Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to reach their destination – your website – you need to provide them with specific and effective signs that will direct them right to your site. You do this by creating carefully chosen keywords.
Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front door. But if your keywords are too general or too over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.
Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the right people may never get the chance to find out about it. So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather and evaluate keywords and phrases.
You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG. It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center of your business network, which is the reason that you may not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the inside. You need to be able to think like your customers. And since you are a business owner and not the consumer, your best bet is to go directly to the source.
Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words from as many potential customers as you can. You will most likely find out that your understanding of your business and your customers’ understanding is significantly different.
The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you probably never would have considered from deep inside the trenches of your business.
Category : Blog
Here are 26 sure-fire ways to increase web traffic and site visitors to your website. Use some or all of them, and let us know which ones worked best for you.
1. Optimize your site (SEO).
Win on the search engines when people search for keyword phrases related to your products or services.
2. Get your site listed in directories.
Submit your site to all the major web directories. This will generate traffic directly from the directories themselves and will also help to improve your link popularity. That helps you win on Google!
3. Get listed in search engines.
Submit your site to all the major search engines.
4. Get links to your site.
Get people with complimentary sites to link to yours. You offer rental kayaks on the beach. Ask the local restaurant owners to link to you, and offer to link to them. Ask the local tour guides, the real estate agents, the night clubs, and everyone else. Links lead to clicks onto your website and help to improve your search engine rankings.
Category : Blog
Free search engine optimization sounds like bologna right? It’s not. Six years ago when I first started running website business ventures, I was under the impression that search engine optimization was an expensive process only available to businesses with big budgets. I foolishly decided instead of pursuing search engine optimization, I would market my online business offline. It was a complete flop. Here’s the reason why, the great thing and major purpose of marketing a website online is to convert prospects to your website easier, faster, and with a higher conversion rate. It’s very difficult to get people to remember your website when advertising offline. Not to mention, most people don’t walk around with a computer on them so they can’t go to your website immediately.
I babbled on about that experience to hopefully inspire you to have confidence in free search engine optimization. If you want to optimize your website for free, article marketing is the best way to go. Article marketing has proven itself to be quite effective. It’s effective for me personally as well as for my clients. Article marketing is not exactly a close kept secret of mine. Many internet marketers use article marketing to get immediate traffic to their website, get, maintain, and keep one-way anchor texted backlinks, and optimize their website for the search engines.
Article marketing requires three small steps to success and they are as follows:
Step 1: Find Keywords
Keywords are the most important step in any search engine optimization campaign or strategy. You will need to find keywords that you would like your website to appear in search engines for. I use seobook.com. They have a free keyword tool that allows you to type a broad keyword phrase and it gives you 100 narrowed keywords.
Step 2: Write Articles
Now that you have your keywords, you need to begin writing your articles. There are some very important things to keep in mind when writing articles. When writing articles be sure you are not rambling on about your product, service, or site. This is irritating for the reader and article directories will reject the article and ban you from their directory. When writing articles make sure you provide value and give people information they otherwise may not have known. Quality is key. If you need an example just look at the style and format of this article you are reading now. I’m not outright soliciting my site. I’m providing you with what I believe to be important and beneficial information. (at least I think it is)
Category : Blog &Marketing &Search Engine Ranking
Cheow Yu Yuan – March 27, 2009
If your website is not indexed by search engines, it will not appear on the search engine listings. Therefore, when your website is live, the first thing you must do is to let the search engines notice your website and index it. In this article, let me share with you 5 ways to get your site indexed by today:
1. Submitting a XML sitemap to search engines. The xml sitemap includes links to every page of your website. It is a file that you can submit to search engines to get your pages indexed. By submitting your xml sitemap, you will notify the search engines about your website and index every page of it. You can upload your sitemap to Google by creating a free Google Webmaster account.
2. Create a HTML sitemap page on your website. A HTML sitemap is very different from a xml sitemap file. A HTML sitemap is a page on your website that is visible to your visitors. It will list down all the links to every page of your site. This allows visitors to navigate your site easily and allow search engine spiders to follow the links and discover all pages.
3. Place HTML text links on your website. Search engine spiders follow HTML text links to discover other pages of your website. Therefore, you must ensure that you use HTML text links for simple navigation menu so that search engine spiders can follow. Also, you should hyperlink keywords within your content and point them to other pages of your site. This is a good way to tell search engines what pages are important.
4. Directory submission. Submit your website URL to a list of SEO-friendly directories. DMOZ, Yahoo Directory and BOTW are important directories that you must submit your website to. It is, however, not all directory submission is free. Some may require you to pay a small fee for your website submission.
Category : Blog &search engine optimization &Search Engine Ranking &SEO
Keyword research determines which keywords you should be targeting with the SEO. Most people think that they know which keywords they should target. Instinct can be a great resource, but it can also be misleading and is almost always not enough. For example, “search engine optimization” gets an estimated 16,000 searches a day while “search engine marketing” gets an estimated 8,800 searches a day. If your gut tells you to target “search engine marketing”, you may get great rankings, but it would only get you half of the traffic that you could have had if you had targeted and ranked well for “search engine optimization”. There are also keywords that you may not be able to rank well for without a lot of time and significant amount of link building regardless of how well you optimize your site. In addition, there are keywords that other people will use to search for what your site offers that you would never even think of. So, in addition to letting you know which keywords are more popular, the research can also provide new keywords to target.
Drawing on the analogy in our search marketing parable (found on the Church Marketing Online blog), optimizing your website without first doing keyword research is like trying to pick apples from a tree without first checking to see if there are any apples on it or if the apples are within your reach. You could end up putting in a lot of effort but going home with little fruit from your labor. So it’s a key component of search engine optimization.
What Do I Research?
There are two main aspects to keyword research. The first is popularity, how often are keywords actually searched for. Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, and MSN don’t share the actual number of searches for specific keywords; however, there are a few tools online which are generally thought to be pretty accurate and Google does offer a free tool that gives the “approximate” number of searches for some keywords. The keyword popularity tools (other than Google’s) use the search data from a number of other smaller search engines along with a few algorithms to predict how many searches are being made for specific keywords. It’s not perfect, but it gives you an idea of which keywords are most popular. Since Google’s figures come from…well…Google, they are probably the most accurate, but even their figures are only estimates and I’ve found that many keywords return a “Not enough data” result. You may wish to use both Google and another keyword popularity tool.
The second aspect to keyword research is competition research. Competition research starts with analyzing your web pages to determine how competitive your site is both in general and for specific keywords. This is sometimes referred to as page strength. I should note that there are really two aspects to page strength, the general strength of a site and the specific strength of a page within the site. For the sake of simplicity, in this article I will use “web page” for both. The next step is to examine the keywords themselves to see how competitive they are. This is sometimes called keyword difficulty. Determining keyword difficulty is done partially by examining how competitive the pages are that rank well for this keyword, though other methods can be helpful as well. This can be tricky for two reasons.
Category : Blog &Marketing &search engine optimization &Search Engine Ranking &SEO
Steve Waganer – March 28, 2009
In this global market, online access is the prime medium for the globalization. Information and commerce are mingling with each other in order to open doors for the people who are interested in this communication process. Organic search engine marketing is such a marketing process through which one can promote business or the product and can have the full update about the business world.
The new comers are promoting their own sites in order to be acquainted with the market. A computer with the online service is enough to reach out to the enthusiasts. Organic search engine marketing is the helping hand to provide all kinds of assistance to create a site which can be discovered by the searching engines. (more…)
Category : Magazines
Search engine placement optimization requires you have a detailed strategy outlined. The detailed strategy should include three parts. It should include keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan.
Below I will briefly discuss the importance of keywords, meta information, and a marketing plan and how they are affected for search engine placement optimization.
Keywords: Before you even begin creating a website you should have several hundred keywords pre-established to determine exactly what keywords you want the search engines to index your website for. If you have already created your website and have not established keywords yet, it is ok because you can still do so now. In order to gain a healthy amount of keywords, you need to use a keyword tool. There are many keyword tools out there that charge outrageous fees to provide monthly search volumes in search engines, and they are all 100% false. Do not get scammed. Search engines do not release their search volumes. For the ones that used to such as Yahoo, they have reported that their search volumes are extensively inaccurate so how in the world could a keyword tool provide accurate search volumes of the search engines themselves can not figure this out? Get it now? Ok. Good. There is a free keyword tool called seobook. Google seo book keyword tool, and the exact link will pop up. Seobook gives you up to 100 keywords and estimated search volumes for free. I use them and I love them, and most importantly I don’t pay a dime.
After you’ve gathered your keywords you need to ensure your meta information on your website is written appropriately.
Category : Marketing
