Search Engine Marketing

7 Surefire Ways To Increase Your Traffic Starting Yesterday

2009-02-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

Internet. Business. Profit. To fully integrate all of these words into a successful merging you will need another word. Traffic. Every article you will find about making your site or company successful would always include the importance of generating traffic.

So, we all know that in the core of it all, traffic is the most essential thing to a successful internet based business company. Aside from ensuring that you have a great product to sell, and you have your company’s internal organization well taken core of, it would be time to get to the nitty gritty of things, generating traffic.

If you already have a site and you want think that you're not getting the traffic that you're supposed to be getting, then its time to reconsider. If you are contending in these very competitive business, you should always be a step ahead of your competition, increasing your traffic flow should have been done starting yesterday.

Timing is essential, that’s an old adage known to everyone. But with generating traffic, you should always be on your toes and be a day ahead of everyone. Never think of today and tomorrow as a starting point for making your site traffic laden, it should always have been yesterday.

To help you out in generating more traffic for your site, here are some seven surefire ways to increase your traffic starting from yesterday.

1) Invest in good advertising with search engines

Google’s Adwords and Yahoo’s Overture provide great advertising schemes that are very truly popular and assures great traffic. Although with this surefire way to increase your traffic would cost some money. While some would shy away from spending money to increase traffic, it is imperative in this case to do so because Adwords and Overture is the top surefire way to increase your traffic.

You could see for yourself the success this search engine advertising methods have reaped rewards for so many companies. Lots of site feature these advertising system and many have signed on to reap the benefits. Do not be left behind. Every penny is worth it with using Google and Yahoo’s advertising.

2) Exchange or Trade Links with other sites

With exchanging links with other sites, both of you will benefit from the efforts both of you do to enhance your sites traffic. When one site features another sites link, they could provide one another with the traffic one site generates. The efforts are doubly beneficial because it would seem like both of you are working to generate more traffic. The more links traded with more sites the more traffic could be expected.

3) Use Viral Marketing

Viral marketing allows you to spread the word about your company and product without any costs or if ever low costs only. This is a marketing method that can be quite sneaky; you can attach your company’s name, product or link to a certain media such as a funny video, entertaining game, an interesting article or a gossip or buzz. With this method, people get infected with the creativity and entertainment of the medium that they will pass it on to many people.

4) Search and use proper keywords or keyword phrases for your sites content

Search engines look for certain keywords that they would show in their results page. In doing so, having the right keyword and keyword phrase is a high requirement in ranking in high in search engine results. You could write your own content or you could hire someone to do it for you.

5) Write Articles that can lead traffic to your site

Submit articles to sites that would contain the same subject that your site deals in. If you sell car parts write press releases and articles about cars and car parts. Attach your sites description and services at the end of the article as well as the link.

6) Join forums and form online communities

Capture a market and show your expertise and credibility. When you found a good foundation for your site, people will trust you and your site and will pass on to many people their trust. Traffic will certainly increase because they know that you can provide what they need.

7) Lastly, Offer newsletters.

If many people know what you are about and your existence is shared with many others, you will find a loyal traffic that can provide you with more traffic by recommendation. If you arouse the curiosity of your customers they would be pushed to help you with your traffic.

How To Use A Tell A Friend Script To Drive Traffic Today

2009-02-13T06:23:00.000-08:00

More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Tell A Friend Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic

2009-02-13T06:20:00.000-08:00

• Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
• Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.
• Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
• Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
• Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
• Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
• Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
• Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
• Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
• When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
• When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
• Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

Viral Marketing 101 - Not Using It Could Kill Your Business!

2009-02-11T05:23:00.000-08:00

Creativity.

This is one virtue a site must possess to lead the race in the ruthless competition in the Internet based business. With so many competition and rivalry going on, every method of marketing must be employed and utilized.

It doesn’t matter if you have a killer product or a fantastically designed website, if people don’t know that you exist, it doesn’t matter, and you are not going to make it big. Worse of all, you business could just get killed.

While there are so many methods and schemes used by so many e-commerce sites today, there are still some of those that can help you with an extra boost in the popularity ratings. One of these is the so called Viral Marketing.

While the term Viral easily depicts a virus, a word very much dreaded by all computer owners, it is not what it seems. You do not actually use a computer virus to spread your business; on the contrary it just might kill you. Everyone has had enough of all those pop up ads and spywares.

Viral Marketing Overview

Viral Marketing also known otherwise as Viral Advertising is a marketing technique used to build the public awareness of one’s product or company. They use many forms of media to reach out to the public without actually promoting the product by riding on in other forms of addictive means that could get a person hooked and be obliged or amused to actually pass it on, with the product or company advertisement along with it.

In a nutshell, companies ride on the idea that if people like the content of a media they will pass it on to their friends and family. They sponsor the certain media, such as a cool flash game, funny video, amusing story and such, which one may pass on to another with the company brand or logo or the products description or any other content to help promote the company or its product.

Viral marketing has become a popular means of advertising and marketing because they are relatively low cost. To avoid being tagged as spam mail, viral marketing counts on the eagerness of one person to pas on the product. If a person sees the name of the person they know as the sender, they won’t block it and open it as well.

Many companies offer incentives such as discounts and rebates when they help in spreading their viral marketing. They rely on the number of recipients a viral marketing gets from one person in determining the amount or number of incentive they can be attributed with.

Using Viral Marketing to your advantage

The main and foremost advantage of viral marketing is that you get a lot of publicity and public awareness about your site and your company. You get to generate a flow of traffic that are potential customers. With a little ingenuity and imagination, plus some incentives or prizes, you can reach out to a great number of people and announce your existence.

Most every site and companies are catching on to the effectivity of Viral Marketing and Advertising. Not using it could kill your business. Along with other schemes and methods in promoting your site, like Search Engine Optimization and such, viral marketing could easily push you ahead in the rating games.

Viral Marketing could be a sneaky way to get people to know about you and your company. You get them to pass your advertisement along. They are also very low cost that not investing in it could be downright a business suicide. All it takes is a great idea, a good addicting game, a funny story many ideas are still out there. Create a gossip or a buzz, many movies are promoted by using scandals and gossips to make them moiré popular. Remember the movie “The Blair Witch Project”?

Many big companies have tried viral marketing and have had many success stories with it. A classic example is Microsoft’s Hotmail. They were the first known big company to utilize the scheme and it has worked wonders for them.

Now it’s your turn to use viral marketing to work wonders for you. Act now and reap the benefits Viral Marketing will provide for you and your sales figures.

Website as Storefronts

2009-02-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

A customer walks into the store, browses through products and shelves, picks up items, inspects, considers the prices, chooses a product and takes it to the cash register to pay. Now if you want to sell your products online, then your site must be enabled for e-commerce, where you must have the following features:

• You need to provide plenty of content and product description like sizes, dimensions, colors and comparisons with other similar products. It must allow the customer to choose a product, get a clear pricing and shipping costs on the product, complete the transaction and get an order number, and/or invoice confirmation via email. Allow your customer to choose a shipping method.
• You must tell the customer if the item is in stock or delivered against order. Ideally, you should have an email contact or live help if the customer has a question. Most importantly you must respond immediately! If you want to provide your own live chat and help desk services on your website, specialized softwares are available for purchase.
• Be sure your customer service links are large and clearly marked, so your client does not have to dig around to find information.
• Provide an ‘about us’ section or a section about your policies. If you have privacy statements and customer satisfaction policies, your customer will feel better about shopping in your store.
• You probably want to have customer quotes and references on the storefront page, as well, to let your prospective client know that others are happy with your service.
• Provide an FAQ with information about your return-back policies, guarantees, shipping prices and insurance charges if any.
• If you are so inclined, you can offer a print catalogue if the customer prefers to order one from your storefront and shop in the privacy of their homes.
• Do not annoy your customers by presenting products that are marked ‘sold’ or pages that say ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’.
• Do add new content frequently, so your returning customers will not be bored by seeing the same products they saw four months ago.
• If your site has got a date tag or has current references, be careful to change these references frequently so you don’t give the perception that nobody is attending or reading your site.

Top 5 Ways To Generate Low Cost Website Traffic

2009-02-09T05:54:00.000-08:00

There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

Using Google Adwords To Drive Laser Targeted Traffic

2009-02-09T05:53:00.000-08:00

The biggest well known secret in generating wealth in the internet based business or e-commerce is Traffic. Everybody knows it; every site wants it and every site needs it. The point of websites is to be visited and viewed. Many elaborate designs, money and countless hours of developing a site to make them beautiful and attractive are utilized. Without traffic, it is for naught.

With traffic comes a potential customer which basically means sales which in turn means profit. While many sites have collapsed in the past with the downturn of many internet based business, many smaller sites have generated good money by concentrating on a certain niche and some subniches.

This is a reason why e-commerce site laser target certain groups of people and drive them to their site to showcase their sites and products. Precision marketing is essential so that you could count on all the traffic on your site as potential customers.

Using Money to Make Money

It’s a common business notion that if you want to make money, you have to spend money. One good way of spending money for business gain is through advertising. Advertising brings in the people because through advertising, they know that there is such a company or product in existence. With the right type of advertising, you can see the spurt of traffic growth to your site. With a high volume of traffic, even if only a small portion or percentage turns out to be buying customers it is still a good average of profit generating income.

Right now, there is no other advertising scheme that would be worth every cent than using Google’s Adwords. The surge in popularity of Google’s Adwords is very evident as you can see so many sites sporting this ad scheme.

In using Google's Adwords, you pay a certain fee depending on the number of keywords your ad is keyword sensitive to. Each time a person does a search in Google, the keyword or keywords use generate ads in the side of Google which are generated by the keywords they have assigned for their ads.

This method laser targets the traffic a site wants for their site. This also ensures that you are readily visible in the first page of a search result. Paying Google for this ad scheme ensures that your target group of people sees your ads. You drive your laser targeted traffic to your site which provides for their needs and wants. You can also be sure that you can meet their demands and needs.

Aside from Google, you can also be featured in their other search networks, these includes sites like, AskJeeves, AOL Search and Netscape. These sites also show Adwords ads that react to searches done by visitors. There are also content networks, non-search engine sites that feature Google Adwords, which will also carry your ads. But this is subjected to the niche the site features. Your chosen keywords will determine which content network shall feature your ad. The frequency of your ad shall also be determined by your allowed budget.

Laser Targeting your Traffic

To get a good number or estimate of the traffic to buying customer ratio it is good to laser target your traffic. Knowing that your traffic are all potential customers and are interested in your products and company provides you with a more accurate statistics. This will show you how effective your utilizing of Google Adwords is.

Drive laser targeted traffic to your site by using keywords or keyword phrases for your Goggle Adwords that pertains to your company and to your products. There are many online internet tools that can help you in choosing keywords and keyword phrases that are currently in demand that could help drive laser targeted traffic to your site.

With your Google Adwords ad, you are ensured that every click to your ad is a potential customer that is precisely looking pr interested in what you have to offer. Make sure that your Google Adwords ad has the right keywords so that you can drive you're laser targeted traffic to your site.

Using Google Adwords to help boost the drive to increase laser targeted traffic will prove to be very beneficial as many other companies can attest to. The benefits are high with the cost relatively justifiable.

Website as Storefronts

2009-02-09T05:52:00.001-08:00

Tips to Increase Ranking and Website Traffic

2009-02-09T05:49:00.000-08:00

It is worth cataloguing the basic principles to be enforced to increase website traffic and search engine rankings.

•Create a site with valuable content, products or services.
•Place primary and secondary keywords within the first 25 words in your page content and spread them evenly throughout the document.
•Research and use the right keywords/phrases to attract your target customers.
•Use your keywords in the right fields and references within your web page. Like Title, META tags, Headers, etc.

•Keep your site design simple so that your customers can navigate easily between web pages, find what they want and buy products and services.
•Submit your web pages i.e. every web page and not just the home page, to the most popular search engines and directory services. Hire someone to do so, if required. Be sure this is a manual submission. Do not engage an automated submission service.
•Keep track of changes in search engine algorithms and processes and accordingly modify your web pages so your search engine ranking remains high. Use online tools and utilities to keep track of how your website is doing.
•Monitor your competitors and the top ranked websites to see what they are doing right in the way of design, navigation, content, keywords, etc.
•Use reports and logs from your web hosting company to see where your traffic is coming from. Analyze your visitor location and their incoming sources whether search engines or links from other sites and the keywords they used to find you.
•Make your customer visit easy and give them plenty of ways to remember you in the form of newsletters, free reports, reduction coupons etc.
•Demonstrate your industry and product or service expertise by writing and submitting articles for your website or for article banks so you are perceived as an expert in your field.
•When selling products online, use simple payment and shipment methods to make your customer’s experience fast and easy.
•When not sure, hire professionals. Though it may seem costly, but it is a lot less expensive than spending your money on a website which no one visits.
•Don’t look at your website as a static brochure. Treat it as a dynamic, ever-changing sales tool and location, just like your real store to which your customers with the same seriousness.

Web hosting Services and Domain names

2009-02-06T08:01:00.001-08:00

Choosing an appropriate domain name is very important. First and foremost, when it comes to domain names, try to stay away from the silly, stupid, ridiculous or clever. Keep your domain name simple and make it something your customers can remember if they lose the link to your business website.

Take note that, while your domain name on Geocities or AOL may seem like the least expensive way to go, it may also get you dropped from certain search engines. Some search engines ignore domain addresses that reside on these ‘free servers’ or on the ‘cheap’ servers.

Even if your site is recognized and considered by search engines, a professional domain name that uses your primary company name or associated words is likely to get more attention and be considered as a stable business by your prospective customers.

Purchasing domain names are not that expensive which cost about $100 and there are many companies that can register the name for you, provided it is available and has not already been used by another company.

Using one of your keywords in your domain name can increase your score on some search engines. For example, solderingirons.com could be more effective as Electric-soldering-irons.com, if that domain name was available.

You might also choose to establish more than one domain name using keywords and then link your ‘doorway’ domain sites to your primary site. But you will have to pay for each of the domain name and also the monthly hosting fees. It all depends on the type and size of your business and your competition.

Keep in mind that some search engines disregard ‘doorway’ sites. So put at least a page of content on the doorway site with some useful information and then link it to your primary site. But don’t design it as an empty page. The other reason being, you can have one, three, five, or even more email addresses that all contain your business name, and give your business a professional feel. When customers get emails from dominicstone@solderingirons.com they feel as if they are dealing with a stable, professional business operation.

No need for customers to understand how you manage all your email boxes on your domain. They just need to feel your business is dependable and reputable.

Effectively Using Overture/Yahoo To Get Website Visitors

2009-02-06T08:00:00.001-08:00

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

How To Monetize Your Traffic So You Get The Most Out Of It

2009-02-06T07:58:00.000-08:00

Establishing your own E-commerce site is not like what it used to be. There are thousands of competition that is all too willing to get a bigger share of the pie. Every scheme and method you can find to augment your sales would be very beneficial.

We have got to admit to ourselves. Most of us are into it for the money. We are not going to waste our time and effort just for the fun of it. Many sites would not wait until hell freezes over just to see their profits. While there are some who takes things lightly there are always those who would rather see profit any given day.

It is common knowledge that without traffic we have no business. Like any business, without any customers you don’t get sales. Traffic represents all the people that gets a chance to see what you have to offer. The more people who see your products the more people there would be to buy them.

Nobody puts up an E-commerce site that doesn’t expect profit. We have a startup capital that needs to be regained. With a consistent traffic, we at least have a fighting chance to achieve that probability. Monetizing your traffic would optimize your chances of making the best out of it.

Making Money out of your Traffic

The best and most proven method of making a profit out of your traffic is using advertising. The internet generates hundreds of thousands upon hundred of thousands of traffic everyday. Most of them are searching for something. While some are just looking for information there is also a good percentage that is looking for something that they need.

The internet has proven to be a very reliable source in finding what was deemed to be a very unsearchable product. The internet has made the world a smaller place; you can advertise a product from the depths of Istanbul and still find a buyer from the center of Philadelphia.

Generating traffic is not an easy task. You have to contend with a great number of sites to generate a good number of traffic flow. But if done successfully this could open up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. One of the benefits is monetizing your traffic flow.

So, to get to the core of it the more traffic you generate the more likely you are considered as a desirable, desirable, in a sense that a good traffic flowing site is easily convertible to profit. Basically traffic equals profit. Advertising is the name of the game; with the good advertising scheme you can use your traffic flow to your advantage.

When you have good traffic you have a good number of potential customers, customers that are willing to pour money into your coffers. Other than that these are also traffic that can be redirected to sponsored links that are willing to pay you for a sizeable portion of the traffic that you have generated.

This scheme is called “pay-per-click”. With every click a visitor of your site makes on an advertised link you will be paid. The more traffic you generate and the more clicks that happens would spell to more profits.

Affiliate Programs

Another method of monetizing your traffic are affiliate programs. You can link up with other tried and tested sites and online companies and monetize your traffic by having a percentage of sales generated by traffic coming from your site.

The basic idea is, traffic generated from your site will go to another site that can offer a product that you do not carry. Many programs can keep track and make records of transactions that was made possible because of site linkage.

When purchases are made by customers that was led by your site to their site you get a percentage of that sale. Affiliate programs would give you the benefit of monetizing your traffic without the actual need of carrying or promoting a certain product.

There are so many ways and methods to monetize your traffic. All it takes is a bit of hard work and the desire to successfully launch a profit-earning site. The internet is a veritable source of information, many tips and guides are offered everywhere in how to monetize your traffic and make your site a good profit earner.

How To Generate Traffic Using Only Free Methods

2009-02-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

Putting up a company would of course require a lot of things, to get straight to the point, you need a capital. To make money requires money as well. But of course, with the versatility the internet offers, there are many ways you could find that could help optimize the potential of your site or business in generating traffic.

While there are ways to jumpstart your traffic flows, many sites don’t have the resources that others have to generate more traffic for your site. Well, you don’t have to spend a cent; all you need is the proper mindset and a lot of eagerness. You also must have the drive and perseverance to do hard work and research to generate more traffic for your site.

How sweet it is to have more traffic for your site without spending a single cent. Now it’s a sure thing that many sites have articles that offer tips and guidelines in how to generate traffic using only free methods. Because it is possible, you don’t need to speed a single cent, it may take time, to say honestly, I’m not going to beat around the bush with you. You get better chances by paying for your advertisements, but at least you get a fighting chance with some of these free methods I’m about to tell you.

Take advantage of online forums and online communities. The great thing about forums and online communities is that you can target a certain group that fits the certain demographic that you are looking for. You can discuss about lots of things about the niche that you represent or offer. Another great advantage is that you know what you are getting into and you will be prepared.

With online communities and forums you can build a reputation for your company. Show them what you are made of and wow them with your range of expertise about the subject, with that you can build a reputation and build trust with the people in your expertise and knowledge.

You can also make use of newsletters. Provide people with a catalog of your products and interesting and entertaining articles. If you make it really interesting and entertaining, more people will sign up for your newsletter and recommend it to other people. The more people who signs up for your newsletter, the more people there will be that will go to your site increasing your traffic.

Another great idea is trading links with other sites. You don’t have to spend a cent. All you have to do is reach an agreement with another webmaster. With exchanging links, the efforts both sites do will benefit both sites. Every traffic that goes to the site could potentially click on the link of your site and visit your site as well. This works well especially when both sites feature the same niche.

Write articles that could pique the attention of people that have interest in your product. Try writing articles that will provide tips and guides to other aficionados. Writing articles that provide good service and knowledge to other people would provide the necessary mileage your traffic flow needs.

Many sites offer free submission and posting of your articles. When people find interest in your articles they have a good chance of following the track by finding out where the article originated. Include a link or a brief description of your company with the article and there’s a great probability that they will go to your site.

Write good content for your site. Many search engines track down the keywords and keyword phrases your site uses and how they are used. It is not a requirement that a content should be done by a professional content writer. You could do your on but you have to make content for your site that is entertaining as well as informational. It should provide certain requirements as well as great quality.
Generally, internet users use search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines in return use keyword searching in aiding their search results. With the right keywords, you could get high rankings in search engine results without the costs.

All of these methods and more will drive more traffic to your site for free. All it takes is a bit of effort and extended man hours. Learn all you can about the methods depicted here and you will soon have a site with a great traffic flow without the usual costs that come with it.

The Importance of Referrer Logs

2009-02-06T07:53:00.001-08:00

Referrer logging is used to allow web servers and websites to identify where people are visiting them either for promotional or security purposes. You can find out which search engine they used to find your site and whether your customer has come from a ‘linked site’. It is basically the URL of the previous webpage from which your link was followed.

By default, most hosting accounts don’t include referrer logs but may be subscribedd for an extra monthly fee. If your web host does not provide a graphic report of your log files, you can still view the referrer logs for your website by logging into the host server using free or low-cost FTP software, like these:

FTP Explorer: http://www.ftpx.com/
LogMeIn: http://secure.logmein.com/dmcq/103/support.asp
SmartFTP: http://www.smartftp.com/
FTP Voyager: http://www.ftpvoyager.com/

The log file is available on your web server which can be download into your computer later. You can use a log analysis tool, like those mentioned below, to create a graphic report from your log files so that the files are easier to understand.

Abacre Advanced Log Analyzer http://www.abacre.com/ala/
Referrer Soft http://www.softplatz.com/software/referrer/
Log Analyzer http://www.loganalyzer.net

You can view the files using Word, Word Perfect, txt or WordPad files even if you don’t have the right tool. This information is very crucial to your business and marketing plans and is not advisable to neglect it.

In addition to identifying the search engine or linked site from where your visitor arrived, referrer logs can also tell you what keywords or keyword phrases your client used for searching.

As referrer information can sometimes violate privacy, some browsers allow the user to disable the sending of referrer information. Proxy and Firewall software can also filter out referrer information, to avoid leaking the location of private websites. This can result in other problems, as some servers block parts of their site to browsers that don't send the right referrer information, in an attempt to prevent deep linking or unauthorized use of bandwidth. Some proxy software gives the top-level address of the target site itself as the referrer, which prevents these problems and still not divulging the user's last visited site.

Since the referrer can easily be spoofed or faked, however, it is of limited use in this regard except on a casual basis.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

2009-02-02T05:11:00.000-08:00

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler

Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Here's Why Paying For Your Traffic Is A Smart Move

2009-02-02T05:07:00.000-08:00

There are so many success stories you will hear about businesses making it good in the internet. The troubling thing is, there are maybe a tenfold or even a hundredfold of stories contradictory to theirs. Many have unsuccessfully launched a business enterprise that is internet based but only a handful shall succeed.

Is this through luck? That is even more remote. It takes good business sense and a lot of help and team effort. Most importantly, it is the eagerness to succeed and the determination to learn and the willingness to invest in a lot of hard work and some money.

The Very Basic

Like Neo, traffic is “The One”. Without traffic, all your effort would just go to waste. Every business needs customers, without them you wouldn’t have anyone to sell your products to. In the internet world traffic is the walk in customer. The more traffic you have the more people would be able to sell your products to.

But like any business that’s in every corner building or in the mall, not everyone that goes in will buy, but the greater of number that do come in to browse your merchandise, the greater number of people that will buy your products. It is a simple and known fact.

But, how do you get traffic, traffic large enough that could make a small percentage of eventual buyers enough to make a good profit. Many big companies generate traffic of tens of thousands a day and a measly ten to fifteen percent actually buys, but that small percentage is enough to provide them with good business.

Many of these success stories get their traffic from paying others. Yes that’s right; you have to spend money to make money. Advertising is the key. The more people that knows that your site exists; the more people would of course go to your site, that’s common sense.

While there are many ways that can get you advertising for free, this do not generate the same high volume as those methods that are getting paid. These paid advertisements include advertising schemes by Google and Yahoo.

The Value of Searches

The search and will be the easiest and fastest medium in finding what a person needs in the internet. Search engines have been very popular because they provide a vital service to many people. They are free and easy to use. With this popularity, they get many visitors and clicks that they are the most common sites that people go to. It is easy to understand why so many companies would pay to advertise with these search engines.

Search engines provide information to the millions of users that they have each day. They provide links to many sites that a user may be looking for. If your sites link pop up in the high ranks of the search results page, you get a great chance that they will go to your site. While search engine optimization is a cheaper and low cost way to get your site a high rank, paying for advertisements will ensure that you will be on the top ranks.

When you pay for your advertisements, it is like paying for your traffic. This may sound like not such a good idea, but the payoffs would tell a different story. When you pay for your traffic, you are guaranteed of a consistent traffic flow to your site. You will never go with an empty sales day.

Paying for your Traffic

Usually, you will be charged with the number of hits a link gets when your ads is clicked, this is called pay per click. For some search engines, you will be charged with the number of times your ad shows up when a certain keyword or keyword phrase is searched. It is imperative that you have good keyword content in your ad. There are many tools that aid you in using the right keyword for the right moment.

All the money you spend in paying for your traffic will not be for naught. You will get an impressive boost in traffic which will also result to a great boost in your sales figures. Paying for your traffic would be a really good idea and you will get all the benefits it has to offer.

What Is Search Engine Optimization

2009-02-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

Search Engine Optimization is a process of choosing the most appropriate targeted keyword phrases related to your site and ensuring that this ranks your site highly in search engines so that when someone searches for specific phrases it returns your site on tops. It basically involves fine tuning the content of your site along with the HTML and Meta tags and also involves appropriate link building process. The most popular search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AOL and Ask Jeeves. Search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret, to get credit for finding the most valuable search-results and to deter spam pages from clogging those results. A search engine may use hundreds of factors while ranking the listings where the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually. Algorithms can differ so widely that a webpage that ranks #1 in a particular search engine could rank #200 in another search engine. New sites need not be "submitted" to search engines to be listed. A simple link from a well established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and begin to spider its contents. It can take a few days to even weeks from the referring of a link from such an established site for all the main search engine spiders to commence visiting and indexing the new site.

If you are unable to research and choose keywords and work on your own search engine ranking, you may want to hire someone to work with you on these issues.

Search engine marketing and promotion companies, will look at the plan for your site and make recommendations to increase your search engine ranking and website traffic. If you wish, they will also provide ongoing consultation and reporting to monitor your website and make recommendations for editing and improvements to keep your site traffic flow and your search engine ranking high. Normally your search engine optimization experts work with your web designer to build an integrated plan right away so that all aspects of design are considered at the same time.

Search Engine Optimization And Why You Gotta Use It

2009-01-28T10:13:00.000-08:00

E-commerce is a cut throat business. You have to arm yourself with the proper know-how and the tools to make your site a cut above the rest. Each day, more and more sites are clambering to optimize their rankings in websites and if you lose your guard, you may just get trampled on and be left in the abyss filled with so many failed e-commerce sites.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a term widely used today by many e-commerce sites. For the past few years and the next ten years or so, search engines would be the most widely used internet tool to find the sites that they need to go to or the product or information they need.

Most people that use search engines use only the ten top search results in the first page. Making it to the first page, more so to the top three is a barometer of a sites success in search engine optimization. You will get a higher ratio of probability in being clicked on when you rank high. The more traffic for your site, the more business you rake in.

But, it is essential to grab a hold of that spot or make your ranking even better. As I aforementioned, each day is a new day for all e-commerce sites to make them selves rank higher using search engine optimization. It is imperative to make your site better and better everyday.

So just what is search engine optimization and do you have to use it? The answer to why you have to use it is an easy one. You need search engine optimization to be number one, or maybe at least make your site income generating.

With search engine optimization you can get the benefit of generating a high traffic volume. Let’s just say you get only a turn out of successful sales with 10 to 20 percent of your traffic. If you get a hundred hits or more a day, you get a good turn out of sales already. If you get only twenty to ten hits a day, you only get one or two if not any at all.

So once again, what is search engine optimization? Search engine optimization is utilizing tools and methods in making your site top ranking in the results of search engines. Getting yourself in the first page and better yet in the top half of the page will ensure that your site will generate public awareness of your site’s existence and subsequently generate more traffic, traffic that could lead to potential income and business.

Search engine optimization requires a lot of work to be fully realized. There are many aspects you have to change in your site or add as well to get search engine optimization. These will include getting lots of information about the keyword phrases that are popular in regards to your sites niche or theme.

You may also need to rewrite your sites contents so that you could get the right keyword phrases in your site without making it too commercial but light and informative. There are certain rules and guidelines to be followed with making your site’s content applicable and conducive to search engine optimization.

You will also need to collaborate with many other sites so that you could get link exchanges and page transfers. The more inbound and outbound traffics generated by sites among others are one of the components search engines uses to rank sites.

Try to search the internet for many useful help. Tips, guidelines and methods for search engine optimization are plenty to be found. Read many articles that can help you optimize your site in search engine results. The more knowledge and information you gather the better. This will all help you in getting those high rankings. This may require a little time and effort in your part but the benefits will be astounding.

If you can part with some money, there are many sites in the internet that can help you in search engine optimization. There are many sites that help in tracking keyword phrases that can help your site. There are also some content writers that have lots of experience in making good keyword laden content for your sites that have good quality.

Act now and see the benefits garner with search engine optimization. All of these will result to better traffic and more business for your site and company.

Must Have Features Your Web Site

2009-01-28T10:05:00.000-08:00

Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.

Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.

Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.

Some other Keyword Research Tools

2009-01-26T04:26:00.000-08:00

One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.

Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.

Overture's http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn't tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly 'computer game' was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.

Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include,
• Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
• Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.
• Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.
• More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.

Guidebeam http://www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam's estimation of how relevant that phrase is.

These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.

The Importance of Search Engines

2009-01-26T04:24:00.000-08:00

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. When a topic is typed for search, nearly instantly, the search engine will sift through the millions of pages it has indexed about and present you with ones that match your topic. The searched matches are also ranked, so that the most relevant ones come first.

Remember that a prospective customer will probably only look at the first 2-3 listings in the search results. So it does matter where your website appears in the search engine ranking.

Further, they all use one of the top 6-7 search engines and these search engines attract more visitors to websites than anything else. So finally it all depends on which search engines the customers use and how they rank your site.

It is the Keywords that play an important role than any expensive online or offline advertising of your website.

It is found by surveys that a when customers want to find a website for information or to buy a product or service, they find their site in one of the following ways:
• The first option is they find their site through a search engine.
• Secondly they find their site by clicking on a link from another website or page that relates to the topic in which they are interested.
• Occasionally, they find a site by hearing about it from a friend or reading in an article.

Thus it’s obvious the the most popular way to find a site, by search engine, represents more than 90% of online users. In other words, only 10% of the people looking for a website will use methods other than search engines.

All search engines employ a ranking algorithm and one of the main rules in a ranking algorithm is to check the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Don’t forget that algorithms also give weightage to link population (number of web pages linking to your site). When performed by a qualified, experienced search engine optimization consultant, your site for high search engine rankings really does work, unless you have a lot of money and can afford to pay the expert. With better knowledge of search engines and how they work, you can also do it on your own.

Tips to Get Repeat Web Traffic

2009-01-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

1. Update the pages on your website frequently. Stagnant sites are dropped by some search engines. You can even put a date counter on the page to show when it was last updated.

2. Offer additional value on your website. For affiliates and partners you can place links to their sites and products and ask them to do the same for you. You can also advertise their books or videos, if these products relate to your industry and are not in competition with your own product.

3. You can allow customers to ‘opt in’ to get discounts and special offers. Place a link on your site to invite customers to ‘opt in’ to get a monthly newsletter or valuable coupons.

4. Add a link to your primary page with a script ‘Book Mark or Add this site to your Favorites’.

5. Add a link ‘Recommend this site to a Friend’ so that the visitor can email your website link, with a prewritten title, “Thought you might be interested in this”, just by clicking on it.

6. Brand your website so that visitors always know they are on your site. Use consistent colors, logos and slogans and always provide a ‘Contact Us’ link on each page.

7. Create a ‘Our Policies’ page that clearly defines your philosophy and principles in dealing with your customers. Also post your privacy policy as well so that clients know they are secure when they visit your site.

8. Create a FAQ page which addresses most of the doubts and clarifications about your product or your company that are likely to be asked. This helps to resolve most of the customers doubts in their first visit to your site.

8. Ensure that each page on your website has appropriate titles and keywords so that your customer can find their way back to your site if they lose the book mark.

9. Never spam a client, who has opted for newsletters, with unsolicited emails. Later if they decide they want to ‘opt out’ of the mailings, be sure you honor their request and take them off the mailing list. They may still come back if they like your products. But they will certainly not come back if you continue to flood their email box with mails they no longer wish to receive.

Keyword Density

2009-01-25T07:11:00.000-08:00

Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:
• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

Tools to monitor your website

2009-01-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

You can’t just put your website on the net with right keywords and all the right touches and expect your traffic and ranking will remain constant. As the web is an ever changing landscape, you have to keep track of your own web results like what is happening with the competition and also the best and highest ranked sites. There are many useful tools to help you find out what exactly is happening.

1. A tool which you can use to test your own website links or other websites for broken links:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

2. With this tool you can check search engines for the number of back links to your URL i.e. other web pages linking to your site:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/backlinks/

3. It sometimes becomes important to know where the servers of your hosting company are physically located. Because, some search engines like Google have the ability to filter search results based on their physical location called geotargeting. This could be used to determine why your site is showing in only a certain country. This link can also be used to research the country location of a particular competitor’s website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/website-country/

4. In order to track the location of the visitor or a customer to your website:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/

5. In order to check the Yahoo! web ranking of your’s or your competitor’s website use :
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/webrank/

6. Here is a link to check the web ranking of a website using a Mac or Apple computer:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/pagerank-mac/

7. You need a Google AdSense account for using this. This link provides you with charts and reports which will help you analyze traffic, clicks, and results from your AdSense advertising
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-charts/

8. If you have an AdSense account, you can analyze your website address or another website address to see what Google ads will be displayed when the customer selects certain website names or keywords:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/

9. This link will take you to a cooperative advertising network where you can join to display and
share your ads with other website owners:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/ad-network/

10. You can add the Search Functionality on your website which uses Google. This works only if your site is listed in the Google Index.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/search/

11. Here are some links to free website counters which you can use on your website to track your traffic and hits:
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/counter/
http://www.amazingcounters.com/?ref=gad033
http://www.cyber-counter.com/signup.php
http://www.statcounter.com/free_hit_counter.html
http://www.free-counters.net/

How Do Search Engines Work - Web Crawlers

2009-01-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

It is the search engines that finally bring your website to the notice of the prospective customers. Hence it is better to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the customer initiating a search.

There are basically two types of search engines. The first is by robots called crawlers or spiders.

Search Engines use spiders to index websites. When you submit your website pages to a search engine by completing their required submission page, the search engine spider will index your entire site. A ‘spider’ is an automated program that is run by the search engine system. Spider visits a web site, read the content on the actual site, the site's Meta tags and also follow the links that the site connects. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository, where the data is indexed. It will visit each link you have on your website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so don’t create a site with 500 pages!

The spider will periodically return to the sites to check for any information that has changed. The frequency with which this happens is determined by the moderators of the search engine.

A spider is almost like a book where it contains the table of contents, the actual content and the links and references for all the websites it finds during its search, and it may index up to a million pages a day.

Example: Excite, Lycos, AltaVista and Google.

When you ask a search engine to locate information, it is actually searching through the index which it has created and not actually searching the Web. Different search engines produce different rankings because not every search engine uses the same algorithm to search through the indices.

One of the things that a search engine algorithm scans for is the frequency and location of keywords on a web page, but it can also detect artificial keyword stuffing or spamdexing. Then the algorithms analyze the way that pages link to other pages in the Web. By checking how pages link to each other, an engine can both determine what a page is about, if the keywords of the linked pages are similar to the keywords on the original page.

A Linking Strategy Is About More Than Just Quality Content

2009-01-24T13:58:00.000-08:00

SEO experts have long cried that "content is king." When Mark Jackson emphasized this in 2007, he wrote that, "Quality content affects both the quality and amount of inbound links." Does this mean that all you need to do to get good links is to build quality content?

Some SEO "extremists" would have you think so, but improving the quality and quantity of your inbound links doesn't rest on the shoulders of good content alone. Let's look at some strategies for inbound linking plans, and some exercises to help increase the value and relevance of the links being targeted for acquisition.

What Does Natural Linking Mean These Days?

Many SEOs evangelize the need to "act natural" when building links to a domain. "Links should have a variety of anchor text," and "links should be pointed to deeper pages than just the home page" are tenets that will remain valuable when considering link development. However, these have become increasingly leveraged, and in some cases people have overdone it.

Using anchor text to link to specific deep pages on a site, as well as the home page, can certainly help from a ranking perspective. Data still shows that we see incremental lift in associated rankings and traffic when we accomplish these tasks.

Remember, however, that it's natural for a large percentage of links to point to a domain (text, images, or logos) where the actual brand or domain name is used as anchor text or alt attribute/image title. Whenever we take on a client with a relatively well-known brand, this pattern is very evident. Launching into an aggressive campaign to increase the variety of anchor text pointed to the domain could backfire, if it isn't carefully planned.

There could almost be a new metric for link building defined as "anchor text density." The total number of links pointed to the site should probably be comprised of "X percent" brand or product-name words and "X percent" of various iterations of relevant anchor text.

Although the concept of "keyword density" is somewhat dated, there's merit in aiming for a certain "anchor text density." You should probably strongly consider building a certain percentage of branded anchor text links if you really want to stay looking "natural."

Natural Tactics are Site-Specific

Although this column isn't about tactics, part of any strategy is defining the tactics you'll employ to build links. In the spirit of remaining "natural," take a close look at your inbound linking patterns to help determine which tactics make the most sense for your site. If you typically have numerous press releases and news articles being published and syndicated, which generate fresh but perishable links to your site, this is an area you would want to address.

If you tend to have a number of links coming to your site around various seasons or holidays, ramp up your efforts during these times in order to match the pace. Although it's wise to keep seasonal content live all year, from a holistic SEO perspective, not many people are likely to link to a Christmas page during June.

I said not many. There are people, including my wife, who start their Christmas shopping in June and may choose to link. These links should continue trickling in, but the majority of links to a holiday-themed page will likely come during a fairly predictable period.

If you have a natural linking pattern from social networking sites, forums, and blogs, then strongly consider hiring an evangelist to become your "face" online. Using social media as a communication medium allows for unobtrusive links to be built to a site, and to specific pages that address relevant conversations. It's still very important to respect communities, but accepted members who provide occasional links to the solution to a problem are typically not shunned, and are considered important members of the group.

Brainstorming Strategies

Link development brainstorming shouldn't be limited to link specialists and project strategists. Brainstorming everything from directory targeting to more advanced link baiting strategizing is far more effective when participants are familiar with the products or services being supported.

I've previously suggested "degrees of separation exercises" for link building. This continues to be a valuable tactic. Much like SEO strategy often isn't fully formulated until after the keyword research is completed, link strategies shouldn't be finalized until many potential sources of relevant content are listed.

Taking the time to figure out what makes sense from a semantic connectivity perspective can yield tactical execution plans for link development with far more breadth than simply targeting everyone directly associated with the product or service. For example, an obesity-related site should consider links from far more than just weight-loss or exercise sites.

Linking will continue to be a very strong queen at King Content's side. Keeping natural while enhancing the growth of your inbound links will be like using fertilizer -- just make sure you spend the time picking the right types of fertilizer and the proper watering schedule, and you should be well on the way to increased rankings and traffic.

Frank Watson Fires Back

I agree that there's more to a sound linking strategy than creating good content. The "if you build it, they will come" mentality hardly ever works. But search marketers shouldn't underestimate the importance of creating something worth linking to.

I've always been an advocate of the power of good writing as a link building tool. Many times when I'm trying to answer people on the SEW forums about 301 redirects and other stock replies, I use the same reference.

We forget that the Web was originally set up as a research tool and that the whole Google algorithm was based on that premise. A link is like a citation, so if you provide good information -- or funny stories -- they have a tendency to get links from other Web sites.

Sure, forum signatures and social media links are valuable now, but there's no substitute for a well-written article with authority. And this is becoming especially true as things move to "trust rank."

Join us for Search Engine Strategies London February 17-20 at the Business Design Centre in Islington. Don't miss the definitive event for U.K. and European marketers, corporate decision makers, webmasters and search marketing specialists!
(By Chris Boggs,searchenginewatch.com)

Twelve Tips When Choosing a Search Marketing Consultant or Agency

2008-04-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

Most businesses currently running SEM campaigns could vastly improve their performance with outside help. I can say this with confidence for two reasons: first, having worked with dozens of companies over the last eight years (most of whom have received millions in funding from top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms), I can speak from experience that I rarely go to a company that is doing search 100% right. This can range from very basic errors (no tracking and thus no insight into ROI) to more complex but no less important problems (misunderstanding of bidding strategy, insufficient ad text or landing page testing).

Second, most businesses aren’t in the business of search marketing - as such, they never really focus enough attention on their campaigns to really get it right. After meeting the senior executives at all those companies, as well as the marketing departments, I know that the personnel at these firms are incredibly bright and dedicated. But when search marketing is one of 15 things you need to do in a day, inevitably you end up doing a lot of things poorly instead of a few things well.

As a result, a lot of companies these days turn to outside consultants or agencies to help them with their search marketing campaigns. This can be an incredibly smart decision - if you pick the right firm. Picking the wrong firm can be a massive time suck and a financial disaster. Being someone who has been on both sides of the search consultant/agency negotiations (choosing the outsourcer and pitching to be the outsourced consultant), I’ve learned a few things along the way that will help you to make the right choice on your search marketing consultant or agency. Here’s my top 12 tips (not in order):

1. Consider the size of your account.
Do you spend $500 a month on search or do you spend $500,000? How much do you plan to spend in the future? This is a crucial starting point before you begin looking for outside help. If you expect to spend under $2500 a month, very few agencies will want to work with you - you are better served by a local consultant. Between $2500 and $10,000, you have a few more options. For example, companies like Yodle.com and ReachLocal.com have semi-automated solutions that can work well for local businesses looking to ramp their search spend, and experienced SEM consultants are also a good option. Once you get over $10,000 a month, small agencies might be interested in your business. At $50,000 and above, even the biggest search agencies will want to talk to you. I’m not suggesting that just because you have a big monthly spend you should use an agency, but I am suggesting you limit the scope of your research based on the size of your budget - it will save you time.

2. Ask for representative clients, then find them on the search engines.
PowerPoint is a wonderful tool isn’t it? Any agency can create a PowerPoint that makes it seem like they have the most advanced technology and proprietary methods for getting your business optimized on AdWords and YSM. My advice is to avoid the PowerPoints all together. Ask the consultant/agency for a few representative clients and then go onto the search engines and look for their clients’ ads. Are they showing up for keywords you would expect to have high conversions? Is the ad text targeted and compelling? When you click-through, is the landing page targeted to the keywords and likely to convert a potential customer? Is there evidence in their destination URL that keyword-level tracking has been implemented? Don’t rely on a salesperson to tell you how great their SEM services are, check it out for yourself!

3. Decide which pricing model works best for you.
There are four basic agency/consulting pricing models in SEM: percentage of spend, hourly rate, fixed monthly fee, and performance-based fee. Percentage of spend is a charge based on the amount you spent that month. For example, if you spent $100,000 and your agency gets a 10% percentage of spend fee, you would pay then $10,000 on top of the $100,000 you spend on your SEM ads. Hourly rate is what most consultants usually charge (usually between $100 to $250 an hour, depending on expertise). A fixed monthly fee is a flat rate regardless of your spend amount of how many hours someone spends on your account. And performance-based fee is basically a revenue share based on the amount of profit the outsourced firm makes for you (this is a very uncommon billing method at the moment). If you think you will only need a few hours of help a week, an hourly consultant is a good bet. A small campaign (say, under $10,000 a month of spend) that you want completely managed by outside help is perfect for a fixed fee relationship. As your account becomes bigger, you’ll encounter larger agencies who will usually insist on a percentage of spend pricing plan. Performance-based agencies exist, but they generally consider themselves to be “online lead generation agencies” rather than SEM agencies. Still, these types of companies are out there and it doesn’t hurt to ask a potential agency if they would be willing to take part or all of their compensation on a performance basis.

4. Determine what services are and are not offered.
Not all SEM agencies and consultants are the same. Some only want to deal with your keywords and bids. Others will work on ad text but not landing pages. And some will help you in every element of your SEM campaigns (keywords, bids, landing pages, ad text, tracking, reporting, search engines). Personally, I recommend working with outside SEMs who will at a minimum do keyword creation, bid adjustment, ad text testing, and tracking and reporting for you. At the end of the day, however, it’s your decision to figure out what services you do and don’t need. For example, if you have great internal Web designers, don’t pay extra for an outside firm to do landing page optimization for you. Knowing what you want before you begin negotiations can save you a lot of money.

5. Determine your long-term SEM strategy.
Is SEM always going to be less than 5% of your marketing budget, or could you see SEM eventually driving the lion’s share of your business? The answer to this question should help you decide whether you want an outside agency that “gives you a fish everyday” or “gives you a fishing pole and teaches you to fish.” If SEM is a “nice to have” for your business, I recommend that you don’t spend too much time trying to learn it yourself. I equate this sort of situation to getting an oil change at Jiffy Lube; sure, you could change your oil yourself, but you have better things to do and it’s worth the $30 to have someone else get dirty. On the flip side, if the success of your business depends on perfect SEM execution, you should think about hiring an outside consultant that will not only optimize your accounts today, but also teach you the ‘dark art’ of SEM. From my experience, if you hire an SEM expert for between one to two weeks of intense training, you can learn the ropes of SEM to the point that you will only need periodic (perhaps monthly) refresher courses. Keep in mind, two weeks of training is 80 hours of a consultants time and that is not cheap (probably between $8,000 and $20,000 for this service), but if SEM is vital to your business, this investment will be well worth it.

6. Look for vertical expertise.
If you are a personal injury lawyer, do you really want an “ecommerce SEM expert” optimizing your SEM? Of course not. As SEM has become more and more popular, I am starting to see vertical SEM consultants and agencies emerge. This is not an absolute requirement, but if all other things are equal, choosing an expert who has direct experience building campaigns for similar businesses to yours should tip the scales in his/her favor.

7. Understand the difference between a sales rep and an account rep.
A classic bait and switch technique is to send in a senior level expert to pitch your business and then turn the account over to a freshly-minted college grad once the deal closes. If you are making your decision based on the quality of the agency staff, make sure that you meet the actual person or people who will be managing your account on a day-to-day basis before you sign on the line that is dotted. By the way, there can sometimes be an advantage to having that new college grad work on your account (they tend to be less jaded and can work longer hours than the ‘over 25 crowd’), but that’s a decision you need to make with your eyes open.

8. Distance from your office may be relevant.
Are you located in Boise, Idaho and getting pitches from an agency in Chicago? Phone consultation can be very effective, but there is value to having face-to-face meetings from time to time. Back in 2001 Yahoo screwed up my Yahoo Mail account and I couldn’t get any messages. After writing them for days without response I finally sent an email that said “I work in Redwood City. If I don’t hear from you in 24 hours, I am coming to the Yahoo headquarters to personally get an answer.” My email was fixed in less than an hour. Idle threats aside, being close to your service providers is just a good way to get more personal and frequent help.

9. Contract length, extra fees, incentives.
Read the contract before you sign it! Are you getting locked in to a two year contract with a minimum bill of $10,000 a month? Is there a fee to have a phone conversation? Is the consultant/agency willing to work for a lower fee in exchange for a performance bonus if he hits certain monthly profit goals? All contracts are negotiable and it’s your loss if you don’t try to change the language to benefit your company.

10. If it sounds too good to be true . . .
I saw a terrible ad on AdSense yesterday. It said “Guaranteed 1st Page Placement on Google - $49/month.” I clicked through (to cost them money and to figure out the scam) and the fine print basically said you’d show up on at least one term ‘related to your business’ on the first page through either paid or organic search. So if you are a Miami plumber for $49 a month you might show up in position #10 in the paid results for “North Miami leaky sink free consultation.” The clicks would cost the SEM firm $1 a month and they’d get $48 in profit. Any agency or consultant who starts off by talking about ‘guarantees’ or ‘insider information’ or ‘X thousand percent gains in profit’ isn’t being upfront with you. Find an agency that is realistic about what it can achieve for you and is under-promising and then over-delivering to build a long-term relationship.

11. Determine if your agency is outsourcing to another agency.
Some agencies are nothing but glorified salesforces. They will pitch you on their proprietary techniques and technology and then outsource your business to a bid management firm or an Indian outsourcing company. You have a right to know who is doing what for your account. If you are uncomfortable with the agency sharing your campaign data with other companies or using overseas sub-contractors, make sure to you ask potential agencies to disclose this data to you.

12. What happens after you cancel?
Some people and companies are wonderful to work with . . . until you cancel your contract. If you happen to have stumbled into a relationship with a vindictive agency, you might wake up to find thousands of keywords in your AdWords account deleted, or with a bill from the agency for several thousand dollars for “data transfer” and “transition costs.” Indeed, some contracts specifically mention these sort of extra costs in the event of a cancellation. The best way to avoid this sort of problem is to pro-actively include favorable language in the contract. For example, “in the event of cancellation, agency agrees not to delete any keywords, ad text or other information from client accounts. Agency agrees to provide a transition document at no cost that summarizes learnings and best practices from the relationship. Upon request, agency will remove any and all tracking URLs from client account at no additional cost.” Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, and I literally made up that language in a few minutes. Talk to your company lawyer and he or she will be able to create a much more powerful clause that protects you.

If I sat here staring at my computer for a few more hours, I’m sure I could come up with another dozen tips to help you choose an SEM agency. But as I read over the tips I’ve already created, I’m sure any additional tips I’d add would fall into three categories: 1) ask lots of questions; 2) know your business; 3) read the contract! There are a lot of great SEM experts out there waiting to help you. Making an upfront investment in thorough research into a potential service provider will ensure that you find the right help for your business.
(by David Rodnitzky, http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/)

Optimizing Paid For Inclusion Search Engines

2008-04-12T08:55:00.000-07:00

Paid for Inclusion is a paid per click mechanism often neglected by companies. It is, however, an extremely successful and cost effective way of driving qualified visitors to a website and through careful management can produce ROI figures in excess of 10 times the investment placed.

A quick look back at history shows that paid for inclusion was one of the first pay per click mechanisms that was available to a marketer. Pioneered most visibly by Inktomi, and then soon followed by engines such as AltaVista and FAST the PFI market really took off providing a welcome manageability to getting your site listed quickly and efficiently. The paid for inclusion market has not changed much since then, with the exception of submission method maybe, but the biggest challenge to a user is how best do I use it?

Whilst paid for placement (Overture, Google AdWords, FindWhat etc) offer simple procedures to getting a site listed, part of the ever increasing strength of the PFP market, the processes that are necessary for optimizing PFI are different. With no guarantee of a high placement and reliance on relevant submitted content, i.e. does Inktomi feel this is 100% relevant to a search or 1%, the challenge to the marketer is much greater. In order to demonstrate that the challenge is not as unfathomable as it may seem here are some guidelines on how to optimize your content.

1. Understand where paid inclusion data appears within the search network

- The usual place for paid for inclusion data is within the 'web pages' results. These are pages that appear when the search term has either a) limited coverage within paid for placement or directory listings or b) exhausted all of the paid for placement or directory listings and appears there after! Here is a simple example to further explain this

- If you search for 'credit cards online' on MSN you'll be presented with MSN's own paid for placement mechanism 'Featured Sites', then Overture's top 3 listings 'Sponsored Sites', then 100+ listings from LookSmart 'Directory Listings' and then once they are exhausted 'Web Pages' which are Inktomi.

2. Understand what you are submitting

- Following on from Point 1, if the listings that appear in paid for inclusion are so low in the pecking order you must be careful of which words, phrases, listings to submit. In the example above creating a PFI listing for 'credit cards online' wouldn't make a whole lot of sense, however, 'online credit card service' would have you appear on page 1 in 15th spot as all other sources were exhausted much sooner. But what is the catch? The simple answer is volume; the number of searches for 'online credit card service' is 5% of the number of searches for 'credit card online'. Your advantage is relevancy, those 5% of searches are going to traditionally have more relevant searchers as they've really pre qualified themselves with a longer more considered search term.

3. Don't submit too little

- If the volume of traffic is lower then why should you bother going to all of the effort of submitting sites to PFI? The answer is volume again. The best content to submit to a PFI engine is large bulk amounts taken from sites with lots of data on their site. This lends itself extremely well to catalogue retailers (such as BestBuy or Amazon) or publishers (such as Consumer Reports or McGraw Hill). In many instances the effort needed for one listing in PFI is the same effort as 10,000 listings. The more listings you submit the less of an issue the smaller search volume becomes as you'll get a larger percentage of the more specific searches with a larger number of listings.

4. Understand 'how' to submit

- There are many ways to submit to PFI engines, many of them will help you with the whole procedure, others will recommend third parties to assist you with it. The most important variable to understand here is relevancy. You listings are not guaranteed number 1 spot, even on the 'Web Pages' or equivalent section of the site. You must ensure that if you are submitting a listings for 'Sony 28" Widescreen TV Model' the entirety of your submission, title, description, supporting text, url, all contain the same information otherwise the engine will bump your listing down for being too vague. Understand the variables of PFI too, for example, Inktomi won't allow anything but a 1to1 listing to unique URL ratio. This further lends itself to bulk submissions from a catalogue or large listing site.

5. Don't submit too much

- PFI have variable rate cards per industry and vertical. As with PFP the price is often dependant upon demand for the content for example, finance and legal services are more expensive than reference or computing. For this reason it is important to do research before you submit your content. Be sure that if you are considering putting your entire catalogue of products online that each and every product if sold justifies the cost per click. In many instances the best course of action is to skim the feed your are submitting to PFI up to the point where the AOV of the catalogue products or CPA of the online lead you are listings justifies your costs. NOTE: having a good tracking tool and understanding both your direct and deferred conversion rates really helps here.

6. Creative Management

- A PFI listings, as with any other, appears within the search network with countless others. Make sure you don't neglect these listings by relying on the title and description from your catalogue or website listing. In many instances normal procedure to substitute the title that appears in the engine with the title that appears on the site. Include calls to action; add your unique selling proposition and if you have a strong brand name be sure to include it.

PFI management is an integral part of an overall search marketing campaign and if your industry lends itself to this form of submission then it is a must. Optimizing your site for spiders may work well for single submissions to PFI but ensuring that your website content is visible in the easiest possible way is the overall strength of this pay per click mechanism.

(by James Colborn : An Account Director for Inceptor Inc, taken from payperclickuniverse.com)

Choosing the correct keywords for your site

2008-04-10T10:36:00.000-07:00

In this article, we focus on the correct way of finding out the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines. This article will give you the formula for the Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) - a mathematical formula which I have developed to help you determine which keywords you should be optimizing your site for.

Step 1: Open your text editor or word processor and write down all the words and phrases that you might have searched for if you were looking for a company which offers products and services similar to yours.

For example, suppose your company organizes packaged tours to Australia. Here's a list of phrases that I might have searched for if I were planning to make a trip to Australia:

tourism in Australia
travel to Australiatravelling
in Australiatravel agencies
in Australiatravelling agencies
in AustraliaAustralian travel agencies

Of course, the keywords that came to your mind may have been different. But that's not important - the important thing is to get an initial list of keywords.You may be wondering why I have not used single word keywords. Here's why:

* Firstly, single word keywords tend to be hyper-competitive. A search for "tourism" or "travelling" in any search engine will probably generate hundreds of thousands of pages. While it is possible that you may get your page in the top 10 for such a single word keyword, it is quite unlikely.
* Secondly, because of the sheer number of pages that single word searches can throw up, most search engine users have realized that they can get more relevant pages if they search for phrases rather than individual words. Statistical research has shown that most people are now searching for 2 or 3 word phrases rather than for single words.
* Thirdly, single word keywords won't get you targeted traffic. When people search for "tourism", they are not necessarily looking for tourist destinations in Australia - they may be interested in any other country of the world. Even if you got your site into the top 10 for tourism, you gain nothing from such visitors. However, when someone searches for "tourism in Australia", he/she is your potential customer, and hence, it makes sense for you to try and get a top ranking for your site for that keyword.

Hence, whenever you are trying to generate keywords, try to be location specific. Try to think of keywords which apply to the geographic area that your product or service is designed to serve.

Step 2: Open any spreadsheet program that is installed in your hard drive. I assume you are using Microsoft Excel. If you are using some other spreadsheet program, just change the spreadsheet related procedures outlined here to fit your program.

Create 4 columns - one for the keyword, one for the popularity of the keyword, one for the number of sites that appear in Google for that keyword and the last for something I call the Keyword Effectiveness Index (don't worry - I'll explain what KEI means later on). In order to ensure that you can follow what I am saying, I recommend that you add the following column headers to the first four columns of the first row of your spreadsheet:

Keyword
Popularity
No. of CompetitorsKEI

Step 3: A great way to obtain a list of keywords related to the ones you have developed in the first step is to use WordTracker's keyword generation service. Wordtracker is a paid service but you can use their free trial tool.

Click on the "Trial" option at the top of the site. In the page that appears, type in your name and email address and click on the "Start the trial >>" button. In the next page, click on "Click here to start the trial". In the next page, type in the first keyword that you developed in Step 1, i.e. "tourism in Australia", in the text box. Click on the "Proceed >>" button.

Step 4: In the next page, WordTracker will display a list of keywords related to the keyword that you had typed in. (Just scroll down the left pane to see the keywords).

Now, click on the first keyword in the left pane which is applicable for your site. In the right pane, WordTracker will show a list of keywords which contain the keyword you had clicked on in the left pane.

Then in the table that you have created in your spreadsheet, copy each of the keywords in the right pane and paste them in the first column of the table. Also, copy the number of times those keywords have been used (i.e. the figure present in the Count column in WordTracker) and paste them in the second column.

In order to ensure that you can follow me, make sure that you type the first keyword in the second row of your spreadsheet. Of course, you should only bother adding a keyword to your spreadsheet if it is applicable for your site.Once you have added all the keywords in the right pane which are applicable for your site, click on the next keyword in the left pane which is applicable for your site.

Once again, WordTracker will display a list of keywords in the right pane which contain the keyword you had clicked on in the left pane. Again, copy the keywords in the right pane which are applicable for your site and paste them in the first column of your spreadsheet. Also, copy the figures present in the Count column and paste them in the second column beside the corresponding keywords. Repeat this process for each of the keywords in the left pane.

Step 5: Once you have finished with all the keywords in the left pane, press your browser's Back button a number of times until WordTracker again displays the text box which asks you to type in a keyword. Type in the second keyword in your original list (i.e. "travel to Australia"), click on the "Proceed >>" button and repeat Step 4. Do this for each of the keywords that you developed in Step 1.

Step 6: Go to Google.
Search for the first keyword that is present in your spreadsheet using exact match search (i.e. you should wrap the keyword in quotes, i.e. you should type a quotation mark before typing the keyword and a quotation mark after typing it).

Google will return the number of sites which are relevant to that keyword.Add this number to the third column of the spreadsheet in the same row in which the keyword is present. Repeat this process for each of the keywords present in your spreadsheet.Once you have done that, your first column will contain the keywords, your second column will show the popularity of the keywords and your third column will contain the number of sites you are competing against to get a high ranking for those keywords.Now it's time to calculate the KEI!

Step 7: The Keyword Effectiveness Index is the square of the popularity of a keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by the number of sites which appear in Google for that keyword. It is designed to measure which keywords are worth optimizing your site for. Higher the KEI, better the keyword. How the formula for the KEI is arrived at is beyond the scope of this article.Here's how you can calculate the KEI.I am assuming that you have created the spreadsheet columns in the way I recommended in Step 3 and that you are using Microsoft Excel. If you using some other spreadsheet program, you will need to adjust the formula to the requirements of your spreadsheet program. Click on cell D2.

Type in the following exactly as it is shown:
=IF(C2<>0,B2^2/C2*1000,0)

Then click on the Copy button to copy the formula, select all the cells in column 4 which have keywords associated with them and press the Paste button to paste the formula. The KEI for each keyword will be displayed.

Step 8: Use your spreadsheet program's Sort feature to sort the rows in descending order of the KEI. In Excel, you would click on the Data menu, click on the Sort menu item, choose KEI from the drop-down combo box named "Sort by", click on the "Descending" option next to it, and then click on OK.

And guess what - that's it! You now know the keywords which you should optimize your site for.You can now start optimizing your site one by one for each keyword, starting with the keyword with the highest KEI. Exactly how many of the keywords you choose to optimize your site for largely depends on the amount of time that you can spare from your normal business activities. But whatever the number of keywords that you target, it obviously makes sense to go for the most effective keywords first.

Tying up the loose ends:

The number of related keywords that WordTracker displays in the trial version is limited. In order to get all the keywords which are related to the keywords you had developed in Step 1, you would need to subscribe to WordTracker's paid service.(Article by Sumantra Roy , taken from payperclicksearchengines.com)

Five Steps to Effective Keyword Research

2008-04-09T02:07:00.000-07:00

There's no getting around it. Keyword research is a vitally important aspect of your search engine optimization campaign. If your site is targeting the wrong keywords, the search engines and your customers may never find you, resulting in lost dollars and meaningless rankings. By targeting the wrong keywords, you not only put valuable advertising dollars at risk, you are also throwing away all the time and energy you put into getting your site to rank for those terms to begin with. If you want to stay competitive, you can't afford to do that.

The keyword research process can be broken down into the following phases:

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice

Phase 2 – Befriending the keyword research tool

Phase 3 – Finalizing your list

Phase 4 – Plan your Attack

Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash Repeat

Phase 0 - Demolishing Misconceptions

Over the years, we've had the opportunity to work with a wide array of wonderful clients. And as different and diverse as their sites and the individuals running them may have been, many had one thing in common: they were self-proclaimed keyword research mavens right out of the gate.

Or so they thought

One of the most common misconceptions about conducting keyword research for a search engine optimization campaign is the belief that you already know which terms a customer would use to find your site. You don't. Not without first doing some research anyway. You may know what your site is about and how you, the site owner, would find it, but it's difficult to predict how a paying customer would go about looking for it.This is due to site owners evaluating their site through too narrow of a lens, causing them to come up with words that read like industry jargon, not viable keywords. Remember, your customer probably doesn't work in the same industry that you do. If they did, they wouldn't need you.

When describing your site or product, break away from industry speak. Your customers aren't searching that way and if you center your site on these terms, they'll never find you.Another misconception is that generic or "big dollar" terms are the most important for rankings, even if the term you're going after has nothing to do with your site. Imagine a women's clothing store trying to rank for the term "google". Sure, thousands of searchers probably type that word into their search bar daily, but they're not doing it looking for you. They're looking for Google. Being ranked number one for a term no one would associate with your site is a waste of time and money (and it may get you in trouble!). Your site may see a lot of traffic, but customers won't stick around.

Phase 1 – Creating the list and checking it twice

The initial idea of keyword research can be daunting. Trying to come up with the perfect combination of words to drive customers to your site, rev up your conversion rate and allow the engines to see you as an expert would easily give anyone a tension headache.

The trick is to start slowly.

The first step in this process is to create a list of potential keywords. Brainstorm all the words you think a customer would type into their search box when trying to find you. This includes thinking of phrases that are broad and targeted, buying and research-oriented, and single and multi-word. What is your site hoping to do or promote? Come up with enough words to cover all the services your site offers. Avoid overly generic terms like 'shoes' or 'clothes'. These words are incredibly difficult to rank for and won't drive qualified traffic to your site. Focus on words that are relevant, but not overly used.

If you need help brainstorming ideas, ask friends, colleagues or past customers for help. Sometimes they are able to see your site differently than the way you yourself see it. Also, don't be afraid to take a peek at your competitor's Meta Keyword tag. What words are they targeting? How can you expand on their keyword list to make yours better? It's okay to get a little sneaky here. All's fair in love and search engine rankings.

Phase 2 – Befriend the keyword research tool

Now that you have your list, your next step is to determine the activity for each of your proposed keywords. You want to narrow your list to only include highly attainable, sought-after phrases that will bring the most qualified traffic to your site.

In the early days of SEO, measuring the "popularity" of your search terms was done by performing a search for that phrase in one of the various engines and seeing how many results it turned up. As you can imagine, this was a tedious and ineffective method of keyword research. Luckily, times have changes and we now have tools to do the hard part for us.

By inputting your proposed keywords into a keyword research tool, you can quickly learn how many users are conducting searches for that term every day, how many of those searches actually converted, and other important analytical information. It may also tune you in to words you had previously forgotten or synonyms you weren't aware of.

There are lots of great tools out there to help you determine how much activity your keywords are receiving. Here's a few of our personal favorites:

Overture Keyword Selector Tool: Overture's Keyword Selector tools shows you how many searches have been conducted over the last month for a particular phrase and lists alternative search terms you may have forgotten about. Our only complaint with Overture is that they lump singular and plural word forms into one phrase. For example, "boots" and "boot" would appear under one category of "boot". This can sometimes cause problems.

Wordtracker: Wordtracker is a paid-use tool that lets you look up popular keyword phrases to determine their activity and popularity among competitors. Their top 1000 report lists the most frequently searched for terms, while their Competition Search option provides valuable information to determine the competitiveness of each phrase. This is very useful for figuring out how difficult it will be to rank for a given term. It may also highlight hidden gems that have low competition-rates, but high relevancy.

Trellian Keyword Discovery tool :

This is a fee-based tool where users can ascertain the market share value for a given search term, see how many users search for it daily, identify common spellings and misspellings, and discover which terms are impacted by seasonal trends (mostly useful for PPC).

Google AdWords Keyword Tool :

Google's keyword PPC tool doesn't provide actual search numbers for keywords. Instead, it displays a colored bar, giving users only an approximation. Still, it may be useful.

Google Suggest :

Google Suggest is a great way to find synonyms and related word suggestions that may help you expand your original list.

Thesaurus.com: Again, another way to locate synonyms you may have forgotten.

If those don't tickle your fancy, we'd also suggest Bruce Clay's Check Traffic tool, which estimates the number of queries per day for that search term across the major search engines.Keep in mind that you're not only checking to see if enough people are searching for a particular word, you're also trying to determine how competitive that phrase is in terms of rankings.Understanding the competition tells you how much effort you will need to invest in order to rank well for that term.

There are two things to pay attention to when making this decision: how many other sites are competing for the same word and how strong are those sites' rankings (i.e. how many other sites link to them, how many pages do they have indexed)? Basically, is that word or phrase even worth your time? If it's not, move on.While you're testing your new terms, you may want to do a little housekeeping and test the activity for keywords your site is already targeting. Keep the ones that are converting and drop the losers.

Phase 3 – Finalizing your list

Now that you have your initial list of words and have tested their activity, it's time to narrow down the field and decide which terms will make it into your coveted final keyword list.We recommend creating a spreadsheet or some other visual that will allow you to easily see each word's conversion rate, search volume and competition rate (as given to you by the tools mentioned above).

These three figures will allow you to calculate how viable that term is for your site and will be a great aid as you try and narrow down your focus.The first step in narrowing down your list is to go through and highlight the terms that most closely target the subject and theme of your web site. These are the terms you want to hold on to. Kill all words that are not relevant to your site or that you don't have sufficient content to support (unless you're willing to write some). You can't optimize for words that you don't have content for.

Create a mix of both broad and targeted keywords. You'll need both to rank well. Broad terms are important because they describe what your web site does; however, they won't increase the level of qualified traffic coming into your site.For example, say you are a company that specializes in cowboy boots. It may be natural for your site to focus on the broad search terms "boots" and "cowboy boots". These words are important because they tell the search engines what you do and may increase your visitors, but the traffic you receive will be largely unqualified.

Customers will arrive on your site still unsure of what kind of boots you sell. Do you offer traditional cowboy boots, stiletto cowboy boots, toddler cowboy boots, suede cowboy boots or women's cowboy boots? By only targeting broad terms, customers won't know what you offer until they land on your site.Targeted terms are often easier to rank for and help bring qualified traffic. They also make you a subject matter expert to the search engines, since the targeted terms strengthen the theme created with the broader phrases.

Sticking with our example, targeted terms for your cowboy boots site may be "men's cowboy boots", "blue suede cowboy boots", "extra-wide women's cowboy boots", etc. Broad search terms may bring you the higher levels of traffic, but it's targeted, buying-oriented terms like these that will maximize conversions.

Phase 4 – Plan your attack

So you made your list of about 10-20 highly focused keywords, now what do you do with them? You prepare them for launch!Chances are, if you did your keyword research right, at least some of the words on your list already appear in your site content, but some of them may not.

Start thinking about how many pages you'll need to create to support these new words, and how and where your keyword phrases will be used.We typically recommend only going after three or four related keywords per page (five if you can balance them properly). Any more than that and you run the risk of diluting your page to the point where you rank for nothing. Make sure to naturally work the keywords into your content and avoid over-repetition that may be interpreted as spamming.

Your content should never sound forced.Your on-page content isn't the only place where you can insert keywords. Keywords should also be used in several other elements on your site:

* Title Tag

* Meta Description Tags

* Meta Keywords Tag

* Headings

* Alt text

* Anchor Text/ Navigational Links

You've spent a lot of time molding your keywords; make sure you use them in all the appropriate fields to get the maximum benefit.

Phase 5 - Rinse, Wash, Repeat

Congratulations. Your initial keyword research process is behind you. You've created your list, checked it twice, made friends with the keyword research tools and are now off to go plan your attack. You're done, right?

Unfortunately, no. As your customer's and your site's needs change over time, so will your keywords. It's important to keep monitoring your keywords and make tweaks as necessary. Doing so will allow you to stay ahead of your competition and keep moving forward.(by Lisa Barone, searchengineguide.com)

Search Engine Optimization Basics Part 2 - Title Tags

2008-04-09T01:48:00.000-07:00

As part of the continued series "Getting Back To Search Engine Optimization Basics", Andy Beal turns his attention to the much talked about Title and Meta Tags (while a Title Tag isn't really a Meta tag the two are commonly discussed as such). This week he takes a closer look at the Title tag.

When I decided a few weeks ago to write a series of articles for those new to search engine marketing (SEM), I considered whether there truly was a need to discuss the topic of Meta Tags. After all, this topic has been so heavily discussed that anyone remotely interested in search engine marketing would already have grasped this basic of techniques. My decision was justified just a few days ago when I was asked by the American Marketing Association to provide a workshop on how to create Meta Tags and discuss their benefits. It was at this point that I recalled starting out on my own quest for search engine marketing knowledge many years ago and researching the basic topics that today seem so fundamental. So for the next few parts of this series, I hope to enlighten those of you who are discovering SEM for the first time and maybe refresh the knowledge of those more seasoned marketers.

Meta Tags - an analogy

I don't recall ever reading the following description of Meta Tags anywhere else (although have been using it for years) so hopefully the following analogy will be new to you. When considering the function of Meta Tags, it helps to compare a website to an old fashion book (remember those paper things that we all used to read before the Internet). The first part of any Meta Tag is the "Title" tag. The Title tag is very similar to the title of a book, it gives a visitor the first hint as to the theme of the website. The next section of any Meta Tag is the "Description" tag. The Description tag is comparable to the summary found on the back of a book, providing a brief guide to the content of your website. The last part of any Meta Tag is the "Keywords" tag. The Keywords are similar to the index of a book, allowing anyone to clearly see if the website contains the information they are seeking. If you compare a search engine to a bricks-and-mortar library, with millions of books you'll hopefully have a good understanding as to relevance of Meta Tags for your website.

In this guide, I wish to focus on what many believe is the most important part of any Meta Tag, the Title tag. Now before we continue and discuss suggestions for the best format for your Title tag, lets stop and consider exactly how it looks in your website's HTML code.

- <"head>- <"title>Title of Your Webpage Here<"/title> (bolded for emphasis)
- <"meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page">
- <"meta name="keywords" content="keyword phrases that describe your webpage">- <"/head>

As you can see, the format is pretty straightforward. You will also notice that your Meta tags should be placed within the "head" area of your website as opposed to the "body" area.

Ok, now we have the basic idea of what Title tags are and we've taken a look at the standard structure, lets turn our attention to ideas for optimizing the content to ensure a successful search engine marketing campaign.

The Best Use of a Title Tag

While many people have differing opinions as to the benefits of the Description and Keywords tag, most all are in agreement that the Title tag is extremely important for any SEM campaign. The Title tag is used by pretty much every search engine that uses spiders to crawl your website. That list includes Google, AOL, Yahoo, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, ExactSeek.com and more. The Title tag is pretty much the most effective Meta Tag and is used for conveying the theme of your Webpage to the search engines. Not only is the structure and content of the Title tag used by the search engines when calculating your webpage's relevance, but it is also displayed in most search engine results pages (SERP). It therefore needs to be carefully constructed in such a way that it influences your website's position in the SERP, but is also attractive enough to encourage a surfer to click on your link.Long gone are the days when cramming dozens of words into a Title tag would result in better search engine positioning. These days the search engines, Google in particular, prefer to see shorter Title tags that are succinct in describing the content on the page. In fact, it appears that stuffing more words into your Title tag will do more harm than good, especially when targeting very competitive search phrases.So how should a good Title tag look? That, my friend, is one of the many questions that us marketers strive to answer. Each of us have our own ideas of what constitutes a good Title tag and the format for one page, might be totally inappropriate for another.

However, I understand that to not provide an example would be a complete omission, so here goes:

- <"title>Desktop computers and computer supplies<"/title> or;
- <"title>Desktop computers and computer supplies at 123Computers<"/title>

As you can see, there are really only two identifiable phrases that make up the above Title tag, but they provide for many different keyword combinations such as "desktop computer supplies" or "desktop computer". Equally important is the fact that they focus on just one theme. Many times, I'll see websites that will try and target two or more very competitive keywords that do not follow the same theme e.g. "desktop computers and digital cameras".

You'll also notice two different formats depending on whether you wish to include your company name or not. In an ideal world of search engine marketing, webpages would not include the company name at all. Unless you're Dell or IBM, the name of your company really doesn't make much difference to the user at this stage. They are more interested in knowing the theme of your page and whether it is relevant to the search query they entered.

Likewise, the Title tag is a valuable thing and adding the name of your company might reduce the relevancy of your page in the eyes of the search engines and reduce valuable space that could be used by an extra keyword. That being said, more than 80% of website owners prefer to see their company name listed somewhere in the Title tag. If that is the case for you, it is my advice to place the company name at the end of the Title tag, allowing the search engine spiders and surfers to read the keywords first and determine the relevance to the search query before seeing the name of the company.In most cases, less is definitely more when constructing optimized Title tags for your website. Keeping to fewer keywords will help to demonstrate to the search engines and their users that the webpage is both highly relevant and solely focused on a particular product or service. In the same way, ensuring that each page has its own unique Title tag will ensure a greater chance your site will be positioned higher on the SERP.

In Summary

In finishing, I'll leave you with three things you should never do when constructing your Title tag.

1. Leave "Untitled" as your Title tag (don't get me started).

2. Use "Homepage" as your Title tag (only slightly better than "untitled").

3. Use only your company name as your Title tag. Unless your company name is searched
thousands of times each month, add keywords.

The above advice should keep you busy for the next few days. The next topic in the series will cover the ideas and formats to use for your Description tag. We'll go through, step-by-step the purpose of the Description tag which search engines use it, as well as techniques for getting better positioning.(By Andy Beal,from searchengineguide.com)

Search Engine Optimization Basics Part 1 - Keywords

2008-04-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

As highlighted a couple of weeks ago, I have decided that with the growth of the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, it is important to ensure that we don`t forget the many newcomers. With many new business owners and webmasters exploring SEO for the first time, this series of articles looks to assist with the basic information needed to start a search engine marketing campaign.

In the first part of the series, I wish to ensure we discuss the importance of a solid foundation. When starting any SEO campaign it is tempting to leap straight in and start tweaking meta tags and changing text. However, like any successful marketing strategy, it is vital to ensure that you know whom your audience is and how to reach them. In the same way traditional advertising agencies survey their demographic audience, search engine marketers must ensure that their SEO campaign targets the correct keywords or search phrases. Target the wrong search phrase and you could end up with great search engine rankings for keywords that have no search requests. A few hours now spent ensuring that the correct search phrases are targeted, can save months of useless optimization.

Brainstorm

When you started your company or developed your products, you no doubt sat down with your friends, relatives and business partners and discussed the needs of your target audience. You would have been foolish to stubbornly press ahead with your products without first testing the market to see if there was a demand. Likewise, when you start out on your SEO campaign it is important to brainstorm search phrases that are likely to bring qualified visitors to your website.

Sit down with your co-workers and business partners and discuss which keywords are relevant to the products and services you offer. Compile an initial list of 5-10 search phrases that you feel best represent your company and which you believe people would type into a search engine when trying to find you. Consider the following factors when brainstorming:

* Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?

* Which of your products are in stock? There is no point targeting search phrases that are popular if you don`t actually stock that item.

* Which products have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.20 mark-up on a very popular product, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.

* Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

Make use of any PPC data

Chances are, your decision to begin a SEO campaign is fueled by your desire to reduce costly pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. While reliance on PPC will be reduced with a good SEO campaign, you can make use of your current PPC efforts when researching your search phrases to target. Analyze your PPC keywords and look to see which of them have brought the highest traffic levels, best click through rates and greater sales conversions. It is likely a search phrase that brought successful results through a PPC campaign will be very relevant in your quest to obtain top search engine positioning.

Expanding your Keyword list

Once you have completed your brainstorming and have compiled your list of 5-10 core keywords, it`s time to move on and expand that list. A list of 5-10 search phrases will not, as I am sure you will know, bring the amount of search engine traffic needed to make your website successful. However, that list will be a vital tool when determining which phrases to add to the mix. At this point, you need to turn to the search engines themselves and research which search phrases are actually being typed into Google, Yahoo, MSN et al. While few search engines will openly tell you which search phrases are the most often searched, there are a couple of very useful tools you can use to expand your list.

The first and most well known, is the Overture Search Suggestion Tool. This great little research tool is primarily for the use of Overture PPC users and if you have ever endeavored on a PPC campaign with Overture, you will no doubt have come across it. Take any of your main search phrases and enter them into the suggestion tool. Overture will then spit out all other popular search terms that contain that phrase. In addition, Overture will place the search phrases in order of popularity and give you an idea of the number of searches per month for each phrase across their network.

While this tool can be very useful, especially as it is free to use, it does have some key drawbacks. First, it does not differentiate between singular and plural search phrases. Consequently, "desktop computer" and "desktop computers" are combined together, leaving you to use your own judgment as to which variation is the most popular. For many search phrases, you can take an educated guess as to which one is likely to be the most searched, but often you will be left without a clue as to whether to target the singular or plural. Secondly, the Overture Suggestion

Tool does not handle punctuation very well, preferring to ignore it completely. Thus "kid`s toys", "kid`s toys", "kid- toys", "kid`s toy" would all be shown as "kid toy". Again, this never used to be a big problem, but go to Google and search for each of these phrases and you will see different results for each one.

If you are serious about your SEO campaign, you will consider a subscription to WordTracker to be a worthwhile investment. Starting at just $7 a day, with discounts all the way up to one year of service, WordTracker offers a similar type of research tool as Overture but with many more bells and whistles. The biggest advantage with WordTracker is that is uses Meta-Crawlers when sourcing search phrase frequencies. This eliminates inflated search phrase frequencies from Overture users checking their own rankings and thus artificially increasing the popularity of certain phrases. In addition WordTracker offers the following advantages:

* Offers a "thesaurus" and "lateral" search. Allowing you to view search phrases that are related to your main search term, but not necessarily containing that term.

* Shows search frequencies for both singular and plural phrases; allowing you to determine which is the most popular.

* Identifies which form of punctuation is the most popular.

* Allows you to place your targeted keywords into a "shopping basket" so that you can analyze all of your phrases together.

* Has an exclusive KEI analyzer that allows you to compare the popularity of the search phrase with the number of websites competing for that keyword.

Determining Competition

Once you have identified possible additions to your search phrase list, you must research further to determine if there is a good chance you will achieve your prized top search engine ranking or if the competition for that phrase is already saturated. While it can be tempting to target only search phrases that are very popular and searched hundreds of thousands of times in a single month, you must also consider the likelihood of you being able to obtain a ranking higher enough to capitalize on all of that great traffic. Many, many search terms are so saturated by competitors that it would be highly unlikely that you would achieve a high enough ranking to reward your efforts. Therefore, it is often worthwhile considering those search phrases that may not have quite the same level searches each month, but likewise do not have as many websites targeting that term.

WordTracker`s KEI (keyword effectiveness index) allows it`s users to analyze their chosen search phrases to determine the level of competition for that phrase. WordTracker has a great explanation on their website as to how to use this index, but in summary it provides a numerical scale for identifying the popularity of a keyword compared to the number of competitors targeting that phrase.

For those of you on a strict budget and opting to use Overture for keyword research, there is an alternative answer. Enter each identified search phrase at Google, using quotations around the phrase (e.g. "discount computers"). Google will then display the search results for all pages that target that phrase exactly as entered. View the top right, blue navigation bar and you will see the number of results Google matched. This number represents the total number of web pages that Google has identified as targeting that exact search phrase. This number represents your competition or your very own KEI. Make a note of this number for each of your identified search phrases and pretty soon you will be able to see which of your search phrases have the most competition and which have less competitors and therefore a better chance of obtaining top ranking.

Selecting Your Keywords

By now, you should have an expanded list of search phrases to target, taken from either Overture or WordTracker. In addition, you should also have a good idea as to the competition for each of those keywords, whether you used the KEI or Google format. Now is the time to start selecting the search phrases that will form the foundation for a successful SEO campaign. Ok, deep breath, we�re almost there.

When selecting the keywords to target, there are many factors you must take into consideration. You will no doubt have your own unique considerations, but you must also take into account the following:

* Is the search phrase relevant to your website and the page that you are optimizing?

* Is there a page within your website that would be particularly suitable for targeting the selected search phrase?

* How many other websites/web pages would you be competing against?

* Do you offer competitive pricing for the product or service that relates to the keyword?

* Will top search engine ranking for the search phrase generate enough revenue for your company?

Arranging Keywords into Themes

Once you have asked yourself the above questions, it will become easy to narrow down your list to the main search phrases that you wish to target. When doing so, remember that you should not try and target every selected search term on your index page. Your index page is the most important page of your website and likely to have the best positioning on the search engines, therefore choose 5-10 search phrases to target here and ensure that they are all closely related.

Trying to target "desktop computers" and "dvd players" on your index page will get you top rankings for neither. Instead, identify the pages within your website that target those particular keywords and use those instead. The key to selecting keywords to target for each page is to think of "themes". Each page should ideally target just one theme. This will assist you in making sure that the targeted page is relevant to the selected search phrase. In turn, this will not only increase your chances of obtaining top rankings, but also increase your customer sales conversions by bringing the visitor to the most relevant page.

In summary

When researching search phrases and targeting keywords for your SEO campaign, it is important to follow the steps above. Research your industry, talk to your potential customers and make use of the themes within your website. In addition, consider these final tips:

* Determine the intent of the visitor. Thoroughly research all search terms to ensure that the searcher intended to find your product or service. E.g. reconsider targeting the keyword "DVD" if you store only sells blank DVD discs, the chances are the searcher intended to find DVD movies rather than blank media.

* Don�t always rely on the numbers. Both Overture and WordTracker use historical data when displaying search phrase frequencies and neither archive more than two months back. Therefore you must know your industry and account for any seasonal or other trends. E.g. the search phrase "red roses" will be more popular for Valentines than at Christmas.

* Look for opportunities. Identify the search phrases that have been untapped by your competitors. Some search terms may have slightly fewer searches, but may have dramatically fewer competitors.

* Target the right pages. This cannot be stressed enough. Do not try and target every keyword on every page. Identify themes within your website and group relevant search phrases around those pages. You will see much better results

I hope you have found the above useful. This series is designed to help the beginner, but I hope a few experienced SEO marketers will find something fresh to consider. In the next installment of this series, we will look at the use of Meta Tags. These once champions of SEO have recently taken a battering, but are still extremely important for the success of any campaign. We will look at how they are used, how to construct them and why they can help achieve top search engine rankings. In the meantime, you should have enough information to assist you in your search phrase research and build the foundation for a successful search engine optimization campaign.(By Andy Beal , from searchengineguide.com)

How to Maximize Paid Search Results

2008-04-06T19:36:00.000-07:00

Because of increasing competition that has led to higher advertising costs with pay-per-click marketing, many battle-scarred - “do-it-yourself” – businesses have not realized their desired objectives. Although publicized as a straightforward, self-service marketing tool, pay-per-marketing involves far more knowledge than most businesses are able to invest in developing in-house. Faced with a moderately or less performing pay-per-click marketing program and the pressure to allocate resources elsewhere, many businesses choose to drop their pay-per-click marketing entirely – leaving a vast potential of sales for their competitors to harvest.

If you face pay-per-click marketing challenges, before you decide to drop the program, try these proven strategies to get it producing your desired results.
Discover These Proven Strategies to Produce Quick Results.
Keyword-Level Tracking
Track your pay-per-click marketing at the keyword-level – referred to as the “root”. For pay-per-click marketing, it is essential that you know your “per click” results from the money you have spent.
For example, if you have 1,000 keywords active in your pay-per-click marketing program and you spend a total of $3,000 a month – do you know which of the 1,000 keywords produce the best results?
What if 80% of your sales stem from 20% of your keywords? Moreover, what if this 20% accounted for just a small percentage of your $3,000 monthly cost? If you do not have keyword-level tracking you will not be able to make these financially beneficial assessments. Time-tested experience shows that the 80/20 rule applies to pay-per-click marketing.
Does the 80/20 rule apply to your pay-per-click marketing? Get keyword-level tracking.
But Beware of Matching Options!
Although matching options (i.e. broad, advanced, exact, phrase and so on) offered by Google Adwords, Overture and other pay-per-click search engines provide “convenience” they unfortunately skew your keyword performance results.
If you setup a “broad-match” for the keyword “real estate”, you will attract visitors who have entered any possible variation of the term “real estate” including geographically specific “real estate” keywords that may have absolutely no relevance to your product or service.
Here is a scenario where matching options skew your results…
You generate $1,000 in revenue from the broad-match keyword, “real estate” yet the total click cost for it exceeds revenue and because of the keyword’s negative return, you label it as a poor performing keyword.
What if the majority of the click cost originated from irrelevant, broad-match keyword variations like “ Louisiana real estate” - while one variation, “real estate strategy” generated all of the revenue? By identifying this keyword (hard to do in a broad-match environment so rely on your web stats program), taking this one keyword and isolating it as an exact term you will reduce your total click cost while continuing to generate the same revenues.
How are your broad-match keywords performing? Isolate keywords to save click costs and to regulate individual keyword performance.
Landing Page Development
Pay-per-click marketing is unique compared to other mainstream forms of online marketing. In part because marketers have the opportunity to select specific keywords, write specific ads and direct the click-through to a specific web page. This “connect-the-dots” structure creates the need to develop consistency among the visitor’s expectation from the keyword they enter to the ad that draws their attention and down to the web page, they “land-on”. Relevancy and consistency are essential for an effective pay-per-click marketing program.
One of the reportedly major reasons why pay-per-click marketing programs fall short of their intended goal is because businesses direct all of their click-throughs to their home page. Since most businesses’ home pages are designed to serve mutliple audiences (i.e. media relations, investors, current clients, potential prospects, customer services, etc.) they do not provide the level of relevancy and consistency expected from the visitor to get them to act confidently.
What in the Virtual World are Landing Pages?
Landing pages are simply web pages designed specifically for a keyword or related group of keywords. They are highly relevant to the keyword searched and consistent with the ad’s claim. They immediately focus a visitor’s attention to a primary call-to-action (most wanted response). In essence – landing pages ask your visitors to take an action.
If your pay-per-click marketing is not living up to your expectations, consider which web pages you are sending visitors to. Are they relevant and consistent with your pay-per-click ads and keywords? Do they offer too many calls-to-action? Do they “fit” the expectations of the visitor searching on the particular keyword?
For example, are you sending a visitor searching on the keyword “Sony LCD TV” to a web page with twenty varieties of electronic products? An effectively designed landing page would present the visitor a “Sony LCD TV” with customer benefit oriented copy, an immediate “buy now” call to action and all applicable guarantee, shipping, customer service and return policies.
Make it Easy for Your Visitors and they will Reward You with Sales.

Keyword Selection
Keyword selection is important. The keywords you select provide access to “pools” of visitors at different stages in their buying cycle. By selecting the right keywords for your products or services, you can open a completely new market of ready-to-buy visitors.
Make sure that you thoroughly canvass your marketplace using strategies such as:

Your competitors’ websites
Your website’s copy
Third-party tools – Overture’s Suggestion Tool, WordTracker, and others
Your website metrics program (look for “natural search engine” keyword phrases)
Search engines like Ask Jeeves or Alta Vista (who suggest keyword variations)

Most importantly, “THINK” about your potential customers and what direct or indirect keywords they may use to find your products or services. Never give up searching for new keywords to setup and test. Both seasonal and even weekday keyword performance fluctuations should be analyzed and studied in addition to potential associations people make to find your products and services.
What about you - have you selected the right keywords?

Bidding Strategies
All pay-per-click search engines possess unique bidding nuances. However, for the two largest, Google Adwords and Overture do not become fixated on the top bid position. Test how each keyword performs against your website’s sales or lead conversion metrics up to the seventh bid position.
Depending on your product or service, you may be amazed how bid position six attracts less click-throughs but produces greater sales or lead conversion on your website. Or maybe position four generates better conversion. Regardless - test, test and test – the outcome may mean lower costs and higher sales conversions for you.
Consider this New Update in Your Bid Strategy.
Are you aware that recently Overture’s top partners, MSN and Yahoo, opened their results to up to eight “sponsor results” or paid ads on the first page? In some cases, the fourth and fifth or fifth and sixth positions will show at the bottom of the first results page and again at the top, right margin of the first results page – in essence two ads for the price of one.
Do not be lured into competing for the first place position instead keep an eye on your keyword performance (via your keyword-level tracking) and occupy whichever position provides the best sales or lead conversion.

Writing Effective Ads
Finally, always test different ads by interchanging words in the title and description. For Google Adwords, try split-testing two different titles and descriptions and add a unique tracking code to each one so you can identify which one causes the best sales conversion increase. Notice that I did not state, “the best “click-through rate increase”. Why? Because “a lot of nothing” (i.e. a lot of traffic without sales or lead conversion) is not a financially effective strategy. Consider that even a single word change on your ad can create a significant jump to your sales or lead conversion rate.
Follow these strategies to boost your pay-per-click marketing results today. Good Producing!
Kevin Gold is a Partner and Co-founder of enhancedconcepts.com, taken from payperclickuniverse.com)

Selecting and Evaluating Keyphrases for Search Engine Marketing

2008-04-05T02:30:00.000-07:00

Many businesses recognize that search engines can bring volumes of highly targeted prospects to their website, typically at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. Unfortunately, these same companies often overlook the most important part of their search engine marketing campaigns, which is keyphrase selection and evaluation. Keyphrases (those phrases that potential customers are using to find products or services on search engines) are the building block of any search engine marketing strategy. It is essential that they are chosen carefully, or else the remainder of the campaign, no matter how effective the implementation, will likely be in vain. What follows is a three-step process that goes over the process of compiling, selecting, and evaluating the ongoing performance of keyphrases for search engines

1. Compiling a keyphrase list:

Usually, companies are sure that they already know their ideal keyphrases. Often, they are wrong. This is typically because it is very hard to separate oneself from a business and look at it from the perspective of a potential customer (rather than an insider). Compiling a keyphrase list should not be, despite common practice, a strictly internal process. Rather, it is best to ask everyone outside of your company for their input, especially your customers. People are often very surprised at the keyphrase suggestions they get- and sometimes dismayed to realize that an average customer doesnt speak the same language that they do. Only after you have put together a list of likely phrases from external sources do you add your own. As a last step, try to add variations, plurals, and derivatives of the phrases on your list.

2. Evaluating keyphrases:

Once you have compiled a master keyphrase list, it is time to evaluate each phrase to hone your list down to those most likely to bring you the highest amount of quality traffic. Although many individuals will base their assessment of keyphrase value based only on popularity figures, there are really three vitally important aspects of each phrase to consider.

Popularity
By far the easiest of the three to judge is popularity, since it is not subjective. Software like WordTracker gives popularity figures of search phrases based upon actual search engine activity (it also gives additional keyphrase suggestions and variations). Such tools allow you to assign a concrete popularity number to each phrase to use when comparing them. Obviously, the higher the number, the more traffic that can be expected (assuming you are able to obtain good search engine positions). However, this number alone is not good enough reason to pursue any particular keyphrase, although keyphrase analysis too often stops here.

Specificity
This is more abstract than the sheer popularity number, but equally important. For example, lets assume that you were able to obtain great rankings for the keyphrase "insurance companies" (a daunting prospect). Lets also assume that you only deal with auto insurance. Although "insurance companies" might have a much higher popularity figure than "auto insurance companies", the first keyphrase would also be comprised of people looking for life insurance, health insurance, and home insurance. It is very likely that someone searching for a particular type of insurance will refine their search after seeing the disparate results returned from the phrase "insurance companies". In the second, longer keyphrase, you can be reasonably sure that a much higher percentage of visitors will be looking for what you offer- and the addition of the word "auto" will make it much easier to attain higher rankings, since the longer term will be less competitive.

Motivation of User
This factor, even more abstract than specificity, calls for an attempt to understand the motivation of a search engine user by simply analyzing his or her search phrase. Assume, for example, that you were a real estate agent in Atlanta. Two of the keyphrases you are evaluating are "Atlanta real estate listings" and "Atlanta real estate agents". Both phrases have very similar popularity numbers. They are also each fairly specific, and your services are very relevant to each. So which phrase is better? If you look into the likely motivation of the user, you will probably conclude that the second is superior. While both phrases target people looking for real estate in Atlanta, you can infer from the second phrase that the searcher has moved beyond the point where they are browsing local homes or checking out prices in their neighborhood- they are looking for an agent, which implies that they are ready to act. Often, subtle distinctions between terms can make a large difference on the quality of the traffic they attract.

3. Evaluating Keyphrase Performance:

Until recently, judging the performance of individual keyphrases was a dicey proposition. Although it is possible to tell from your log traffic analysis how many visitors are getting to your site from each keyphrase (valuable information, but unfortunately not enough to do much with), it was very hard to decipher which phrases were bringing you the most quality traffic. Recently, however, some sophisticated but affordable tools have been developed that allow you to judge the performance of each individual keyphrase based upon visitor behavior. This new software makes it possible to periodically analyze which keyphrases are bringing your site the most valuable visitors- those who buy your products, fill out your contact form, download your demo, etc. This type of data, rather than the sheer number of visitors from each search phrase alone, is invaluable when you are refining your search engine marketing campaigns, since you can discard and replace non-performing keyphrases and put increased effort toward the phrases that are delivering visitors that become customers. This kind of ongoing analysis is the final piece of the keyphrase puzzle, and allows you to continually target the most important phrases for your industry, even if they change over time.

Conclusion:

Keyphrase compilation, evaluation, and performance are all vitally important to any search engine marketing campaign. While high rankings in search engines are an admirable goal, high rankings for poor keyphrases will consistently deliver poor results. Integration of this keyphrase process into your overall search engine marketing strategy can dramatically improve your website performance (and thus your bottom line).
(By Scott Buresh, from searchengineguide.com