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Using Links Increase Targeted Traffic To Your WebSite. by: Juan Richardson Link popularity is a factor that many search engines use when ranking web pages within their indexes. Simply put, most search engines give a ranking boost to sites that have incoming links from quality, related sites. This method of establishing importance, pioneered by the increasingly popular Google, is now used in some form by 19 of the top 20 search engines. While it is still possible to achieve high rankings for non-competitive terms without a great deal of link popularity, it is unlikely your site will rank well for very popular terms without it. Links are a great free way to increase traffic flow to your site. Some sites get as much as 200,000 visitors a month from links. Remember, this is Free traffic. There are more benefits, as we will discuss later. First though, how do you get a link to your site? Look for other sites that might link to yours. Ideally, the businesses that run these sites will be related to yours but will not be direct competitors. For example, if you had a site that sold supplies for swimming pools, it could be useful to your visitors if your site had a link to a swimming pool installer, and useful to his visitors to have a link back to your site. Since your offerings complement each other, neither of you are likely to lose business by exchanging links. When you have found a good number of sites, add a link to each of them from a "links" page on your own site. It is important to do this before contacting the site owners, as they are much more likely to reciprocate if they see that you have already taken the trouble to link to them.
Six Common Mistakes In Website Design That Kill Your Online Business by: Mike Spence Some websites fare well. Others falter - and miserably at that. What’s the difference? What do the successful websites do right and what do the failed websites do wrong? The answer - or answers even - isn’t difficult to fathom. There are quite a number of common mistakes that seal the fate on internet marketers and their dreams. Here are 6 of them, which hopefully, you’d try to avoid at all cost. 1. A slow loading website. There is nothing more irritating than a website that tales forever to load. Granted that most internet users these days have high speed connections, a great percentage are still hooked up to the World Wide Web via slower 56K access. This percentage should not be taken for granted. In building your website, try to stay away from the humongous graphic files. No, you don’t need a high number of pixels. No, you don’t need fancy movies or flash animation. No, you don’t need catchy music. You need a website that will deliver the information it promises at an instantaneous rate, and for this reason, you have to choose functionality over design. 2. A navigation system that is very difficult to understand. If your menu bar is too complicated, you’ll just end up driving away a lot of your visitors. You don’t want your visitors to get stuck in just one page. You need to make it easy for them to explore your website. Your pages must be interlinked in a logical way, and this connection should be easily navigable through an intuitive interface that even a 7 year old will be able to understand. Again, this is a matter of functionality over design. Place your navigation links either at the top of the page right below the header, or at either side of the page in a separate column. This is where your visitors’ eyes will wander once they want to discover the other pages in your website. 3. Low quality content. Content is king on the internet. People log online to find information they need, and information is conveyed through your content. If your content is poorly written, who will have the patience to read the same? If your content is not unique, why will people choose your website over others? Indeed, there are two requisites for good quality content: excellent presentation and originality. Minus either of this, your entire website will be in jeopardy. 4. Poor choice of keywords to focus on. Keywords drive traffic to your website. Keywords are the terms that people search for when they’re looking for information. If you targeted the right keywords, quality visitors will come aplenty. If you targeted the wrong keywords, visitors will be scarce. So make sure you discover the right keywords even before you start building your website. 5. Cookie cutter websites. Again, this is a matter of originality - or the lack of it. Why would people choose your website over thousands of others sharing the same layout and boasting of the same content? What makes your website special? If these questions cannot be answered positively, then your online business is doomed. Worse, search engines penalize duplicate content, and your website will have a lower position in the search engine results. 6. A website that lacks focus. Focus is key in designing a website. It will be difficult for a website to focus on several, unrelated topics. Why would visitors who are interested with dogs be interested with astronomy? There’s no connection between the two subjects, and if your website caters to these topics, among others, then prepare for some rough sailings ahead. These are the things you should try to avoid. Your online business depends on how well your website fares. So take some time to think about how you can properly build your website,
How To Drive Traffic to Any Site The Easy Way! by: Cedric Aubry Traffic is vital for any website to flourish, especially of it's a commercial one. Traffic refers to the number of people who visit your website. The additional traffic you push to your site, the more likely more people will be attracted in what you have to propose. There are numerous different ways to develop traffic to your site, but what we'll be discussing here are the easier ways of driving traffic to your site. 1. Tell everyone This is the easiest and furthermore, free! If you have a lot of online or real life friends, incite them to drop by your site if they can. The more the merrier, as they say. 2. Using Crawlers Crawler-based search engines like Yahoo, Google and Ask Jeeves are the next easiest way to grow traffic. Crawlers work by picking up every website or page that matches a query. It crawls on individual pages, big websites and directories. Google in particular has a feature wherein you can instantly add your site's URL to its directory for simple recovery. Anyhow, this method doesn't guarantee that your site will be visited by hoards of visitors. Oh no. That will be determined by your page's ranking. Page rank is a measure of how relevant your website is. It's like a range of how much support your site gets. If you get a lot of back links to your site, then this does much to increase its page rank. 3. High quality content, increase in keywords and add a sitemap A lot of webmasters use the content, keywords and sitemap to develop their traffic. How you ask? Content As we've said, page ranking is how pertinent your site it. It doesn't matter if you have a hundred or so pages but they have in it nothing but spam. This is extremely irritating, specially to Google, who might even ban you from their list. High quality content however, is the first way to go about it. Even if you've got only 5 or so pages, but possess out up relevant and well written articles, people are certain to come back and visit. A lot of times. Keywords For instance, your site is covering a topic like, Superman. Of course the typical person looking for a page on Superman will type "superman" on his query box. However, some search for more distinct terms like "super man" or "clark kent" or "lois and clark". If you have pages that have these keywords, there are better chances for your site to be found. The more specific the keyword, the better since it limits the number of the competition. Sitemap A sitemap is effective for any website since it increases the number of internal links and pages that you have, therefore increasing the probability that a crawler will pick it up. It's also a big help to prospect who are looking for a specific page but wouldn't want to bother browsing through the whole website. 4. Exchange links with other sites Exchanging links with other websites will be a superb way to foster alliance and friendship. It'll increase traffic too, considering most people browse through the links page of websites, especially on fan sites. At any rate, it wouldn't be adequate to ask for an exchange link for free or just out of the blue. Before a similar site can do an exchange with you, you must have been offering them something in return, like free content or downloads. 5. Article marketing Submitting your articles to online publications is a great way to increase traffic too. This is a bit harder than the other methods, since the publication need to accept of your article first. However, one approved, not only do you get to publish your work, you are also given a link back to your site. This way calls for quality not quantity so please do your best. 6. Submitting to directories There are free and open directories like imegamall.com and searchsight.com. You can submit your site to them and it may increase traffic to your site. This method is quick and simple but not so reliable either. It might take weeks or months before your site can be listed or maybe not at all. So it's better to try this along with the other methods for greater success.
Discover The Secret To Free Traffic -- Keyword Optimization by: Deanna Mascle What is the secret to free traffic? Telling the search engines and your future visitors what they want to hear! It sounds like a Catch-22. After all, if you have no traffic then how can you deliver your message to the search engines and potential customers? There is actually a pretty simple answer to that complex problem. Keywords are the secret to free traffic. One of my sites has been around for years. I used to publish an ezine of the same name but that ezine was folded into another publication two years ago. All that site consists of is a blog with pages of trivia content. It is not a huge site and it is not updated very often. I do very little to promote it. And yet every day it brings in over 200 visitors who contribute to my income by subscribing to the new trivia publication and supporting my advertising partners. This traffic is free because it is generated by search engines. This site generates free money for me every day and the only marketing technique I use is keyword optimization. If you properly choose keywords that your target audience regularly searches for and optimize your web site for those keywords then you will see an increase in traffic. A simple one hour investment of your time could reap dramatic results. Many internet marketers spend time generating a list of keywords they want to target but they do not do the basic research to make sure people are actually using those keywords. It is useless to optimize your site for a set of keywords that generate no traffic. There are a number of keyword suggestion tools around but the best not only give you a list of keywords but also tell you how many people are searching for those words or terms. My favorite keyword suggestion tool can be found at http://establishyourepresence.com/?page_id=3. Simply type in the basic word or term that you would like to target then hit the enter key. You will receive results for both Wordtracker and Overture. I always study the Overture list but tend to base my own keyword choices on the Wordtracker results. Overture gives you the total number of times a search query has been entered into a search engines within the Overture network (including Yahoo, AltaVista and MSN) and can generate some duplicates. On the other hand Wordtracker gets its figure from entries made on meta search engines (such as Metacrawler and Dogpile) that query all the major engines simultaneously and sorts out the duplications. Depending on the results you receive you may need to experiment with different words and combinations until you arrive at an audience size that will meet your needs. Do not simply jump at the top term as that may well be a highly competitive market. Sometimes you can achieve better results for your site by aiming a bit lower down the list--especially if there are good results for a longer keyword phrase. It is often difficult to get within the top search engine results for competitive one or two word keyword terms but you can place well with a longer phrase that is not as highly targeted by competitors. Once you have your keyword phrase selected you must optimize your site. Make sure the phrase is reflected in your title bar, alt tags (with your logo, for example), top headline for the page, and once within the text of your page. Do not go crazy and stuff the keyword in every nook and cranny of your site. Keyword stuffing can often have negative effects on search engine results and may even get your site banned by some search engines. Simply making sure the keyword is included in these key positions will be sufficient for basic keyword optimization. Selecting the right keywords and including those keywords in key positions within your web site will have a dramatic result on your traffic.
One Way Links Help Link Popularity? by: Melissa Fishman Links that point from other sites are one way links and they are a tool that will have constructive to the webmaster. The webmaster's decisive aspiration is to have many traffic visitors arriving to his website in the chance the visitor will stayand even make some purchases. The problem is, though, that you need to have visitors there. One way links may be able to help you. they help to create traffic to your website so that you will achieve a better rank in the very important search engines. What is important to note here is; that there is no 100% accurateway to get at the very top of the results page. But, there are do many things to attempt your way up this ladder of success. One of them is using one way links. These links are quite simply a link to your site from other sites else's website. Even though you have your link on their page, you do not have to put their link on your page. That's a nice benefit because it keeps the traffic at your site, rather than leaving your website. Its benefical because the other website owner (the one that your link is at) is going to do his best to get traffic to his site. Others will arrive to yours through his website. What does that mean, more traffic from smallest amounts of work. How does one way links help you rank in the search engines? Ask yourself a question. Why do you think search engines perceive that your website must rank excellent if you have one way links to it? A reason for this is that your link is there, the website owner is attesting to the constitution of your website. Looking at the facts, the search engines also show that these links are excellent than reciprocal links based on the information. The search engines are even ranking those websites that will use fewer reciprocal links less highly because of this fact. The other website owner is committing by placing your link on his page and the website owner not getting a link back, this is held at a higher standard than those that purchase reciprocal links. How to locate links As a matter of fact, the difficult part knowing and understanding the one way links in the first place. The superior webmasters are going to provide this to you if you just ask. If you have the bestquality content that is directly related to their website, they can do it. Of course, site owners will want something. One strategy website owners have found that works well is to use article directories. Here, you will produce a well written, explanatory article (or more) about elements that may be in your website. Once the article is complete just add your link and information at the bottom. Webmasters come to the directory to find solid, favorableness content to create over on theirwebsite. When using your information, they have to use your link too. now you have a one way link pointing from the other sites. One way links help you site achieve a better page rank on the search engines.
SEO Secrets They Don’t Want You To Know About by: Josh Green Back by popular demand, the second installment to the "…secrets they don’t want you to know about" series (see Affiliate marketing secrets they don’t want you to know about). Without further ado, here are the 3 secrets "they" try to keep away from you: effort, time and money. Once again I admit that this is not want you expected to hear, but believe it or not many novice webmasters (even experienced ones for that matter) often overlook these simple rules of thumb. Before I elaborate on my three "secrets", I would like to let in on another little secret: who are "they"? You might be inclined to think that "they" is all the major search engines out there, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Your intuition is good but in this case misguided and is exactly what "they" want you to think. You can’t blame search engine for not reviling there secrets, if everybody knew how to get top 10 rankings, there would be no reason for these search engines to even do business. "They" in this case is all those SEO firms who milk you out of your hard earned money promising you the moon (top ten rankings in this case). Secret #1: Effort The effort you put in your search engine optimization campaign remains the most important factor in determining your positioning is search engines. There are countless strategies you can use to boost your rankings, but you must first do your research. Reading articles like this is a start but visiting specialized websites like Search Engine Watch to learn even more is your best option. Writing informative content is also a great way of attracting search engine traffic. Just the other day, I got a hit from Google Brazil. The user typed the oddest keyword, but ended up staying on the landing page for quite a while, so I guess it’s safe to say he found what he was looking for. You can also share your articles with article directories. Not only do you spread the word around on how great your site is, but you also get a link back to your website form a reputable and established high ranking website, which is a plus for your rankings. The fact of the matter is, you can’t just create a website and then dump it on the net in the hopes that the hits will come. You will have to update and consistently offer new content. Not only will this help you with your search engine rankings, but it will benefit the lifeblood of your website, your visitors. Secret #2: Money Despite all the free strategies there exist, you will have to strongly consider spending some money to help you in you search engine optimization campaign. Signing up for Google’s Adwords or any other search engine keyword marketing service for that matter would be money well spent. By biding on specific keywords that best suit your website, you will get an add space on Google. The good thing is you only pay when someone clicks on your add and you could also set yourself a daily budget. Paid inclusion in some quality online directories is also a good idea. While this remains a viable strategy, it’s easy to get carried away. Spend cleverly by searching for the most reputable directories beforehand. The only real advantage as opposed to free online directories is immediate inclusion. While free directories can take up to a year to include your website, a pay-for directory will index you within a predetermined amount of time (usually 24 hours). Secret #3: Patience Finally, the last secret I would like to elaborate on is patience. Now without getting into a philosophical debate with all of you, our society in general is becoming increasingly impatient. While hocking your horn on your way back home after a long day at work might give you the illusion that you’re getting home faster, impatience like that does not serve you well in the world of search engine optimization. What many novice webmasters don’t realize is that even getting all the major search engines to index you can take several days. And all that means is that your in there database, that doesn’t mean you will be getting top 10 rankings. You must be patient and continue working on the strategies we discussed earlier and the (and only then) will you start to see positive results.
Search Engine Optimization by: Robert McCulloch The term SEO also refers to “search engine optimization”. We can break down methods used for SEO into two categories; “white hat” and “black hat”. White hats say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hats counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant. Search engines display different kinds of results on ’search engine results pages’ (SERPs), including: pay per click, paid inclusion, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies strive to increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimization is sometimes offered as a stand-alone service, or as a part of a larger marketing effort and is often more effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a website. For competitive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be very high. Not only is the cost high, but the quality of traffic is not as good as the organic search engine traffic. The reason for this is that people that have been on the Internet for more than a short period of time know not to trust the pay per click websites as much as the organic websites. It does not take long for someone to realize the pay per click websites always have a sales pitch. Ranking well in the organic search results can provide better targeted traffic with a significant savings. People just tend to trust the organic search engine results because they often have websites that are there to provide information and not always a sales pitch. Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites seek any and all traffic and may be optimized to rank highly for many common search engine keyword phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a website that has broad general interest, such as a periodical or a directory of websites. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries. In contrast, many webmasters try to optimize their sites for highly specific keywords that would indicate readiness to buy or take some kind of desirable action. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. This is called ‘highly targeted traffic’ and can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy.
SEO and Search Engines - A Love-Hate Relationship by: kathy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a decade old phenomenon. The term search engine optimization has not appeared in any text before 1996. It came into the lingo in 1997, i.e., a few years after the search engines came in. Since that time, they are having a love-hate relationship, triggered by black-hat web masters and the more intelligent search engines. Those who operate search engines recognize quickly that some web masters (specifically search engine optimizers) are making bold efforts to rank well in their search engines, even by manipulating the page rankings in search results. For Infoseek and some other search engines, optimizers were grabbing the source code of the top-ranking pages and placing it in their pages. They were successful in this way to top the search engine rankings. But, that's the old story. Then web optimization companies were exploiting open source resources for their own financial gains. Search engines have always frowned upon those aggressive SEO practices; going to the extent of banning the pages in their search listings. The more aggressive site owners' who generate automated sites for better ranking, suffered much search engine wrath; their domains were banned from the search engines. An annual conference named Air Web was held 1997 to eaze the tension between SEO and search engines companies to minimize the sometimes-damaging effects of aggressive web content providers. Though, due to the high value of search results, there will always be an adversary relationship between search engines and SEOs. The Wall Street Journal profiled a company that allegedly used high-risk techniques and Wired reported the same company sued a blogger for mentioning that they were banned. Google later confirmed that it in fact banned Traffic Power and some of its clients for black-hat techniques. Today, many search engine optimization companies employ long-term, low-risk strategies; some SEO firms that do employ high-risk strategies for their own affiliate, lead-generation, or content sites, instead of taking the risk on client's web sites. Google, since its early days has been gaining intelligence, it has enforced web page restrictions for years, such as for hidden-text in 2006. It punishes non-standard web sites by automatically blocking the search-results for 30-35 days or longer. It does allow for a reinclusion request, and the re-indexing of that web site might take a total of 2-4 months. MSN Search and Yahoo! do not automatically punish the web sites for small amounts of hidden text. In early 2006, MSN Search typically re-indexed small web sites every 14 days, and Yahoo! also re-indexed quickly, much faster than Google, but all three MSN/Yahoo!/Google could require more than a month to index a new page on an old web site. However, the condition is improving. Today search engines are competing and some have reached out to SEO industry. They organize sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. With the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. All of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask) provide guidelines to help with site optimization. Google has a Site maps program to help web masters learn if Google is having any problems in indexing their web sites. It also provides data on Google traffic. Similarly, Yahoo! has Site Explorer that provides a way to submit your URLs for free, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo!. So that the web masters can drill down on in links to deep pages. It has an Ambassador Program and Google offers a program for qualifying Google Advertising Professionals. Nobody knows for sure what the next move of search engines will be. Remember, if your business exists due to your web presence, it's always better to seek help from Search Engine Experts and remain unaffected from the love-hate relationship between SEO and search engines?
SEO Link Building for Web 2.0 - Social Bookmarking Secrets by: Ross Goldberg You need to think about what it would take for you to become the renowned expert in your field. You must offer content that is original and valuable to a consumer. Only then, will you conquer the major search engines. One way link building is the core part of search engine marketing. There are many simple ways to obtain one way links: directories, articles, press releases, and most importantly social bookmarking. When you submit your website to a directory, the directory has an editor take a look at your website and either approve or deny it based on their rules. If you are approved, you will gain the all important one way link pointing to your website. Directories need to accept new submissions to keep their content fresh. This makes the search engines and consumers happy. Social Bookmarking gives YOU all of the power. You select your site and use a social bookmarking website to gain one automatic backlink. It does not stop there! Then, you add tags to the listing. The secret here is that you get a link to your site on every single tag page as well. That can result in anywhere from 10 to 20 one way links per social bookmarking site! You must make sure that your website offers unique, relevant, highly valuable content. If it does, other people will bookmark your website as well. The more people bookmark your site, the better traffic you will gain from that social bookmarking website. Social Bookmarking is the best way to create an internet buzz about your products or your company. If you offer unique content that people will find useful, you have outstanding odds of ending up on the front page of social bookmarking websites. If your link is on the frontpage, you will receive a large amount of traffic for the effort. If you do not offer outstanding content on your website, you will still gain the all important one way links to your website. Even negative reviews of your site will not change the ways the search engines see your link. Search engines look for new relevant content. All you have to do is provide it to them! The most important aspect of social bookmarking is spam. Most sites allow their users to either vote on the importance of a site, or allow them to ignore you and your site slowly goes away. Don’t ruin this great opportunity for the other internet marketers out there. Social bookmarking is based on the idea of a sites popularity being decided by the visitors of that site. Make sure you are adding important sites that you use every day to these sites, as well as your own personal websites. Social bookmarking is meant for the entire community to enjoy. You should cater your bookmarks to a person that would find them, not the major search engines. You can be sure that the search engines will figure out how to find social bookmarking spam, just like they’ve found all of the other spamming methods. Link exchanges are a thing of the past. The only time when link exchanges work is when they provide useful information and products to your customers. Otherwise, link exchanges are nearly useless. Search Engines have figured out the idea behind the link exchange and have lowered the value of exchanged links to almost nothing. Links are the most important aspect of search engine optimization, according to all three of the major search engines. Even the links you use inside of your website count. MSN, Yahoo, and Google all analyze your site’s inner linking structure to figure out what keywords are most important to your website. This is the best way for them to find which keywords are important in regards to your company. Spamming of search engines is on the rapid decline, because search engines have become smarter than most of us. Use your head and you should be soaring to the top of the search engines in no time! Here are some tools that will help: http://www.onlywire.com - Onlywire is a web-based social bookmarking tool. It allows you to format your bookmark once and submit it to the 15 most popular social bookmarking websites in one shot! Talk about a timesaver! http://ekstreme.com/socializer - The socializer is a site that makes social bookmarking a breeze. You add socializer to your favorites and when you find a site worth bookmarking (including your own of course), you click on the item in your favorites that states "socialize this". It then saves the web address and title of the page and sends you to an area where 50 different social bookmarking websites reside. There is a little more effort involved here, but 50 bookmarks is definitely worth the time involved. http://www.tagtooga.com/pg/delicioso - Delicioso is a desktop based tool that allows you operates similar to onlywire. It allows you to submit your bookmarks to tagtooga.com, del.icio.us, furl.net, blogmarks.net, shadows.com, spurl.net, simpy.com, and netvouz.com at once shot. Definitely a worthwile tool.
Ezine Marketing, Another Low Budget Means Of Advertising by: Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi As its name implies, an ezine is an electronic magazine, or electronic newsletter, that is published and distributed through Internet, talking to your customers about your business. EZINE MARKETING Ezine marketing is other of the low budget and very good means of advertising your products or services that you can use to promote your easy home business on Internet. The ezines sometimes named "news letters" are very popular among small business entrepreneurs, because ezine marketinng works, and that's why many times when you decide to publish your ad, you can find that there's a waiting list. Just take a look at your favorite ezine... Are there any ads on it? I'm sure you found many, and the reason for that is very simple: people put ads on the ezines, because ezine marketing get results. Most ezines do not reach more than a couple of thousand of subscribers, so what's the secret of the ezine marketing? The secret is that when you put an ad on an ezine, you can reach your target audience, if the ezine has 3000 subscribers, you know in advance that 3000 targeted "might be customers" are going to see it. And this is the reason why the ezines and newsletters are one of the most effective ways to promote your easy home business. Other very popular way of advertising on Internet are the banners, but compared with the high costs of web site banner advertising, ezine markering's costs are a bargain. YOU CAN HAVE YOUR OWN EZINE Is there a better option, than ezine marketing? Yes, there is and it's to publish your own ezine. I know that if you have never published an ezine, this can seem to be much difficult than it really is, but you will soon find that it's easy, and you can publish it weekly, biweekly and even monthly. Your advantage? * No printing costs * No postage costs * You can offer free subscriptions to engross your subscriptors list * A regular contact with your customers/prospects, establishes both your reputation and your marketing expertise WHY SHOULD YOU HAVE AN EZINE? If you are the ezine's owner you can obtain many advantages from it, like: * You can be constantly in touch with your customers * You don't need to pay for the ads you put on it * You can keep your customers and prospects abreast of any new product or service that you decide to offer to them * You can make money offering sponsored advertising * Nothing helps you network like your own e-mail newsletter. * If you supply an ezine with specialized information, you will be able to turn prospects into customers and will increase your Internet exposure through that platform. * A regular provision of specialized information creates credibility among your subscribers and since you create a special relation with them, you will get a higher response rate from offers to your subscribers, than you would from offers to non-subscribers. HOW CAN YOU MANAGE YOUR EZINE? You can always manage and deliver your newsletter or ezine using some of the good e-mail programs like: * Eudora: eudora dot com * Pegasus: pmail dot com * Infacta (ex Aureate Group Mail): infacta dot com If you choose to start this way, you will have to send your ezine with the BCC (blind carbon copy) option, because this way you will be sure that every body receives his own copy without looking at the e-mail addresses of other people that receive the same ezine. Nobody wants to see that thousands of unknown people can know their e-mail address. But if you really want to work in a professional way, the best program I can advice you to use is Postmaster. Postmaster is a database management and automated follow up software which sells through a network of nearly 1000 Associate Affiliate Program Resellers. They pay you $60 for each referral sale that downloads from your FREE affiliate program's web site, and $20 on all orders, your resellers, you sign up, refer. Along with any other program, you're involved in, including USA America Hosting; your referrals will be placed in your group, earning you commissions. (See the link below to try it for free) HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR EZINE You can mail your ezine yourself or use one of the excellent software that I have mentioned previously, but the first thing you need to do is to build your subscribers list, and one way you can do it is announcing your newsletter, and you can do it at: * New List: new-list dot com/ * Newjour: gort dot ucsd dot edu/newjour/ * Bestezines: bestezines dot com/ You can find more places searching for "announcement lists" at your favorite browser. Another important way of promoting your ezine is including your ezine in the Directory of Ezines WHO WILL HOST YOUR EZINE? That depends on your choice; if you decided to use programs like Postmaster or Bamboobiz online then you have to host your list on your PC. The advantage of this option is the easiness you will have to make any changes you wish to your database. But if you rather give this task to someone else there are many options for you: FREE HOSTING SERVICES That will host your mailing list, and handle all the subscribe and unsubscribe requests for free and in exchange for their services, they will put a small 3-line ad, at the end or the top of every message that you mail out. You will find this kind of service at: * coollist dot com * topica dot com/create/index2.html * oaknetpublishing dot com * groups dot yahoo dot com/ * bravenet dot com PAID SERVICES Paid services will give you many additional features for a price range that goes approx. $25 per month for small ezines and can end up in the thousands for very large lists. (Many offer free trial), and the best ones I found are: * constantcontact dot com * topica dot com/ * listserve dot com * bcentral dot com THE EZINE MARKETING MACHINE Ezine marketing can be a very interesting means of promotion for your business, even if you don't write your own ezine. Because if you learn how to use ezine marketing for your advantage, you can generate great traffic to your web-site, promoting your business with almost zero cost and get 10 times better results than placing ads in ezines. There's a very simple technique to do so and consists in sending free articles to the ezines (almost every ezine owner wants to have new fresh and free articles written for him) If you like this idea, there's a great book you can read about named "The ezine marketing machine" (link at the end of the article) ADS SWAPPING Another great way of growing your ezine is swapping ads with other publishers. This kind of advertising is free and your ad goes to a targeted audience: people who like to read ezines and are interested in the kind of topics you write in you own ezine, and this increases the chances of your ad being noticed. And to finish this web page I'd like to tell you about a brand new, original, and totally FREE service that I use to grow my E-zine subscriber list. It's a new system for E-zine owners to share their ad space with other E-zine publishers... and it works great! With EzineADVenture you can get your own ad in front of an extra thousand, five thousands, twenty thousand, or even one hundred thousand or more E-zine readers literally overnight. And this PERMANENTLY! You and I both know the importance of growing our database lists and subscriber's base. Well, now you can double, triple, or even quadruple, your subscriber base- and this for FREE! There's no catch. I'm doing this myself, and my subscriber list is automatically growing faster, I'm reaching more people every day, and it doesn't cost me one single penny... ... and it won't cost YOU a penny either. Good luck, and once you have signed up to this excellent service, you may expect a special message from me... READ A GOOD EZINE There are many good ezines and newsletters on the net, and at this point I can't avoid mentioning to you that you can join for free to my Easy Home Business Newsletter
Search Engine Optimization! by: Ankit Talwar Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings, and could be considered a subset of search engine marketing. The term SEO also refers to "search engine optimizers," an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites. Some commentators, and even some SEOs, break down methods used by practitioners into categories such as "white hat SEO" (methods generally approved by search engines, such as building content and improving site quality), or "black hat SEO" (tricks such as cloaking and spamdexing). White hatters say that black hat methods are an attempt to manipulate search rankings unfairly. Black hatters counter that all SEO is an attempt to manipulate rankings, and that the particular methods one uses to rank well are irrelevant. Other SEOs reject the black and white hat dichotomy as over-simplification. Search engines display different kinds of listings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), including: pay per click advertisements, paid inclusion listings, and organic search results. SEO is primarily concerned with advancing the goals of a website by improving the number and position of its organic search results for a wide variety of relevant keywords. SEO strategies may increase both the number and quality of visitors. Search engine optimization is sometimes offered as a stand-alone service, or as a part of a larger marketing effort, and can often be very effective when incorporated into the initial development and design of a site. For competitive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be substantial. Ranking well in the organic search results can provide the same targeted traffic at a potentially significant savings. Site owners may choose to optimize their sites for organic search, if the cost of optimization is less than the cost of advertising. Not all sites have identical goals for search optimization. Some sites seek any and all traffic, and may be optimized to rank highly for common search phrases. A broad search optimization strategy can work for a site that has broad interest, such as a periodical, a directory, or site that displays advertising with a CPM revenue model. In contrast, many businesses try to optimize their sites for large numbers of highly specific keywords that indicate readiness to buy. Overly broad search optimization can hinder marketing strategy by generating a large volume of low-quality inquiries that cost money to handle, yet result in little business. Focusing on desirable traffic generates better quality sales leads, resulting in more sales. Search engine optimization can be very effective when used as part of a smart niche marketing strategy. Ankit Talwar - Web Designer
Driving Website Traffic: The Fastest, Cheapest And Most Ignored Method by: Kevin Dahl True or False: All website traffic is created equal? FALSE! And if you answered true, you need to read and reread this article carefully. One of the first assumptions new affiliate marketers make about their business is that any traffic to their website is good traffic. That’s partly true and it seems logical. Brick and mortar businesses love when you come into their store and browse. Browsing will either lead to a sale or not, but it doesn’t cost the business anything. For them, any traffic is good traffic. But there’s one very big difference between someone browsing a brick and mortar store and someone browsing your online website. Chances are very good that you have already paid a fee to get that person to your site. You invest in every person who enters your site via online advertising, making the quality of your traffic very important. Essentially there are three ways to drive traffic your way. * Buy It. The most popular online advertising is Google Adwords (the small, classified ads you see on search pages). The ads themselves do not cost you anything. It’s when someone clicks on the ad and is directed to your site or the site of the product you are advertising that you are then charged a fee, based on a complicated formula of keywords and relevancy. This is very often the first (and sometimes only) advertising strategy new affiliate marketers utilize. Lots and lots of money is spent, with seemingly uneven and unpredictable effectiveness. * Borrow It. Being linked to another highly trafficked, highly relevant website is a great way to get your site out there. There are many ways to accomplish this, but it is by no means easy. Opportunities exist for you to link reciprocally with another site, resulting in good payoffs for you both. But finding these opportunities and reaching agreements while holding down costs can be a big challenge. * Redo It. Marketing research tells us that consumer loyalty is a precious commodity. A return visitor to your site is sending a loud and clear message to you. It’s amazing how many affiliate marketers completely ignore this incredible opportunity to capture the buying loyalty of their visitors. So What’s the Redo Method? Think of this method of advertising as a reclaiming process. You are targeting individuals who have visited your site in the past, and through a variety of different strategies, you are reclaiming their patronage, and hopefully increasing your name awareness and credibility as a seller. Once you’ve captured a visitor’s information, whether they’ve purchased or not, you have created a pool of targeted leads for future promotion and advertising efforts. One of the most popular methods of reclaiming or redoing marketing is to produce a newsletter and have visitors sign up to receive it. A well done and timely newsletter will put your product in front of your customer with all the punch of an informative and intuitive sales pitch. It offers the customer something for nothing; information, helpful links and related articles. It goes a long way toward site/product recognition, and people buy things they are familiar with. Another way to recycle previous traffic is to make enticing offers or deals on products, or to offer brief tutorials that deliver valuable information in easy to digest formulas. However you get people back for that second, third or twentieth visit, you are capitalizing on all of the “ins” that marketers are searching for. Successful affiliate marketers take full advantage of this reclaiming or redoing form of marketing. If you’re sitting with a list of email addresses from people who have taken the time to visit your site, and you’re not doing anything with it beyond merely keeping track, you are making a huge mistake. It doesn’t even require your money to use this form of marketing. But it does require your time; time to mine those lists for all the gold that lies within.
Google Pay Per Click: Making Money With AdWords by: Michael Brymer AdWords is Google's answer to helping people get their ads out and increasing their website sales with heavily targeted traffic. This article will give you a big head start over most. This is a PPC ( Pay Per Click ) system. You only pay for advertising when an interested person sees your AdWords ad and clicks on it. The amount you pay per click is dependent on many factors. Some of the factors that go toward deciding the price per click are: 1. The amount of competition bidding on that keyword. 2. The site value that Google may give your site. 3. The amount of clicks on your ad itself compared to the amount of exposures your ad receives (CTR), Even though a keyword may start at a high price per click, its popularity will bring the price down. Popularity is the result of people using Google to search a term or phrase and choosing your ad. As your Click Thru Rate (CTR) rises you will see the price per click go down. I've had keywords start at over one dollar and fall to about five cents a click. Some tips to lift your your CTR and thus lower your PPC (Price Per Click) are: 1. Use the keywords that you are bidding on heavily in your ad. This will make the keywords in your ad show in bold and stand out when someone does a search on Google using your keyword. 2. Encasing your keywords in [square brackets} or the use of "talking marks" will ensure your ad relates to what is being searched. Without the [square brackets} or "talking marks" around your keywords, your keywords will cover a larger unrelated area giving your ads more exposure but less clicks. This will force down your CTR (Click Thur Rate) and force your price per click up. Not a good thing. 3. The use of negative keywords. Negative keywords really bugged me because I read all about them and their use but didn't know what they were, the articles never actually explained what or how to make them. Just that it was the thing to do. Negative keywords: if you were looking for people searching for the keyword "pink" but don't want people who are searching for "light pink" then you would ad the negative keyword -light to your list of AdWords keywords the same way as you add the keywords you are bidding on. Did you notice the minus sign (-) next to the keyword above? Here it is again, -light. You put in as many negative words as you can think of to narrow down searchers to the ones you want. 4. With AdWords you can go locally or globally. You can limit your ad to only viewers in a particular city, state or country. If you live in New York City selling meat pies, then you may not want to sell them to china. Limiting your ad to a specific location, country and language will increase the likely-hood of great targeted traffic clicking your ad and bringing the average price of your clicks down. With AdWords your aim is to get highly targeted cheap traffic to your website and to make sure you are profiting from the use of AdWords. To see if you are profiting you have to answer these questions: A. How many clicks does it take to get one sale? B. How much do I profit from one sale? Divide A by B to see if you are in profit using AdWords or losing money! If you are in profit great, if you are losing money your keywords, negative keywords and your ad need more fine tuning or changing. You may even have to reconsider what you are trying to sell or your sales copy. A customer follow-up auto-responder will help improve copy sales. People don't often buy the first time they see a website, but you are off to a much better start then most. AdWords gives us the ability to give people what they are searching for and to profit from that service. Start slowly with a small daily budget and have fun.
How to Get High Listing for Your Website in Search Engines by: Vinai Prakash How to Get High Listing for Your Website in Search Engines Welcome to the world of Internet Marketing. Now you can use the knowledge you gain in this Special Report to market your products and services using the web, and reap rich rewards. Google has changed our world forever. We no longer ask people for recommendations; we no longer call our friends for long chats. We no longer idle our time at the coffee machine… We are mostly busy at our Notebooks or PCs, finding something or the other on the Internet, using search engines like Google or Yahoo. There is so much happening in the world, and internet is becoming the key medium to stay in touch with everything – electronic greeting cards, MSN messenger, GMail, Net2Phone, grocery shopping, Amazon, eBay, Internet Radio & TV… you name it, and it is available on the Internet. So why would you or your customers leave home at all. Small Businesses Need a Jumpstart on the Internet With all this happening at warp speed, the small business owner has to think of ways to get their product or service in front of eager buyers. And where do you find such eager buyers? After all they may not visit your shop or office. Hint: Find them on the Internet. Two Ways to Get New Customers There are only two ways to get customers - either you find them, or they find you. Push Method – You find your Customers Competing in a global marketplace, you will have increasingly less time to find customers yourself. And the more you chase customers, the more they run away from you. Pull Method – Your Customers Find You A pull method, where the prospects eagerly seeking your products or services find you works the best. Because they seek you - “the expert”, you have a much higher perceived value, and consequently, you have to do much less of selling… (They are already sold when they found the expert in you). Make it Easier to Find You If you (meaning your website) is easy to find, more prospects will not have to hunt you down. Today, they may search high and low on the search engines finding your products and services. If your website is listed high on the search engines (Hint: in the first page or two), you have a high chance of getting their attention. If you are among the remaining 432 million pages, you stand no chance. Not everyone can be in the top pages of search engine results. But you can, if you follow certain principles, some guidelines, and show persistence and perseverance. The art of optimizing your web pages, so that Search engine think they are highly relevant to what people are searching for, is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in short. Search Engine Optimization Explained Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your each page on your website work like a magnet to attract eager prospects. It starts will identifying those keywords that people are most likely to search your product or service for in search engines. Keyword Identification For example, if you sell rare second hand watches on the web, you want those people who search for “second hand Rolex”, or “used Patek Philippe” or “rare branded watches” to come to your website. Optimizing your Web Page for these Keywords So you optimize the pages with such keywords. You use these so called “keywords” in your web copy (body or text written on your webpage). There are many ways to get these words on the page. For example – your page title could be “How to Select a Rare Branded Watch”. Then the various paragraphs on this page could have sub heading like – “Finding the Rare Branded Watch”, “How to identify a Fake Branded Watch”, “Negotiating Price for a Rare Branded Watch”, “Huge Collection of Second Hand Rolex Watches” etc. Search Engines Find Your Goldmine You might have noticed that the keyword “rare branded watch” has already appeared multiple times in the title, body, and description. The Search Engines think that you have a great content for the word “rare branded watch”, and move your listing much higher in the search engine results. If you consistently and correctly do this, you have a much better chance of hitting the top pages for your keywords. Don’t Over Do it, or you will get banned This is just one of the techniques. Of course you can’t over do it, or else Google could punish your site and not show it at all if they think you have purposely “stuffed” your keywords in the body of your webpage, and the sentences do not make much sense. So do it carefully, and benefit from this technique, but don’t go overboard. Other Ways to Get a High Search Engine Listing SEO requires you to tweak so many aspects of your website – you could continue to do it for the next few months easily. And this is a key point too… continue to make changes to your site regularly. This show that your site is current, up-to-date, and not something that was setup in 1998. Of course, a current site is rewarded with a higher rank than an old site that is never updated. Some of the other basic SEO Techniques are: a. Optimizing your Page Title, b. Using appropriate Meta Tags for Keywords, Description c. Using Descriptive Headings d. Having a Site Map on your website e. Making your Site Rich with Content f. Making Navigation to inner pages easier g. Building Inbound Links from other Directories, & Authority Sites Each of these techniques takes time, and you must do it carefully, correctly, and make sure you keep the site updated for continuous good support from search engines. More information is given below for each of these SEO techniques. Use it to your advantage. Optimizing Page Title A page title is what is displayed in top of your browser’s window. Most websites don’t even have a page title. Others have the company name as the page title. Ideally, each page of your website should have a unique page title. It should be short, yet clearly summarize what the page is all about. Keep it within 60 to 100 characters. The Windows Title bar can’t show any longer than that anyway. Using appropriate Meta Tags for Keywords, Description If you have never heard of Meta Tags, do not be alarmed. These Meta tags are not meant for humans. It is more meant for search engines, so that they can assess what the site is all about. To check if your webpage has Meta tags setup, visit any page on your website, and do a View Source from your browser’s menu. You will notice that just below the & are tags like Books > Marketing Books > Magnetic Marketing This way, a user can navigate to any level. From “magnetic marketing” back to “Books” or Home in a single click. Search engines love a site which makes navigation easy. You prove to them that you are thinking about your browsers, your customers, and not only yourself. Building Inbound Links from other Directories, & Authority Sites One of the most important aspect that can make or break your journey into the top pages of search engines is Inbound Links. Inbound links means links to your website, coming from other websites, directories and authority sites. It is no longer about content alone. Today, there are millions of great sites that are rich with content. To compete with them, you can also build great content. But that is not sufficient. Search engines like Google and Yahoo look at who links to you. If you have great content, an authority site, then a lot of websites, blogs must be linking to that content. If no one links to you, then Google does not give you a higher rank. Conclusion Hope you enjoyed learning about Search Engine Optimization, and how you can get your website to get High search engine rankings. We will continue to update you with latest SEO news from time to time. Do let us know how you feel. We like to hear from you to improve this special report and make it more useful for you. All bouquets and brick-bats are welcome. Your feedback is important to us and helps us in improving this report and other workshops that we hold regularly.
Web Site Promotion For Newbies by: Michael Best If you are new to the internet world you are not alone. There are a lot of people who are not too familiar with the internet, but want to join in on the profits that are available. If this sounds like you one of the most important things that you will need to learn is how to promote your web site. When it comes to promoting your web site there are many options available to you. The good thing is that a lot of them are free of cost, or will only set you back a few dollars. But at the same time there are also a lot of ways that you can promote your web site that will cost you quite a bit of money. But either way, if you learn what you are doing you will be able to get the word out about your web site. As far as free web site promotion is concerned, one of the best things that you can do is join in on the discussions that are taking place at some of the online forums. For instance, if your new web site is targeted towards the clothing industry, you will want to find forums that discuss this topic. When talking with others you can run ideas past them, and also market your new web site to them. Make sure that you add your web site to your forum signature. This way, every time you make a post anybody that reads it will be able to click on your link. Believe it or not this will drive plenty of traffic to your site. Another low cost way to promote your web site is to submit articles to article directories. This can be done in a matter of minutes. All you have to do is write an article that coincides with your web site, and then submit it to directories. In addition, you will be able to add an author’s resource box after the article. This again will allow readers to click on your link and head straight for your site. Over time different article directories will pick up on your articles. In turn, your links will begin to show up all over the internet, which of course means more traffic directed to your web site. Overall, web site promotion is something that you will want to learn about early on. But do not let this scare you away. There are many ways that you can promote your new web site to the internet world. With a bit of research, patience, and determination, you will be successfully promoting your web site. Here's an idea. I've been using a free Internet Marketing Success Guide which has increased my website traffic by 300%. This guide will teach you the correct way to promote your web site and see success with internet marketing from the very start. And with successful promotion comes traffic and profits! And isn’t this what everybody wants? Get your Free copy of the Internet Marketing Success Guide below!
Ultimate Search Engine Secrets by: Ian Graham We all know the secret to earn more money with your website is achieving a high page rank, so below I’m going to give some of the tips I have learnt and used. Firstly the misconception is you don’t need to start from scratch as you can copy an existing website’s strategies, and use it to your benefit, but this comes a little later. I get really fed up with reading articles stating how onpage optimisation is so important, now don’t get me wrong it is important but nowhere near as important as off page optimisation i.e. Onpage optimisation - Ranking factors that are actually featured on your website-its content - Title tags - place the keyword you want to optimise in between the title tags so if your site is about Search Engine Optimisation, then place ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ between the title tag and don’t repeat it hundreds of times. - Header tags - place your keyword i.e. ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ between the header tags and bold the phrase or italicise. - Alt image tags - add an alt image tag right at the top of your page, and name the image alt=‘search engine optimisation” - Meta tags - this is very important do not Spam your meta tag with the same keyword i.e. ‘search engine optimisation’ hundreds of times as this will possibly get you banned by google and won’t actually help your page rank. Google doesn’t actually use Meta Tags when ranking a website anyway (this is a huge misconception). - Keyword density - (if you have written 10 words and your keyword features 3 times that's a keyword density of 30%, keyword prominence, keyword proximity- Yes you can sprinkle your keywords throughout your website’s content and it certainly won’t do any harm. Please remember although you should use all the above onpage optimisation techniques I have taught you, its the offpage optimisation that will make the biggest difference to your website’s page ranking. The most important factor to take into account when looking for a rise in your page rank is link exchanges. I can not stress how important this is. Firstly sign up to a link directory, as this is one of the best and fastest ways to get a higher page ranking. I have listed a few free and paid websites at my blog which are hardly known, but feature many high ranking websites looking for link partners. Back links from high ranking websites pointing to yours is probably one of the most important techniques I have used to get a high page ranking. Now you don’t need to start from scratch as you can copy exactly how a competitor earns their page rank. Choose a website that has a realistic and achievable page rank with Google, you can download the Google toolbar here http://toolbar.google.com. I would start with a page rank of 3, as this is quite easy to achieve. Type in a website url that is related to your site and you will have many sites that show up. Choose one with the page rank of 3 and then analyse that particular site’s content. You can use a very simple onpage optimisation trick by going into the toolbar at the top of your browser, click 'view' and then scroll down to 'page source' and bang you can see exactly what the site is doing to make his/her onpage search optimisation rank a Google 3. You have already chosen your website and analysed their tricks and now you can find the exact sites that are linking to this website and get them to link to you as well. This is a little known trick that works every time. Type in link:www.whateverthesiteiscalled.com and this will give you the exact linking strategy that this website has used to gain its ranking of 3. Now all you have to do is contact the sites that link to www.whateverthesiteiscalled.com. Now I know this is a lengthy process so this is why I have listed my "Top Picks" at http://ultimatesearchenginesecrets.blogspot.com that can help you further, and make your search engine optimisation allot less painful. With regards to your search engine optimisation you need to put in a certain amount of time everyday, whether this is 30 minutes, do 30 minutes consistently everyday. Make it your aim to contact five websites a day asking for a link exchange. I recommend putting their link on your website first and write an email stating how much benefit you gained from there website. Give them the link to where you have placed their website on yours, remember flattery gets you everywhere. You now know more than 50% of website owners out there and if you use these strategies that I have taught you it won’t be long before you achieve the page rank you truly deserve.
Internet Marketing Strategy: Enter The Age Of Automation! by: Derek Gehl Internet Marketing Strategy: Enter the age of automation! Your computer was originally designed to make life easier for you. But sometimes it doesn't seem that way, does it? These days, computers are essential tools that, more often than not, symbolize work for many of us. Well, it's time to reclaim those hours that the computer was supposed to save you! I'm talking about automation. Without a doubt, automating your e-business is the most cost-effective and profitable thing you can do to turn your small office or home-based business into a formidable online entity that can compete with the biggest players out there. The biggest mistake most newcomers to the world of Internet commerce make is thinking of their business as an online store. If you start off thinking that way, that's all it will ever be! Think about it: If you're a hairdresser, and you try to take your business online by simply advertising your salon with a web site, you're still limited by how many haircuts you personally can give in a day. But if you somehow managed to automate your business then there's no limit to how much money you could be making! Unfortunately for salon owners out there, automated haircuts aren't possible yet. But I guarantee that some part of your online business could be streamlined through automation! For example... Customer service Without sacrificing the personal touch or your own interaction with your customer base, 90% of your customer service correspondence can be automated. Whether you're answering the most common questions, booking appointments, sending invoices, or following up with your customers, those tasks can be done faster and more efficiently when they're automated. And you can concentrate on the things that can't be! Product delivery The faster you deliver your product to your customers, the more professional you appear. And there's nothing faster than instantly! Setting up your sales process to immediately send out your product the moment an order is placed not only makes it possible for you to work on growing your business, it grows your business for you by providing the quickest possible service to your clients, and word gets around fast on the Internet! If your business isn't automated for constant growth, you'll stagnate. So set yourself up for success now by automating your business! Does your online business need a new Internet marketing strategy? With the current explosion of e-business and online opportunities, more people than ever before are searching for professional advice on Internet marketing strategy that is tailored for beginners.
SEO: It's Not Just About Clicks! by: Mary Pierce Before beginning Search Engine Optimization, it is very useful to define your goals. It will be tempting to make more traffic or a number one ranking on Google your SEO Goal. Everyone wants to be number one on Google. That is only natural. More traffic to a web site is a real accomplishment. But a truly successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign is about more than just traffic. After all, you can have thousands of people tromping through your web site, but if not one of them results in sale or a phone call, what does it matter? A good SEO plan should help you think carefully about your web presence. What truly represents success to you? What exactly do you want the web user to do when on your site? Also, who is your target audience? For example, you are a house painter based in the Boston area, and you are thinking about building a web presence. You want your company’s name, Joe Schmo House Painting, to appear when a searcher types in House Painting. But do you really? What if the web user lives in London? What if you have a pay per click campaign, and you just paid 5 cents for someone who lives thousands of miles away to click on your ad? What if this happens hundreds of times? That is money right out the window. It is imperative to answer some key questions. Who is your target audience? How are you going to measure success – is it more traffic to your site or is it more sales? The more defined the answer to these questions, the clearer and more successful your SEO campaign can be. For Joe Schmo House Painting, a goal of “more phone calls to the 1-800 number that result in projects” is a better goal then more traffic to the website. But an even better goal would be “more phone calls to our 1-800 number that result in projects that utilize our specialty textured finishes”. The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to identify and target your audience. If you are a non-profit, success may be a more intangible quality like more awareness of a particular problem. Maybe you are an animal rights activist, and you are concerned about puppy mills. You would like to educate the public about them. This may be one situation where more site traffic is a reasonable goal. However, even in this case, more hits to your website is probably just one aspect of your organization’s goals. Your off-line goal may be something like passing legislation to ban puppy mills in your state. Keeping your organization’s goals in mind can help inform your SEO decisions, even if you are a non-profit. The more clearly defined your goals are for the SEO, the better the outcome will be.
Website Promotion Online Is A Sure Shot Success Method by: Steve Waganer How many eyeballs does your website grab in a day? Don’t know? Well it is about time for you to find this out and determine your actual levels of visibility on the web. The more visible it is, the more the public will talk about this. Your website promotion online depends on how visible you can be on the web. The web has a very wide reach and thus if your website promotion online is good you will reach out to people in all corners of the globe. So after the promotion you can have global customers buying your goods and services. Ranking high and very high in relevant keywords in all major search engines is what the special emphasis of website promotion online is all about. Some of the major search engines on which you must get top ranking while doing website promotion online for your business site are Google, Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, MSN and Ask. There are many rules and methods that you can implement for making your site top ranked in the major search engines. Write a page title for the different pages for your website. The page title of your site must describe clearly what a particular page is all about. This is helpful when major search engines index your webpage. Use all the appropriate and relevant keywords related to the goods and services you are offering. Do not use just the name of your company on the page title. Avoid using those keywords that you do not have on the web page as this can affect your rankings. Link building your website with other related and relevant sites is another important factor that you can do for website promotion online for your business. Link building helps you in generating traffic to your site and tremendously boosts up your visibility everywhere on the web. Try building and exchanging the links of your site with sites that have high page ranks and are very popular on the web among online users. This means that the popularity and visibility of your site also increases tremendously. Search engine rankings are also affected by this. So, take care of this factor while you are building links for your site. Writing articles relevant to your site and the products you are selling is one good way to increase your visibility on the web. Articles are a great source to attract traffic and customers to your site. Submit your articles to all major article sites on the web. Try to make use of only one author name for all the articles so that the name of the author becomes a well known brand in the internet. So the next time people see an article written by this author they automatically tend to believe that the article is good and thus you can get valuable customers for your goods and services. Pay per click advertising is one good way for website promotion online for any business site. Pay per click is an advertising method that makes use of relevant and the most appropriate keywords for advertising about your goods. If you undertake pay per click successfully, your site will be displayed at the top of sponsored listings of search engines. It has been found that being listed at the top of the sponsored listings guarantees to bring customers to your online business site.
SEO for MSN and Google by: Andrew Seidel This article focuses on some of the differences between search engine optimisation for the Google and MSN. However I have included some results from Yahoo as a comparison. As the majority of my clients have Australian businesses, my testing results are based on google.com.au, yahoo.com.au and msn.com.au, with "results only from Australia" selected. I recently took on a client whose website was built entirely in Macromedia Flash. Search Engines have little or no ability to read Flash* so this website could not be found anywhere in Google. However, on the basis of the keyword, "Make Up"-without the ""-their website was ranked at no.3 out of 188,984,290 results. The only place on the website where any keywords could be read by the search engines was the Meta tags. This example shows a very clear distinction between how a search engines such as Google and MSN rank sites within their listings. I decided to run some very specific tests to find the differences between the Big3 search engines, and how easy or difficult it is to rank well within them. Note: While there are many different components that make up a successful search engine optimisation campaign, different SEO mixtures are required for different sites, as well as different search engines. You cannot always rely on exactly the same SEO mix. While this example may be great for a website built entirely within Flash, it does, however, leave room for search results within MSN to return results that are considerably less accurate then Google i.e. the tags could be filled with keywords that do not accurately reflect the website theme. While Google places some importance on the header and description tags of a website, it places more importance on the content of a website. i.e. if your content does not support the keywords you have placed in your Meta tags, it is unlikely you will see results from your Meta Tags unless your website has no real competition. There are other important aspects as well, such as link popularity, but these other components are not the focus of this article. Example 1 - Flash designed Website My client's website had absolutely no optimisation work done other than place information within the title, description and keyword tags, and only on the home page. The header and title tag mentions "make up" once and "make-up" is mentioned three times. In MSN search, "make up" ranks 3 out of 188,984,290 results, "make-up" ranks 3 out of 26,586,615 results. When searching the first 100 results in Google, this website was nowhere to be found under either key phrase. My further tests proved that ranking well in MSN with this method is not just specific to this example. Example 2 - Comparisons between Google, MSN and Yahoo For further testing I used a totally different and more competitive industry-finance. In this case I used a website that was already well optimised. I focused on a commonly misspelled keyphrase- "buisness loans" and started by adding this phrase once into the header tag. When I started this test, the following total search results for each keyphrase were: - Google - 534 - MSN - 295 - Yahoo - 395 6th May 2006 - Added these keywords. On this date my client's site did not appear under the key phrase, "buisness loans", nor did it appear in the first 100 results in either MSN or Google. The key phrase above is a commonly misspelt phrase for Business Loans. The correct phrase currently ranks at position 3 in MSN Search. 13th May 2006 - This keyphrase appeared at position 1 in MSN, but no results in Google's top 100. 19th May 2006 - A further 6 days later no results for this keyphrase had appeared in Google, so taking the test one step further, I added this keyphrase to the description tag. 26th May 2006 - With still no results showing in Google, I placed this keyphrase into the anchor text of one of the links towards the lower part of the page content. 26th May 2006 - This keyphrase appeared in Yahoo search results at No.1. 26th May 2006 - This keyphrase also appears in Google's search results at Position 6. During this period of testing, all search engines crawled the site on a daily basis, so all changes I made would have been noticed by them during the crawl. While my testing confirmed some interesting results, what it most importantly highlights is the need to test different methods with different keywords within the main search engines of your focus to achieve a successful search engine optimisation campaign. * More recent versions of Flash have settings that allow you to change the format of the text within Flash to render it HTML and allow the search engines to read it, but it still does not allow you to work with the text in an SEO friendly way.
There Is Not Quick Fixes To Increase Web Site Traffic by: Ali Papila Many web site owners would love to get lots of visitors to their site. However, competitor sites and lack of finances are major limitations to get desirable number of visitors. Although there are few solutions available to increase web site visitors without spending money, many site owners prefer to choose some quick fixes to solve their problems. Probably one of the most popular quick fixes out of all is auto traffic sites (also known as manual exchange, pay-to-click, paid-to-surf, click exchange). These sites are known to increase web traffic in just few minutes. However, it is all artificial traffic and visitors are not really interested about your content or your site. They only visit your site for few seconds to gain credit, which can be used to send visitors to their sites with same method. With auto traffic all you get is visitors with no intention of using your services or web site content. Increasing web site traffic is time-consuming effort. With the right content, you will get right visitors that are actually interested with your services. Therefore optimisation techniques play important role to accomplish this. Well-tuned web sites will eventually get targeted visitors from search engines. So, you should always keep in mind, if you have patience, good content, and well-tuned web site, visitors, who appreciate your content, will visit your site.
The Perfect Internet Marketing Plan Can Work Wonders For Your Business by: Steve Waganer Marketing on the Internet is the in thing these days. Everyone who wants to be successful in their business has an online presence as people are becoming more open to the idea of having a web presence to be successful. If you are serious about your business and want to be successful you will have to be careful and meticulous about the internet marketing plan that you choose for your business. There is simply no use for a marketing plan if the plan will not work for your business or if the plan is not at all feasible for your business. So think carefully before you settle down to implement any internet marketing plan for your business. When deciding on an Internet marketing plan it will be beneficial for your business if you start form the very beginning. Be very clear about what you are expecting from your business and what your target audience is. Being successful in any business is all about being able to reach out to your target audience. Imagine a situation where you have the best internet marketing plan, but due to faulty marketing plan you are not bale to reach out or penetrate to the your target audience. This is the perfect recipe for disaster. Most people lead a very busy and hectic life and have very little time to actually sit down and map out the perfect Internet marketing plan for their business. But if you want to be really successful and earn lots of profit form your online business venture you will have to seriously find a good Internet marketing plan. If you feel that it is not possible on your part to find out and implement the internet marketing plan, you can always get help from an internet marketing firm to do the work for you. Your effort does not end here. After you have implemented the marketing strategy you must constantly find out if your plan is working favorably for your business or not. Make and implement all the changes that you feel is necessary for making your site easily accessible to online visitors. Changes that are done for the betterment of your business prospects are sure to spell success for your online business venture. There are several ways and methods that you can utilize for finding out if your internet marketing plan is working successfully for your business or not. One way of finding this out is to see if your sales are actually going up or not. If your plan is successful then your sales will touch the roof, what better proof can you have then this. Ask you clients and customers how they came to know about you. If you find that a particular source is working really well for you then you can put major emphasis on that area. Also you can ask them to recommend your goods and services to their family and friends. Word of mouth is a good way of doing successful business. The crucial part of any internet marketing plan is advertisement. Make advertisements that are very forceful and easily penetrate to your target audience. Take in to consideration the likes and dislikes of your target audience and make the advertisements accordingly. Basically the idea is to make everything in such a way that it suits your business and also your target audience. Finally do not compromise on anything that will cause even a little bit of harm to your business.
What Is The Importance Of Press Release? by: Steve Waganer A press release is all about the publicity that you can do for your online business. The more publicity you do for your goods and services the more your business gets recognized everywhere on and off of the web. The trick is in making use of all the publicity tools including press releases in the correct way to draw attention to your site. Publishing press releases on the web is one great way of going about the successful publicity of your site. Well, it is not enough just to write press releases and publish them on the web, you must know the correct way of writing a press release to be noticed on the web. There are hundreds of press releases posted on the web on a daily basis and there are chances that the one you write will get lost among the lot. The press release that you write must be just perfect to make you visible on the web. The first and foremost rule of writing a good press release is that the information that you give throughout the press release must be newsworthy. Who will even read the press release that you have written if the information is not newsworthy? Remember, your press release must not sound like an advertisement. Rather it should be newsworthy information about the product or service you are offering to customers. There is a very thin line between writing about your site and the write up not appearing as advertisement of your business. Always remember to ask the question how you as a customer will feel while reading your write up. And if you feel that you would not like to read it, then you drastically need to change your press release. If you do not like something chances are no one else will like it either. Put special emphasis on the first paragraph of your press release. Most editors do not go beyond the first paragraph and if you are going to create a first impression then half the work is done. If some one likes to read your first paragraph then they will go through the entire thing. Press releases have more credibility among all the other publicity methods. While reading a press release readers do not feel that they are reading some other disguised advertisement about a product. Readers and online visitors are more likely to trust credible sources like columnists, editors and reviewers about the authenticity of any write up appearing anywhere. Editors will not publish anything that is not well written. The buck does not stop here. The next step for you is to submit your press release to the proper places. You need a proper channel to publish your press release be it online or offline. Lots of people must have access to your press release if you are serious about this and want to create an effect. Create very impressive and eye catching headlines for your press release. A catchy headline guarantees that you press release will grab attention and compel people to read it. Take care that there are no spelling and grammatical errors in your press release. Get someone to proof read it two or three times so that there is no chance for any mistakes. Incorrect spelling and grammar usage is not acceptable. Stick to the facts while giving information to readers and do not try to use fancy language and adjectives in your writing.
7 Essential Steps to Ranking Well in the Search Engines by: Moshe Morris Anyone who has a website knows the importance of attracting visitors to that site. No matter how professional a site you have and no matter how good the content on your site is, you simply can't be successful online until you have managed to find a way to bring in large numbers of relevant visitors to your sites. That is why it is important to learn how to properly optimize your site for the search engines. Because ranking well in the search engines is one of the best ways of driving masses of targeted visitors to your site each and every day. Here, then, are the 7 essential steps to ranking well in the search engines. 1. Only worry about the major search engines There are basically only 3 search engines that you need to worry about – Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Collectively these 3 search engines make up the vast majority of search traffic online each and every day. Oftentimes, even when you don’t think you are using one of these search engines you actually are. For instance, Google provides search results for sites such as AOL and Yahoo provides search results for sites such as Altavista. At the end of the day, if someone is searching for something online, chances are they are searching at either Google, Yahoo or MSN. 2. Make sure that the search engines can “read” your site Many times a site is programmed is such a way so as to make it difficult or impossible for the search engine “spiders” (the programs that the search engines use to analyze and organize the information found on websites). If the search engines can’t process your website then you will not rank in the search engines at all, period! Therefore, it is essential that you (or your programmer) build a search engine friendly website. 3. Find the keywords that your customers use to search for your products and services Right now there are people searching for your products and services online. Your goal is to find out what terms and phrases they use when searching for your products and services. Those are the exact terms and phrases that you want to optimize your site for. After all, what better time to turn up in the search engine results then when your customers are actively looking for the products and services that you sell! 4. Create specialized, focused web pages for your keywords Once you have a list of relevant keywords, you will want to create pages on your site specifically for those phrases. Each of these pages should target only a small number of keywords (1 – 2 being ideal). You will then want to optimize this page for those keywords. This involves writing relevant content which uses your keyword phrases a number of times within the text of your webpage. This content should be of the highest quality as possible. This will both help with your search engine rankings as well as customer satisfaction, both of which are crucial to online success! In addition to writing good content, there are other important places to “put” your keyword phrases. To learn where those places our, visit our web page optimization tutorial at http://www.sembasics.com/sem-guides/web-page-optimization. 5. Get lots of high quality, incoming links This point can’t be emphasized enough. At the end of the day, high rankings come by getting other sites to link to your specialized, keyword-rich web pages. What’s more you want to make sure that those links come from topically related, popular sites. There are many ways to do this such as participating in blogs and forums, writing press releases, submitting your site to special directories and more. It is crucial that you learn all the various techniques involved in creating high-quality incoming links. To do so visit our link building strategies tutorial at http://www.sembasics.com/sem-guides/basic-link-building-strategy. 6. Track and improve upon your results Most people don’t want to take the time to analyze the results of their optimization campaign. Not only is this a tremendous mistake, it is also a great opportunity (for you). If you take the time to properly track how you optimization efforts are going and constantly work to improve upon your result you will be able to leave most of your competition far behind. At the end of the day, high rankings in the search engine are the result of learning how to fine tune your particular site to the particular keywords that you want to rank well for. General principles and theories are just that, general, that don’t relate to you, your products, your customers, your website, or your rankings. 7. Stay up-to-date It is crucial to understand that what works today may not work tomorrow (and what worked yesterday may very well be obsolete today). The search engines are constantly changing their algorithms and you need to change along with them. If you don’t, your success will be short lived. As such, you need to keep yourself informed of the relevant changes that are taking place in the search engine. Here is a list of 5 sites that you should frequent to help keep you up-to-date in the world of search: http://www.seobook.com (very helpful and insightful blog – also sells a good e-book on search engine optimization) http://www.seomoz.com (a high quality blog with lots of useful information and insights) http://www.sembasics.com (free search engine optimization tutorials – also includes a helpful blog) http://www.searchenginewatch.com (in particular, check out their blog and forum – great place to get advice) http://www.searchenginenews.com (this site is not free, but is well worth the cost – excellent advice and business sense) Getting your feet wet Now that you know what to all you have to do is get out there and do it. Nothing is as good a teacher as experience.
Website Submission to Directories by: Chris Chenoweth Online directories are locations where people go to find websites, the same way they do with search engines. However, there are considerable differences between the two. In order to be successful at increasing website traffic, it is crucial for people to understand these differences. Whereas search engines usually accept almost any site that is submitted to them without looking at its quality, directories typically only accept sites that offer quality content. Since humans review all websites submitted to directories, low quality sites rarely get accepted. Therefore, it makes sense to make sure that your website is ready before submitting it to any directories. Remember that directories list sites, not pages. In most circumstances, you should only submit the front page of your website to directories. WHICH DIRECTORIES SHOULD YOU SUBMIT TO? You should always begin your website promotion agenda by listing your website in the most popular online directories. These directories can significantly affect your search engine ranking so it is a wise move to list your website here before you submit to the search engines. Directories can also send significant traffic to your website. Make sure you are listed in all of the major directories before you try any other promotional methods. In this way, you will have laid the groundwork for a successful marketing campaign. Submitting your website to the directories is an easy process, requiring very little effort. However, making certain that the site will be accepted is the difficult part. Since directories are far more selective than search engines and require much more preparation, you must become familiar with their policies before you submit your website. If you do not follow their instructions carefully, your website will be rejected. If you are unsure about the appropriateness or quality of your website, research web page design articles to see what works and what does not. The primary goal of a webmaster should always be to have unique, high-quality content and lots of it. OPEN DIRECTORY PROJECT: The best directory to start with is the Open Directory Project. Make sure you read their instructions carefully before you submit your website. The editors usually review sites quickly and will not reject them unless there is a good reason for doing so. The Open Directory Project is free of charge, making it a perfect place to start. Once you are successful at listing your website on the Open Directory Project, you should move on to the number two directory. YAHOO: Try to get your website listed in the Yahoo directory. Commercial websites are charged a fee but it is worth the price. Non-commercial websites are free. Again, make sure you read their instructions and guidelines carefully before you attempt to list your site. LOOKSMART: The third biggest directory is Looksmart. A good listing in it can send a lot of visitors your way, but it is expensive. Looksmart does not draw as many visitors as Yahoo or the Open Directory Project. However, MSN, Altavista and Dogpile all use Looksmart's data in their search results, making it attractive to a lot of people. SUBMISSION PROCESS: Now you know where you should submit but how do you get started? It is quite simple. The first thing to do is to carefully read the rules and instructions on how to submit. They are usually displayed when you are beginning the submission process. Read them over a couple of times and follow them to the letter. Most directories consist of various categories and subcategories. Each category consists of sites related to the category’s name (e.g. the Business category will only have sites relevant to business). You need to find the category (or more often, subcategory) that most closely fits the subject matter of your site. You can accomplish this by browsing around the directory or by doing a search on the keyword or keywords that are most relevant to your website. There may be several categories that fit your website and you will have to choose the one that most closely describes it. Make sure you submit your website to the most accurate category for your site since submissions done to the wrong categories are usually thrown out. All directories will ask for the title and description of the website you are submitting. Give careful thought to your choice. A good title can significantly boost the amount of traffic you receive. A bad title can work against you and decrease the amount of traffic you obtain from the directory. Your title should be brief and include your most important keyword and start with a letter that is close to the beginning of the alphabet. Many directories list websites in alphabetical order and getting listed near the top can boost your traffic. Since the title has to be the official title of the site and it must be used on your pages, you might be required to change the name of your site. The title must sound like it just happens to start with a letter near the beginning of the alphabet or it will get edited. Do not use hyperbole (best, unbelievable, etc.) or all capital letters. As with your title, do not stuff your description with cheap filler words (greatest, cheapest, fantastic, etc.) Never use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Write a short (20-25 words) description that exactly describes your site and includes one or two of your best keywords. Your description should flow smoothly. If the editor thinks your description is just a list of keywords, he/she will reject it. Try to make it sound like an objective review. After you have entered all the information, check and re-check for any possible typos or spelling errors. Be very careful typing in your URL as a typo in it would result in your site never getting reviewed. When you are ready, hit the submit button. You will be notified by email if your website if accepted but not, as a rule, if it is rejected. Therefore, it is difficult to know whether your site has been reviewed and rejected or if it has not yet been reviewed. Give them enough time to process your submission and wait a few weeks before you resubmit your site.
What Is The Importance Of Press Release? by: Steve Waganer A press release is all about the publicity that you can do for your online business. The more publicity you do for your goods and services the more your business gets recognized everywhere on and off of the web. The trick is in making use of all the publicity tools including press releases in the correct way to draw attention to your site. Publishing press releases on the web is one great way of going about the successful publicity of your site. Well, it is not enough just to write press releases and publish them on the web, you must know the correct way of writing a press release to be noticed on the web. There are hundreds of press releases posted on the web on a daily basis and there are chances that the one you write will get lost among the lot. The press release that you write must be just perfect to make you visible on the web. The first and foremost rule of writing a good press release is that the information that you give throughout the press release must be newsworthy. Who will even read the press release that you have written if the information is not newsworthy? Remember, your press release must not sound like an advertisement. Rather it should be newsworthy information about the product or service you are offering to customers. There is a very thin line between writing about your site and the write up not appearing as advertisement of your business. Always remember to ask the question how you as a customer will feel while reading your write up. And if you feel that you would not like to read it, then you drastically need to change your press release. If you do not like something chances are no one else will like it either. Put special emphasis on the first paragraph of your press release. Most editors do not go beyond the first paragraph and if you are going to create a first impression then half the work is done. If some one likes to read your first paragraph then they will go through the entire thing. Press releases have more credibility among all the other publicity methods. While reading a press release readers do not feel that they are reading some other disguised advertisement about a product. Readers and online visitors are more likely to trust credible sources like columnists, editors and reviewers about the authenticity of any write up appearing anywhere. Editors will not publish anything that is not well written. The buck does not stop here. The next step for you is to submit your press release to the proper places. You need a proper channel to publish your press release be it online or offline. Lots of people must have access to your press release if you are serious about this and want to create an effect. Create very impressive and eye catching headlines for your press release. A catchy headline guarantees that you press release will grab attention and compel people to read it. Take care that there are no spelling and grammatical errors in your press release. Get someone to proof read it two or three times so that there is no chance for any mistakes. Incorrect spelling and grammar usage is not acceptable. Stick to the facts while giving information to readers and do not try to use fancy language and adjectives in your writing.
Finding Profitable Keywords For Your Google Adsense Campaign by: Leonard Bartholomew No doubt that Google Adsense has become the number one player in making money on the internet. The latest claim that I saw advertised was an internet marketer that made over $19,000 in one month. What is their secret? It is simply writing articles and building adsense webpages that use high traffic, or even some traffic, that use profitable keywords. Not just any keywords, profitable keywords. You have to find keywords that your customers use and that your competitors do not use. Their are many tools available and this article will cover just a few of them. WordTracker is the leading keyword research tool. SEO professionals worldwide use this tool to find profitable keywords. Wordtracker's suggestions are based on over 300 million keywords and phrases that people have used over the previous 90 days. (In other words, there is no "guessing" when you use Wordtracker. Everything is based on the keywords millions of people have actually typed into search engines.) KeywordDiscovery is also a very popular keyword research tool and is a major competitor to Wordtracker. KeywordDiscovery compiles keyword search statistics from over 180 search engines world wide, to create what they call "the most powerful keyword research tool". It has been noted in a number of reviews that Keyword Discovery returns more words that are relevant than Wordtracker, Yahoo's or Google's suggestion tools. There are many other tools on the internet that are worth mentioning. They can be used to supplement and verify the profitable keywords that you find using the major keyword tools. They include, the Google search tool, Yahoo Overture, SEO20/20, webconfs website keyword suggestions (you put your competitor's website URL in this one to determine the profitable keywords they are using), and many more. The SEO20/20 search tool is the most valuable for determining monthly traffic for profitable keywords by search engine. It includes information on the Overture bid prices, total monthly search volume, estimated search volume for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Digital Point (WordTracker), and Nichebot, Google trends, Google Traffic Estimator, Google Suggest, Google Sysnonyms, and Adwords Keyword Tool. It also provides you with links to news searches, directories, blog searches, tag searches, thesaurus, dictionary
Website Promotion Tips by: Chris Chenoweth You’ve spent days, maybe weeks, creating a terrific website. Unfortunately, no one has seen it. Now what? Website promotion is a many-layered, many-varied process. If you ask five people what they think are the best ways to promote their websites, you will probably get five different answers, with a few common denominators. Promoting your site takes a significant amount of time and should not be hurried. Results will probably not be seen for a number of weeks, or even several months. Many people give up after not seeing results right away. The keys to successful website promotion are perseverance, patience, and diligence. To begin a successful promotion campaign, you must complete two steps. Those two steps are submitting your website to the major online directories and to the top search engines. DIRECTORIES: You should begin your marketing campaign by listing your website in the most popular online directories. These directories can affect your search engine ranking so it is a wise move to list your website with them before you submit to the search engines. Directories can also send significant traffic to your website. Make sure you are listed in all of the major directories before you try any other promotional methods. In this way, you will have laid the groundwork for a successful marketing campaign. Submitting your website to the directories is an easy process, requiring very little effort. However, making certain that the website will be accepted is the difficult part. Directories are far more selective than search engines and require much more preparation. You must become familiar with their policies before you submit your website. If you do not follow their instructions carefully, your website will be rejected. If you are unsure about the appropriateness or quality of your website, research web page design articles to see what works and what does not. The primary goal of a webmaster should always be to have unique, high-quality content and lots of it. The best directory to start with is the Open Directory Project. Make sure you read their instructions carefully before you submit your website. The editors usually review sites quickly and will not reject them unless there is a good reason for doing so. The Open Directory Project is free of charge. This makes it a perfect place to start with. It will also provide you with experience that will be valuable to you later on. Af |