Strategies For Blogger

SEO May Not Be As Hard As You Think

SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) May Not Be As Hard As You Think. Being found on page one of the major search engines is one of the number one marketing techniques you can use.

It's all about bringing targeted traffic and visitors to your site for your niche. Not only that but it is often one of the least costly kinds of advertising even if you hire an expert to do it for you.

For example a Toronto search engine optimization company may charge a few hundred dollars a month for their services. In comparison you would easily spend upwards of a thousand dollars trying to get similar results from paper ads. And optimizing your site can give it much a broader exposure.

You don't always need to hire an expert because you can do a number of things yourself if you are willing to put in the effort.

Before you even begin to optimize your site you need to think about which keywords you wish to rank for.

Think like a customer to discover keywords phrases they might use to find a similar product or service. The more you can think of the better. These may then be plugged into on-line tools like Google's keyword research tool or on sites such as Wordtracker or Wordze.

These sites can give you an estimate on how often these terms are searched for. If you find some terms that have a great number of monthly searches then it is a good indication that being on page one for that phrase could equal a large number of site visitors.

Remember that frequently the keyword phrases with the most amount of searches are often the most competitive also. That does not mean that you can never rank for them, only that it may take quite a lot of time.

A good strategy is to select a mix of difficult and easy to optimize terms. This will help get you a short term and long term focus.

The content contained on the pages of your site should be your next focus.

Try to use your chosen keywords into the various web pages. Despite the fact that one of the reasons for using your keywords in your site is for the search engines don't forget that actual visitors will be viewing it.

The greater the number of pages you can add to your site the better. Every time you add new content you are attracting the search engines to frequently return and reindex your web site. This can increase the chances of getting you to page one for many more terms than the ones you are specifically focusing on.

Finally comes what is definitely the most critcal part. Every time another site points to your web site you are one step closer to being on page one. That does not mean getting just any kind of link from any site. They need to be from sites that are of the same theme to yours.

For example if your site is real estate oriented site then you will need to have a real estate search engine optimization strategy. This may include getting links from various real estate agent sites, blogs, or anything related to that topic. You should be more concerned with quality, not just quantity.

One of the premier ways to accomplish this is with article marketing. You create content in the form of articles. These can then be submitted to various directories for inclusion like Article Alley. Your site will get a link pointing back to it in return for handing out free content. This is step you should be doing a minimum of once a week.

You will slowly begin to see your site's traffic and ranking soar. The greater the time period you optimize your site for the better your results will be. It could take some time and work however it is well worth it. ( entireweb.com )

How To Select Affiliate Programs

How To Select Affiliate Programs. Affiliate programs offer most promising opportunities to earn money, to grow contacts and to establish yourself on the net. But this is easier said than done. There are so many affiliate programs available – genuine programs and the other ones. Joining most of these programs is extremely easy. The natural question is – how do you locate good programs that will suit you?

This is an important question and needs careful consideration. It is better to do a little research before joining a program rather than realizing later that all is not well.

The first consideration is the reputation of the program. It is worthwhile doing some research on this to satisfy yourself. There can be several ways of doing it. You can get in contact with the person who referred the program to you and find out his experience with it. Visit the website of the program and look for testimonials. If you know someone who is well versed with internet marketing he can offer you some advice. There are also websites that evaluate various affiliate programs and you can find them quite easily by searching on Google.

There are affiliate directories which provide some details of hundreds of affiliate programs registered with them, such as:

http://www.cj.com
http://www.associateprograms.com
http://www.affiliatematch.com
http://www.becomeanaffiliate.com
http://www.affiliatedirectory.com
http://www.refer-it.com
http://www.linkshare.com
http://www.2-tier.com
http://www.lifetimecommissions.com

Generally affiliate programs found at these directories can be trusted because these directories do their own verification of the programs before registering them. However, this should not absolve you from doing your own little research.

Once this issue is settled to your satisfaction, you have crossed a big hurdle. I shall assume that you are interested in long term relationship and your own persistence with the program will count as much to your success as the benefits you get from the program.

Another consideration is how much it will cost to join the program. Many programs offer free affiliate membership and to that extent risk is minimized. Therefore it will be advisable to go for free or low cost affiliate programs unless you have definite information that it is worth paying for the program of your choice.

Payment schedule of the affiliate program is another issue to be considered. There are wide variations. Various programs pay weekly, fortnightly, monthly, quarterly and some programs give immediate payments. There is now a tendency towards immediate payment and many affiliate programs are adopting it. This is facilitated by using payment processors like PayPal and Stormpay. The method of payment also varies – payments may be made by checks, direct deposit in the bank account or thru the payment processors. Also different programs have their own policy regarding minimum commission that must accrue before payments can be made to the affiliates. You will be in the best position to decide whether the program’s payment policy suits you.

Another factor to be considered is - what is the hit per sale ratio? This is the average number of hits to a banner or text link it takes to generate a sale based on all affiliate statistics. Many programs make this data available to the affiliates which is a big help. This factor is extremely important because this will tell you how much traffic you must generate before you are likely to earn a commission from the sale.

Now almost all the affiliate programs track the computers which are used to access the affiliate sites by placing cookies on those computers. The lifetime of these cookies varies from few months to the lifetime of the computer. This is necessary to give credit to the affiliate for any sales made thru his promotional efforts. The period of time that those cookies stay in the system is also important. This is because most of the time visitors do not buy initially but may want to return later to make the purchase. It will be advantageous to know if you will still get credit for the sale if it is done some months from a certain day.

Success of promotion can be improved only by trial and error. There is no fool-proof strategy which will work for all situations. This has to be done the hard way. The affiliate program should give ad-tracking services to their affiliates to keep track of their promotional campaigns. The data these services generate should be available online anytime you decide to check them out. Constantly checking your individual stats is important to know how many impressions, hits and sales are already generated from your site.

The affiliate program should offer physical goods, goods in electronic form and/or services of some value to their customers. As an affiliate you should have good knowledge about what the program offers. It will be to your advantage if you actually own and use any of those products – you will be able to narrate first-hand experience to your prospective customers. If by any chance you do not really understand what the program offers, it is better not to join such program.

Does the affiliate program have a single tier or multi-level structure? A single tier program pays you only for the business you have directly generated. A multi-level program pays you for the business, plus it also pays you a commission on the sales generated by any affiliate you sponsor in your program. Multi-level programs help you leverage your earnings which grow to huge amount with consistent effort. In the process you have a chance to get to know your up-line and down-line affiliates well and develop personal relationships with them.

Lastly, what is the commission paid by the program? What other payments are made by the program? There can be one time commission for selling a single item, recurring commission for services or memberships, leveraged earnings and bonus of various types. Understanding the compensation as well as affiliate structure is necessary for an affiliate.

These are some of the important considerations for evaluating an affiliate program. It is not a complete list by any means. The affiliate needs to remain watchful for surprises. Even then some element of risk will always be there. The success of the affiliate will depend not only on the program, but also on his own efforts. ( baliglobalmarket.com )

The Importance of Local Search

The Importance of Local Search. Although projections and numbers may differ by source, there's no denying that the future of local search is upon us now!

According to a Piper Jaffray 2008 research paper, 30 percent of all queries contain a city, state or zip code. With 2.6 billion local searches performed each month, the Internet has now surpassed print Yellow Pages and newspaper as a primary source for local consumer service information. And the adoption of smart phones will only add to these numbers; 27 percent of all mobile searches are for local information.

The Players: Local Content Publishers

Online consumers seek local information from two primary sources: search engines, such as Google, and Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs), such as City Search.

Search Engines

When an engine user currently conducts a search that includes a zip code, city name or state name, local search results are returned within the main search results. These listings are positioned below paid search results but above organic listings.

Additionally, local results are usually marked on a street map with push pins or presented with some other identifier, helping them stand out. Users may also search specifically for local information within the maps section of a major search engine. Google Local information also powers mobile searches on iPhones and other Google properties, and Yahoo Local information powers the "Nearby Businesses" information on Yahoo! oneSearch.

Internet Yellow Pages

IYPs play a similar role in local space as comparison shopping engines play in retail space. They provide consumers with a search platform dedicated to one specific vertical, which increases search relevancy for purchase-oriented consumers.

And IYPs grow market share effectively by employing aggressive SEO and SEM efforts. It is not uncommon to have more than half of the resulting 20 first page listings (including paid, organic and local listings) lead back to an IYP.

How The Publishers Acquire & Utilize Business Information

The emergence of local search has left publishers scrambling to acquire general business information to augment their miniscule local indexes. Search engines have traditionally garnered their information by deploying scripted search spiders to crawl the Web and pull in new content. They have relied on this methodology to build organic search indexes, which now have billions of web pages that can be referenced.

Due to the nature of information necessary for local search, the search engines and IYPs cannot employ spiders to pull data and must rely entirely on the information pushed to them by third parties. Third party offerings include individual submissions of business listings, listings pulled directly out of print editions of yellow pages, and information gathered by third party, direct marketers such as Acxiom or InfoUSA.

The information acquired is usually limited to business name, address, telephone number and fax number. The accuracy of the information is dependent on the source, and is not frequently updated. Since users' searches tend to be much more comprehensive search engines now need deeper information - products and services offered, brands carried, hours of operation, amenities, specialties, etc. Including such data in business profiles is vital, especially considering how search algorithms operate in local space.

The Ways of the Algorithm

Most local search engine results are determined by the following criteria:

Geo-proximity to the searched location/zip code
Appearance of the searched term within the business name
Appearance of the searched term within the business profile
User feedback/reviews

Maximizing exposure in local search results entails creating a complete profile that takes advantage of all additional information allowed in the search space.

Caution Ahead: The Challenges Of Local Search

Though thoroughly discussed, local search is just now come to the forefront of online marketing. Much like the early days of search engine optimization, local search currently resembles a "Wild West" environment, untamed by set regulations and established processes. The space is rapidly developing and fluctuating. Currently, the challenges discussed below warrant addressing.

Protecting Your Data

Local search is intended to be a collaborative effort. If a person finds a great new restaurant or dry cleaner, they are ideally encouraged to add it to the local directory. As with Wikipedia, the general population is thought to have the most knowledge of things going on locally.

While Wikipedia has minimal policing, local search is effectively free-reign. Listings can be deleted, filled with false data, or even created erroneously. This has happened on numerous occasions with people altering the business profile of Google, changing the phone number of Yahoo and, changing the Microsoft business services offered to "escort agency". (Danny Sullivan Article and Profile for Steve Ballmer)

Submitting Your Data

With the exception of Google, no local search publisher offers the ability to bulk upload business listings. This requires businesses to have someone manually input each one of their thousands of locations into multiple publisher databases.

Timely Updates

Much like the early days of search engine optimization where we had to wait months for the listings to update - the local search results often require 4-12 weeks before updates are live.

Unfortunately, there is no set schedule and updates are irregular.

Staff Support

Since local business profiles are considered "organic" and not tied to advertising products on the publisher's end, search engines tend to have very few people allocated to uploading the profiles and troubleshooting.

Tracking Performance

The local publishers do not permit the use of URL tracking parameters or phone numbers in organic local space. Therefore, businesses have a difficult time determining how much value local profiles contribute to the bottom line.

Data Merging Issues

The local search publishers pull from multiple data sources in generating a single business profile. In most circumstances, maintaining control over the content displayed within a business profile is extremely difficult. ( addme.com )

Search Engine Optimization for Newbies

Search Engine Optimization for Newbies. With so much information - and misinformation - available on the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) it can be tricky trying to separate fact from fiction.

Coupled with the fact that SEO changes only slightly less rapidly than the weather, it can be downright overwhelming to know where to start.

So, if you're an SEO newbie looking for a place to start, here's a look at some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) basics. What Is SEO?

Even the most beautifully-designed site won't do you much good if potential customers can't find it. That's where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in: SEO helps ensure your site is more visible in the search engines, drive qualified traffic to your website, and convert that traffic into actual customers.

In short, SEO increases your website's rankings in the search engines by making the pages within your site more attractive to the search engines. The more attractive your site is to Google, the higher its rankings in the search engine results pages. And the higher your rankings, the more likely users will visit your site. Obviously, a site with a result on Page 1 of Google is going to get more traffic than a site buried on Page 14.

If your site is missing from the top search results, then you may not be maximizing your ability to generate new business and add revenue to your bottom line. Let's take a look at some stats:

* 1.3 billion Internet users
* Over 85% start at a search engine
* Less than 25% will go beyond the top 10 search engine results
* Top 10 results get 80% more traffic than those ranked in the 11-30 spots

Besides gaining better rankings in the search engines, SEO is effective in several other areas as well:

* Branding/establishment as an authority
* Pre-qualified lead generation
* Easily tracked ROI
* Cost savings compared to other mediums such as glossy brochures and yellow pages ads (average cost per lead is $0.29!)

Breaking SEO Down

SEO consists of several key elements that work together to generate increases in a website's rankings, traffic and conversions: Keyword Selection, Copywriting, Link Building, HTML Optimization and Analytics. Let's take a look at each element in more detail:

Keyword Selection

The foundation of any SEO campaign is good keyword research. That's because targeting the right keywords is essential to getting your SEO on the right track. If your sell silver ladies watches, then you're going to want to rank in the search engines for the phrase "silver ladies watches" and other similar phrases. If your keyword research is off and you target the wrong keywords, then you may not get visitors who want what your site has to offer. That's why you need to make sure that your site is properly optimized for the most-searched-for keywords related to your business.

Copywriting

Getting potential customers to your site is only half the battle; you've got to convince them to buy. That's where persuasive copywriting comes in. Be sure to tell people why they need your products or services and include conversion points throughout the site. The search engines like content, so you also need to optimize your copy to include your keywords. This includes things like descriptive product pages, built-out content like biographies, news sections, etc. One important point to remember is to keep your most critical content "above the fold" - that's the area that's visible to your users before they have to scroll down.

Link Building

Think popularity contests ended in high school? Think again; you're not so lucky. Link building is like one big online popularity contest, and the search engines like the popular kids. Your success in the search engines depends, in part, on the amount of relevant incoming links to your site. Of course, having lots of good links also drives customers to your site, which is a good thing, too. Links can come in various sources, including directories, business partners, organizations, social media sites, and much, much more.

HTML Optimization

Title tags, header tags, Alt tags, Meta-descriptions -- the search engines want your site's HTML to be descriptive and clean. Search engines want to know exactly what your page is about; they don't want to sort through a bunch of extraneous code to figure it out. That's why you'll hear SEO types talk about the importance of having clean code and how to use CSS to make that happen.

Measuring Success

No SEO campaign is complete without analytics. After all, if you aren't measuring things like traffic, link popularity, and conversions, then how do you know if your SEO strategies are working? Programs like ClickTracks and Google Analytics help make the number-crunching a little easier. When analyzing an SEO campaign, it's important to only make one change at a time so that you know which changes are effective.

If you want to have an effective SEO campaign, you need to include each of the five SEO elements listed above. Keep in mind the information here just scratches the surface of these topics, and there are certainly other more advanced SEO strategies that can benefit your site as well. These building blocks, however, are the perfect way to get your SEO campaign started on the right track. ( entireweb.com )

What is Affiliate Marketing?

What is Affiliate Marketing?. Affiliate is a word synonymous to "referrer". If you are into affiliate marketing, this means that you are the intermediary link between the owner of the goods and the clients.

The owner of the products and services that are being sold online is called the merchant. But the merchant does not market his services directly to his customers. For that job, he relies on middlemen like you, who are the affiliates.

Simply put, you are only the person who is making the sales happen. You are the salesman, who receives his money as a part of the commission that he makes from his sales.

So if you make no sale, you get no money.

To promote a product in order to earn revenue from the sale, you will need an affiliate program. The programs actually help you by driving the traffic of visitors to your site. It is very difficult to choose the right affiliate programs, since there are so many of them out in the Web world, and only a few that you can blindly trust.

More importantly, when the companies that you are working for go under, they might not even let you know, so that your payouts turn out to be very small, and sometimes, months go by and you never get to see your payday.

Another disadvantage of the affiliate marketing is banners. If a company gets its banners all over, a lot of confusion is created in the web sites so that the visitors start to face too many options. In such cases, they become easily overwhelmed and deterred.

Affiliate tracking could also turn out to be a bit of a problem. The companies will assign special code to you that you have to use in order to report your sales. This code assures that no other affiliate gets your pay by mistake.

You must have this code pasted in your site correctly and without errors so that you do not lose out. Or else you may send a lot of potential clients without any reimbursements.

In order to look for an affiliate program, all you have to do is go to the search engines and type in the keywords. You will get many affiliate programs displayed soon, but before you make your choice, it is better that you read up the reviews and see whether people had any problems while using those programs.

The affiliate marketing mainly depends on the craft you possess in marketing goods and services to the clients. This will determine your success and failure in this business.

You can start to use the available tested marketing methods after adding certain tweaks of your own creativity to them.

There might be certain obstacles in the way, but the affiliate marketing is still very important -especially if you hoard the skill to sell even a fridge to an Eskimo! You will get your pay according to every sale you make, and this situation turns out to be pretty simple and easy. ( entireweb.com )

The Top 10 Essentials for Your Pay Per Click (PPC) Success

The Top 10 Essentials for Your Pay Per Click (PPC) Success. Whether you're looking to do Paid Search Advertising yourself or to hire someone to do that for you - you should know what makes a Pay Per Click campaign successful - or you will end up suffering. Paid search advertising may look deceptively easy to do. Countless times small business owners decide (and correctly so) that PPC is going to do wonders for their business and 'dive' right into it.

Unfortunately most of them don't really educate themselves enough on what to do and how to do it, and then they end up spending a helluva lot of money, with little to no results. Next they declare that Paid Search Marketing doesn't work and then they're out!

Alternatively, the small business owner hires an overpaid, over-promising PPC management firm, and lets them do whatever they like - not knowing what to be aware of in order to make sure he's getting the best possible results for the best price.

Well - despite the doom and gloom scenarios above, I'm here to tell you that PPC works for most businesses!

It works very well, and can be one of the best, quickest, most cost effective and best tracked medium of advertising/promotion there ever was... Sure, there are other ways you can market your business, but if you know how to, and if you want almost immediate results that are fully tracked - then PPC can't be beaten.

OK, let's get to the top 10 essentials of Pay Per Click marketing:

1. Know your market place

It's as obvious as daylight, but people still go into PPC without doing their research. Bear in mind that you may know your market place offline, but when you consider the internet - it may be a whole different environment. So make sure you look into it - even if you have to pay for professional research - it will be worth your while.

If you're letting an agency manage your paid search, then make sure you ask them about your market - make sure they have done their homework thoroughly.

2. Know your target audience

Again an obvious one - and yet again people don't do this step properly. Don't just list out a bunch of demographics about your prospective customers. Get into character - engineer 'real-life' people profiles (avatars), describing everything about them.

Creating about 3 customer avatars for your business, will help you understand your customers, and thus you'll be able to anticipate how they behave. Knowing how they are likely to behave, will allow you to setup a VERY effective PPC campaign process, that will guarantee you success.

Remember - your customer just wants to feel understood, then if your product/service is good - they will buy.

3. Know what you want your visitor to do

In other words decide - do you want a prospect visiting your site to:

* call you to make an appointment?
* email you with more info about themselves, before setting up a consultation?
* click on the "Buy Now" button on your landing page?
* sign up to your membership site?
* sign up to your free newsletter?
* download a free report?

The clearer you are about what you want visitors to do, the easier it will be to entice them to do just that. If you don't tell your prospects what it is they need to do to progress this visit to something that is of benefit to them, they will click away, most likely to never be seen again...

4. Know how they look for you & your product - i.e. understand searcher intent

This one's not so obvious. Only very good paid search marketers know that keywords have different intent behind them. In other words, if a searcher on Google types in "running shoes" they are highly likely to be doing some preliminary research on what types of running shoes there are.

If the same searcher typed in "running shoes reviews" - then they are likely to be still researching - but they now know that they will buy - when they find the shoe that appeals to them.

A prospect with 'buying' intent, however, will likely type in "buy asics gel kayano running shoes" or "asics gel kayano stockists". You get the idea...

5. Start small - grow big later

This simply means that it is better to find the most suitable keyword phrases for your business, and run with that small group first. This will allow you to test the 'waters' and it will help you keep control of your budget.

Later on, when you know what works and what doesn't you can add other phrases to your heart's content.

6. Split test your ads

It is amazing how many people don't take advantage of this feature on Google AdWords. Split - testing will give you a constant way of improving on your ads. Your ad is the 'window' to your sales... so you cannot afford not to be constantly trying to make it better converting than before.

7. Use landing pages (LP)

Landing pages are powerful when using them correctly. They allow you complete control of what your visitor experiences. I always recommend that if you are only wanting one result from your prospect you should use LPs. But if your resources and knowledge are limited, then at least make sure you are leading the searcher to the most search-relevant page you have on your site.

8. Track everything

This says it all - even if you don't know how to, or with what - find someone that can help you. Outsource this job, or simply head over to Google and read all there is on their Analytics service. In some cases this is perfectly sufficient.

9. Listen to your stats

Once you have your tracking working, make sure you look at your stats to see the results. I recommend you look at them once a day in the beginning - depending on the size of your campaign, the amount of traffic your keywords are getting, and the amount of money you've budgeted to spend.

Once your campaign is working and making you profit, you can start looking at it less often, but at least once a week. Also make sure to optimize it regularly on the basis of your stats.

10. Learn consistently and constantly

Learn from your successes, your failures, your competitors' successes and their failures too... I have a document template that I use for all my campaigns called - Lessons Learned. It's only through experience that you will be able to progress and optimize any paid search campaign.

Well - hopefully you'll find the above list of PPC essentials very useful. Of course there are a lot of other important points to consider, like daily budget, competitive research, and return on investment requirements, but the above 10 will be able to start you off in a very strong way.

Bear in mind that whether you're managing your own PPC campaigns, or you're hiring a professional to do it - you can use the list above to make sure you're getting the best out of your campaigns. ( addme.com )

RSS feeds and Search Engine Optimization

RSS and Search Engine Optimization. After putting a lot of thought into how to best use RSS feeds on your website and then creating them on your website, the next step is to promote them. As with any kind of marketing, where and how you advertise your website can determine the amount of visitors. The same applies to RSS feeds.

As you create your RSS feeds, keep in mind that the title should contain optimal search keywords. The more keywords contained, the more likely you are to have your feed come up when a particular search string is entered. This is not to say you should cram every possible keyword into the title of the RSS feed. Instead, keep in mind that you can have up to 15 different titles listed for the same link, article, content, etc. when creating the original RSS file.

Use descriptors to attract visitors to your site by tempting them to click on your feed. Think of text that will enhance your content, but not make it appear irrelevant. People are less likely to click on a RSS feed if it doesn't fit their needs and wants. By keeping the descriptors concise, but also tempting, you will drive people to click on your link over someone else's.

In keeping with the keyword search, don't forget that you can now search by theme. Use this to your advantage and group your RSS feeds into themes. When submitting them to search engines, group the feeds into specific themes. This can help bring your feeds up more often when similar themes are searched.

When you add RSS feeds from other companies, you can tell your website how to react when the feed is clicked on. Rather than have visitors transported to the new site, have it come up as a new window. This will help lessen the chance your site visitors will leave your website completely.

People don't use the back button as often, so it increases your chances of the person to continue to peruse your site if the RSS feeds pop up as new browsers.

As you design your RSS feeds, include your company's contact information. This entails your website, any relevant contact information, and if possible, your logo. The more experience a person has with your website, the more frequently he or she will recall it when thinking of your products or services.

Consequently, it also goes to say you need to make sure the experience is a positive one because it goes the same way with a negative experience, except it deters visitors from returning.

Use your feed within your own site. By promoting it within your own website, you can improve its standing on external search engines. Search engines often return results by the most frequently clicked first. If you don't have enough faith in your own RSS feed to include it in your website, why would anyone else want to subscribe to it? At the same time, RSS feed search engines often return results alphabetically.

Typically an English teacher would not count the word 'A' in a title when cataloguing it, but in RSS search engines, it is viewed as the first word of a title. Try to word your titles to begin with 'A' to improve their standing. As they are clicked on more and more, it will increase the feeds' standings in other search engines.

In order to utilize your well written and constructed RSS feeds, remember to subscribe to them yourself. Nothing gives others' faith in their content like seeing it on the originators' website. Use keywords appropriately in titles because you can write multiple titles to fit the same content. You can also use themes to help capture the essence of your RSS feeds. Keep site visitors at your website by 'instructing' external RSS feeds to open in new browser windows.

Lastly, don't forget to include your company's contact information with the website in your feeds. The more often these are put out to the general population, the more exposure you will get. ( entirewb.com )