Web Promotion Articles

Tips On How To Increase Your Google Page Rank

Tips On How To Increase Your Google Page Rank

 by: Steve Hill

Are you looking into the best ways to increase your Google page rank? If you are, this article will give you some free tips on how to achieve this. I hope you enjoy the read.

There are many webmasters who are looking into ways to increase traffic and on how to obtain a higher page rank for their websites. I myself have many websites which I am always looking to promote.

PPC

Pay per click is where you agree to pay a certain amount of money when people click on an advert that you have created. Programs such as adwords from the search engine Google allow you to place an advert on the right hand side of their search results. Which position you are placed in depends on how much you are willing to spend per click, it is like a kind of auction. Be careful not to spend more on the adverts than you are likely to receive in income. This can be very popular especially if your website is fairly new and is low down in the natural search results.

Paid text adverts

Paid text adverts is another way of attracting additional visitors to your website and it also has the potential of increasing your Google page rank. If the advert is on a high ranking page, this may well on its own lead you to moving up a level in your page rank. If the page is a high traffic page, part of this traffic could well be redirected to your website. I personally would only ever consider paying for a text advert on a website which was related to my own and which had a page rank of five or six.

Writing articles

I believe that the best way of promoting your website is by writing articles like the one you are reading. People reading the articles are potential visitors to your website, as you are able to include a link to your website in the article. Other webmasters are able to use the articles on their websites which creates you a one way backward link. Google are more likely to increase your page rank if you have a large number of backward links, especially one way links.

Link exchange program

As I have just stated, it is vitally important to spend time building up the number of backward links your website has. Joining a link exchange program can seriously reduce your workload, and people have told me that linkmetro is quite good.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

The Basics Of Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising

Not long ago, Forbes magazine has reported that pay per click ad sales are expected to increase to at least $8 billion by 2008.

There are three fundamental elements that form the basis of a successful pay per click ad program and they are constant monitoring, response analysis, and refinement.

Pay per click search engines offer a way to buy your way to the top of search results for any term you wish. With proper management, and a clear focus, pay per click search engines can offer some of the most well targeted and economical advertising on the Internet.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

Getting Noticed by Search Engines

We all, meaning us webmasters want to have the best and top-rated website. But how do we get there? We start linking and submitting. If you are like me though, you don’t want to pay someone to do this. So, you so it yourself. This article shows a few tips and tricks on how to do that, mostly on how to get indexed by search engines.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

Google Patent Application ? Linking

The recent patent application filed by Google details numerous items the search engine uses to rank web pages. The specific application is summarized as:

"A method for scoring a document, comprising: identifying a document; obtaining one or more types of history data associated with the document; and generating a score for the document based on the one or more types of history data."

The patent application sheds significant light for those pursuing search engine optimization with Google. Patent applications can be difficult to understand, so following are highlights for those that don’t speak lawyer.

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Search Engine Algorithm Quandaries

Before you make drastic changes to your website after a rocky search engine update, take time to study your web server logs, changes in traffic to your site, and your ranking in the search engines.

Making Changes Before Analysis

Making rash decisions when you are hearing one thing then another from forum postings and articles is not the best choice to make. Much of the talk about fluctuations in the search engine rankings is just that–talk. Cold hard facts come from established tests of what is going on and why. Don’t jump ship before examining what is going on with your website first. Panic will lead you nowhere.

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A Website Is Not Enough

A Website Is Not Enough

 by: Shawn Hickman

Your small business needs an appealing and professional website but that is just the beginning. If no one visits your website and — more importantly — if it does not bring in new customers and allows you to sell more to your current customers, then your site is not effective. What do you need to improve your online marketing efforts?

The first step is to decide on a primary goal for your website. Is it to directly sell products or services through e-commerce? Or is the goal to capture leads so you can follow-up and make the sale by email and phone?

For e-commerce you need a website design with a shopping cart system, that encourages people to purchase products using the shopping cart. Both the design and written content should maintain this focus.

If your goal is to capture leads, the key is to have the content that provides initial information about your products and services that interests prospective customers. It should be easy for the prospective customer to fill out a contact form and hit the submit button or call your 800-number. The form should be submitted to a contact management system such as Salesforce or SugarCRM.

Getting it Done

Your business needs a professional website, which can cost between $2,000 — $15,000 to design. This is not only more than most small businesses want to spend but also unnecessary to succeed on the Web.

For small business there is usually little need for an elaborate, expensive website. You can get an appealing and professional website design for as little as $250.

The key to a professional website design is to work with a good designer who takes the time to listen to you and translate your vision into an effective website. Your designer must be as skilled in listening as in design.

Once the site is completed there must be an easy way for you - or someone on your behalf — to maintain the website. The designer should provide you with an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), enabling you to edit your website without having to contact your designer. This saves you money.

Once you have a professional website you have the foundation for marketing online. You can build on that foundation and use the Internet as an effective marketing tool.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing can be divided into two main categories: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Please do a Google search right now for something pretty popular (e.g., coffee). The results on the left side of the browser window that reach down to the bottom of the page are the organic search results. The top results are generally the more popular sites. The highest ranking sites are those sites that have the most links from other websites (especially other high ranking sites). In a sense, other people have voted for the high ranking sites by linking to them. Often, the high ranking sites are the most popular but there is also a lot of gaming of the system. You cannot, however, pay Google to increase your site’s ranking.

On the right side of your search results and, sometimes, up at the top of the page are the “Sponsored Links.” These links are paid advertising through a system called Google Adwords. Look for the “Sponsored Links” heading and compare how these links look with the non-sponsored organic links.

Search Engine Optimization

To increase your search rankings in Google (and other search engines), you can do a number of things. We will focus on Google because of its dominant position as a search engine.

The truth is that it is a crowded field out there for most keywords. Your best bet is to find some niche keywords and work on those. It would be very difficult to achieve a high ranking for the keyword “coffee” but if you have a more specific niche you have a better chance of succeeding.

For example - and this is just an example for illustration, not necessarily a good keyword combination - “Guatemalan shade grown coffee” would be an easier space in which to compete. You would have a chance of rising to the top or at least getting on the first page of results.

The primary way to increase your ranking is to have other high ranking sites establish links to your site and have those links associated with specific keywords - such as “Guatemalan shade grown coffee” as in our example. What follows is a few ideas on how to do that in an ethically and effective way. Don’t be tempted by gimmicks because Google and other search engines are becoming more savvy, and can penalize sites that try to game the system too much.

First, submit your site to as many directories and other clearinghouse type sites in your industry as you can. That should probably be your first step in SEO. Again, use the keywords that you are most interested in associating with your site.

Submit your site to general directories that are organized by topic. Some sites charge money for fast consideration of your submission, and are probably worth it. For example, Yahoo Directory charges $300/year for expedited consideration of your submission. For other highly prized directories — such as the Open Directory Project — you just have to submit your site and hope it will be considered reasonably soon.

Next, talk to your vendors and people in related industries and see about arranging for link exchanges or perhaps even success stories that include a link. They link to you and, in exchange, you link to them.

Then start writing articles. The key to articles is to write about something you know and that has information that is genuinely interesting to your audience. Publish your article in publications that are related to your industry. If your article is published in web publications, you will not only get direct sales leads from your article but your article will also help your search engine position.

For example, our fictional coffee vendor could write an article on exactly why shade grown coffee is superior to non-shade grown coffee. Or, better yet, why “Guatemalan Shade Grown Coffee” is truly the best. The article would have to include facts to support this claim and not just fluff. Maybe the next article could be on how to make the perfect cup of coffee. I would be first in line to read that one.

The key thing to remember is that SEO is a long process. You rarely get instant results. It can take 8-12 months to see any significant progress. You have to keep at it.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

There are a number of PPC providers but we will focus on Google Adwords as they are currently the dominant PPC system.

First, you decide on the goal (called a conversion) of your Adwords campaign. Is it a direct sign-up? Is it capturing sales leads?

A conversion when the goal is achieved and Google Adwords keeps a running tally of your conversions and the cost per conversion. You can see the cost of obtaining a lead or the cost of getting a customer. You can determine if Adwords is working for you, and whether you should make adjustments or discontinue it completely. Generally, it takes a bit of experimentation to get it right but it can be a steady source of business for you. It is worth some effort as once it is set up well it runs and can bring in a steady stream of business.

You set a daily budget (say $35) and a maximum bid on specific keywords (say $2.75). You only pay when someone clicks on your ad click. So if you are bidding $2.75 you might only pay an average of say $2.60 per click. It depends on the keywords and how much you want to bid. Spend some time choosing good keywords. Google Adwords has tools to help you choose the most powerful keywords. You will also need to embed some special code in your website to enable Google to track conversions.

Google Adwords really works. Try it and see if it will work for you. It does not require a big investment to get started. In fact, some web hosting and design companies offer a coupon so you can get started with Adwords for free. Google Adwords is easier to use than you might think.

Permission-Based E-mail Marketing

Spammers have given Email marketing a bad name in much the same way that unethical salespeople have given sales a bad name. This is unfortunate as a knowledgeable salesperson can be an essential part of making good buying decisions. The same is true of good email marketing.

With permission-based email marketing - as opposed to spam - the receiver of the email has expressed interest. Think of spam as the wily salesman in the polyester suit — and think of permission-based email as the knowledgeable salesperson we respect.

For example, I am on an email list at a bookstore that I frequent. I look forward to the e-newsletters as they often have interesting content and good discounts. I enjoy receiving this e-newsletter and the bookstore gets more business from me as a result. I rarely go anywhere else to buy books. They have retained me as a customer and I buy more often at least in part because of their e-newsletter.

Email marketing can help you increase customer retention and help you earn more revenue from each customer by cross-selling and up-selling to your current customer base. It can also help you expand your client base.

Email marketing is becoming crucial to online marketing and - when done ethically and well — can be extremely effective. Sign up for a free trial with an email marketing service and see if it works for you. If not, try another service. Find a service that meets your needs.

You can grow your own email newsletter list with a sign up form on your website, and by asking for opt-in in your sign-up and lead capture forms.

What to look for in an Email Marketing Provider

At a minimum an email marketing service should make it easy for you to create eye-catching emails, manage multiple email lists, and place newsletter sign-up forms on your website. There should be powerful list management, robust reporting, and reliability. Your provider must also have excellent customer service.

Your email marketing service should include an easy way to track the results of your email campaigns. Who opened your email, how many times, and when? Did they click on the link you provided? Did they purchase anything or submit a lead? The service should enable you to track message reads in real time, and read detailed reports online or export them to a spreadsheet.

In addition, your email marketing service should give you the ability to manage multiple lists and divide lists into multiple segments.

Conclusion

Obtaining a website and marketing your products or services online does not have to be expensive. An economical way to accomplish these goals is to hire a company to design your website and provide you with bundled web hosting and permission-based email marketing services. It would be an added bonus if they can get you started using Google Adwords with a free coupon.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

How To Be Seen By Search Engines

How To Be Seen By Search Engines

 by: Adrian Lawrence

You’ve finished your website, and it’s beautiful. You ensured it would be content rich; you have a plan to maintain fresh content, whether it’s through blogs or rotating content. You hired a professional writer to ensure that your content was keyword optimized for the search engines, to raise its rank. You’ve even paid attention to tags and how they are focused on your web page, and image descriptions for your graphics.

So now you can submit it to the search engines, right?

Wrong. You don’t want to submit at all.

The Right Way To Be Found

Instead of submitting directly to search engines, allow your page to be found naturally. The spiders are constantly running down the trail of every link, cataloguing where pages are and recording them in the search engine database. Allowing your site to be found this way allows it to rise naturally in the search engines as each new link is catalogued and included in your placement algorithm.

What you want, then, is to be found because of links to your site. If you’re starting with a fresh slate, you should first list your site with directories. Directories appear similar to search engines, and are used, like search engines, to find sites of interest. But search engines use spiders to fill a dynamic database. Directories, on the other hand, are dependent upon manual registration of each site. If you want your site to show up in directories, you need to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it.

The best part about directories is that each one provides you with a one-way link to your website - the exact thing that the search engine spiders seek out.

The Major Directories

For years, Yahoo! has been recognized as the premier online directory. That’s only natural; it started life as a list of Jerry Yang’s favourite links in 1994. Today, Yahoo! has both a search engine component, included in 1998 as a feed from Alta Vista, and a directory component. You should submit your site to the Yahoo! directory manually; certain sites may have to pay to be listed.

The other major directory is Dmoz, an open directory that shares its data freely with hundreds of other websites. Dmoz is always free to list with, and is surprisingly underused.

With either major directory, you should list your site by hand yourself; only you can properly determine what category you should appear in, and your categorization is critical to how well you’re ranked by the search engines; list in the wrong one, and you won’t make a dent.

Other Directories

Besides the major directories, there are thousands of free directories for every imaginable niche market; you should list with any of these that are appropriate to your site content.

In addition to the free directories, there are a number of paid directories you can list with. Though you should first go ahead and register with the larger free directories you find out there, later you should go back and register with some of the paid sites as well. Not everyone will pay to acquire this link, and many of the paid sites are seen by the search engines as more authoritative, and will be weighted more heavily than other directories.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

10 Ways to Exceed Your Clients Expectations Every Time!

The following tips are just a few of the things I do as examples of setting my service apart from the crowd. In general, the weakest areas in the Internet Marketing and Web Development business, are “Customer Communications” and “Customer Service." Set your effort towards learning to deliver “excellence” in both customer service and communication, and you’ll have distinct advantages over many other competitors. These tips are based on the tried and true method of “under promising and over delivering.”

Add comment July 11th, 2006

A Three Day Marketing Plan for Better Google Rankings

If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably discovered that simply building a website is not enough to ensure success with your small business. Competition on the web is fierce. Rising to the top of the search engines is often a combination of web-savvy marketing, link trading, and understanding the intricacies of complex ranking algorithms for search engines. You may have already spent a great deal of time optimizing your pages, creating content, and building your email lists. It’s easy to get overwhelmed in your web marketing endeavors, especially if you’re a small business or a business moving online from a brick-and-mortar location.

Add comment July 11th, 2006

Tons of Top 10 Rankings Guaranteed

Tons of Top 10 Rankings Guaranteed

 by: John Gergye

Okay I admit it. I was kidding. I can’t guarantee top 10 search engine rankings any more than the next guy.

But hold on. Before you click away in disgust I believe I’ve got the next best thing. That all but guarantees you’ll get top 10 rankings. Lots of them. For next to nothing. So you might want to stick around and find out what this is all about.

You see to hear some tell it a top 10 ranking is a shoo in. A gimme. A piece of cake.

Must be since Google Adwords are crammed with all sorts of beckoning, come hither ads that suggest as much.

Now admittedly in any food chain even the bottom feeders play a role in the big scheme of things. But I don’t know. Such pitches may be hard for the typical traffic starved newbie to resist. I mean these ads suggest for a mere $49, $69 or $99 you’ll be rolling in top 10 rankings in no time.

The sad truth is you may indeed land some top 10 rankings. But they won’t be for keywords that produce much if any traffic. And if you don’t get any traffic what good are the top 10 rankings?

Still, let’s not be so hasty. While I’m not advocating anyone plunk down hard earned cash in the hopes of landing high search engine rankings for competitive keywords, hidden in the hype is a low cost strategy. In other words there’s a way to make this work. If you know how. And you will in about 60 seconds.

Here’s all you do.

Simply fire up Wordtracker. (A subscription is about $8 for a day.) Start looking for related keywords by doing a search for a broad, general, generic keyword in your niche. Then drill down and dig up all the related “exact” keyword phrases that have 9 or fewer competing pages. All that’s left is to optimize a page on your site for each one and presto chango! A top 10 ranking!

See? A surefire formula for guaranteed top 10 rankings. Brain dead simple too.

Now I call such search terms “orphan keywords”. Orphans because the search volume is so low they are all but ignored by the fat cats intent on landing the big fish — a.k.a. high rankings for terms that get hundreds of searches a day.

That fact makes these orphans super simple to rank in the top 10 for. Especially since many of the competing pages aren’t even optimized the least little bit.

But hold on. Let’s not high five all around just yet. There’s a tradeoff. As I suggested lack of competition is a sure sign such terms aren’t searched for often. Maybe no more than a mere handful of times each day in Google.

Okay so how do we make lemonade out of those lemons?

The best way to make this tactic work is to find a ton of these terms. And don’t worry. Most niches are loaded with orphan keywords.

Then here’s your next step. Simply create content pages that each focus on two, or at most three, of these small fry.

Put up 100 such pages and you’ve probably got 250 of these 9 or fewer competing pages phrases covered.

To get to 100 pages all you do is create four pages a day - five days a week. If you miss a day make it up over the weekend. But by the end of five weeks you’ll have 100 pages hard at work for you. Now that’s not so hard now is it?

Even better these orphans come with a collective traffic jolt you wouldn’t expect.

I’m looking at one list of orphan keywords that shows 309 daily searches in Google. Another came in around 513. While the orphans for a third niche had over 1876 Google searches each day according to Wordtracker!

Given all that I casually suggested this micro traffic idea to a friend with an already successful web site. In other words he wasn’t hurting for traffic. Which made this a no lose proposition for him to test.

About four weeks later he excitedly reported his traffic had doubled! That’s right doubled. That got my attention. Should get yours too. Because this orphan keyword strategy is a surefire way to get top 10 rankings for a whole host of lesser keyword phrases. Giving you near exclusive access to the traffic that comes with them. While leaving the bruising battles for the hyper competitive terms to someone else.

Pretty clever, huh? Absolutely.

Add comment July 11th, 2006