Archive for June 24th, 2006
The first months my website was online, I was constantly checking the search engines to see if my site was listed under the keywords that I was targeting. And always with the same negative results.
The truth is that the keywords that you are targeting are often not showing your site the first months at all on the first 200 search listings. OK,if you try to get your site listed for hoooohjgaagga or something like that, it could get you a first place in no time. But who wants to target that keyword?
(374 words, estimated reading time: 1:30 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
Nurturing Relationships With Your Website Visitors: How To Keep Customers Coming Back
by: Mary Anne Donovan
I had a really wild experience the other day. I was on my bank’s Internet site, wildly trying to ascertain whether an important money wire had been deposited into my account. It hadn’t. I thought perhaps it could be somewhere in the system, so I wanted a warm body to either calm my fears, or establish what my priority was going to be on that day.
One of my biggest frustrations with websites is trying to find contact information when I need it, and of course, even for those sites that have it, there are few standards for where it might be located. These are the instances where I feel alienated, drifting in an impersonal cyber world that for all I know may be populated with nothing but cyborgs. Many web sites have lost sales because they made themselves impossible to deal with except through their Internet shopping carts.
Anyway, back to the bank. Lo and behold, there on the page was a chunk of information where I had several choices to actually deal with a human being. One was to send an email, one was to engage in instant messaging, and the third was to click on a button to speak with someone on the phone. I opted to click and my phone immediately began ringing. Now this was service! I picked it up, and although a received a recording, it was just a few seconds later when a REAL person got on the line. Unfortunately, the competent and human representative on the other end determined that my wire was no where in the system, but at least now I had a game plan for what I needed to do that day as opposed to wallowing in ignorance.
This is called relationship, and it is the challenge for today’s Internet. How do you personalize an otherwise vast universe where by its very nature people are relegated to alienation and anonymity?
The first, though seemingly obvious thing you need to do is make it an objective for your site - a priority objective. Once you do that, you can consider and employ specific strategies such as:
1. Identify and describe, as closely as you possibly can, your target customer or visitor. And unless you are a Kodak or Motorola, don’t pretend to be all things to all people. The Internet is about customization - the days of the Industrial Revolution where one size fits all due to manufacturing economies of scale are gone!
2. Content that communicates. Once you have figured out who your target audience is and what content would be valuable to them, fill your web site with lots of it. And make sure to keep your content dynamic - if a document is out of date, your customer may be lost! This is the easiest way to keep an ongoing dialog with visitors.
3. Make yourself accessible. Your photo should also be on your site, as well as your contact information, including email, telephone, and address. Put this contact information in an obvious place - a page labeled “Contact Us”, for example. The best contact information is a physical location - because brick and mortar gives people an important link to reality.
4. Appoint an editorial staff. Advertise for and then appoint a group of individuals with industry credibility to serve as regular contributors to your web site content. Have a weekly, rotating column. Encourage users to write in response to your columnists/editors. Ah, and one very important thing - publish their photos and if they agree, their email addresses. If they don’t want to give out their personal email, then give them one on your server.
5. How about a weekly puzzle? I had great luck with a puzzle I used to run in a biweekly e-zine. Visitors loved it and kept coming back for more. Craft the puzzle around your business or industry. For example, come up with a 9-letter word with just one of each letter that has something to do with your industry, and then make it into a sudoku.
6. Start up an advice column. Become the Dear Abby of your industry. Provide readers with relevant, substantive advice and increase traffic while cementing relationships.
7. Offer online seminars and training programs. Though these programs do not need to be synchronous, consider chunking up the material so you can provide personalized feedback at intervals along the way.
8. Build a message board or forum to allow customers, visitors, and other businesses to communicate with one another. Make sure you also play an active role in these communications to further cement these relationships.
The key to successful search engine relationship marketing is to keep a dialog going with your site visitors. Give them valuable content, let them have access to you, and encourage them to participate in your site. Not all of these suggestions will work for every site - know your customers and pick what works for them. When you have succeeded in building a relationship, they will keep coming back to your oasis in the cyber desert.
|
About The Author
Mary Anne Donovan is both a scholar and a practitioner, a balance
that “gives me the best of both worlds: the theory behind digital
communications and the hands-on experience to know what really works
and what doesn’t.” She is in her tenth year as a professor of
technical writing and business communications while at the same time
serves as Vice President and Director of U.S. Operations for SEO
Literacy Consultants, Inc., a search engine optimization consulting
and training company. Mary Anne has worked with computers since they
first came out of the closet and into more general application,
starting with computerized quality control systems for Kodak
photographic and printing processes and now with the fine points of
SEO theory and application.
seolc.com
mad@seolc.com
|
Permanent link to this post (988 words, estimated 3:57 reading time)
June 24th, 2006
Watch out for a shift in the pay-per-click (PPC) industry, happening right now! This shift is finally going to give smaller search engines and directories the ability to tap into the PPC market, currently monopolized by the big guns online (Google, Yahoo & MSN). They will attain this lofty goal by banding together and delivering paid ad placements on a mass community scale for a fraction of the cost.
(1632 words, estimated reading time: 6:32 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
Part I of this article discussed some of the points that should be included in a search engine optimization proposal. Visit the resources section at the bottom of the page if you wish to get a copy of the whole article.
Part 2 will discuss the following topics:
Creation of Meta Information
Site Map Creation
Link Popularity Building
Web Site Load Time and HTML Validation
Downloading and Uploading of Web Pages
Browser Search Engine and Directory Submissions
Compatibility and Resolution Checking
(859 words, estimated reading time: 3:26 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
One of the most frequent questions I get asked is in the choice of keywords for a new site, specifically secondary keywords.. These are the words or phrases that you use when writing your content to help theme the page so that the search engines know what your page is about. These secondary keywords also help to bring in more traffic, because they add more depth to your page, meaning that your page is found for a lot more phrases than just the primary phrase you page is built around.
(1016 words, estimated reading time: 4:04 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
SEO Tips For People Who Aren’t Dummies!
by: Philip Lim
TIP ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF KEY WORDS
In the world of marketing online, one topic comes up over and over with great frequency: site rankings. It can sometimes seem to be the ‘holy grail’ in the highly competitive world of online marketing, where search engines rule supreme. The reality is that unless you have deep pockets indeed, SEO optimization in the long run will be more affordable than simply buying placement with click campaigns and advertisements.
This is the good news. The bad news is that the process is slow, and it can take months (and months and months) of dedicated effort to achieve decent rankings (one reason you don’t want to abandon those paid campaigns while optimizing your site). But it is well worth the time and effort in the long run, since it addresses the one issue that is foremost when marketing your product and services online: people use search engines such as Google and MSN to do their looking. And search engine listings that are highly ranked consistently outperform ‘paid listings’.
So how do you get your site listed and ranked highly? Does it take dedicating your life fulltime to this effort, or specialized knowledge? The answer is “yes” and “no”. It can help tremendously to hire the assistance of a firm that specializes in SEO (and, in fact, this is highly recommended). They can give you professional guidance in this arena, and steer you away from common mistakes.
But for those with a limited budget (which is most of us, nowadays, it seems) it’s also possible to do your own site optimization, and work on a long-term campaign to help your site rise. It isn’t easy (unlike those ads and books online that promise overnight success with no effort), but by rolling up your shirtsleeves and diving in, you can learn a tremendous amount, and help your site get found when people type in your products into a search engine.
TIP TWO: SELECT YOUR KEYWORDS CAREFULLY
Search engine keywords are what lead people (as in potential customers) who type in phrases in their favorite search engine to your site. When they go onto Google, Excite, or other search engines and directories, and are looking for a specific item, keywords are the ones that they type in during their search.
To market effectively to them, you will need to think like them (this is the basis of all excellent marketing). You will want to determine:
What phrases people type in when looking for your product, service, or content during their online searches (including the most common
misspellings, by the way). Not sure? Try looking at your web stats for your site. You should see an extremely valuable area called “search strings”, with a list of words underneath it.
These search strings are the phrases that actually brought people to your web site. Which ones were the most popular? You’ll want to note these. But you’ll want to add more.
Sit down for a minute, and think of every possible phrase people might use for searching for your product. At this point, don’t edit yourself, just let the words flow and write them down. If you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, VA, you might come up with “used cars, used Chevrolets, vintage cars, reconditioned cars, Chevrolet dealers, Alexandria VA car dealers, Alexandria VA used cars”, as just a start.
By now, you should have a list. Go through it again, and decide which ones seem the most focused for your product or service. You want search engine keywords that will bring targeted customers to your site, who are interested in doing business with you, and the right keywords can help accomplish this. Be specific and relevant in your choices. Then, alphabetize your list, since some search engines and directories list pages alphabetically; so use your best phrases in alphabetical order whenever possible for better optimization.
Next, analyze which keyword phrases are realistic for obtaining high rankings. While you may sell used autos, and want to get top rankings for that term, ‘used autos’ is an extremely popular and general phrase, and odds are, difficult to get good rankings for. But if you sell used Chevrolets in Alexandria, Virginia, then it’s realistic to hope for high rankings for search engine phrases for ‘Alexandria used Chevrolets’. You’ll also get a more targeted audience (think ‘more likely to buy from me’), since most of your customers will probably come from your locale).
At this point, you should have a list of keywords. If you have a very short one, or are having trouble thinking of some, you can gain access to professional software at minimal cost. Just start a Google adwords campaign, or a CPC campaign on Overture. Each of these sites have “keyword suggestion” tools that will give you several keywords based on your product or service, and will include the relative popularity of each one.
TIP THREE: PLACE KEYWORDS CAREFULLY
Once you have your keywords, you’ll want to use them in the right places. The goal is to help search engines find your site for those phrases, so you will want to place them in spots the engines look closely at. These include the page Title, inside the meta tags, inside the heading tag, in the domain name (more about this in a later lesson), and the keyword tags.
You will also want to sprinkle them liberally throughout the content (text) of your site, with special consideration for the top of your page and its first paragraphs. This is especially important on your home (index page), which is the one that most search engines will cache when spidering through. And please, have some real content on your page, and not just a list of keywords, or your site could go down in its rankings. Search engines do rank according to content relevancy, and the site that says “Our dealership provides quality used Chevrolet cars, reconditioned to meet our customer’s needs,” (with at least 100 words of good, relevant content) will always rank higher than the site that says, “cars, cars, cars, buy quality used Chevrolet cars, quality used cars are here”. In addition, you won’t drive away customers offended by poor quality writing and obvious over-usage of marketing phrases.
But you do want to maintain a certain ratio of keyword density in your text; a keyword density of 5 to 7% is usually recommended. If you don’t feel comfortable writing copy using keywords, a professional copywriter who specializes in online writing can help you.
THREE COMMON MISTAKES TO AVOID
Mistake #1: One common error that many people make is to forget to place ALT tags for their graphics. You may have a beautiful logo or graphic on your web site, but if you don’t have an alt tag, the search engines can’t “read it”. Be sure to place keywords there, and to label graphics with names that reflect keywords.
Mistake #2: Always have text on your site. When creating your site, search engines depend upon text to decide what your site is about. The more relevant the text, the better. The spiders and bots can’t “read” graphics as mentioned above. Don’t just make the text for the site one big graphic, as some firms do. The search engines will skip over the graphic, and assume you have no content at all.
Mistake #3: Finally, please don’t spam (by trying to ‘hide’ your keywords by using a font the same color as the background, or repeating keyword phrases over and over in the title and meta tags). Search engines are now excellent at finding those who try to break the rules (and their technology for doing so is getting more sophisticated all the time), and will drop spammers from their indexes like a hot potato. So play by the rules, and when in doubt, ask an ethical SEO firm for advice, or visit one of the many excellent forums online (such as Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Search Engine Forums).
Your site will rise more quickly, and enjoy higher rankings, if you follow these tips and their advice. And your traffic will increase, at no cost to you!
|
About The Author
Philip Lim is the editor of www.Catasult.com which provides valuable tips and advice on web promotion and internet marketing from linking strategies to search engine industry news, internet marketing articles and more.
|
Permanent link to this post (1403 words, estimated 5:37 reading time)
June 24th, 2006
Search engine optimization is one of most popular online marketing tool for any website. With most websites looking forward to increasing the online sales of their products/services, search engine optimization can be a very cost-effective tool to target and procure your customers online. In this paper, we will discuss about search engine optimization, its benefits and how you can optimize your website for top search engine rankings.
What is search engine optimization?
(1587 words, estimated reading time: 6:21 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
SEO #4: Off-page Optimization
by: Ahmed Omran
Yesterday you should have read the third course out of 6 courses that will help you get a TOP rank in the search engines and get EXPLOSIVE LASER TARGETED TRAFFIC for Free. Today we move on to course #4 and study off-page Optimization. Please read today’s course very carefully and take some time to test what I’m about to tell you on your own webpage. Alright let’s start!
Off-page Optimization
Unfortunately optimizing your WebPages is not enough; the search engines have developed a “system” where the ranking of a website is determined by its “Link Popularity”. This system was first developed by Google and now many other search engines like yahoo search and msn are doing the same. So to get a top page ranking you must get as many websites linking to you as possible. Before I tell you how to increase your link popularity I have to tell you about the other major factors in off-page optimization.
1) Anchor Text: This is the text that is hyperlinked to send people to your website. Anchor text MUST contain a few of your main keywords because google uses it to determine your websites relevance to a particular topic.
2) The website that links to you: If the website that links to you is related to your site then that’s a huge bonus to you. So look for websites that are related to your website’s topic.
You now know that it’s vital that you use an anchor text that includes your main keywords. For example if you remember from day2, the title that I chose was “Yo Mama Joke | Blonde Joke Online”. Now a good anchor text that can include my main keywords would be that title! You also should know that in order to get a good ranking you must seek out websites that are closely related to your own website and get them to link to you.
To get your website on “its feet” you can start by submitting your website to popular directories. These directories are free but you can always pay for a guaranteed placement ($$). Now I have here some links that should be more than enough to get you started.
http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=seo-friendly.php
This website has links to hundreds of Search engine friendly free directories that you can add you link to. Beside each directory you can see the PR, this is very useful.
http://www.dmoz.org/ (PR 9!) YOU MUST submit your site to the Open Directory Project.
http://www.zeal.com (PR 8!) YOU MUST submit your site to Zeal, by being in their directory you will be indexed by LookSmart.
Now the next step is to look for link partners. I can’t stress this enough, you have to find partners with websites related to your own website. What I have here are four link-exchange directories that you can sign up to and start exchanging links with people. These are great and will get you hundreds of sites that may link to you. I suggest you install a link directory script on your website and add all the websites that you want to exchange links with. After adding their link just send them an email and approach them professionally. You can use an email like this:
Hello my name is Ahmed Omran. I am seeking out possible link partners that our visitors would be interesting in visiting. I’ve found your website to be a very good fit for our visitors. I have already gone ahead and added your link to our links page at: http://youdomain.com/links
I am contacting you to see if it is ok to have done so. Also, I would like to ask if you mind linking back to us. If so, please use the linking details below and send me the location of our link on your website.
Here are our linking details:
Title:
Description:
URL:
We’ve got several PR6 and 7 websites, so we expect this site to become at least a PR5 within 1 month and will eventually become a 6 or 7 in 2-3 months.
I hope this can be a way for us to benefit our visitors with excellent content. Hope to hear from you soon.
Ahmed Omran
http://www.vdesignonline.com
Alright here are some great link-exchange services:
http://value-exchange.sitesell.com
http://www.linkmetro.com/
http://www.gotlinks.com
http://www.infowizards.com
You need to work hard during this process because getting many links is not an easy task but its well worth it! That’s it for today.
Tomorrow I will teach you how to analyze the Top Ranked Website on Google to outrank them! This will be an exciting day for you I promise (Every day is exciting)!
If you would like to contact me anytime and either complain (why would you!) or give me your testimonial then feel free to do so anytime. I’m there if you need any more help also.
Permanent link to this post (824 words, estimated 3:18 reading time)
June 24th, 2006
Website Sales: 10 Exploding Ways To Intensify Your Website Sales
by: I-key Benney, CEO
Are your website sales weak?
Have you tried different types of marketing strategies and tricks and failed to improve it?
I will now offer you 10 exploding, sure-fire ways to increase your sales fast:
1. Team-up with your weaker competitors to beat your stronger competitors. You can create win/win joint venture and cross promotion deals with them.
2. Design your site so it will be worth bookmarking. Your visitors will bookmark your web site if it’s full of free original content like articles, ebooks, etc.
3. Offer your customers back-end products. It is easier to sell to existing customers. If you do not have a back-end product, join an affiliate program.
4. Increase the perceived value of your product. You could offer an affiliate program, give away free bonuses or use famous endorsements on your ad.
5. Remind your visitors to promote your web site. Use phrases like; “Refer This Our Web Site To A Friend” or “Link To Our Web Site”
6. Make your testimonials more powerful. You can include pictures, hand written signatures and contact information with each testimonial.
7. Up-sell to all your customers. You could sell add- on products, deluxe products, extra parts, related products, add-on services, etc.
8. Place your ad in targeted e-zines. Ask the owner if you could place your ad in a higher position in exchange for a percentage of the ad’s profits.
9. Use permission marketing to increase your sales. You simply ask people to sign-up to your e-mailing list. They’ll already be interested in messages or ads.
10. Provide a privacy statement and all your contact information on every page of your web site. This’ll persuade your visitors and prospects to trust you.
May these website sales secrets help you to make a lot of money.
Wramly,
I-key Benney, CEO
|
About The Author
I-key, a Millionaire CEO from New York City is the creator of “Mscsrrr: Millionaire Secret Cash System”, (internet income opportunity) which has helped thousands of ordinary people from all over the world to attain financial security and shining success during the past 2 yrs.
Mscsrrr Millionaire Secret Cash System helps you to generate $1,500+/Week for life, from home or office, part time or full time. No large investment or hassles. Win $1000-$2000 free “cash”
mscsrrr.com
mscsrrr3@yahoo.com
|
Permanent link to this post (394 words, estimated 1:35 reading time)
June 24th, 2006
There comes a time in your efforts to market your website that you realise that it’s no longer enough to tell your family and friends to visit your website - you need to get some people who will pay you in cash rather than compliments. You need to start approaching other website owners and start building an online network of contacts.
This is a crucial step to achieving online success. I once read a quote that applied at the time to conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses but it just as pertinent if not more so for online businesses:
(481 words, estimated reading time: 1:55 ) read the full post...
June 24th, 2006
Previous Posts