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Thursday, March 30, 2006

Reaching to a Top Ten Placement

articles » search engine optimization

Achieving a top ten placement in the search engines can be compared to being invited to a party for the elite. Only the best of the best optimized web sites get to be in the top ten. While many may still agree that this is the truth, one needs to understand the entire picture. How much does Page Rank or Site Rank have to play in the picture of getting invited to the Search Engine's Top Ten party?

A few years back, Bob Massa of Search King created a program that exploited Google's Page Rank formula. Massa created a network of sites and charged a monthly fee to have sites link to each other. The advantage of Massa's network was based upon the fact that it was a lot easier to find high Page Rank sites to purchase links from and increase the Page Rank of one's web site. Google didn't like this idea too much and penalized Massa's group and clients. Massa, of course, attempted to sue Google but lost because the US Court of Appeals ruled that Page Rank was an opinion and was entitled to the protections of the First Amendment.

Now, Google has decided to employ a Topical Match program where they match one's site to a particular topic based upon how their system reads the site. In order to be matched to the proper topic Google now requires that sites get links from other sites and use link text that defines the topic of one's site. Depending upon which sites are linking to one's site, the Page Rank of one's site could improve. This helps with positioning with Google as Page Rank plays an important part.

In order to achieve an invitation to the party for the elite, you need to have a popularity level that warrants a look. But, the question is how do you get the required level of popularity?

Keys to Achieving a Top Ten Placement

Many will say the following steps are required to meet the requirements of the highly sought party invitations.

Develop your site in a search engine friendly manner.

This requires ensuring your content is as close to the top of the HTML Body as possible.

Use acceptable HTML Standards.

By developing the site using acceptable HTML Standards many features are made available that are otherwise ignored. ALT attributes would be part of the HTML Standards.

Develop your content so that it is optimized in an ethical manner.

Use proper Heading elements and ensure the content includes your most important keywords.

Submit your site to the major search engines.

Submitting to the major search engines could be by using Paid Inclusion, Paid Submission or Pay-Per-Click.

Start your site on the right foot by getting links from other similar sites.

There are many sources available to start this path. Smartads.info, Linkpartners.com and Linksmanager.com are three sources for link building assistance. Ensure your incoming link text represent your subject matter rather than your URL/domain name or name of your company.

Submit your site to as many associated directories as possible.

There are many directories, but not all directories are useful. b. Do not submit to Free-for-All or classified ads sites.

Write articles covering subjects related to topic of your site.

Two places you can have them published through are knowledge-finder.com and thephantomwriters.com. Ensure your incoming link text represent your subject matter rather than your URL/domain name or name of your company.

While some of theses steps are required, they are not all required.

There are many parties for the elite. Some require being more popular than others. For instance, if a site is about televisions the potential list for the party could exceed 8,000,000 depending upon the search engine holding the party. However, these parties don't always carry the clout they do in Hollywood or Uptown New York in the Diamond District.

The more elite parties that bring higher conversions and greater returns are the more targeted parties. Examples of these higher would be RCA Plasma Televisions, cat urinary tract, pet scrapbook themes. These are examples of highly targeted keyword phrases.

Highly targeted keywords and phrases pull the better conversion rates simply because of a single undeniable factor; that factor is people who seek a particular product are the most likely to purchase. Generic or broad-based searches could result in the person looking for educational information, product reviews, or any number of other concepts available on the Internet.

The question now becomes, what phrases should a site focus upon? That's a tough question, but fortunately there is an easy answer. The products will define themselves and their appropriate categories. Like with RCA Plasma Televisions, the two or three related categories could be RCA televisions, Plasma televisions or even RCA Plasma televisions.

Without following the above steps a site will perform poorly in the search engines. It is highly recommended that a site owner have their site evaluated for the most profitable keywords and phrases available. There are a number of tools available for this. One of those tools is Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool.

You, the web site owner, want your web site to perform extremely well in the search engines. Using the above discussed techniques can help you achieve a top ten placement in the search engines

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The Secret Benefit Of Search Engine Optimisation: Increased Usability

By Trenton Moss

A higher search ranking is what many website owners dream of. What they don't realise is that by optimising their site for the search engines, if done correctly, they can also optimise it for their site visitors.

Ultimately this means more people finding your website and increased sales and lead generation. But are search engine optimisation and usability compatible? Aren't there trade-offs that need to be made between giving search engines what they want and giving people what they want? Read on and find out (although I'm sure you can guess the answer!)...

1. Keyword research carried out

Before you even begin building your website, you should carry out keyword research to identify which keyword phrases your site should target. Using publicly available tools such as Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com), you can discover which keywords are searched for the most frequently and then specifically target those phrases.

Doing keyword research is also crucial for your site's usability. By using the same keywords in your website that web users are searching for in search engines, you'll literally be speaking the same language as your site visitors.

For example, you might decide to target the phrase, "sell toys", as your website does in fact sell toys. Keyword research would undoubtedly show you that web users are actually searching for, “buy toys” (think about it - have you ever searched using the word, “sell”, when you want to buy something?). By placing the phrase, “buy toys” on to the pages on your website, you'll be using the same words as your site visitors and they'll be able to find what they're looking for more easily.

2. 200 word minimum per page

Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Search engines may struggle to work out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings.

In terms of usability, it's also good to avoid pages with very little content. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed information. Don't be afraid to put a reasonably large amount of information on to a page. Web users generally don't mind scrolling down anymore, and provided the page provides mechanisms to aid scanning (such as employing sub-headings - see point 6 below) it shouldn't be too difficult for site visitors to locate the information that they're after.

3. 100kb maximum HMTL size

If 200 words is the minimum page content size, then 100kb is the maximum, at least in terms of HMTL file size. Anything more than this and search engines may give up on the page as it's simply too big for them.

A 100kb HMTL file will take 20 seconds to download on a 56k dial up modem, used by three in four UK web users as of March 2004 (source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/intc0504.pdf). Add on the time it takes for all the other parts of the page to download, such as images and JavaScript files, and you're looking at a highly un-user-friendly download time!

4. CSS used for layout

The website of Juicy Studios (http://www.juicystudio.com) saw a six-fold increase in site visitors after switching from a table-based layout to a CSS layout. Search prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:

- The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines

- Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document

- There is a greater density of content compared to coding

Using CSS for layout is also highly advantageous for usability, as it leads to significantly faster download times.

5. Meaningful page title

If you know anything about search engine optimisation you'll know that search engines place more importance on the page title than any other attribute on the page. If the title adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.

A meaningful page title also helps site visitors work out where they are, both within the site and the web as a whole. The page title is the first thing that loads up, often quite a few seconds before the content, so a descriptive, keyword-rich page title can be a real aid to help users orientate themselves.

6. Headings and sub-headings used

Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings (in theory at least) summarise the content immediately below them.

Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they greatly aid scanning. Generally speaking, we don't read on the web, we scan, looking for the information that we're after. By breaking up page sections with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, scanning becomes significantly easier.

Do be sure not to abuse heading tags though. The more text you have contained in heading tags within the page, the less importance search engines assign to them.

7. Opening paragraph describes page content

We've already established that search engines love content, but they especially love the first 25 words or so on each page. By providing an opening paragraph that adequately describes the content of the rest of the page (or the site if it's the homepage), you should be able to include your important keyword phrases in this crucial area.

As web users, whenever we arrive at a web page the first thing we need to know is whether this page has the information that we're after. A great way to find this out is to scan through the first paragraph, which, if it sufficiently describes the page content, should help us out.

8. Descriptive link text

Search engines place a lot of importance on link text. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say 'click here', search engines can't gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, 'widgets' then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.

One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, 'miserable failure'. So many people have linked to George Bush's bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush's bio appears top of the search rankings!

As web users, we don't generally read web pages word-for-word - we scan them looking for the information that we're after. When you scan through text you can't take any meaning from the word 'click here'. Link text that effectively describes its destination is far easier to scan and you can understand the destination of the link without having to read its surrounding words.

9. Frames avoided

Frames are quite an old-school technique, and although aren't as commonplace as they once were, do still rear up their ugly head from time to time. Using frames is one of the worst possible things you could do for your search engine ranking, as most search engines can't follow links between frames.

Even if a search engine does index your pages and web users find you through a search engine, they'll be taken to one of the pages within the frame. This page will probably be a content page with no navigation (navigation is normally contained in a separate frame) and therefore no way to navigate to any other page on the site!

Frames are also disadvantageous for usability as they can cause problems with the back button, printing, history and bookmarking. Put simply, say no to frames!

10. Quality content provided

This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search engine optimised website, but it's actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to looking at page content, look at the number of links pointing in to web pages. The more inbound links a website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.

By providing creative, unique and regularly updated content on your website, webmasters will want to link to you as doing so will add value to their site visitors. You will also be adding value to your site visitors.

Conclusion

Optimising your website for both search engines and people needn't be a trade-off. With this much overlap between the two areas, you should easily be able to have a website that web users can find in the search engines, and when they do find it, they can find what they're looking for quickly and efficiently.

About the Author: This article was written by Trenton Moss. He's crazy about web usability and cessibility so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy ( Webcredible - http://www.webcredible.co.uk ) to help make the Internet a better place for everyone.

SEO HELP: Why Do Web Sites Fail?

Nearly 80% of all web sites fail. They fail because business owners do not have all the correct information they need. You fail when you don't get what you need, fail to spend the needed time or simply don't know what to do with your web site.

As people in general you're taught to find the least expensive options available. You're also taught you need to live up to the standards of the Joneses. As a business owner you can't have the best of both worlds.

Your business is important to you. And, you are important to your business. You want the best from your business. Your business deserves the best.

Buying a three or five page web site is like buying a 10-second advertisement on radio or television. The 10-second advertisement might sound like a great investment because of the low price . so you buy it. Regrettably, later you find you didn't have enough time to tell your potential customer what they really need to know. The three of five page web site is just like that.

Your web site should promote your business and provide your potential customers with enough information to make an educated decision ... and do business with you. Before buying a three or five page web site examine your competitors' web sites. Do they have a three or five page web site? Does it provide you enough information? Would you do business with them?

Your web site is either an extension of your business or your only business. As such, it is a salesperson that works 24-hours per day and never takes a vacation. You must spend the time to train it and give it the same information you would a salesperson.

Providing your web site with the tools for success helps it succeed. Your web site must know as much as you do about your products and services. It must answer the question - why should I do business with you? If you don't answer that question, your potential customers will go to your competition.

You're a business owner. You don't have time to learn a new marketing channel ... or do you?

Taking the time to learn how to use your new marketing tool will help you succeed. A web site is a dynamic entity that has direct interaction with your customers. Web sites are not passive advertisements.

Print, television and radio advertisements are passive. They do not interact with the customer. They sit there waiting for the customer to pay attention or they lose the customer.

Web sites are interactive. Your customer can visit different pages and learn additional information. Your customer can revisit sections ... they can go to new sections. Your customer is just like you ... she wants to enjoy the experience.

But how do you get your customer to your site?

Forty-six percent of a web site's visitors come through the search engines. Limiting your web site to three or five pages limits the number of ways your customers can find you. This web site has over 20 pages ... that's more than 20 ways the site can be found in the search engines.

Successful web sites have three things in common. They have more than five web pages. The business owner spent enough time providing the web site with the needed information for it to succeed. And, finally the business owner learned how to market with their web site.

You want your web site to be successful. Invest in it properly and it can succeed.

SEO NEWS: The Power of Newsletters

Newsletters can be powerful tools in getting your messages out. With the Can-Spam Act of 2003 some changes have occurred that affect unsolicited commercial email. Unsolicited commercial email is defined as email from businesses that have not previously been subscribed to. That is different than newsletters.

Newsletters are information a customer requested. Permission has been granted to the site owner to contact the subscriber about new products, services, and any other relevant information. This is where the power begins.

Email marketers cite numerous problems with delivery of their email notifications. These issues are a direct result of people and businesses misusing the powerful tool of email notifications. Email addresses were sold by unethical businesses and email addresses have been harvested by unethical marketers. The Can-Spam act, as week as it may be, prohibits the exercise of harvesting email addresses off web sites. Yet, the act is still performed.

Due to the fact that unethical business people have ruined a worthy tool, there are still things that are important in measuring the success rates of newsletters. First, as I mentioned a few weeks ago the best days to send out newsletters are Wednesday and Thursday. This has nothing to do with less spam being sent out on those days. It primarily relies upon the fact that people's work weeks are coming to an end and the beginning of the week with all its headaches are nearly over. Receiving newsletters from favorite companies can be refreshing if the content is compelling and interesting.

Each newsletter a business creates must be interesting to the subscriber. By providing information about your products and services with a mixture of interesting and educational material will always come over with the best reception. Including a call to action can assist in measuring the successfulness of your newsletters.

Email marketers have focused upon the metrics of opened newsletters while they were limited to the ability to measure click-thru rates. Those companies that could afford high-end newsletter programs capable of reading the log files from the web server were able to measure this all important metric.

As a business owner your goal is to know how to interpret the statistics available on the web server. Since many business owners do not understand how to interpret these important elements, their success rates are extremely small. Open rates are a result of two elements only. First, the sender's company name or email address and second, the subject line. My advice is to use your company name in the sender's address. Second, use subject lines that identify the purpose of the newsletter. Below is an example of both:

Sender's Address:
If you look at my sender's information you'll notice it says Apple Pie Shopping Cart. You are assured that any email from with that sender's information would be from me.


Subject Line:
My newsletter subject line is always "Apple Pie Recipes of Success". This identifies the subject of my message and assures the subscriber that they are about to read my newsletter.
The most important metric is not the number of subscribers the newsletter was sent to or the number of subscribers that opened the newsletter. In fact, it is the click-thru rate that becomes the one most important element and above all the most successful marketing statistic available. That number tells me how successful my message and call to action were.

As mentioned above, many business owners pay third-parties to provide these statistics. Or, they have to decipher the server logs. Attempting to do either can be either overly burdensome due to cost or simply due to time constraints. In order to assist clients the Apple Pie Shopping Cart includes this high level of measurement.

Friday, March 24, 2006

How to Improve your Click Through Rate in Google AdWords

By Kalena Jordan

Like many people who earn their income via the Internet, I use affiliate programs to supplement my income. One of the affiliate products I promote (
Proposal Kit) had been performing particularly well for me recently and I decided to help things along by creating a Google AdWords campaign based around my reviews of the product.

After one month, the campaign was going ok, I was getting a few sales here and there and certainly making a good ROI on the promotion. However, although my Click Through Rate (CTR) was pretty good (1.2%), it was starting to slide backwards and I thought I could do better. As you probably know, your ad position in Google relies heavily on your CTR compared to your competitors, so I was keen to turn things around and keep my high ad positions.

Around this time, I bought Nick Usborne's book
Net Words and started to read it, taking notes as I went. I realized that according to Nick's philosophy, my AdWords ads were flat and boring. They were just not appealing enough to entice people to click on them. As Nick explains in his book, "Being blah guarantees you'll never be heard".

So I set about re-writing some of my ad text to speak more directly to my audience and ask them a question that required a response. Below is an example of an ad targeting the search query "business proposal before I changed the text:

Business Proposal Kit
Close the sale with a professional
business proposal template kit.
And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need a business proposal?


Create your own professional
proposal with our template kit

The aim was to get my average CTR for the entire campaign up to around 2% from the existing 1.2% it was sitting at.

I logged off for the evening and went to bed, not expecting too much. The next morning, I had messages in my email in-box advising me that I had made 3 sales overnight! I was quite excited and logged into AdWords to see how things were going. Sure enough, my clicks were way up and two of the three AdGroups I had edited were showing an average 33% CTR! My overall campaign CTR had risen from 1.2% to 2.4%. I had never experienced CTR that high before. The ad I had changed used to show a 2.5% CTR and after a few days the changed ad displayed a 4.3% CTR.

Taking note of the ads that had attracted the most clicks, I created more around related keywords and phrases, using similar headlines to the ads that were performing the best. This time, I incorporated Nick's advice to use short and punchy copy.

Below is an example of an ad I was using to target the search query "seo contract" before I changed the text:
Sample SEO contract

Proposal Kit provides a perfect SEO

contract template. Read our review.
And here is the text I replaced it with:

Need an SEO contract?

Create yours.Today.

After another week, my average CTR for the whole campaign jumped from 2.4% to 4% and I had a couple of ads showing 100% CTR! You can imagine how excited I was. Of course the high CTR builds on itself because the higher your CTR, the higher your ad position and the higher your ad position, the more clicks it is likely to attract. So my campaign had jumped from 1.3% in the first month, to 2.4% in the second month and after my fine-tuning, it's now showing a 4% CTR consistently. And the sales? Well I now average at least seven sales per week, up from two per week over the past 6 months and my affiliate commission is at an all time record.

The exercise just goes to show that a few thoughtful tweaks to your ad copy can make a HUGE difference to your bottom line. So what are you waiting for? Go tweak that copy in your own campaigns...

Thursday, March 23, 2006

The Benefits of Black Hat Techniques :SEO Articles

Yes, you read that correctly. There are benefits of "black hat" techniques used to manipulate rankings in the search engines.

If you work within the search engine optimization industry, or you are a webmaster, you have most likely already encountered some black hat techniques in play. As someone who does SEO for a living, it's in my best interests to know what the techniques are in order to combat them.

Problem is, to a black hat, it's all worth it. While the majority of us sweat and labor and obsess on getting top rankings in Google and other search engines, the black hatters sit back and laugh at our efforts.

The elite hatters will "churn-and-burn" websites, but in the three months of that website's existance, the black hatter can easily make over 100k from each site.

That's why they continue to employ their techniques, all the while raking in the cash. This is also the same reason why spammers continue to do what they do - out of the millions of emails sent, there are enough people clicking on the advertisement to make them money.

So, now that we know the motivation of the black hat, where is the benefit?

The black hatters keep the search engines on their toes by constantly pushing the boundries of manipulating data and information on the web. If the Googles of the world could just sit back and never apply any new thoughts to their algorithms, the "Average Joe" would never have a shot at getting a top spot in the search engines.

All of the top spots would be owned by the players with the most money to spend.

But, since the black hats continually look for loopholes in the algorithms, it forces the search engines to continually re-think their apporach on how to rank the content found on the Internet.

While I admit that it can be frustrating to see a site above yours in the search engine results that is employing these techniques, you must keep in mind that you have a chance to achieve top rankings because of their techniques.

While the black hatter relies on automation to obtain their goals, the rest of us have to do it with effort. That is the kryptonite of the black hatters. Eventually, your site should have better, original content and more relevant links pointing to your site, and that will drive the black hatters away.

The goal of the black hat is to make money as quickly as possible. The elite black hatters are smart enough to know when they have been beaten in a specific area, and will simply turn their focus to another topic.

You can beat the black hat. But it will take time, and it will take resolve. Consider it a battle - because they do.

-To your online success!

Paul Bliss

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Free Online SEO Tools Review :Seo Tools

Here's my favorite free online seo tools ....They each have a distinguishing or unique feature to make this list....

1. Find out the number of searches on a keyphrase -
Yahoo-Overture Tool

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!! http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool . Jim's company has the BEST free tools. For instance: see the list of backlinks with anchor text

3. Tells you how many links a domain has totalling the different engines. Has the additive feature of tracking history and "categorizing you" (unknown vs 900 lb gorilla - great marketing!) http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

4. Start with a phrase and find out which pages on your website are doing the best: http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php

5. A range of tools that highlight the source of page rank and how its "used" across the number of outgoing links http://www.rustybrick.com/tools.php

6. A great tool that reminds you of your outgoing (and internal) links - http://www.dead-links.com/ . My new favorite link/html checker is: http://www.elsop.com/quick/

7. Find out the number of .edu or .gov links (considered to be "authority" sites) . go to yahoo search - http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linkdomain%3Ahomeschoolfun.com+site%3A.edu&ei=UTF-8&fr=slv1-&x=wrt and search for: linkdomain:webdomain.com site:.edu
8. Want some keywords to consider? Put in your phrase and get a list of choices: https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox

Note that the google search engine - www.google.com - itself is perhaps the greatest free seo tool. To find out how recently google spidered a site, search on google in a way that finds the site if you must, you can always put the url into google) and then clicked on "cached" to see when it was last spidered. Do this regularly and see what schedule you are on. To see how google is viewing your keywords on a page, search with those keywords so that it comes up and look at the cached version for the highlighting (example: to see whether google recognizes homeschool on a search for home school, type into google: home school domain name and look at the results. Lastly, the "similiar sites" choice in google reveals google's concept of relevance.

-------------------------------
Below - some details & feedback on a few of these tools and some other near-favorites:

2. Find out how a page does for a certain keyphrase. Plus who is doing well and why. Amazing!!!!!
http://www.webuildpages.com/cool-seo-tool
- enter a page and a keyphrase to find out how and why that page does well on the phrase.
- On a single chart, you get the top 10 sites for that phrase for google, msn, yahoo compaged with your page in terms of:
- rank, Pages Indexed (google/yahoo), Backlinks to that page, backlinks to the domain, Allinanchor rank, Domain Age, & Phrase count
- Desired features: add in the Yahoo analysis of number of searches for that term last month

3.
http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop

- Provides for up to 3 domains at once, a "total" count of links from google, msn, yahoo, hotbot.
- Has the very addictive feature of maintaining your history of searches so you can see progress.
- Also a very motivating but silly set of categories: Limited, average, above average, contender, player, 900 pound gorilla.
Should I admist that I celebrated when I became "average" and then "above average"

4.
http://tools.morevisibility.com/ranking/index.php

- For a single word or phrase at time, provides which page (or pages) on your site are in the top 50
- the good feature is finding multiple pages which are doing well for a given term
- Request: it would be great if we could submit multiple phrases at once

6. I started with this tool while I was checking my site for dead links. Amongst other great features, for SEO purposes, it analyses the links out of each page.
http://www.dead-links.com/Theres also a reciprocal link checker.

What other free tools do you find useful?

WOW - jsut found the motherload - try a google search on free seo tools.....

Also of note:
http://www.dnsstuff.com/ This is a great collection of cool stuff, some too sophisticated for me to appreciate yet. I did find out how to get my dns number and other useful
free info.....
- another link popularity check. this one gives, for a keyphrase, your rank on google, the leaders, plus the link count (G&Y), Google PR, and allinanchor for you and the leaders...Not as good as cooloh

www.globalpromoter.com has a buncho tools but nothing special has jumped out at me... they have a tool which searches the Yahoo tool and another which supposedly will run a batch thru yahoo...but it didn't work for me.

Thursday, March 09, 2006

The Big Website Question: If You Build It, Will They Visit?

Q: I recently launched a websitefor my sporting goods business. Do I need to do anything special to attract customers to my website? I know nothing about search engines and marketing as such. Please tell me where to begin.

A: That is a question that has been asked by every business person who has ever launched a website. If I build it, will they come? Of course they will -- if you've built a website that appeals to dead baseball players.

For those of you who didn't get the "Field of Dreams" reference, let me put it this way: No, Sean, if you build it they will not come, at least not without some effort on your part.

Assuming that a website will automatically attract customers is the single biggest mistake that many business owners make. It is this mistake that eventually leads them to dismiss their website as a failure and abandon their online sales efforts.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard a client say, "Well, I threw up a website, but nobody ever came to it and I didn't sell a single thing from it! Dang thing was a waste of time, if you ask me …"

Forgive me, but "threw up" is the operative term there. These short-sighted entrepreneurs (God love them) mistakenly think that all they have to do is throw up a website and that their business will automatically double overnight. And when nothing happens they blame it on the infallibility of the Internet, on El Nino, on the Bosa Nova, on their customers… everything but their own lack of marketing efforts.

If you build it, will they come? That, Sean, depends totally on you.

When it comes to attracting customers, opening an online business(or an online branch of an existing business) is no different from opening a traditional brick and mortar shop. Without a little fanfare and a well-devised marketing plan, chances are your website will become just another spot of roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

The first step in devising your marketingplan is to ask yourself this question: Who is my customer? Who is it that I want to attract to my website? Believe it or not, this is a question many entrepreneurs fail to ask. The identity of your customer is incredibly important because if you don't know who your customer is, how can you expect to market to them?

The next question concerns the locality of your customer. Do you want to attract a local or global clientele to your website? If the answer is local, then you will gear your marketing efforts toward customers in your own backyard, which means incorporating your website launch with your offline marketing efforts.

If the website is the online branch of a brick and mortar business, include the website URL in all your print materials and advertising campaigns. Consider running ads in the local paper, on radio or TV announcing the launch of your site. Use direct mail or in-store posters to announce the site launch to your existing customer base.

In short, keep doing what you're doing to attract customers to your physical store, just add your website address to the mix.

Just remember, it's important to consider your website a branch of your brick and mortar business because that's exactly what it is. A good business website will help you sell more products, widen your range of clientele, and increase your revenue without adding overhead. Don't sell your website short. Make it work for you.

If you are seeking a global audience, your marketing efforts will be quite different. Attracting customers from around the world is a more difficult task than attracting customers from around the block. Fortunately, the task is not impossible. The Internet has leveled the playing field in many ways. Now every business, no matter how large or small, has the ability to do business internationally.

In the most basic sense, an online marketing campaign to attract global customers should include the following efforts.

Register With Search Engines There's not enough room in this newspaper for a thorough discussion of search engines and their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in driving traffic to a website. Suffice it to say that 95% of search engine traffic comes from Google and Yahoo, so start there. It's also important to realize that just registering with search engines does not guarantee you traffic, but it certainly can't hurt.

Unfortunately, the free search engine lunch ran out a couple of years ago when search engines figured out that people would actually pay for listings and higher placement. Since that time the only way to guarantee a high (or at least higher than others) rankingis to pay for it. The two most popular pay-for-placement programs are Yahoo's "Yahoo Express" and Google's "Adwords." Visit their respective websites for details on these programs. Be prepared to spend several hundred dollars at a minimum to get your site listed.

Exchange Links With Similar Sites One free - and potentially effective - way to drive customers to your website is through link exchanges with sites of similar interest. Locate sites that make a good match to your own and contact the owner to ask if they will link to your site in exchange for you linking to theirs. If you sell golf balls on your website, set up a link exchangewith another website that sells golfclubs. You post a link to them and they post a link to you. It's called digital back scratching, and if done properly, can work well to drive traffic your way.

Go To Where The Customers Are If the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain. One little known way to attract customers to your website is to market your products on a mega-site like eBay. There are thousands and thousands of people on eBay at any given time and each one is potentially your customer, so it's a great place to drum up business.

Your goal is not to make a living selling on eBay, but to use eBay as a marketing tool to drive traffic back to your website. Go to where the customers are, then bring them back home with you.

Let's use our golf ball example. Post a few auctionson eBay selling your golf balls at a ridiculously low price so your auction attracts plenty of attention. When customers make a purchase, add them to your client list and send them an email inviting them to visit your website for more great products. eBay also lets you create your own "About Me" page that you can use to advertise your business.

We have just scratched the surface, but hopefully this is enough to get you started. I wish I could tell you that attracting customers to your website is easy, but the truth is, it's anything but. It takes hard work, creativity and above all, perseverance.

Here's to your success!

How to make a link page and outbound link structure?

This is a major question, which comes in mind of every SEO, link building company and webmaster's that what kind of link page should be on their site or what is the best way of giving outbound link. Every body need links and to get it one has to give back some thing in return unless your contents are so good that the site is voluntarily linked by others. To give back link you need some link page or some other way of giving outbound links. What method should be adopted for outbound links structuring. In my opinion you can adopt following :

1. The best way to give outbound link is to give links within the content page as it is most useful for users who read your site contents. This method of linking is natural and long lasting as search engines want that the pages should be made for users and not for the search engines

2. You can make 4 to 6 resources pages but each page should be on particular theme and object of the page should match the theme of your site. In such a way you will provide the users more related resources on same topic at one place. It will help you in making an authority page.

3. You can also adopt the traditional style which is used in research papers as well as books also where links are given at the end of the page referred to as more references and resources. It gives more information to the users about any particular topic thus enriching their knowledge more. There are many other ways of making link page but the most common is to have a long page with huge list of sites on one single page and linking each site with its title or optimized anchor text without having any relevance between the sites. Such pages never bring traffic rather we just make it only for search engines, which is no doubt a Spam. Googlementioned in its SEOguidelines "Make pages for users, not for search engines ". Search engines are well aware of such kind of link pages and are definitely to be treated by search engines as "Link Farm" and will be penalized.



So in order to have the maximum benefit along with increasing traffic and giving the best to your site users make relevant, authority based link resources which would be beneficial for both your site as well as for the users.

Article Source: http://www.articles-galore.com

Monday, March 06, 2006

Improve the Sales of Your Internet Marketing

When you put your all into learning something that you need to know, you can bet that other people can benefit from what you have learned. Internet marketing is one of those topics that lots of people need help with. So once you've gained knowledge and experience writingand selling an internet marketing ebook might be a good opportunity for you.

In order to make money in ebookpublishing, you have to have a product that people want. How-to books that fill a need are undoubtedly best-selling ebooks. An internet marketing ebook falls into that category.

There is nothing worse than an internet marketing ebook or how-to ebook that is filled with junk. Thus, in order for your internet marketing ebook to be a best seller, it has to offer useful information. If it doesn't, you'll get return requests and charge-backs left and right. Besides, if you don't have quality content in your internet marketing ebook, you can't comfortably offer a money back guarantee which is actually a vital aspect of marketing ebooks for profit.

Every ebook, especially an internet marketing ebook, needs to have a clear purpose before you begin to write it. Decide who your target audience will be - who will buy your book? Selecting a niche market to sell your internet marketing ebook to is half the battle. When you narrow your market rather than trying to satisfy the masses, you will have a much higher quality product and less competition. The trick to producing a best seller is to provide a solution to an existing problem that isn't effectively solved by numerous competitors.

Add value to your internet marketing ebook by offering freebies as bonuses for buying the ebook right away. A customer's perceived value is very important. Examples of bonuses might include things like a report on how to set up an affiliate program for an ebook, how to manage a pay-per-click campaign, or how to write results-oriented sales copy for an internet marketing website.

Realize that if your internet marketing ebook is going to make money, you've got to apply the internet marketing principles that will get your ebook noticed, walk the prospect through the sales process and close the sale. The first principle is driving traffic to your website. Whatever internet marketing techniques you use to accomplish that, targeted trafficis vital. Once you have visitors at your website the sales process kicks in.

Long-copy sales letters are undoubtedly best for selling an internet marketing ebook or any other ebook for that matter. Short copy just doesn't cut it. You see, when you are selling information products online, like an internet marketing ebook, you don't have the advantage of a face-to-face sales opportunity. Your web copy has to accomplish the sales for you.

To close the sale, the copy must convey a unique selling proposition - one or more things that stand out apart from your competition. It has to be attractive and compelling to your well-defined target market with headlines and subheads that grab attention by stating the product's benefit or solution, or invoking curiosity. Your pricing strategy and relative bonuses must give readers a high perceived value so they feel they are getting an internet marketing ebook and additional information or products that are worth what they are paying.

The sales copy also has to build credibility either by stating the author's credentials, using testimonials, or both. The reader's objections also have to be countered by the sales copy. This can be accomplished by addressing them directly and by offering a money back guarantee.

A long-copy sales letter for selling an internet marketing ebook or another "how to" ebook that creates a sense of urgency can result in immediate sales. People have a tendency to be impulse shoppers so creating urgency by offering a "limited time" price or bonuses or making the product available only for a limited time will prompt the close of the sale.

Another factor to consider when writing sales copy for your internet marketing ebook is, buyers want to know they can contact you. When you provide valid, easy-to-find contact information your credibility increases tremendously and as a result so will your sales for your internet marketing ebook or any ebook you choose to publish.

Article Distribution Service by rcplinks.com.

Article Source: http://www.articles-galore.com

Thursday, March 02, 2006

Internet marketing complete simple for the trainee

By: Christopher Enders

There are so many internet marketingpossibilities for promoting an online business, or even a traditional business. The ability to engage in internet marketing has truly opened the door for women in business and has made working from home a lot easier than it used to be.


Internet
marketingcan be much less expensive than traditional marketingand it can reach a huge, precisely targeted audience. Because there are no geographic barriers in internet marketing, it is truly possible to do business worldwide and to sell anything from anywhere, even from the comfort of your own home. Following is a simple explanation of some of the most common internet marketing options that you can use to promote your business.


Article Distribution


Distributing professional articles with a resource box that directs readers to your websiteis a very valuable and effective method of internet marketing. The articles can be given away with permission to reprint at-will under the terms that the article content and resource box cannot be changed. Many websiteoperators will post these articles on their websites which will direct visitors to your website
as well as enhancing your internet marketing link campaigns.




Directory Listings


Directory listings are a form of internet marketing that can be very useful. Directories are a lot like search engines, only listings in the directories are anaged and ranked by people rather than by automated, electronic means. Many directories accept directory listings free of charge, so they can be an inexpensive and effective form of internet marketing.


Email Marketing


Email marketingis a viable internet marketing technique that is very similar to direct mail. Generally, it is best for internet marketing messages sent via email to be sent to opt-in or subscriber lists. However, third party lists can be purchased for the purpose of email marketing.


If using third-party lists, check into how the
emailaddresses were collected and make sure that they are truly targeted lists with content gathered from individual who opted to receive information relevant to what you are sending.


Ezine Advertising


Ezine advertising, as an internet marketing option, is a lot like advertisingin a magazine; only the "magazine" is delivered to subscribers electronically rather than through the mail. Companies that distribute online newsletters often sale advertising in their newsletters as well, and some may even trade out for an advertisement in your newsletter.


Link Campaigns


Building links to your
website from other websitesthat have information relevant to your target market should be a part of your internet marketing plan. Link popularity, the number of links coming in to your website, and link relevancy, the relevance of the website that is linking to you, can improve your website ranking in the search engines as well as directing targeted traffic to your site.


Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing


Pay-per-click search engine marketing is one of the most successful forms of internet arketing.
Basically, pay-per-click
search engine advertising is a process whereby you bid on specific keywordsthat will direct targeted trafficto your website. You are listed in the search engines based upon the amount you bid for the keyword. You are charged the bid price each time a visitor clicks on the search engine listing, through to your website. This is a good internet
marketing option because you only pay for successful click-throughs which result in
traffic
to your website.



Portal Listings


Portals are similar to directories but are generally specific to a topic or industry. Because visitors to portals have interest in the topic, getting listed in a portal that is relevant to your business can be a very effective internet marketing technique for driving targeted, qualified traffic to your website.

Search Engine Marketing


Search engine marketing is a much preferred internet marketing option because the majority of visitors to just about any website come via the use of a search engine. Search engines use what is called spiders or crawlers which are really just
software programs that index websites and determine their relevance, based on the search engine's rules, to the information a person using an internet browser is looking for.


There are also meta search engines that draw from the results of other search engines, and specialty search engines that are geared to a particular topic or industry. To get listed in search engines, a website needs to be optimized and submitted to the search engines. Major search engines include
Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Alta Vista and others.