact but perform poorly in search engines. Most search engines cannot read text or links embedded in Flash. It is best to limit the use of flash for content which absolutely requires flash or make a text-based alternate for your website so that search engine crawlers can index your site content easily.
Having text in images:
Search engines cannot read text embedded in images. If you have too much content and navigation using graphic, image maps or image buttons, it would be good to either convert them to simple text or have an alternate navigation bar at the bottom of your website. It would also help to have appropriate text in the Alt-Text tag for each image. Similarly
Having frame-based sites:
If you have built your website using frames, you might have a major problem indexing content sitting inside frames. The way frames and the content page URLs are structured, most search engines find it difficult to reach the inner page content of your website. It is best to restructure your website and remove frames so that you can get your site in the search engine index.
Having free content behind login:
Some sites & forums prefer the visitors to login before they can reach the real content of the website. Due to lack of awareness or inadvertently, if you have placed all your content behind a login, then the search engines cannot index your site as their crawlers cannot fill in a login-password or ‘register’ on your website. You might want to restructure your website such that you can show the publicly-available content without the need to login to your website.
Poor site inter-linking:
Poor site interlinking not only poses hurdles to search engines for indexing your site but also makes your site navigation difficult for your site visitors. It is advisable to have a good navigation bar and a site map on your site so that each page is not more than two clicks away.
Deep directory structure:
A deep directory structure is generally difficult for search engines to crawl. While it is not a rule, it would be good if you can keep your directories not more than one or two levels down, neatly classified into ‘themes’. Deep directory structure also makes your inner pages URLs look too long, which discourages other sites to link to your inner pages.
Having less content / Non-original content:
Search engines thrive on text content. They are mainly looking for text content on your website and reward sites which have lots of easily accessible, non-duplicate original text content. If your sites has less or non-original content picked up from other sites or your affiliate sites, it is unlikely that you would be rewarded, no matter how many efforts you put in optimizing your website. A good way to generate original content is to write nice, keyword rich, descriptive articles classified in themes, about your product or service, its usage, benefits and tips etc.
Using session IDs:
Session ID is a long string of jumbled characters appearing in the URL of your website which changes on each visit. They are usually used to track a visitor ’s online shopping cart contents. When a search engine crawler visits your website, your server assigns it a session ID and the crawler indexes your content and associates it with that session ID. Most search engines have hundreds of bots crawling and re-crawling the web. On each repeat visit of the crawler to your website, they index a fresh copy of your content and associates it with different URLs (session IDs) resulting in cluttering the search engine database with lots of duplicate content. Since search engines are not very good at tackling this problem, they often drop the site from future indexing. If you wish to track as user’s session, a better solution is to use cookies instead of session IDs. Cookies are information files stored on user’s computers and perform the same task as a session ID.
No efforts in getting incoming links:
Incoming links to your website are very important and are responsible for high rankings on search engines to a large extent. Link popularity determines how important your site is. Link building is an important part of your SEO campaign. No extent of site optimization can get you high rankings if you do not carry out a supporting link building campaign.
Relying on one-time SEO:
Search engine optimization is a constant process. You need to update your website SEO when you add new content, update old content or change the theme of your web pages. Addition of new content often requires you to update site interlinking, improve navigation and add links in your site map. Search patterns and keyword phrases also change over time as the search community matures or industry trends change. This requires a fresh keyword research and SEO perspective on your site. Changes may also become necessary if your current SEO strategy is not paying off. In any case, optimizing your site once and expecting it to give you sustained results without further efforts is a mistake.
Showing impatience:
SEO of a website rarely show instant results. If your site is already indexed in search engines, it may take about 4-8 weeks to index your new content. New sites may take 4-6 months to get indexed for the first time. It takes time for SEO results to show up. It is easy to think the past efforts were not good enough and get tempted to change the optimization techniques. It is not advisable to change the optimization of your site pages before you are able to see the results of your previous SEO efforts.
If you keep the above points in mind while carrying out SEO for your site, you would be safe from any penalties. If you are outsourcing your site SEO to a professional company, make sure they adhere to the above guidelines and do not risk your site into a search engine penalty. Remember, just a few precautions can go a long way in having your site rank high and stay away from undesirable search engine penalties.
» Master CSS Through a Step by Step Guide CSS Master Hilco van de Meer steps you through a comprehensive step by step guide teaching you CSS. From novice to expert, everyone will gain some knowledge.
About This Author For SEO help you can reach me at webseohelp@yahoo.com for more help and information on SEO.
