Search Engine Optimization Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing is a very competitive business. If you are to succeed is it important to try at all times to stay at the front of the field. We are perpetually striving to get there “firstest-with-the-mostest” as the rather ungrammatical saying goes. Owners of business websites are doing all they can to stay ahead of the crowd. With all marketers applying every technique they can come up with to improve their ranking, how do we ensure that we don’t get lost in the crush.

‘Search engine optimization strategies’ is a phrase which all internet marketers will hear at a very early stage of their business without, perhaps, really understanding just what it is all about. Since my initial incursions into the business about 9 years ago, the way that search engines assess webpages has changed. When I first began it was all about keywords and very little else. Now the search engines look at other issues too such as backlinks, content, and, above all, activity.

The aim of all serious marketers is to get their websites and articles listed on the first page of Google and the other search engines, as many internet users don’t look beyond the first page they are shown in response to their search query. The higher your ranking, the more people will see your listing. The more people who see your listing the more visitors your site will receive. The more visitors who reach your website the more sales you will make. To put it bluntly it is all about the numbers game!

So, what search engine optimization strategies can you use to achieve that high-ranking? First of all, you want to have the very best website you can create. Always be looking to improve its appearance, its loading speed and the quality of the content. Having an opt-in form and other links can also help with your ranking. Search engines are the main source of traffic driven to our websites so we need to use an effective SEO strategy if we are going to get the flow of traffic we need.

Keywords are still an important part of SEO. Every bit of copy you write should be keyword rich. Never overdo this, however, or the search engines are likely to take offence. Primarily we are writing to inform our readers and nothing should ever compromise that, but, at the same time, we must consider the needs of the search engines too. Keyword research is crucial for high-ranking websites. I always try to get a small number of high quality keywords rather than going for quantity. These will score more highly and make writing an article much easier. The ideal, when incorporating keywords into any piece of copywriting, is that the reader should be totally unaware of them. They should just become part of the flow of the words. We have all seen website content and sales letters where keywords have been shoe-horned into sentences spoiling the flow and making them seem ‘clunky’.

The importance of SEO cannot be overstated, especially as it has become much more complex than it used to be and, I suspect, will be become even more so in the future. Keep researching the subject to keep up-to-date with the latest developments. The application of search engine optimization marketing strategy can be outsourced to professionals. The cost is not great so it is something well worth considering in order to get the very best possible search engine ranking for your websites.

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Google’s Siren Call – Is It Crashing Your Search Engine Marketing?

It’s difficult to dispute the rational behind the rant since Google continues to outpace its rivals in popularity with an 89% “strongly positive experience” rating from an opinion poll of U.S. Adult Internet Users conducted by eMarketer in early 2005. Google certainly achieves mass exposure and logically it’s fair to attribute a first position ranking to gaining access to the masses.

However, your success in search engine marketing should not be reliant on a single source of visitors. Although the convenience of focusing on Google is comforting in the whirlwind of new search and Internet technology, the outcome from it could be disastrous to the growth of your business.

An effective search engine marketing strategy leverages the advantages of all of the major search engines and their advertising channels including natural and paid.

Why?

Here are three essential reasons why you should expand your search engine marketing strategy beyond just Google, paid search or any other singular search engine marketing strategy to encompass the broader opportunities available for your business.

(1) Paid versus Natural Search: Relevancy and Conversion

A common strategy of search engine marketing companies and Internet marketers is to bid for the top paid search listing in Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) or Google AdWords as a way to acquire the perceived “bread and butter” position in the search results page. The concept is that a search result appearing at the top of the list is the most relevant to the search users’ keyword query and therefore will receive the most click-throughs and conversions.

However, research from Enquiro as well as many other research firms, found a “significant amount of confusion over sponsored links.” In the research conducted, over 77% of participants when performing a product research search choose a natural listing over a paid listing. Even during an actual purchase scenario, 67% of participants still choose a natural listing over a paid one.

And what about Google specifically? The Enquiro study showed that 85% of Google users choose a natural listing while 14% clicked on a paid “sponsored” link. The study stated that, “Google users also had the lowest level of confusion about what was a sponsored link on the search results page.” Compare these numbers to 42% of search users on non-Google search engines like Yahoo and MSN choose a sponsored link over a natural listing.

Also, the conversion rate whether sales or leads may be affected by the source of a website visitor’s click-through. A study conducted by MarketingSherpa called “Search Marketing Metrics Survey” in July 2004, showed that “conversions from (natural) search engine results are 25%+ higher than paid search ad conversions.” Relevancy from search result listing to website is critical however you also need to consider the relevancy associated with the ad type – paid versus natural.

So you know the insight – what’s the solution?

Easy – don’t get caught up in an “either/or” decision, as a search engine marketer you must focus on both natural search through search engine optimization and paid search.

As the Enquiro study stated, “Unless a company is willing to forfeit either 70% (in the case of natural) or 30% (in the case of paid) of their potential market to the competition they have to seriously consider both search channels.”

(2) Cross-Search Engine Builds Brand Credibility

Tempting as it may be to put all of your eggs in one basket for convenience sake, Google is not the only major source of quality website visitors. In the most recent search engine rankings issued by Nielsen/NetRatings in March 2005, Google was first with 47% of searches (among work and home users in U.S.); Yahoo second with 20.9% and MSN third with 13.6%. If you only focus on Google, you are missing access to over 53% of the marketplace.

In addition, another separate study conducted by Nielsen/NetRatings determined that “the majority of Internet searchers use mutliple search engines.” As a ClickZ article written by Rob McGann on February 28, 2005 stated, “The (Nielsen/NetRatings) study found that 58% of Google searchers also visited at least one of the other top two search engines, Yahoo and MSN Search.”

So what happens when a potential customer finds your search listing on Google yet you are no where to be found on MSN or Yahoo? What if they only see a sponsor listing on Google which they immediately view as less than relevant? How about a major slam against your credibility?

Yes – that’s right. Because of the wide-spread utility of the internet for research and consideration during a buying cycle, if you are not found across search engines for a particular keyword search, you don’t exist in the eye of the searcher as a potential option to fulfill their needs. On the other hand, if you are found across multiple search engines, you instantly receive a relevancy and credibility boost.

So you know the insight – what’s the solution?

Focus on generating search result listings for at least the top three search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. Because these three feed a number of other search engines like AOL and AskJeeves (for paid listings) you will gain cross-search engine exposure.

In the worse case, work on generating natural search listings in Google and perform paid search in Yahoo and MSN using Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) to achieve the broad search exposure.

If search users are adopting multiple search engines to conduct their keyword searches then build your credibility with them by appearing across the major search engines especially for your top brand-oriented keywords.

(3) Search Engine User Demographics

Depending on the type of product or service you are selling, focusing on just Google or any other single search engine marketing strategy may be placing you in the entirely wrong marketplace. Although absolute demographic figures are difficult to gather, a 2004 Enquiro study titled, “Search Engine Usage in North America” provided some interesting demographic characteristics for the top three search engines:

o Males are more likely to remain loyal with one search engines (primarily Google) while females are more likely to use more than one search engine (Google, MSN and Yahoo).

o Males prefer Google while females had a strong preference for MSN.

o For both males and females, a trusted site that offers unbiased information with the natural search results was the strongest preference.

o As educational levels increased, an affinity towards Google increased as well. This may imply that Google uses are more sophisticated.

o Google users were more Internet savvy than non Google users therefore, for technology-related products Google may be a better source of qualified visitors while MSN and Yahoo may be better for non technology-related products.

So you know the insight – what’s the solution?

Visitor behaviors are dynamic – they have a tendency to change as frequently as the weather. Therefore, do not assume that your potential customers are sophisticated and therefore reside in the Google pool. Instead, use paid search engines to test all three major search engines to generate a sense of where your potential customers hang-out. Once you find a populated pool of qualified visitors work on building your natural search listings to support and ultimately replace your paid search engine strategy.

Although it is easy to want to simplify search engine marketing by focusing all of your efforts on the biggest and most popular search engine, Google – it is business smart to avoid the temptation. Yahoo and MSN are prominent players in the search engine market and may possess hidden gems that could explode your business growth. Even more so, moving beyond the top three search engines is also important to extend your brand exposure on an international level.

By focusing your efforts across the top three search engines whether using natural or paid listings, you are placing yourself in the best position to build credibility, relevance and conversion – the main variables that lead to significant search engine marketing success for your business.

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Search Engine Marketing

You must have heard a lot about search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).
You must have also tried ways to find the difference between them. So let me today focus light on Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Search engine marketing (SEM) is also referred as internet marketing. Actually there can be a number of definitions for search engine marketing, let me give you a simpler one. Strategies and Techniques that are applied on the internet to sell and advertise company’s products and services is called search engine marketing.

There is lot of difference between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO)., but the main reason that differentiates both of them is the landing page. In SEM you decide which page visitors see, whereas in SEO a search engine decides which page the visitors see. There are lots of ways to promote your product online to meet your company’s goal. Following are some of ways practiced in SEM:-

  • Search Engine Optimization: – SEO is about understanding the elements a search engine is looking for and to include those elements in your site. So that the search engine includes your sites in top ranked pages when a user searches a term. You have to make your site search engine friendly and at the same time user friendly.
  1. Title and Meta tags: – Make sure your keywords specific to your site should appear in your title and Meta tags. Some of the tools available on internet can be of great help like Google keyword selector and overture keyword selector tool,
  2. ALT tags: =- Images make your site visually attractive and carry great importance in search engine ranking. You must include the keywords in ALT tags as they are crawled by spiders.
  3. What to avoid: – Avoid JavaScript, frames, and flash content in your site. As they are not crawled by search engines. For quick SEO tips please read this article 5 SEO techniques .
  4. Professional SEO help: – If you have the budget, hiring professionals to optimize your site can really make a difference. These professionals charge for the quality they bring to work. You can search for these professionals on Search Engine Guides.
  • Search Engine Submission: -

    After you have done all the hard work on search engine optimization. Now its time to get your site listed in top web directories and search engines.

    1. Search Results: – Submitting to web directories helps search engines to list your site in their databases and search results.
    2. False commitments: – Never be fooled by services that claim that they would deposit your site to 500,000 search engines. That is a complete waste of money.
    3. Services that matter: – If you are hiring professional SEO’s they can be of great help. They develop strategies that will suit your site.
  • Link Popularity: – Link popularity is the number of incoming links to your site from other sites, directories, and articles. More the number of incoming links to your site the better results you will achieve.
    1. Links to your site: – Deposit your site to web directories. If they accept your site, your site will get a free link.
    2. Exchanging Links: – By exchanging links with potential sites that can be a complimentary to your audience is a good process to increase your sites link popularity.
    3. Good content: – Good content is always the king. Good content can drive visitors to your site.
  • Paid Inclusion: -

    Paid inclusion is another way to include your site in search engines and search directories. In this process you don’t have to wait for the search engine to index your site,

  • Pay per Click: -

    Pay per click is a way to include your site in search results on the keywords you wish your site should appear. You decide how much you are going to pay each time a visitor clicks your sites URL. The higher you decide to pay for each click, the higher the search ranking your site would achieve.

    1. PPC search engines:- There are lots of PPC search engines. The larger the search engine, the more you have pay for your keywords to get to the top of a search result.
    2. Big Players: – Some of the big companies in PPC industry are Yahoo and Google.
    3. Important Points: – Start your investment with low amount and keep an eye on the number of traffic you are getting from PPC and how many of those visitors are converted into payable customers.
    4. Consult: – Better consult a person who has mastered PPC as they can guide you better. The other alternative is to hire some professional SEO.
  • Traffic Analysis and Log Files:-

    Log files enables you to know how many visitors are visiting your site and how many potential traffic you are generating.

    1. Traffic analysis is a way to know on which keywords visitors are visiting your site
    2. How your site is performing.
    3. Which pages of your site is most popular.
    4. The exact or the geographic location of your site.
    5. Which search engines are visiting your site.
    6. Which pages of your site is crawled.
    7. Errors that may have occurred while crawling your site.

    Search engine marketing has got some proven measures that will help your site to rise to the top in search engine results. Implement all the above measures and wait for two to four months to get the results of all the hard work you have done. Results will be profitable.

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    What Is a Website Backup and Why You Need One

    Most businesses now have a website and in order for that website to be live it must be hosted on a server. The IP address of the server combined with your business URL is what delivers the stuff you’ve been looking for. It might sound complex, but it is simple fit the people who set it up, configure or maintain it!

    What could go wrong?

    The server where your website files sit, whether that be ‘in the cloud’ or in a freelancers spare bedroom, is a physical piece of hardware, and that makes it vulnerable to failure. This failure could be down to a number of things:

    Security breach

    Everyone that has heard the word ‘website’ has also heard the word ‘hacked’. Hacking is a major issue that you have to face. There are many ‘types’ of hack, from a brute force attack – which is an automated ‘bot’ guessing thousands of passwords a minute – to more sophisticated breaches. For example those that get into the root files through something like a plugin, and install malware on the website itself. Whatever the hack is, they cost a lot of time and money, not to mention the loss of credibility with customers. Doing all you can to minimise the chances of a hack occurring, or reducing the impact when it does, is only a good thing.

    Accidental deletion

    To clarify, the site files and the database sit on the server and power the whole website. You won’t (or shouldn’t) ever need to concern yourself with these, only your web developer or hosting company will ever touch them. It is possible, because humans are involved that there may possibly human error and someone deletes your site off the server. Think about that – someone just simply deletes your whole, entire, website with a couple of errant clicks. A reputable company hosting your site with really good infrastructure, will take a copy of the entire server every night and transfer that to another completely separate server. However if it is a small company or a friend hosting your site, it is highly likely you now have no site at all and no way of retrieving it.

    Malicious deletion

    One thing that is less common, but something to consider is malicious deletion. You may have a disgruntle employee with access to the content management system (CMS), the facility that allows you to make all the content updates. They may not even work for you anymore, but if their access credentials haven’t been changed, they can log in and cause all kinds of damage. While they might not be able to delete the core site files (the actual site architecture), they would be able to delete all the content that is on the site, or perhaps worse, write all manner of ‘inappropriate things’. With content deletion you would notice, with new content slipped in, you may not. If they have access to the server and the site files, you may have an even bigger problem on your hands.

    Server Failure

    A server is a piece of physical hardware, and therefore it can break, no different from your laptop or your phone. If the site isn’t backed up, then the inability to get the server working will mean that your website cannot be restored.

    How can I avoid these things happening?

    Ensure you have a good policy in place that allows you to monitor who has access to what, and as soon as an employee ceases to work with you, or there are employee relationship issues you can restrict, or remove access to avoid any issues.

    There is a step that you can take however which means that you’re covered for every eventuality, and that is having a robust backup schedule in place. So how do you get this?

    01 – Find out who hosts your site and their backup regime. What is the disaster recovery plan? Just in case the worst happens

    02 – Ask if you can get a physical copy of your website site files and database sent over to you as a zip file, so if the absolute worst happens, and your site is completely deleted, you have a copy of your site on your hard drive

    03 – If a backup schedule is available, ask what it is and establish whether it is enough. For instance if the site is backed up every three months but you add and amend content three times a week, you stand to lose a fair bit of content. Ideally you want it backed up every night

    04 – Make sure that you check your site regularly for any issues and that backups from longer periods are saved. If your site is backed up every night and you have been hacked, each new backup will overwrite the old one – effectively a bad copy replacing your existing good copy. Unless you establish you’ve been hacked immediately, your restore copy (from the night before) may not be the clean version. This is why you need a series of backups taken so you can go back to various points in time with a ‘clean copy’.

    05 – When you write content for your website, make sure it is saved elsewhere as opposed to just being added to the website directly. That way if the worst happens and your content is wiped, you still have a copy of it to paste back in the CMS – for example as I write this blog, I’m writing it and saving it as a Word document so I can retrieve it if needed in the future.

    06 – Make sure you keep your website and plugins up to date, and ensure you have as few people as possible with access to the server and the CMS, and those that do have really solid passwords so there is less chance of a security breach.

    How Square Daisy can help with website development and website back up hosting
    Having a good hosting package with a decent backup regime is like insurance, it feels like a pain paying for it… until you need it and wish that you had made the investment. We make the process pain free, deliver a great service and help you to understand how it all works, because after all, you only know what you know, and why on earth would you know about hosting infrastructure.

    If you’ve recently lost your site through unfortunate circumstances, we can help you get back up and running with a temporary site while we build a bespoke, new one for you. Never waste a good crisis as Churchill said!

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    What To Do Before Booking A Courier Service

    Technology has made our world to be on the fast lane. We have finally gotten accustomed to the easy life that anything short of it makes us uncomfortable. When we want to send parcels to friends and loved ones, we expect the dispatcher to be fast. Courier service has become innovative with fast riders, vans and others. Companies involved in sending and receiving parcels work 24/7 to ensure that people are not disappointed. What do you know about courier services?

    The following are things you should know before sending out a parcel:

    The internet

    The internet has made it possible for companies to build their organizations around it. With an online booking feature, you do not need to visit an on-site office. The challenge of meeting unpleasant customer service personnel or wasting your time is completely eliminated when you make use of the online office. Dispatchers are always waiting to move a parcel from one location to another including outside the country.

    When you use the online service, you can easily track your parcel. If you are looking for a reliable courier firm, it must have an online presence. Without an online presence, it may be difficult to know what is happening to your parcel.

    There are things you should consider when it comes to a dispatcher firm. The first thing that you should consider is time. There are comparisons sites that will help you decide the suitable firm that you need within minutes. A lot of people take a look at comparison sites before they can decide on the firm that they need.

    The Time

    Time is important when it comes to sending your parcel. There are parcels that are limited with time. What this means is that if they fail to get to their designated location at a particular time, they may get damaged or destroyed. Take for instance, vaccines that may denature when their ice jackets are melted.

    High Quality

    You should not compromise on a high quality service when looking for affordable dispatcher firms. A suitable dispatcher firm should be able to beat deadline and also deliver the item without damaging. It can be painful when you spend a lot of money in buying an item, and losing it because a dispatcher was careless in handling it.

    International Courier Service

    Moving items from one country to another has options in timescale. When you want your items to get to its designation within one to three days, you may need to go for the air flights. However, if time is not paramount, you may go for ships. The time duration varies with firms. You should check the policy of a dispatcher before making use of their service.

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    How a Multi-Faceted Approach to Site Promotion Can Secure Your Search Engine Positions

    Copyright 2005 Tinu AbayomiPaul

    In my last article on site promotion, I talked about why using one site promotion technique is a short-term solution. Now I’m going to illustrate why site promotion is multi-faceted, and show an example of how these techniques can build on one another to help you get better search engine results from your search engine optimization efforts, as well as more traffic to your site overall.

    Then, in the next part, I’ll tell you more about what some of the components to site promotion are, and how they can work together to help you maintain your travel levels and search engine position despite the ever-changing search engine algorithms.

    Truly effective site promotion lies in using a group of tools and techniques to draw traffic to your site from many sources that build on each other, rather than just one.

    To illustrate how some of these promotion techniques work together and build on each other, we need to go back to the previous example of my own site for a moment.

    Each day, I get about 80 – 100 visitors to just my home page from search engines – this month you can verify that by looking at the referrer list at the bottom of my home page (see the resource box at the end of the article). As stated in the last article, visitors clicked through to my site for 1959 different keyphrases. 15% of those phrases yielded more than 10 unique visitors, with the top result sending 214 people to my site.

    That traffic is invaluable and shows proof of how you can use my multi-pronged methodology to enable you to get top rankings even for more difficult terms. The methods I use are a combination of different website promotion methods that have combined to keep me consistently ranking in first page results for literally hundreds of terms. One of the more difficult of these feats was ranking for the term “free traffic” in both Google and Yahoo on the first page.

    So how do I use other site promotion techniques to help keep my site from being dropped from search engine results? And how can you learn how to do the same?

    Okay, let’s go back to our example, and look at May again. The next most frequent way I get a visitor to my site is from someone clicking through to a link – 15 -20% of my traffic comes this way.

    My stats say that “1663 different pages-url” that were linked to me brought me visitors. The top three links back to me brought me over 1700 visitors. After the top thirty, most links brought me only 10 visitors or less each.

    But even when a site brings me only one visitor, having several hundred sites do this adds up to a lot of potential clients.

    So, obviously, getting links back to my site wasn’t the only important part of this particular method of site promotion. It was getting people to actually click through those links to my site. The trick is to get your link listed in places where visitors who are looking for your information will be, and getting that link to appear with keyword related text that you control.

    Syndicating your site via RSS is one of the ways that this feat can be made easier – but again, they are but a part of a well-rounded search engine solution. And there are certain things you need to think about when setting up your blog that yield the most search-engine friendly results, as alluded to in part three of this series.

    Do you know what else is important about having many links pointing back to your site? Other than the fact that, set up correctly, a percentage of people will click on them and visit you?

    It’s the fact that search engines often find new content to include in their results through links that follow back through to your site. That’s one of the top functions of the search engine spiders that crawl the web. They follow links that lead to other links, and so on, deciding how to fill a deficit in their databases with the sites they find.

    Not only that, but if the search engine algorithms should all change today, and state that quantity of links pointing back to you will give you only a little bit of positive karma, and that, from now on, only the quality of those links really gives you a big boost, if you used the methods I teach, including ways to optimize your links, you’d still covered.

    This isn’t particularly difficult to emulate – if you use a multitude of ways to promote your site to search engines, as well as other ways to increase your site’s traffic. Each one of the techniques builds on the others, helping you maintain your search engine rankings, and bringing new visitors from other sources. I’ll have a sample list for you and a few resources in the next part.

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    The Basics Of Free Web Site Promotion

    It’s easy to forget the fundamental components of Web site promotion. Winding back the clock to the days when many Webmasters couldn’t afford prolonged advertising campaigns, the majority of people starting out with a new Web site were forced to discover the art of free Web site promotion. In recent times, however, with “pay per click” advertising becoming less expensive and various other marketing activities becoming increasingly cheaper, the art of effectively promoting your site for free appears to have been lost. The purpose of this article is to act as a refresher course for any Webmasters who are keen to keep their promotional activities down to a shoestring budget.

    The practices you perform when promoting your site for free are just as important as any paid advertisements you might run. Indeed, drawing a steady flow of visitors to your Web site needn’t be an expensive affair. So, what things really matter if you’re serious about increasing your site’s traffic for free?

    1) You should ensure your site is easy to link to. Even Webmasters who enjoy what your site has to offer may not consciously think to link you. In any case, you should remind your visitors, preferably on every page, how to go about adding your link. Not only will this bring extra visitors, it will improve your site’s relevancy for the search engines. Additionally, establishing link exchanges with similar-themed sites as yours is a remarkably popular and effective way of boosting your traffic levels for free. Your aim should be to establish as many relevant link-backs as possible.

    2) You might like to consider adding a hyperlink to your Web site in your e-mail signature. If you’re feeling creative, you could do what some Webmasters do and add a small slogan, too. As well as this and within reason, you should respond to every legitimate e-mail you receive so that your Web address sticks in the mind of your contacts.

    3) You should utilise search engines since they’re an ideal form of free traffic. Ensuring your pages are search engine friendly is crucial. The majority of people find information on the Internet via search engines and it’s important that you correctly research how to optimise your site. A good listing on a popular search engine can works wonders for traffic levels, so try spending some time optimising your pages. If you’re unsure and need some guidance with the technicalities, there are numerous sites and forums on the Internet that can help you out.

    4) Entering your site for awards is an excellent way to gain recognition. However, when suggesting your site for review, be sure to avoid “automatic award submitting” services, since these can significantly lower your chances of winning. They don’t generally fare too well with the judges either.

    5) Although not entirely free, you might like to experiment with running competitions on your site. Even if the prize is inexpensive (e.g. a t-shirt with your Web address on the front), it’s a sure-fire way to reel-in interested visitors. Besides, directories specialising in listing competitions may also link to your site and send you additional visitors.

    6) Submitting your site to the Open Directory (dmoz.org) is a free necessity for generating more site visitors. Not only will a listing here help to increase your site’s relevancy (for search engine purposes), it will be accessible via countless other Web locations who use the Open Directory to power their own sites.

    7) If you want to instantly draw some attention to your site, then tell all your friends about it. Word of mouth advertising is the best possible form of promotion anyone can muster, and incidentally, it’s completely free!

    8) Try telling visitors how to bookmark your site. There are still many Web surfers out there inexperienced with the Internet. You’d be surprised at how many also don’t know how to bookmark a Web site they’ve found. That said, when designing your pages, it’s a good idea to tell visitors how to add a bookmark. Alternatively, you could add a “click here to bookmark us” hyperlink.

    9) Newsgroups are perfect for gaining site recognition. Recklessly promoting your site in newsgroups, however, is frowned upon. The key to promoting your site in newsgroups is to participate in newsgroup discussions that interest you. To promote your Web site (and to avoid any behaviour that may be deemed inappropriate), simply include your Web address in your signature. If readers appreciate your point of view, then it’s likely that they will take some time to visit your Web site.

    10) You should endeavour to update your site regularly. Fresh, regularly-updated content will enable you to gather a keen audience, and what’s more, it will keep visitors returning. It’s far easier to retain existing visitors than to find new ones. Therefore, your content should be structured in such a way that it entices people to return.

    11) You may not have realised but how a person finds their way around your Web site is a make-or-break scenario for traffic levels. If people can’t find what they’re looking for then they won’t view your site in a favourable light – and chances are they won’t return. Therefore, when designing your site’s pages, keep site navigation in mind, since consistent traffic levels are swayed by your site’s user-friendliness. All your content should be easy to locate within three mouse clicks. Think “simple navigation”. If visitors can find what they’re looking for within the shortest amount of time possible then by and large, they will keep a mental note of your site and may pay a visit in the future.

    12) Sites that are fast to load keep visitors visiting, and they’ll undoubtedly help to increase your Web site traffic flow. Keeping site loading times down is a free and sensible way to indirectly increase traffic. How many times have you visited a Web page, only to find that it takes an age to load? My guess is that you didn’t bother waiting around. On the Internet, if you want to be successful, then your site should (ideally) strike a balance between presentation and loading time.

    Summary: A massive, targeted advertising campaign is the ideal solution for quick traffic. However, most ordinary Webmasters are not working for large corporations who can afford this level of promotion. The fact is you don’t necessarily have to pay for high traffic levels, although if you are opting for the “free” route, you will have to work hard if your endeavours are to be successful. Remember: some of the best and most effective ways to increase traffic do not always require a wallet!

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    Traffic Building – How to Create a Landslide of Visitors to Your Website

    Traffic, everyone wants it and is trying really hard to get more people to their site. Traffic is what generates more traffic, and vitally for website owners, increases their revenue. When you are planning a web site, part of your thinking should include a strategy for building traffic and realistic time scales and budgets for doing it. Be prepared to wait several months for your traffic to build, unless, of course, you have the budget for some instant advertising.
    Here are four essential key elements of traffic building:

    Pay-per-click (PPC)

    Link building

    Search engine and directory submissions

    Article marketing

    Pay per Click Advertising

    There are dozens of PPC advertising opportunities but until you understand how PPC bidding works and how to make a profit stick with Google Adwords. Pay per Click advertising like AdWords is worth spending money on. I would suggest reading up on AdWords books and articles on how to use this great advertising avenue to its fullest.

    Link Building

    Search engines such as Google see links from other sites as a vote of confidence in your site and will boost its position in their search engine results accordingly. Acquiring links from other sites is a slow process and requires a much organised approach. On the plus side, running a link building campaign means that you are not solely relying on search engines to bring you visitors. A link from an authoritative site lends you credibility, a link from a popular site sends you traffic and a link from a relevant site boosts your search results. Reciprocal linking is an effective, free way to get more visitors to your site.

    Search engines

    Getting your site listed with all of the major search engines and directories is essential for building traffic. Increasing search engine traffic organically can be an essential part of the promotional mix of for your website. When setting up a website, a vital task to carry out is to submit it to website directories.

    Article Marketing

    Article marketing has come a long way to become one of the core traffic building strategies for internet marketers and webmasters. Writing and submitting quality articles to article directories is an excellent way of promoting your site and sending it lots of targeted traffic. Article traffic is big, big, big: and here is why. When you write articles and submit them to the highest ranked article directories, for well targeted keywords, they can rush to the top of the search engine rankings.

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    Why is Article Marketing Such a Powerful Traffic Building Strategy?

    Of all the diverse traffic building strategies available to internet marketers, article marketing, is by far the most powerful method of increasing web site traffic, boosting sales, and maximizing profits.

    If you have not yet implemented a powerful traffic building strategy for your website, you should definitely consider writing and publishing articles for the following reasons.

    Writing useful, informative, high caliber articles about your market niche will identify you, to your readers, as an expert in your field.  

    Being recognized as an “expert”  instills an aura of credibility, builds trust, and confidence with your potential customers.   Your prospects will feel more comfortable when buying from you, and an increase in sales from your online business will be the direct result.  

    Cost effectiveness is also another reason why article marketing is such a powerful traffic building strategy.

    It is not extraordinarily expensive to hire a ghost writer to create articles for you, if you don’t have the time available or ability to do so for yourself.  

    It costs nothing to submit your articles to article directories for publication, and if time is a prohibition, there are tools that are now commonly available to automatically submit your articles to several directories at once.  

    Multiple directory submissions dramatically increases the back links to your website, which in turn translates to increased traffic, and an increase in web site sales.  

    Article marketing is an extremely important and powerful traffic building strategy, for increasing back links, that the search engines robots are constantly on the lookout for.

    Including keywords when writing your articles, and submitting multiple articles to the article directories, is a very powerful traffic building strategy that makes your website more visible to the search engines.  Your web site will be quickly indexed by the search engines when using this strategy.

    Published articles become viral in nature.  All your articles will contain an author’s bio or author’s resource box, where you can give a brief pitch about your business, and insert the URL for your web site.   The author’s resource box is always located at the end of your article and is usually limited to about 250 – 300 words.

    Unlike other advertising strategies; when your articles are published by the directories, your website URL, which is contained in the author’s resource box, will become viral and will be disseminated throughout the internet universe to remain there indefinitely.

    Your article will be archived in the various article directories, and will over time continue to funnel thousands of permanent back links to your website.  

    That is the primary reason why your article should be well written, useful, well thought out, and keyword rich.  

    It should now be evident to you why article marketing is such a powerful traffic building strategy in comparison to other traffic driving methods.

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    What Is a Canonical Tag & How Does It Improve SEO?

    There are aspects of SEO that seems to scare people away due to the perceived complexities involved. Using there are certain things in search engine optimization helps to guarantee that your website will be set up in an ideal way that allows both crawlers and visitors to navigate it easily. Here we will take a look at the how a canonical tag can help to improve SEO results.

    What Exactly Is A Canonical Tag

    A Canonical tag allows Google and other search engines to understand which page is the original when compared to other similar pages. Many sites will have pages that are almost identical and sometimes completely identical and without the use of a canonical tag those pages could be flagged as duplicate content and receive a penalty for it. The tag itself should be placed in the head section of the HTML code on any page that is considered original content and the page that you want search engines to know is the most important page.

    How Does A Canonical Tag Look Like?

    The tag is added from the non-canonical page to the canonical one. It is sort of a redirect for the search engines.

    How Do You Choose Which Page To Place A Canonical Tag On?

    Very often you might have a situation that has several choices, but one page that makes the most sense and that is the one to place the tag on. In some cases, however, it might not be as obvious which page you should choose. In this situation, it is not a problem because all you have to do is simply to choose one. The point of this SEO practice is simply to let the search engines know which page they should consider being the original content so that you avoid a duplicate content penalty. In addition to optimizing the page for the search engines, it also helps visitors as they get directed to the most friendly URL.

    How Does The Use Of These Tags Improve SEO Results?

    Anytime you have pages that are similar to one another, and you select one of those pages to carry a canonical tag it will improve the overall result of your SEO strategies. The reason for this is that the search engine will know which version is the one they should consider as the original content. The search engines will then count all of the links to all of those pages for the 1 page that carries the tag. It is a way to redirect all traffic to the tagged content without having to do a redirect.

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