Small business owners may not have the resources to invest heavily in their web presence and finding solutions to problems can be like finding a needle in a haystack. You know something’s wrong but don’t have the faintest idea how to fix it. Is it a technical issue? Are your ads not performing well? Don’t know what kind of traffic you’re getting? Website problems can fall into a myriad of categories. So if you think your website sucks, a) it probably does, and b) you should read on.
1. You Aren’t Getting Traffic
You’re excited about the big, expensive job the design team just finished on your site. It looks like a million bucks! Well it’s a shame it isn’t making you a darn cent. Just because it exists doesn’t mean people know about it. Announce it to the world by submitting it to reputable directories and sharing your useful content with others on social bookmarking sites (you do have useful content, don’t you? If not, I’ll cover this later). You can even do some link exchanges — provided the sites you exchange with are reputable — just to get your site crawled early on. Further optimize it for search engines by following good SEO practices, building quality content and generating inbound links from other sites. Once you do that, you’ll need to monitor progress with web analytics software. Google Analytics is free and it has a slick interface. And we know you like pretty things seeing as how you broke the bank on your web site design.
If you’re looking for high ROI, invest your own time in learning search engine marketing. Better yet hire a qualified SEO firm if you have the budget for it. Don’t settle for quick-fix promotional ideas. Build long-term exposure and a solid reputation by attaining high rankings, keeping email/newsletter lists, targeted ad placement and social media participation.
2. You Have Worthless Content
What defines worthless content? Without knowing what topic your web site covers it’s tough to say, but if you have nothing that sets you apart from your top competitors then I’d say you aren’t in good shape. If you don’t know what kind of content people are looking for on the Internet today, take a peek at what’s popular on social bookmarking sites. Observe some of the story titles on the front page of Digg.com:
* “Guinness Stout Beef Stew Recipe for St. Patrick’s Day”
* “In Move to Digital TV, Confusion Is in the Air”
* “Kim Jong-Il Interprets Sunrise As Act Of War”
* “Automatic bacon dispenser?”
* “The 5 Best Obama Photomosaics on Flickr”
Words I would use to describe these topics, in order, are: seasonal, informative, satirical, comical, and trendy. This information is popular because it’s appealing in its uniqueness and is relevant to today’s market. To set yourself apart from your competition, you need to get creative. If you’re the kind of person who had trouble painting by numbers, then hire someone creative. Professional copy writers can be well worth the investment. Create free tools your customers will want to use; write funny or interesting commentary in a blog about your industry; put a new spin on a traditional product or service or offer seasonal discounts. Create a comprehensive F.A.Q. on your site that covers topics your competitors don’t.
Take the time to beef up your content. Be innovative - don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Use the top competitor in your field as a measuring stick.
3. You Have No Call-to-Action
Poor promotional language can have a sabotaging effect if visitors aren’t drawn to your conversion pages. A conversion page is any page that acts as the final step in a visitor submitting a form, making direct contact or purchasing a product online. Obscuring those pages or confusing the visitor on where to go next can make them leave your site. Internet users have a short attention span - give them a clear direction when navigating your web site.
Use your web analytics software again to find out what pages visitors are landing on first. If your home page gets the most traffic, make sure there are clear links to your sub-topics. If inner pages are your most popular landing pages, find out if the traffic is targeted. Once you know the type of visitor and the specific page they land on, then you can start marketing your content more accurately.
The bottom line is to always make clear why, and how, visitors can buy your product. Don’t get too cute with multiple steps, options or convoluted language.
4. You’re Getting Traffic But No Sales
Are you sure the traffic is relevant? If you’re running a pay-per-click campaign, ensure your ads are geo-targeted properly and your ad text or landing pages appeal to your customers. For organic search engine placement, have you done keyword research and analysis before optimizing your content? Look at your web stats and see where your visitors are coming from. What keywords were they searching for when they landed on your site? Are the referring sites relevant to your industry or topic? How much time does the visitor spend on each page? Sales won’t come if your visitors aren’t interested in what you’re selling. This is why preliminary keyword analysis is so important to search engine marketing.
If you’re running ads it’s always good practice to experiment with different ad campaigns. If you put all your eggs in one basket you run the risk of losing out on potential revenue. Elements of your ads that you can change are:
* ad text
* landing page
* specific network your ads are shown across
* topics on which you focus the campaign
* geo-locations targeted
Remember, it doesn’t pay to skimp on initial product/market research and analysis.
5. You’re Getting Relevant Traffic But No Sales
This problem could signal a technical error or navigation problem with your site. Make sure you thoroughly test all functionalities on various web browsers and systems. Submit test forms. Do a link check to spot possible broken links. Is your web hosting service reliable?
If you’ve ruled out technical issues as the cause then turn your attention to the content and customer base. Has your market taken a downturn? Can the lack of sales be attributed to the poor economy? Have you fallen behind your competition in product quality, selection or pricing? Does your web site’s navigation system confuse users? Your web site is the first line of contact between the business and potential customer, but it’s not the only step you need to worry about. Telephone operators or online payment systems can present their own issues.
This is moving away from web site problems but if any part of the sales process takes place away from the site, investigate those areas of your business as well.
If you’re pulling out your hair over a problem with your site and these tips still haven’t helped, feel free to post a comment and I’ll personally have a peek at your site.
Social media marketing is the very effective tool for marketing your products. There is no other alternative marketing strategy for social media marketing. Hence social media marketing is indispensable for any online business. Social media marketing needs a different approach when compared to the other online marketing strategies. For a social media marketing campaign to be successful, it is very much important to understand the tactics that work better. This article is all about the effective social media marketing tips.
1. Creating unique profiles in Social Networks
Social networking sites like myspace and facebook have great importance in business promotion. This part of social media marketing can get lots of traffic to your website along with building credibility among people worldwide. The social networks are now crowded with the online marketers and hence it is important to highlight your profile in the crowd. Though there are lots of customization options available in the social networking sites itself, it is always good to get some professional help for advanced customization. These social media marketing professionals will be able to provide you will very unique profiles which will get noticed by the social media crowd immediately.
2. Don’t try to sell anything in the Social Networks
Many social media marketers just advertise their products through their social media profiles. This is a wrong move. Social networks are for connecting to people and not for advertising the products, Hence your main motive in the social networks should be to connect to as many people as possible. The traffic to your website and the credibility to your services/ products will eventually increase as your networks grow.
3. Don’t leave any social media profiles unattended
Active participation is a basic necessity of any social media marketing campaign. Just creating some profiles in a handful of social media sites doesn’t do any good. You should post some content to the social media profiles frequently and make them look lively. Always remember the fact that Google crawls the profiles that are frequently updated. Moreover, the visitors of your profile will love to see many updates. You should also involve in activities like participating in polls, posting in forums, making comments and connecting with the people of similar interest.
Social Media marketing is a time consuming process and for the moment of truth it is really worth the time you spend. If you don’t have enough time for social media marketing in your tight schedule, there are professional social media marketers who are ready to help you. To the added advantage, these professional social media marketers can analyze your website and create the best marketing strategy. By paying them a nominal fee, you can just sit back and relax, watching your network grow along with the web traffic and business.
Strategic Internet marketing makes earning online profits a breeze. With the multitude of strategic marketing tools readily available on the Internet, there is no way you can miss out on all the profits… and fun. We’re talking about blogs, forums, viral websites and more!
However, this doesn’t mean that you can just recklessly immerse yourself in every Internet marketing application you come across. Not everything works for every person.
Planning
It’s highly important that you create a plan before diving into anything. Even if you don’t have any money at stake, your time, effort, and credibility are all important factors to consider.
Planning is one of the most important first steps in strategic Internet marketing. It’s a basic concept applicable to every situation. Planning decreases your business financial risks drastically. If you’re just a beginner, then there’s more reason for you to be cautious. Make wise investments.
Research also comes with planning. After all, how can you plan if you don’t know what the available options are? Find out what others are saying about certain Internet marketing strategies. Learn from their experiences. Find out the source of each failed or successful marketing method and go from there.
Scaling Up
One great example of strategic Internet marketing is scaling up your business. Knowing how to scale the business up and how to proceed with it is important, because it helps you earn profits with consistency.
You don’t have to rely on beginner’s luck all the time. Know which pattern works best and go with the one that gives you the best results.
If you have a blog and would like to scale it up to another level, you have more than a few alternatives to choose from. A blog that receives over 500 visitors a day (which many marketers online experience on a daily basis) is already ripe for a scale up or expansion.
At this point, many bloggers feel that the time to add a forum has come. A forum gives your “500 visitors a day” more opportunities to interact with you and their fellow readers as well.
The lesson here is recognizing when your blog has received sufficient traffic to consider the option of investing in another opportunity. A message board, also known as a forum today, is an excellent option to scale your blog to the next level.
Even if the blog does not attract that many sales, and even if the blog was done for the purpose of bringing sponsors in and other monetization purposes, a forum has been proven to do well statistically as evidenced by traffic averages.
The magnificent opportunity with scaling the blog is that as far as internet marketing strategic points go, it’s yet another way to provide continuous revenue to your network in time.
However, increased traffic also means increased responsibilities. A forum is not something that can regulate itself. You still have to devise ways to keep track of what is going on in the discussions. It’s your responsibility to know what is going on in your backyard.
Not only does this help you attract more members, it also offers you invaluable insights into what else you can do to improve the blog. There is an adage “Do not bite the hand that feeds you.” The people in your forum sustain the interest in your blog. Don’t blow them off too quickly.
Keywords
Another effective Internet marketing strategy is the right use of keywords to get good search engine rankings. Choosing the right keywords can significantly increase the number of visitors to your blog or website.
There is a distinct difference between the number of searches for the word “dog” than for the word “dogs.” Of course, you don’t have to be that specific; unless of course, you’re a hardcore keyword person. This example just goes to show how using the right keyword can lead to greater or lesser traffic.
Other Strategic Internet Marketing Campaigns
There are many ways to start your strategic marketing campaign with your online business. Having a blog and forum is not the only way you can advance your business to greater heights.
There are many more exciting ways that could help you market your business to your advantage. The current recession poses no hindrance here. Even if many people are ranting about slow sales and stagnant businesses, strategic Internet marketing still has a considerable effect on people.
If you are an Internet marketer who sells how-to information, you can earn money faster if you present concrete proof of your product’s effect.
Presenting success rates and testimonials won’t hurt either. If you feel at a loss for what to do, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Why should people buy from you? Why should they give your product a second glance, especially with recession knocking on their door?
Overall, strategic Internet marketing has a lot to do with common sense. Always have a plan ready in your head. Don’t forget to make plans B and C just in case you need to regroup. Don’t be afraid to move forward.
A blog might have a huge impact on your visitors, but a blog with a forum opens up more opportunities for growth and sales! Use every element to your advantage. The keywords you use obviously have an impact on the number of people who stumble across your blog or website. Choose your keywords wisely. Do not turn away advice from strangers. Consider them and think through each more than twice.
Sticky blog? I am sure you pretty much know what a sticky blog is, but just in case you are not entirely sure, let’s take a moment to describe one. Let us say that you enjoy a sudden surge of visitors due to one reason or another. Certainly, you would be ecstatic the entire day. But what about the day after? And the next? Would those people still be visiting your blog?
That is the idea of a sticky blog – you get to entice people to keep coming back for more. Getting exposure is only the start. What you want are repeat visitors.
So how do you make your blog sticky? Here are some practical tips which you can employ NOW.
Create your visual design with “sticky” in mind.
And how do you do this? Put yourself in the shoes of a visitor. What will make you keep coming back? For sure, one element would be easy navigation. Make sure that your archives are easy to access. Use relatively large fonts. Stay away from a combination of colors that hurt the eyes. You follow?
Highlight recent posts and most popular posts.
What you want is for your readers to be able to find your posts easily. While your archives can help a lot, especially for the recent posts, it would be much easier for readers to find a section devoted entirely to these. As for the most popular posts, why not make them even more popular by creating links to them as well? More so, you want new visitors to sample the best of what you have to offer, and your most popular posts give them exactly that.
You may have gotten into the habit of thinking of your article marketing as just one article here and another article there, but it really helps to approach your article submissions with a big picture view.
Submit just a few articles, and you probably won't see drastic results, but submit a handful of articles every month for 12 months and you will see what marketing momentum can do for your site!
Consistency is key with submitting articles as with any online marketing tool, and creating and implementing an article marketing strategy can inspire that consistency.
I use an article marketing strategy myself that is comprised of a series of simple steps.
Last time I told you about Step 1: Establish your baseline.
Today we're moving on to Step 2, which is: Establish the baseline of your competitors.
Why in the world would you want to look closely at how your main competitors are doing?
1) Well, for one thing, trying to get to the top of the search engines is not something you do in a vacuum–your success depends on how other sites are doing in relation to you.
If you're at number 50 in the rankings for your keyword in Google, and the site that is ranked #1 is also working hard to market their site and building links each month and gaining PR, then you will have a clear idea as to what you're up against.
2) Competition will spur you on. Think of article marketing and SEO as a race–you do best when you have competition. If you're just running by yourself and someone is timing you, you probably won't make your best time.
But, if you're embedded in a flock of speedsters running their hearts out, you will most likely run harder too.
Keeping track of your main competitor's status helps remind you that you're in competition with other sites, and how well they perform with SEO influences how well you perform.
3) Keeping track of your competitors can give you insights and be consoling when the road gets bumpy.
Ask anyone who is consciously and consistently staying on top of their website's progress–it's not always uphill every single month. Sometimes your site may take a dive in an area for completely unexplainable reasons. When this happens, the tendency can be to overreact and think, "What did I do to deserve this?" and then not knowing if the sudden change had anything to do with you at all, you start making changes out of desperation.
But when you keep track of your competitor's progress every month, it's like you're running with a pack.
What affects you may very likely be affecting them as well, and that can ease your mind that whatever the reason for the unexplainable change in your site's backlinks, ranking or whatever, that it was across the board and not just affecting you, and that with some patience things will go back to normal.
4) Why not learn from your competitors? If a site is sitting at #1 in Google, they are there for a very good reason. You may find that your competitors are doing some things that are benefiting them greatly that you may be able to incorporate into your own marketing plan.
Those are the reasons why I track my main competitors and why I advise others to do so as well.
Let's go over the steps on how to do this:
How do you know who your main competitor's are?
It's simple enough to tell–type each of your keywords into Google, and see what site comes up at #1. The site at #1 is your main competitor.
When I started my article marketing strategy last year, I focused in on 3 keywords, so for each of those keywords I have a main competitor.
What info should you track for your competition?
Mostly the same info that you are tracking for yourself as we discussed in Step 1: How To Create An Article Marketing Strategy
*The search engine ranking for the keyword. (And of course for at least the first month, that search engine ranking will be #1, since that is how you determined that they were your main competitor.)
*Number of backlinks. Here's a tutorial on how to do a back link check.
*The Google PageRank–you can find the PageRank (PR) by installing the Google Toolbar and looking at the PageRank indicator. Remember, the web page that you will be keeping track of is the web page that is at #1 for your keyword term. Sometimes this is not the top level domain of the site (http://www.theirwebsite.com), but rather an inner page (http://www.theirwebsite.com/page2). When you're doing your checks each month, just be sure that you're consistently checking the same web page for your competitor. It helps to write down on your spreadsheet the exact web page that you're checking so that you can remember each month.
And that's it–on the same day that you do your stats check for your own site, also do the stats check for your main competitors.Some months you'll notice that they did increase their backlinks, some months you'll see that they lost backlinks, and other months you'll see that they just stayed the same.
This info will give the stats for your own site a whole new dimension. It will be encouraging to you to see your site making advancements in backlinks or PR or search engine ranking, and you can sort of see yourself on a horse galloping up from behind getting closer and closer to overtaking the person out in front–at least that's how I like to think of it!
If you're aiming for being #1 for a keyword and you're way back in the rankings, you can still see how you're making progress each month. Really galloping up the search engine rankings is not something that happens overnight, and sometimes it can be one step forward two steps back, but over time you will see a trend of steady improvement.
If you are running a commercial website, you realize the importance of a high amount of traffic and visitors is to the website. Network marketers realize that traffic can be converted into critical leads needed for success.
This is why it is important to take the right steps in order to expand the amount of traffic you are receiving. There have been a number of ways to promote this concept over the years. Some methods have lost their effectiveness and this drives the need for compelling new strategy. One such new strategy is utilizing giveaway events in order to increase traffic and leads.
As the name implies, giveaway events involve providing something for free in order to attract a large number of visitors and potential leads. This strategy has been employed in the real world for centuries as a way of boosting sales. It should not come as a surprise that the concept has moved into the online realm.
There are multitudes of ways one can devise an online giveaway event. Here is a brief overview of one way it can be done. Of course, you can tweak and modify as much as you like based upon your particular needs.
Setting Up a Giveaway Event
- It is important to pick what you want to give away. Obviously, it would be beneficial to give a gift away that relates to what your primary business is related to. For example, if you are involved with the health and fitness field, it would be best to give away something related to health and fitness. For example, coupons that offer discounts on health drinks would be a solid giveaway.
- Set up a date for the giveaway event. Since the giveaway will be intended to draw a large number of people together for an interactive event, a specified time and place is important. The place will be a website community and we will delve into that component soon.
- A website must be set up to promote the event. The website will have a public and private area. The public area will announce the specific giveaway you will be offering. It will also announce the time and place. More importantly, it will have a section where members have to register. This is so they will receive a password to enter the private area during the event. Of course, the information you acquire in the sign up process will eventually be used to compile your lead list.
- Of course, you will need to promote the event. Traditional strategies such as optimizing the giveaway site for the search engines and promotional blogging are helpful. However, setting up a social networking site (or several social networking sites) can pull in a lot of people in a short amount of time.
- It would also significantly help your give away event if you allowed the advertising to go viral. In other words, you should suggest anyone interested in your giveaway event to tell their friends contacts about it.
- The actual giveaway event should take place in a private section of the website. Live chat rooms and message boards should be integrated into the private section. Games and contests could be r un in order to add to the fun environment of the giveaway event. Of course, during the event, you could introduce and promote you MLM business while solidifying a relationship with those potential network members that have taken part in your giveaway.
In Summation
Giveaway events have the potential to build lists and expand traffic to a commercial site promoting MLM or other online ventures. It is not difficult to set up a giveaway event. Simply planning out all the steps in advance can increase the odds it will run smoothly and effectively.
Link by Link
Ranking of websites can only be achieved by the analysis of how popular your links are on your site, and is an integral part of a successful SEO Campaign
The more popular your links are, they higher your ranks will be. The higher your ranking is on a search engine, the more traffic your site will attract, and that should have a direct correlation to the success of your business.
Where should you start with our Link Building?
Firstly, there is no point in having creating a website to promote your product if nobody on this earth can find it. The leading search engines today are reputed to be Google, MSN Search and Yahoo and are most commonly used for searches, world wide. But before your website can even start to feature you have to have a good position in their result pages.
For your links on your website to be thought of a popular, you need to have a number of them pointing to your website, from other sites. The more links to your site, the higher your rankings should be and it is then that your site is considered important in the world of search engines
Link Building and Page Rank are considered to be ‘off page’ factors which comprise part of your SEO marketing campaign and should be not ignored or taken too lightly. Building ‘link popularity’ is critical if you want to optimise your SEO campaign to the fullest extent. Link building improves your Page Rank. The higher your Page Rank the higher up you will appear on the search results pages. Search Engines also look at Page Rank of the pages that link into your website, especially the relevancy of them compared to your own product. If your have links coming in from sites which have a higher Page Rank than yours, and they are relevant, your site will gain a higher value.
Link Building is a process, the advantages
The process of link building involves creating incoming links to your website; there are a number of ways you can do this. Some of the ways are to establish reciprocal links or you can establish a link in an e-zine or a newsletter and even a directory. If you decide to link into a directory you will receive three types of traffic. The first is ‘click through’ traffic who will see your link when they land on the directory page. The second is that directories start to index your pages once they find links to it, bringing traffic with them as they do. The third way directories help is by increasing your rankings and you can also create and establish links on a search engine.
Link building helps you attract high quality traffic to your site from other relevant sites; therefore it is a valuable source of potential business. It creates awareness and visibility of your site, as well as helping your create and maintain credibility. Link building will help your site gain more exposure in a wider search engine audience.
Link building will go a long way to helping you get your website indexed and are worth money today, you can sell and buy links. Link building is possibly one of the most important steps to achieve for all website competing in the SEO arena.
There are some really great Search Engine Optimisation Tools available that make doing SEO easier and can actually be fun. Some of these tools are available for free, while others come at a price. You can have fun experimenting and testing them until you settle with those you feel most comfortable with and those that benefit you the most. Tools can be a real fun experiment and you learn a lot as you go along.
There are many interesting Search Engine Optimisation Tools available on the Internet and new tools are constantly being developed. Search engine optimisation is an integral part of any website and these tools give a welcome helping hand.
Paid submitters
The digiXMAS article submitter tool software comes free and you will be charged for the submission per article, but it is worthwhile as your articles will be submitted to roughly 1000 article directories and you will be registered to the directories.
This program is semi-automatic and works fast and accurately. DigiXMAS directory submitter, which is a link submitter, has two modes to choose from. The free mode is not completely automatic, works slower and you have to manually check each directory, do a check and then submit. On the other hand, the paid mode will cost you per website and do all the work for you. This is a valuable tool for creating back links for your website.
Checkers, analyzers and suggestions
You can learn some interesting things about your web traffic and ways to improve your optimisation with tools such as a back link analyzer, a Keyword Suggestion Tool and a page rank checker. Two good keyword tools are Hit-tail that will report on what keywords browsers use that lead them to your website and give tips on improving your website.
The other keyword suggestion tool will point you to links on a monthly basis that report on most popularly used search words and search volumes. DnScoop is a statistical tool that reports to you about the SEO status of your website as to inbound links, Google page rank, stats about your domain name and age as well as a report on your domain IP. Page Rank Predictor is a fun program to use and you might learn interesting things about your website. This tool gives you a prediction of what kind of PR your website has.
Browsers, Plug ins, social networks and blogs
Firefox offers two plug-ins; when you do a search, SEO for Firefox will display information under each search result such as links and page ranking. With Firefox Live page rank you will have the Google Page Rank of that page displayed in the right hand bottom corner of your screen. The Blogosphere carries weight online and tools from Feedshark, Ping o Matic and Pingoat will get you listed in the biggest online blogging directories.
There are social bookmarking tools such as Social Marker and OnlyWire that submit your link to many other websites taken from the URL and title information of your web pages.
Did you know that online spending is predicted to increase by 14% this year? Therefore, it's a good time to grow your affiliate business despite the current economy is entering into a downward trend. Online business still predicted to continue growing this year as more people are turning to purchase online. If you are earning online through affiliate marketing, you can make 2009 your richest year ever. Here are some tips of doing it:
1. Selecting The Right Affiliate Products Are Crucial
What are the hot sell products in year 2009? This year has been a bad year for many people as the world is stepping into a recession and most countries are facing negative economy growth. In addition, the stock trading market is fluctuating & currencies for many countries are at the unstable stage.
People are looking for solutions on issues such as how to outlast the recession with alternative income sources, how to trade the stock in profitable level at the unstable trading market, or how to profit from Forex exchange market when the world's economy is at Yoyo situation. These are the areas where you find hot sell products for your affiliate marketing. There are high market demands surrounding the niches such as make money from internet, stock market investment & Forex exchange trading.
There are so many affiliate products available for you to sell, but not all products are profitable, you need to spend some time to find the right affiliate products that are wanted on internet. Selecting the right affiliate products is crucial because it will determine the success or failure of your online business.
2. Web Contents That Are Monetized Make The Different
During the old days when less competition in the online market, if you have a website with averagely good contents, it will sell. But, in today's highly competitive online market, web contents that are not able to attract the attention of the visitors will fail to monetize and lead the visitors to a cash generating page. Therefore, you should also focus heavily on your web contents. Creating a web contents that are monetized and trigger the "Want to Buy" impulse behaviour of the website visitors will make the different on whether you will good money or make zero penny from the affiliate marketing efforts.
3. Implementing Effective Marketing Campaigns Are Key To Success
The demand for online purchase has increased lead to more online business opportunities. It also means more people will try to make their fortune from internet. The internet business will become more competitive, only those who successfully implement effective marketing campaigns will lead the market and share most of online market's pie. How you drive the internet surfers to your targeted selling page and convert them to become the paid customers is the key to success to your affiliate business.
Summary
Online business is predicted to continue growing this year as more people are turning to purchase online. So, for those who are making money through affiliate marketing, year 2009 could be your richest year ever if you put some efforts and commitments to grow your online business.
The Internet has opened up vast avenues for business that did not exist prior to the creation of the Internet. This has mushroomed into a global giant where there are millions upon millions of web pages where people advertise their products and services. So what exactly are your expectations of what a search engine can do for you? Most people answer straight away that they want the search engines to rank their business in the top 10 on their search results pages.
Since up to 60% of your online business could be generated through search engines, this is not a realistic wish; the problems come about if you do not understand how search engines work and what your responsibilities are with your search engine optimisation marketing.
A tool to be used
Search engines can be used as an extremely powerful tool, depending on where you lay in the search results ranking. If you are too low down, searchers will not even bother to scroll down far enough to see your URL. To be able to utilise search engines fully, you must understand how they actually work for until you do you will not be able to make full use of this tool to bring you traffic from your targeted audience.
They work in three major ways; by indexing the webpage, but not the entire website, by indexing everything on every page of a website and by continuously crawling through external links. This last way literally means the crawlers never stop crawling; they visit these external links until they have gone through every single website on the Internet, and then they start all over again.
Different ways of working
Search engines do not all work with the same criteria when someone does a search, so the search results will vary what different search engines show in their search results pages. This means you have to use search engine optimisation in different ways to appeal to the different search engines. It is important to understand that search engines regularly change their algorithms and this will influence your search ranking listing.
Besides the giant search engines such as Google, there are also META search engines. The way they work when they search is by doing simultaneous searches through multiple search engines. Your ranking by a META search engine follows the calculation by combining your ranking by the multiple search engines used for that search and your ranking is thus the average of that. With META search engines there is no need for submission of your website as they use the results from other major search engines.
Go with a professional
To many an entrepreneur this can be a headache and most people do not have the time to learn all of this in detail. That is why it is so much easier to make use of the services of a professional SEO consultant. It is his job to understand how search engines work and what keywords appeal to the search engines and how to optimise your entire marketing campaign to bring you that much needed web traffic through being highly visible in the search page ranking listings.
Search engine optimization is clearly important in this day and age. An entire industry has arisen around the quest to get to the top of the search engines, with black and white hat SEO witches battling it out to stay in the top five positions.
It sounds like a scene out of dungeons and dragons doesn't it? However it's a serious business when hundreds of thousands of visitors are lost because rankings disappear, which equates to hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
In a previous article I discussed how to select keywords to help you to start planning a targeted campaign. When you get to the end of this article I hope you should have a fair understanding of the importance of the HTML Title tag with regard to search engines and far more importantly with regards the humans, the people, the guys and gals that you want to get to your website so that they can buy your goods and services.
Firstly, what is the title tag?
The title tag is an element in the header part of an HTML page denoted by two tags. For instance you might have . That would mean that the title would read (as a link on search engines like Google for instance "Using Title Tags to Improve SEO & Website Conversion". Setting yourself some simple guidelines to help you write your tags is a good idea.
Guidelines are good but not set in stone
There are no hard and fast rules for writing titles but there are some guidelines you might want to follow. W3C say on their website that ideally a title should be 64 characters or less and that titles may be truncated if it's longer than that. Google show 66 characters in their search results listing, Yahoo allow listings up to 120 long. What I would suggest is that you bear these sensible limits in mind when writing the contents of your title tags.
If you need a long title make the first 66 characters Google friendly and use the rest up for Yahoo. In order to learn how to effectively use these 66 characters you should know how titles are used online.
Online uses of titles
1) Titles are used by website resource librarians, directory editors (such as DMOZ), and other webmasters (such as strategic link partners) when they link to your website. 2) The title is displayed in web search results by the vast majority of search engines to help you target and attract your visitors. 3) Nearly all the major search engines use a title tag in order to rank your page. Search engines deem the title one of the most important pieces of information when determining what the content of your website is. 4) The title is displayed in the visitors browser window usually at the top of the viewable part of the browser screen. Browser screens, search results, editors, why is this important?
Firstly, by carefully crafting your website title you make it more accessible to resource librarians, editors and webmasters. If you have a nice simple title link which they can add to their pages both relevant and understandable they are far more likely to link to your website. If they link to your website using a hyperlinked title relevant to your target audience, you get targeted traffic from simply writing a good title tag. More relevant traffic means much higher conversion.
Secondly if Google or Yahoo crawl your website and find that the title tags you've written are relevant to the page on which they are written it means there is a much greater chance of a good ranking on the engines. A good ranking on the engines for your selected keywords means that you're more likely to be found by your target audience. This again means that you attract the people that you want to your website, the people who are looking to buy your product or service. The title tag becomes your search engine listing. Think of it this way, in a similar way to the classified ad you write for a newspaper, the title tag listing is your online advert, so make it as attractive and relevant as possible to attract the right visitor.
Thirdly, the browser window is affected by the title and it's convenient for the visitor to your page. How many times have you had five or six Internet browser windows open? A good title tag means that a quick scan of these titles shows the reader which page is which. The first couple of words in the title it could be argued for this reason alone are the most important text you will ever write for a web page you want to be read.
In summary you want your web page to be read by your desired audience
That's all. Your title tag is the first step toward achieving that goal. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you have eight hours to chop down a tree, spend 6 hours sharpening your axe." The title tag is your web pages axe, it's the part you should refine so that you get the most from the search engines. Of course there is more to SEO and website conversion than simply the title tag. In the next article we'll discuss the next important point to sharpen, the headline, or rather the tags that should be used in conjunction with titles to be even more search and conversion friendly.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a highly valuable tool to any online business. It’s a relatively process improve your search engine position and grow your business. Yet optimising your website to improve its ranking in search engine result lists is not a quick fool-proof task. You’ll need to understand search engine guidelines and how to optimise your website so it falls within these regulations. Apart from working within ethical SEO guidelines, it helps to know the most common SEO mistakes made, and how to avoid them.
Spelling mistakes
Sometimes unethical SEO methods include purposely misspelling words, like for example ‘airfairs’ instead of ‘air fares’. Search engines discourage this in SEO strategy. Poor grammar and spelling mistakes give an impression that your website’s not trustworthy.
URLs without keywords
Have an accurate description of the page content within your URL, these are picked up by search engines and also give online users a more specific description of the webpage.
Non-standard title format
Include a couple of your website’s keywords within the title, try to avoid using your business name as search engines pick up the titles but gives little consideration to business names. Avoid adding too many keywords into your title as this will be recognised by search engines.
Keyword stuffing
The use of keywords is vital in SEO, but you shouldn’t have more than five to eight sets of keywords that are relevant to your business. Thread these keywords around 15 to 20 times in the content of each webpage. Avoid placing a keyword on every link in every webpage; it won’t produce the results you’re aiming to achieve.
Inaccurate image descriptions
Overloading your images descriptions with keywords may harm your rankings. Try to avoid this and provide a relevant image description.
Irrelevant keywords
What phrases or keywords can you think of that are specific to your website? Try to vary keywords on each of your pages, and drill down to the essence of what each page offers. The more specific your keywords are, the easier it will be for an online user to find you. Regularly check your keywords and update them to reflect your products, services or information.
Static content
Regular content updates are important to main high ranks in search engine results. Instead of making vast changes to your website, gradually update areas of content to maintain the website’s appeal and relevance to users. Consider refreshing content at least once a week (or month at a stretch), by adding further engaging nuggets of information.
Using only Google
While Google’s the lead player in search engines, it’s not the only route for attracting online traffic. Don’t forget MSN, Yahoo and other search engines can also drive significant traffic to your website.
Forgetting about internal links
Creating a list of incoming links to your website is highly valuable for SEO, but don’t forget to include internal links within your website. Internal links can improve your page ranking, and they don’t have to be outweighed by incoming links (your links placed on external websites).
Website optimization can have a significant impact on your search engine rankings. However, there are common pitfalls of poor search engine optimization which can cause the very opposite to occur. Check out our top 5 tips on how NOT to approach website optimization.
Don't just use the first keywords that spring to mind without checking their usefulness to Search Engine Optimization first.
Although you may think that "Mike's bikes" is the phrase you would like to see most often in your website because that is the name of your shop, the chances of anyone actually typing "mike's bikes" into a search engine are low. However if your keywords include "bmx bikes Glasgow" there is much more chance a search engine will find your optimized webpage. There are several keyword tools online to aid website optimization.
Don't try cramming hundreds of keywords into your website's written content.
Rather than achieving good search engine optimization because you have many repetitions of the same word or phrase, this can very quickly result in the polar opposite of website optimization. The major search engines will recognise it as spam and drop you to the bottom of their list or ban you altogether. Your website will also be virtually unreadable to your customers so your attempts at website optimization will have been a waste of time.
Don't hide repetitions of your keywords behind pictures, off-screen or by making the text the same colour as your background.
This will have the opposite effect of the website optimization you are trying to achieve. Search engine spiders will read your website as spam rather than as optimized and possibly blacklist you from their results. This is not an accepted method of ethical search engine optimization.
Don't use large amounts of Flash or Javascript in your site.
Search engines prefer to read text and will look for that first. Employing good website optimization doesn't mean you can't have Flash or Javascript all, just that they are best limited to a small amount compared to text content to achieve maximum search engine optimization.
Don't think that once you have given your site a search engine optimization overhaul, that's all you will ever have to do.
Website optimization is an ongoing process. Although major search engine optimization can be carried out over a short period of time, without regular updates and changes, your website will slip down the results pages again as search engines are drawn back to new content.
Newsletters and articles. A powerful Website Optimisation technique that assists Search Engine Optimisation is to offer articles and informative writing to e-zine publishers. Links often stay live in archives for years, maintaining your website optimisation for searches.
Multiple Domains. Search Engine Optimisation can be enhanced by having multiple domains if you have a range of topics that could justify their own website. Search Engine Optimisation can result in the listing of only one page per domain for any given search. A good website optimisation tip is that you can get more directory listings by having more domains which improves your overall website optimisation.
Article Exchanges. Article exchanges are similar to link exchanges, only much more powerful, so great for Search Engine Optimisation. Giving and receiving high quality links can really help with your Search Engine Optimisation.
Titles For Links. A top Search Engine Optimisation tip is to title links using keywords and phrases as some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page. This will help to maximize your website optimisation.
Site map. Large sites need a site map to maximise Website Optimisation, linked to and from every page on the site. A site map is an excellent Search Engine Optimisation tool. It enables search engine robots to locate every page in just two clicks. The navigation bar can also act as a site map proving a useful Search Engine Optimisation technique on small sites.
Be bold. Using tags around some keywords on each page can improve website optimization. Don’t use them everywhere - this might undermine your Search Engine Optimization efforts.
Deep Linking. Ensuring as many quality inbound links as possible is a powerful Search Engine Optimization technique. This indicates to the search engine that your content is worthwhile, helping with overall Website Optimization. Having links directed just to the home page suggests the value of the site content is largely superficial, or your links were generated automatically, which is not a sign of good website optimization.
Emigrate. Look at Search Engine Optimization internationally. There are many directories for websites of companies based in other English language countries, America, Australia, Canada, South Africa for example. Could you use a business address in any of those countries to help with your website optimization?
Get Text in there First. Another Search Engine Optimization tip is to make sure text links show up before image links in the source code. Search engine robots follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page so it would be wasted website optimization effort.
Not anchor text. A Search Engine Optimization tip is to not too heavily on the anchor text. It can look like automation which isn't helpful with website optimization. Search engines don’t like all your inbound links to look the same. Use your URL sometimes and your company name other times. "Seoconsult Search Engine Optimization", occasionally, "Search Engine Optimization by Seoconsult" as well, "Seoconsult Web Design and Search Engine Optimization" some other times, etc.
