The Ins and Outs of Successful Keyword Research

admin | December 10th, 2009 - 4:34 pm

To succeed online you must focus on effective keyword research. By choosing the right keywords you can succeed at the SEO game. I have personally worked with hundreds of clients seeking number one rankings but who have given adequate focus on keyword research. This is incredibly important when your site is competing against well ranked sites that have been in the top ranking for some time.

The first step is finding a keyword that isn’t all that competitive. Once you do, the next step is to make sure that the keyword you have selected gets enough traffic. Don’t overlook this important aspect of keyword research. I worked with a company that was proud of their number one rankings. When I did some research to discover the type of traffic they could expect, I found less than one hundred searches each month on the keyword they selected. Even with top rankings, they would never see the traffic they expected.

Assuming that you have been able to find a keyword phrase that doesn’t have a great deal of competition and generates enough traffic, it’s time to look at your competition. You are competing against other web sites who currently rank in the top few positions for your chosen keyword. Research each of these top ranked sites to determine their Google page rank, age, and the number of sites linking to them. The more inbound links they have the more difficult they will be to outrank.

Once you’ve conducted your keyword research and decided which keyword phrase you are going to optimize for, it’s time to focus on optimizing your web pages. This can be done by focusing on on-page optimization techniques and off-page optimization techniques. Start with a well formatted web site that includes keyword phrases in meta tags, page titles, and so on. Then turn your attention to off page optimization which includes building links and getting your site listed in major directories and social media profiles. Add additional link building techniques like bookmarking to enhance the quality of your web pages and web sites.

Your plan should include daily, weekly and monthly tasks that can attract links from authority websites consistently over time. Your goal should not be to generate thousands of inbound links quickly because Google will penalize your website. Rather, focus on steady link building. If you want to enhance your organic search engine ranking, begin with keyword research. By selecting the right keywords, you’ll be able to optimize your website faster than your competitors. After choosing the right keywords, focus on integrating your chosen keywords into your web site. Then you’re ready for link building and other off page optimization tactics that significantly improve rankings.

What is Split Testing ?

admin | December 9th, 2009 - 5:07 am

Simple language differences and tiny changes in presentation can be the difference between an extremely effective marketing campaign that nets you millions and a complete and utter failure.The Internet marketing world is a world of subtlety.

It is very difficult to predict, what change is to be brought in to have a more effective marketing strategy. Many people have suggested the idea of split testing.

It is one of the few research tools that an Internet marketer has at their disposal that actually guarantees more conversions ” rather than simply implying that more conversions are supposed to occur. Split testing is a sales tactic that tests two different sales pages, keywords, PPC copy and other online sales tools using an equal number of impressions/views to see which one converts more effectively.

Here is an example: Imagine that you are buying advertisements through Google adwords in hopes that you will be able to maximize your hits per day. Start two ads at equal rates and put small differences in them. Add something subtle to one such as “money back guarantee” and leave the other one as it is.

You let your ad campaign run for a few days. See which ad is the first to 40 or 50 clicks and that ad is very likely your most successful PPC ad. With split testing, you would then take that result and say to yourself Okay, well, money back guarantee got me the most clicks ” should I put that phrase in the beginning of the ad or at the end of the ad? Then you run the split testing again, with that small change.

When you have completed this, you will have your highest preforming ad. This technique can also be used for sales copy, newsletters or anything that will increase your conversations. Some people rotate their sales pages using software and see which one gets the most sales. Through this they will eventually find the perfect sales copy. It will have a high enough conversion rate to almost guarantee success in internet marketing.

Since emarketing is still developing, a lot of what we know to do relies more on anecdotes rather than any type of science. Random tests convey that science. If you use huge samples sizes it ascertains that the promotional ways you are using so that you can maximize on sales is the most valuable and successful method that there is. This method should therefore give you confidence that after all the promotions you are guaranteed of the best exchange rate there is.

Because of this, it is those marketers that are willing to use Split testing that tend to have the most success in the field. In many ways, the best marketers never stop split testing, as they continue to look for the pinnacle of ad copy in an ever changing online world. Split testing is one of the few effective research tools that you can use on your own work.

Start split testing today.

How To Build A Link Wheel

admin | December 8th, 2009 - 11:25 am

One way to help boost your results in the search engines for a specific keyword is to build a link wheel around the webpage you want to give a boost. You do this by writing six articles that you can position on social media and other websites and link back to your page and one of the other six articles inside of each of them.

When you think of a link wheel, try to picture an old-fashioned wooden wheel with spokes. At the center of the wheel is the article or webpage that you want to move up in the search engine results. At the outside end of each spoke is another article or page that you control. Each of these outside articles links to the center article or page. They also link to the next article on the outside of the circle. In this way, you will connect the dots with links to draw a wheel around your main page.

To help you understand better, you can try drawing a picture of the wheel. Write the name of your target article or page in the center. Now draw six lines reaching out from the center article. Make these into arrows pointing back toward the center to represent the links. Now you need to complete the wheel by making lines in between each article on the outer edge. Make these lines into arrows as well. All of the arrows should go in one direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This shows which articles will link to each other.

Next, you need to know what pages to put the links on. You can use pages on a number of different sites to make your wheel. Any service that allows you to publish a webpage or article containing at least two links will work. Some examples include Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and Ezine Articles. Just pick six of these types of sites to use to build your link wheel.

You don’t need unique content for each of these pages. Only the main page at the center of the link wheel needs to be unique. The other articles can all be rewrites of the same article. You are not going to be promoting the outside articles to human visitors. Their only purpose is to provide backlinks for your main page.

However, the way you set up your links is important. When you create your links to the center page, make sure you use your targeted keyword as the text for your links. For example, if you want your webpage to rank well for “best way to make money online, ” you need to use “best way to make money online” as the text for your links.

Building a link wheel around a webpage or article can give you a huge boost in the search engine rankings, but the six-page wheel described in this article is just the beginning. If you really want to boost your rankings, you can build multiple wheels around a single article. You can also build secondary wheels around each of the pages in the original wheel. Just make sure you build your backlinks slowly and steadily so that your webpage doesn’t get sandboxed.

Using Social Media to Strengthen Customer Relations

admin | November 21st, 2009 - 10:06 pm

Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

How To Use Flickr As a Marketing Tool!

Neil Andrew | November 18th, 2009 - 1:34 pm

5,419 uploads in the last minute, 71,248 things tagged with jump, 3.0 million things geotagged this month. Do you still need a reason to get yourself a Flickr account?

Flickr is quickly becoming a popular online marketing tool for it allows creative agencies to market their products through a visually appealing medium. It can help you generate traffic to your website and ensure that your website ranks higher on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing too. Consider this, according to Nielsen or NetRatings, Flickr is the fastest-growing photo sharing site on the web. It is the 7th most trafficked social media site overall.

Flickr is primarily a photo-sharing community, owned by Yahoo!. You can use your Yahoo! Login ID and password to log onto Flickr and use your account to tag your photographs, share them and participate in the community discussions as well. The photographs, which you post on Flickr, might leave a lasting impression in the minds of the millions of Flickr users and some of them might end up being your potential customers as well. By networking actively on the community forums, you can build your contacts and build greater awareness about your business and services as well. You could use the links from Flickr to further your link popularity too!

Video is for everyone too! As a member of Flickr, you can upload and share videos (business videos and presentations too!) just like you do with photos.

To avail the benefits of SEO through Flickr, you need inbound links, which you could obtain in the form of links from other blogs and websites. Ensure that the photo title matches the title tag or element. You are assured higher rankings for the phrase. Most importantly, you should only try to sell unique and noteworthy product or services-related photographs through Flickr.

Quick tips for marketing your business on Flickr:

* Use your business/website name as your Flickr display name.

* Use the best, relevant photographs to advertise your business.

* Actively participate in the Flickr community. Find groups relevant to your business and join them.

* Tag your photographs with terms that are relevant to your business or service. Provide a link to your Flickr account on your website.

However, don’t post advertising messages on the discussion forums or stuff keywords in your tags. You could end up turning “off” the community and users, and not being able to generate any interest in your photostream too. To top that, Flickr added “nofollow” tags to links placed within its website last year. Flickr implemented these tags for the same reason as a number of other social-media sites – to prevent misuse and spamming.

Go here to read more about Yasir Khan.  Feel free to get a totally unique version of this article from our article submission service

Generate Traffic For Your Online Business With A Press Release

Kevin Thomas | November 16th, 2009 - 2:15 pm

Press releases have been a great way to bring traffic to a business, and of course advertise. It doesn’t matter whether they want to tell the public about a new product or just talk about the company-press releases have always been the way to do it. Over the years though, press releases have changed quite a bit, and the way they’re used has changed too.

In the past, a press release was used solely as a way to promote a product, company, service or event through the media. Perhaps you released a brand new product with some fantastic features that customers have been looking for. Your company writes up a press release, sends it out to all of the major news providers in your area and hopes that it sparks their interest.

One of the ways that a press release could get out, is when a journalist catches wind of it and believes it is good story material. They will write an article on it or feature it in their news program. Your company will suddenly get free advertisement, and the media got a new story. This was a win win situation for everyone involved.

The entire game has changed now. Press releases still exist, and they are still being used in the mainstream media, but now there is a new type of press release out there, which is an internet press release. Online press releases are sent to online press release sites instead of real life media outlets. Do these help bring traffic to your business? Yes of course they do.

The online press release is beneficial to all parties involved. Your goal is to create back links that will take customers directly to you. Press release sites are usually sitting high on the search engine lists, and you’ll find that posting with them will get you all the traffic you need.

If you want yet another benefit to an online press release, then just look to Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can actually put back links into your website AND include keywords that are highly searched for in different search engines. Once you know how to take advantage of it, you’ll get all the hits you’ve wanted, and you’ll get a steady string of income, as well as reputation.

Basically when an individual chooses to search, and then see your press release, they are probably going to click on it. Through this you will get tons of traffic. If you remember to use your SEO, then the amount of traffic definitely will not be small.

It doesn’t matter what your product is. It could be a women’s clothing line, and when people search, they’ll use certain search terms. If your press release contains those terms, then they will be directed to your press release. If they find it to be interesting, then they will probably head over to your website to see what you have.

Keep in mind that when you use an online press release, there’s still a chance that you will get regular media attention. Even though you are going for SEO, you may still get noticed, after all, it’s very important for the media to find stories. Basically if you have a good SEO’d press release online, you might still receive the benefits of regular media coverage. You never know!

As with every other area of marketing, advertising and promotion, the realm of press releases has changed and evolved over the last decade. While traditional press releases are still powerful, online press releases are quickly growing in importance. You can increase your presence, improve your ranking in the search engines and send high quality traffic to your website.

Kevin Thomas is a 21 year entrepreneur network marketing coach and SuperGuide who is teaching people how to use low cost social media marketing for online business success learn more at The Carbon Copy Pro Times

4 Major Advantages To Link Building Revealed

Dhruv Patel | November 11th, 2009 - 2:35 pm

Creating links to your website is one of the best ways to generate more unique visitors to your site. Links are placed on other websites and are hyperlink directly to yours. This means that should a visitor click on one of these links to your website they will be directed there. There are 4 major advantages to link building that you should know, which are:

Firstly, you will find that the level of traffic which is flowing to your website will go up. To further increase the level of traffic make sure that you place links on websites which are highly trusted. Doing this will ensure that you get quality traffic from quality sites every single day.

By achieving excellent one-way links page ranking that your website achieves will increase. The aim of every website is to be ranked on the first page of search engines. Getting this much sought after place will mean that the traffic to your website will increase as people only tend to click on page rank 1 websites.

If you have many one-way links to your website it shows that your site contains excellent information. This is known as creating trust and it is one of the things that the indexing bots from search engines take into account. Whilst reciprocal links will not ultimately harm your website, having too many of them will not increase your websites trust. However having many one-way links to your website from others will increase trust and your traffic.

Link building can also help to increase the revenue of a website quite dramatically. After all the more visitors that click on to a site the more potential that website has to sell goods or services. Even if visitors do not make a purchase on their first visit they will remember the site and possibly buy from it in the future. Failing to see the relevance of link building can ultimately cost a website owner a lot of potential revenue. So make sure that you recognise this and start creating links.

If link building is something that you are interested in it is worth spending in mind that it should not cost you any money. Simply get in touch with owners of websites and ask them to place links back to your site. If they feel that they would like to link to your website they will do so for free. You should not be paying anyone to place links to your site from theirs.

By spending time creating links from other websites to your own you will see the ways in which can benefit you. You will find that the trust that search engines have your website will increase, so will the traffic and the page rank will also go up.

Having the 4 major advantages to link building revealed should help you to see why it is so vital for the success of a website. Spending a little time creating one-way links to your site can make all the difference to the fortunes of your site. Do it now and you will not be disappointed.

Dhruv Patel is a happy DreamHost customer. He has a web site to promote DreamHost. Use the dreamhost coupon to get a discount at DreamHost sign up.You will also find the information about dreamhost ioncube there.

Is PayPal The New Kid On The Block

Ron Cripps | November 11th, 2009 - 12:04 am

For anyone considering starting an Internet business, arranging a facility to accept credit cards online is a necessity; there is no way Internet shopping could exist otherwise.Offering goods or services but only accepting checks or money orders won’t work; mainly because it delays completing the order. Once you have them at your site, the last thing you want to do is place another hurdle for them to overcome; caring about what your customers want is the key to success.

Perhaps we have become impatient, but whatever the reason, customers to any website that offers goods or services, demand an instant payment facility. You will find that every successful website on the Internet accepts credit cards online; that is why they accept this type of payment as part of their daily business. If you have built an internet based company with a website that sells, you must arrange online payments as soon as it goes live if not before.

It is possible and quite normal to use more than one method to accept credit cards online; this has the potential to attract additional customers but some are too expensive for smaller companies to consider. There are now quite a number of methods of accepting credit cards online and which one you use may come down to how much money you are willing to spend.

PayPal, the new kid on the block

Often the traditional systems of accepting card payments can be expensive and out of the reach of many small internet businesses; alternatively you can use Paypal to accept online transactions. PayPal was started by ebay and although it requires the buyer to have an account, most people who buy products online now have an account as it is free and easy to set up.

A person can use their credit card in their PayPal account as it makes check out a simple process; many internet users prefer to use this system over others. The only way to keep customers is by supplying a safe online payment service for them to purchase your products or service; providing a safe and secure environment to accept payments is paramount to any online business.

Internet identity fraud is a problem, so visitors need to know that their personal information is encrypted and not accessible by people who would use it for their own ends. You can see an https:// beginning to any web address that has a secure setting. If you want to accept credit cards online you have to have this facility or your customers will most definitely think twice before they put their information in your ordering system. With internet fraud being one of the top concerns on the internet it is your responsibility to make your customers feel safe and secure when they place an order otherwise they will leave and order elsewhere.

Before Deciding on any Online Payments System make sure you review all the resources at our Affiliate Marketing website. Ron has been marketing for Five years and has some great tactics and free downloads.

How Many Keywords Should You Target on a Web Page?

Nicholas Halmond | November 10th, 2009 - 2:26 pm

Most people know that one of the keys to utilizing SEO and ranking your website in the search engines is the use of keywords. Still, there are many factors you must consider when using keywords if you want to see success. One of the elements that some people get focused is how many keywords they should target on one webpage.

One of the overlooked factors that people don’t give much attention to is how many keywords you should target on a single web page. The truth is that many people want to do too much when they work with SEO. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and try to cram tons of keywords on one page, assuming that the more you use the better. However, that’s not really the way that it works.

There was a time over a decade or more ago when the use of keywords was first gaining importance where the more you used, the more you ranked for. At this time nobody really knew anything about SEO and how it really worked, and the search engines themselves were still developing their formulas for how to produce high quality rankings.

However, this kind of strategy is no longer effective, and most people try to go after too many keywords on a single page of their website. If you have a huge list of keywords, it’s not smart to try to rank for each of them on every page of your site. You’re only thinning out your association with each individual keyword and wasting your time and effort. Additionally, your content will up looking spammy to both visitors and search engines that see all of those keywords on one page.

However, in actuality the opposite is true. More is less when it comes to SEO and the number of keywords you are trying to target. By targeting too many on a single web page, you aren’t doing anything but thinning out your focus. You’ll also likely be including so many keywords that your content will come across as spam to both the search engines and your visitors.

Now that you know that less is more, what’s the answer for how many keywords should be on a single page for maximum SEO success? There is no guaranteed answer that is going to ensure you a perfect mix, however targeting 2 or 3 keywords on a single web page is usually the best idea. For pages with less content you’ll want to reduce that to 1-2 keywords, and for pages with a great deal of content you can target a few more.

When you break up your site and individual pages like this you will be able to target a complete list of keywords effectively. Each page will have a few keywords that they can rank for and you’ll avoid using anything excessively. It’s the best way to use keywords across your entire site and it will produce great results for you in the search engines.

Of course, use your good judgment when you determine how many keywords you want to target on each individual web page. Think about factors such as what the page deals with and how much content it has. But remember, when in doubt a smart guideline is not to target more than 2 or 3 different keywords per each page of your site.

Taking Your Company Public Only Works With The Right Publicity

James Scott | November 9th, 2009 - 7:00 pm

As a website publicist I’m always hearing about the latest and greatest way to get my client’s brand out to the public in an orderly yet expedient manner. Fly-by-night methods and organizations come and go, yet the original promotional concepts that yield the greatest results are still at the forefront of the publicity industry, they’ve just evolved and taken a different shape.

Catering to the emotional triggers of the populace while weaving a web of information and post hypnotic cues through the cynical conscious minds to the unconscious faculty of legions of oblivious targets (oops! I mean ‘potential customers’) is still the name of the game. Television, the visual stimulus that fed exhausted, lackluster minds with a temporary, emotional escape from reality has been replaced by web-mercials and the fast pace of viral media.

The informative minds that would gather facts on industry, politics and special interest concepts once supplied by the New Yorker and the New York Times is now replaced by the 24/7 information tornado of Web 2.0. Those colorful ads in Time and the Sunday paper have been overshadowed by interactive flash ads that cater to the senses of sight and sound. And of course the idiot radio DJ that would spit out grotesque and perverted one-liners while simultaneously converting the listeners mind matter to mush has been replaced by special interest audio and video Podcasts.

The actions and reactions of the general population have kept the same structure, but the adaptability and ability to absorb messages has evolved. When marketing to the masses the path to the decision making sector of the mind is still initiated with a single stimulus such as an image, sound or scent. When the attention is attracted, keep that initial stimuli active like the hypnotic dance of the cobra, then use the other senses to input messages for instant or future action, in most cases this action is a purchase.

Using television and AM/MF to promote a business on a shoestring or unlimited budget is like passing up a brand new luxury sedan for a’85 Hyundai. These methods are out of date and should only be used as modest forms of passive branding while the heavy lifting of promotional branding and call to action publicity marketing should be done with online video, social and news bookmarking, press release distribution, blogging, unique article distribution, Podcasts and other innovative white-hat methods that cater to habits of modern man.

To find out more about Publicity Marketing visit Princeton Corporate Solutions website at Princeton Corporate Solutions