When, shopping for a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company/specialist you need to be aware of a few things.
If someone offers you fast results they may be pulling your leg. If you aren’t listed on search engines the average time to be index takes around 4 weeks. Someone offering submissions in less then that is coning you. Websites that are already listed and are just being updated will have a faster result.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
Overview of SEO
by: Bobbie Grennier
Search Engine Ranking - Optimization Strategy
Think of the Internet as the biggest library-like source of information in human history, with one major difference from a actual library. The Internet is not organized, nor is all the information out there credible. This is where search engines come into play and why SEO services, SEO ranking and SEO optimization strategies are so important to real businesses who provide real information, services and products.
Why You Need Good Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Strategy
We call it being in the Top 10 of a search engine. It means your web site is listed on the front page, in the first 10 results, of any given search engine listing for your keywords … and that’s referred to as a Natural Listing or Natural Results.
In reality, your web site coming up in the top 10 of any search engine is anything but natural. Appearing in the top 10 for your business’s keywords will bring in potential customers to your web site just as effectively as the businesses that pay for the Google Ads and Yahoo Ads, but it’s more cost effective to you because you didn’t have to pay $3-$20 per click like they did … and remember, clicks don’t mean sales, it just means someone clicked onto their web site. Also, I’m not inflating those prices … if you want to compete with the big boys at the top of the keyword list on Google, that’s what it’s going to cost you. Suddenly optimizing your web site has much more importance to you doesn’t it?!
Search engine ranking and optimization is a highly specialized field of Internet study combined with the ability to write decently. Search engine users are what we call a targeted audience because they come looking for your business and usually want to buy what you sell. You don’t need to do anything, but provide them a clean web site that nicely displays your products, and close the sale (but that’s another article).
Internet Users and Search Engine Search Listings
Every web business needs a web site marketing plan with a solid search engine ranking and optimization strategy. The Georgia Institute of Technology says more than 85% of all Internet users find new web sites through search engine search listings. Data shows that search engine listings are the number one way to generate traffic to a web site.
Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Services
Think about it … when you got your very first computer, hooked it up and wanted to go out onto the world wide web … didn’t you ask yourself, How do I find web sites? Then you discovered what a search engine was and from there, you relied on the search engines to give you keyword results and that’s where you played on the Internet.
That’s what millions of users do everyday. These are people who are not tech savvy like you and me. They use search engines as a way of sifting through the myriad of web sites out there, narrowing their search and focusing them on the top 10 results. The goal of any SEO company is to get your web site to rank in the top 10 for your set of keywords, bringing you the people who are searching for the goods and services you provide.
Good Search Engine Ranking and Optimization Strategy
SEO services involve knowledge of SEO optimization, web site planning, SEO experience and having the right SEO tools, but most of all it requires patience because getting your web site into one of those top positions on the search engine results pages (SERP) takes an average of 1-3 months. Any SEO company will need to tweak your web site and it’s content, and then wait for the search engines to make their changes. The goal is to achieve and maintain true search engine optimization and placement for your web site.
By hiring an SEO company like us, to handle your search engine optimization you will see results. A good SEO company will bring you good search engine placement, and any business that can get the targeted traffic should also get the conversion necessary to drive profits up if the web site is able to close the sale.
Your web site content should both drive SEO optimized traffic to your web site and help close the sale. A good SEO Copywriter can help with both!
Search Engine Ranking and Optimization for Good ROI
ROI is the return on investment. You need to compare your ROI for the costs of placing pay per click ads (PPC) with Google and Yahoo vs. the cost of optimizing your web site to get a natural ranking.
How competitive is your market? If it’s highly competitive, like the Finance market is, then you’re most likely going to need to do both to make it in that business online. This is where where our SEO experience can be invaluable to you and the success of your online business.
Forrester Research reported that Over 80 percent of all Internet users reach sites through search engines. Translated, that means if your web site isn’t attracting 80 percent of its visitors from search engines, you’re losing out on a lot of free traffic.
A study from the NPD Group found that search engine listings are far more effective than standard banner or button advertisements when it comes to brand recall, favorable opinion rating, and conversion of traffic to sales.
In unaided recall, search listings outperformed banners and buttons by three to one. More than twice as many people gave a more favorable opinion of companies in the top three search positions than those featured in ads. The study also found that 55 percent of online purchases were made on sites found through search listings, while a mere 9 percent were on sites found through banner ads. You do the math! Search Engine Optimization is clearly linked to a better ROI for your business.
Based on our own internal calculations, the current cost of getting customers through a good SEO optimization strategy is less than half of the cost of pay-per-click services such as Yahoo’s Overture or Google’s AdWords.
We also know that organic or natural traffic, that comes to your web site from natural search engine ranking, converts better than traffic delivered via pay-per-click search… because the traffic is better targeted! Not all, but most people don’t want to click on the Ads and prefer to click on the organic links instead.
Search Engine Ranking and Optimization
Search engine ranking and SEO optimization is cost effective and should be a high priority. While the search engine ranking and SEO optimization process is complex and time consuming, it is very do-able if you know what you’re doing. That’s why you may want to hire an SEO writer.
SEO optimization is not only about working your web pages to match the ever changing search engine algorithms of all the major search engines, but it’s also about trying to out-rank your competitors.
If you are new to SEO optimization and want to learn more, Wild Wolf SEO Copywriters and Wild Wolf Webmasters both have a lot of tutorials and articles regarding SEO.
by Bobbie Grennier, SEO Copywriter
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About The Author
Bobbie Grennier is an SEO copywriter and freelance writer at www.SEO-Writing.com and teaches herbalism at http://Herbal-College.com. Visit her web sites www.wild-wolf.com or www.wildwolf.ws for more SEO information and http://seo-writing.com/free-reprint-articles/ for FREE reprint articles. Visit her Webmaster Blog at http://webmaster.typepad.com.
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Add comment July 28th, 2006
Offline Website Promotion
by: Martin Bradley
Offline Website Promotion
Promoting your website offline is just as important as an online marketing campaign. There are still lot’s of potential customers who don’t know how to use the internet effectively. Some people get baffled just looking at the results page that the search engines return after searching for a product or service. Others are only casual users, and will navigate the web only by clicking on links that are available on screen, or by typing the address of a website directly into the address bar.
In order to reach these customers, and many others, you must implement an offline promotional campaign. You’re URL or website address is obviously the key here. The more exposure your URL receives the more traffic you will send to your website. So what can you do to get your website address out into the offline world?
Company Documentation
A good place to start is to look at what can be changed within your own organisation to promote your new website address. Company documentation should be the first thing you add your URL to, after your website of course. Letter headed paper, compliments slips, business cards, invoices, etc should all bare your URL. Even print it on your envelopes. Only the addressee usually sees the content of a letter, but how many people see the actual envelope?
Company Vehicles
How many vans, lorries and cars do you see everyday with phone numbers and company names plastered all over them. Your website address can be added to any part of your vehicle with a sticker, this exposes your URL to thousands of people everyday who are driving to work, going to the shops or even walking the dog. Make sure that you have this done professionally though. If it looks badly designed, it will probably reflect badly on your company.
Newspapers and Magazines
These are a very good source of advertising because so many people use them. It can be quite expensive to run full page colour adverts in the national papers and glossy magazines, but you can start small. As a first step, you could try running a small advert in the classified section of your local papers. As your traffic and your business grow, you can move on to the larger national papers. Also, it would be worth finding out what sort of cost is involved in advertising in publications that gear more towards your specific product or service. This way you have more of a chance of reaching your target audience.
Radio
This type of advertising can be very effective. The national radio stations reach out to millions of people all over the country, but can be quite expensive. You can start by checking the local radio stations. They can offer good value for money advertising. Remember though, the price you pay will depend upon the time of day and how often your advertisement is aired.
Television
Probably one of the most expensive forms of advertising due to its massive audience, especially on prime time T.V. Usually only the big businesses with massive advertising budgets use television, but there is an alternative. Advertising on local cable television channels can bring in a lot of business. It is relatively well priced and because it’s on TV can give the impression that your company is bigger and more successful than it actually is.
Branded ‘Stuff’
Placing your website address on items such as pens, pencils, badges, mouse mats, cups and t-shirts etc can be a very effective advertising tool. These products are usually given away for free, but the returns can be well worth the initial outlay. It’s worth targeting specific markets that will use your product. It’s a waste of resources when you give a hundred branded t-shirts to a naturalist colony. Try giving a pack of pens to a local business that might use your product or services, or some mouse mats to a local college. You never know who will see your brand.
Word of Mouth
This can work both positively and negatively. The only way to get positive word of mouth advertising is to provide an exceptional product or service. Don’t lie and cheat your way through as this will come back to haunt you. Be professional, courteous and honest, and the rest will look after itself. If a person likes what you do they will tell six others. If a person is disappointed with what you do, they will tell twenty others.
So there you have it. Just a few ideas related to offline promotion. If your whole marketing campaign is purely online, you could be missing out on a massive portion of your customer base. Get your name out there in the real world and start to reap the benefits. The effort is well worth it.
Good luck
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About The Author
Martin Bradley is the Creative Director at Bullbreed Design Studio. The company provides Website Design, Hosting and Corporate Identity Packages. http://www.bullbreed.com.
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Add comment July 28th, 2006
It’s a jungle out there, so know and use your guerrilla marketing tactics! Jay Conrad Levinson wrote the book that started it all, the popular guerrilla marketing series. He has compiled a list of 100 tactics ? most of them fr*ee ? that savvy business leaders use.
One increasingly popular ? and profitable ? tactic on Levinson’s list is the informative article. Articles are not ads. Articles are written to inform, to educate, and to help people solve problems. Articles you publish, online or off, can help you achieve several worthwhile marketing goals.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
5 Totally Free Website Marketing Tools
by: Michael Cheney
I’ve collected some really cool free products for you that will help with your website marketing efforts. What do I want in return? Nothing!
Free Tool No. 1 - How To Keep Track Of Your Google Rank Without Wasting Hours
This is a very nifty tool that let’s you keep track of where your website is listed in Google.com for your key phrases. You can also input other websites and keep track of them as well (you didn’t hear me say ‘competitors’ did you?).
Download it, install it, run it. Simple.
http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm
Free Tool No. 2 - How To Check For Broken Links
One of the things that can really annoy visitors to your website is if you have links that simply do not work. Well worry no longer! You can now insert the web address of the page you want to check and this brilliant little tool will run off and check every link on your page to make sure that it works okay - how cool is that?!
http://www.siteowner.com/badlinks.cfm
Free Tool No. 3 - How To Check The Speed Of Your Homepage
It’s essential that your homepage is optimised so that it loads up on people’s screens as quickly as possible. You can use this handy tool to simulate how long it takes your homepage to load up at different connection speeds. The tool will also provide you with some handy tips on how you to speed up your homepage.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
Free Tool No. 4 - Free Web Tutorials, Reference Materials and Resources For Your Website
Whether you have created your own website or someone else has built it for you the following resource is a great place to learn more about web development. Even if you don’t develop your own website you can access the free, simple tutorials to grasp the basics of web design.
The site has lots of free tools you can just copy and use straight on your website, tutorials on different aspects of web design and bulletin boards where you can discuss problems with other website owners.
Bonus Free Tool No. 5 - Seven Part Internet Marketing Course
Get a free training course on website marketing that includes a one hour audio seminar, special reports and more here:
Enjoy the freebies!
Michael Cheney
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About The Author
Michael Cheney is the Author of The Website Marketing BibleTM: “Your bible is superb! The world needs to read it and learn from it.” - Jay Conrad Levinson, Author of “Guerrilla Marketing” http://www.websitemarketingbible.com
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Add comment July 28th, 2006
Back when I was starting out with my first internet venture, I did a crazy thing. I subscribed to a Search Engine Optimization newsletter. These guys send a weekly email with their bundle of latest tips. For the first few months, I actually followed what they said. Now, I just keep my subscription to get a few laughs.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
The last 1.5 years have shown major changes in search engine behavior across the board. Algorithms change at random dates. Websites that ranked great in search results are suddenly completely wiped out from the search index. It becomes less and less predictable what a certain change to your website will get for results. A major change to a website or the way how it is promoted could have a major impact on search engine success for that website.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
The Sandbox Effect
by: Matt Colyer
What once many people thought they had a penalty, is now being called the Sandbox Effect and is causing new web sites not to rank very well in the search results of Google, not even for the least competitive phrases. Meaning that a filter is being placed on new web sites and cannot rank very high for most words or phrases for a certain amount of time.
This does not mean it’s punishment for anything the webmaster did with their site, such as using Spam or anything like that. The probation likely don’t apply to the web site, but instead to backlinks. After the link stays on the web site for a certain amount of time it will no longer be on probation and fully counted as a backlink to your web site. Even if your site is better than your competitors it will still be in the Sandbox.
There is a lot of debate as to why Google uses the sandbox filter. However, It is believed that this is attempt by Google to discourage web site owners that use SEO Spam techniques to rank high fast and make a quick buck before Google discovers they are using Spam. This is largely because Google uses link popularity so much to rank web sites in it’s search engine.
There is no way to know for sure if a new web site is in the Sandbox, but the best way to determine if you are in the Sandbox is if your web site has a good amount of quality backlinks, quality content and a good ranking in other search engines, such as Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves, but still no where in Google’s search engine results for your keywords.
It has been suggested by some that it can take up to 9 months before a new web site can get a high ranking in Google’s search engine results and out of the Sandbox, but this does vary from web site to web site. This Also depends on how competitive your new web site’s market and keywords are.
There is no known way of speeding up the amount time a new web site is in the Sandbox. Before you fully put up your web site you could get a few backlinks to it before you fully put it up, even though you will still be in the Sandbox this way, you won’t waste much time. You could also buy a domain that’s already being used, so you never have to be in the Sandbox.
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About The Author
Matt Colyer began as a SEO Specialist in 1997. He founded Superior Webmaster in 2004 as a source of articles and tutorials for Web site owners looking to improve their Web site.
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Add comment July 28th, 2006
Advantages of the free mailing lists
The free newsletters are a great way to build a relationship with your customers, or with your potential buyers. Online, only a very small percentage of your visitors will buy on their first visit to your site. So, if you don’t get their name and email address, you just lost them forever. Instead, you can invite them to subscribe to free mailing lists and keep in touch with them later on.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
For people who have decided to strike out on their own entrepreneurial careers, the currency of choice for lasting and meaningful compensation?and the primary reason they left the “rat race” is?spiritual fulfillment.
Like fulfillment, the word ’spirituality’ has a different meaning for different people, too.
I believe that spirituality is something we carry within ourselves. It is expressed, or “outwardly manifested,” by our sense of self and our sense of respect for others.
Add comment July 28th, 2006
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