In recent years there has been a massive drive in the business world to save on human costs by selling products online. For this reason millions of websites have popped up all over the internet trying to do just that. Whilst the internet does provide a chance for businesses to save money by cutting down on wages, many websites struggle to get the right volume of hits in order to kick start their website sales. What these businesses need to do is advertise their websites more effectively to increase awareness and hopefully generate more activity on the site.

If you’re looking to advertise your website online without spending a fortune then pixel advertising could be the solution you need. Pixel advertising is a cheap, effective and modern way to put your brand name, company logo or product information on a website than can direct traffic to your own website. Pixel websites display the advert you pay for on their website in the form of a link so anybody visiting the site who views your advert can be directed to your own site. Advertising in this way is not ludicrously expensive and pixel adverts can be bought for as little as ten pounds on many UK sites.

Adverts are usually charged per pixel, for example a ten pixel display may cost ten pound on a site that charges one pound per pixel. Adverts will appeal to smaller companies looking to keep expenditure on advertising to a minimum. Pixel advertising provides a cost-effective and modern alternative to the more orthodox and lucrative schemes such as T.V, Radio and Newspapers. In order to gauge the potential of such schemes one need only look to the success of people like Alex Tew and his website ‘million dollar homepage’. Pixel advertising may well be the future of web advertising and with the initial success of the idea catching on, now may well be the ideal time to invest in pixel advertising before costs shoot up.

Whilst a website is a great way to sell products, the website will only be successful if people are aware of its existence and the site is generating a lot of interest. In order to generate this interest pixel advertising is a great solution as the sites direct traffic to your website. Pixel Advertising is relatively inexpensive and appeals to small or start-up businesses as there are very little or no costs involved in setting up an account and you just pay for the size of the ad you want, in the position that you want it. Couldn’t be simpler!

Source:ezinearticles.com

MINIMIZATION (NOT OPTIMIZATION)

Allow me to minimize the importance of search engine optimization, or SEO. The real work to be done is search engine marketing, or SEM. You’ll want to find a savvy partner for this journey. It takes a ton of patience, intuition and insight to read into the abundance of Google traffic statistics and arrive at prioritized, strategic focus areas. How you market against this knowledge decides whether you will rise or fall.

Before we look at a list of activities that constitutes “the real work” of improving Google rankings, please consider the following:

1) Everyone wants more online visitors, which makes the marketplace very competitive. This is not silver bullet marketing!

2) The best in SEO simply gets you “on the grid” – which means people will find you somewhere along the results returned by Google but not in the top 5 positions where over 75% of traffic gravitates.

3) SEO can only succeed where real research in engaged – meaning that it takes a smart marketer to navigate Google data and separate the real opportunities from millions of searches. Once these decisions have been both artfully and scientifically made, then leveraging that knowledge for results at your website is very easy.

4) Search engine optimization is misleading. It should be “search engine minimization” since it’s the least you can do for your website to get into the game (too many think it’s ALL they need to do).

5) The real difference is made with search engine marketing where you commit a budget to an ongoing campaign of measures that raise your optimized website in the rankings. A pro can help you to prioritize which measures bring the greatest return in the near-term.

So, what are the various service areas included in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) services? There are two major components – increasing visibility and improving conversion. The latter is the process by which prospects are turned first to leads and then to customers. While SEO falls entirely in the first category, SEM straddles both categories. One thing should be clear. It’s not enough to turn consumers on to your product. You need to motivate them to buy!

INCREASING VISIBILITY

Online Niche Discovery
Keyword Research
Google Local Listings
Google Organic Rankings
Google Sponsored Ads (pay-per-click, PPC, Adwords)
Blogging
Local Forums
Customer Reviews
Article Marketing
Press Releases
Link building
Business Directories
Industry Memberships

IMPROVING CONVERSION

Branding Consultation
Website Design
Website Copy writing
eCommerce
Contact Form Management
Email List Building
eNewsletter (quarterly)
RSS Feed Management
Multimedia Development
WordPress Blog Software
Content Management System (CMS)
Audio/Video Content Development
Google Analytics
Progress Reports

Eric S. Townsend
Marketing Expert
http://www.ericstownsend.com
202 494 4326
eric.s.townsend@gmail.com

Source:ezinearticles.com

PageRank (PR) is a number calculated by Google which determines the popularity or reputation of particular web page. Its basic algorithm is known, however, it is not possible to precisely calculate this number with some tool because the details are known only to Google. The basic principle is that the number and the quality of backlinks to particular page define its authority. This authority is in measured by this magic number–PageRank. The same applies to the quality of the backlink–the measure for this is again PageRank. The PR for each page is constantly calculated by Google and it is not know to the public. Few times a year Google releases integer value of this number to the public. It can be accessed with Google toolbar, dedicated websites or widgets.

While this number itself does not guarantee high positions in search results it is still a good measure of the quality of the page. The higher the PR the more useful or respected page it is. Therefore it is a good idea to invest some time and effort to raise PR number as high as possible. Another useful property of this number is that it can serve as a tool to quickly evaluate the quality of any website. If you are purchasing a domain or website then the PR number is the first indication of the quality of the site.

The only way to increase PageRank is by getting as many backlinks as possible. In general, every link counts but you should pay attention to at least two things. The first one is the PageRank of pages where you are trying to get backlinks. The higher the PR the more is link worth. In other words, every page passes its reputation (measured by the PR value) to other pages it links to. Therefore, you should look for link opportunities on pages with high PR. The second important fact is the “nofollow” attribute. Links which are marked with this attribute do not contribute to the PageRank calculation and are, from this point of view, worthless. However, link is a link. It points to your page and visitor can follow it. This means that nofollow links still have some value and should not be discarded. On the other hand, the PR value and the nofollow attribute apply only to Google. Other search engines treat links equally.

The easiest way to optimize PageRank value is to get backlinks from blogs, forums, Web 2.0 sites or web directories. There are forums and blogs for every possible niche. All you have to do is to find them. Try to contribute some useful content, posting backlinks to your website should not be the first priority.

Source:ezinearticles.com

The phrase ‘Long Tail’ is a marketing term which was coined fairly recently and was brought about by the move to online retailing and the way that it’s now possible to offer a virtually unlimited number of products to people, whereas in the past you needed to worry about stocking shelves and taking up aisle space for people to have a choice of what to buy.

The term Long Tail refers to the shape of the curve you get when you draw a diagram to represent the change in demand for less and less popular products. So if you imagine a graph where down the left you have demand and along the bottom you have products, you’d see that there is massive demand for the really popular things dwindling down to almost zero demand for the really niche stuff. That sweeping curve and the diminishing space underneath it as it goes to the less in-demand items is the tail and the ‘long’ tail is all that space that’s catering for very little demand but for a lot of products. It’s pretty much asymptotic (never reaching zero) because of the constant stream of new things into the online marketplace.

However, the popularity of the term has meant that IMers also now use it when referring to search terms with less and less demand. So you’re likely to see/hear the phrase ‘Long Tail Keyword Phrase’ used in forums. Obviously the number of words in a phrase is not directly related to the popularity of the product/niche, but when narrowing down your target audience it with your website content or messaging for PPC, it can be a useful way to do some research.

If you’re in the music niche – long tail might just mean very niche cult status music – it could still be one or two keywords. The keywords just represent what people are using to search for those long tail niches, so there is no set number of keywords relating to this subject – it all depends on the niche.

It seems to be commonly accepted (probably because someone positioning themselves as a guru said so) that 3 or more keywords in a phrase is what people call long tail. So if you see it in use – that’s likely to be what they mean. If you know your market and its sub and micro-niches you should be able to find some long tail phrases without too much trouble – just don’t confuse it with terms that don’t get searched much or you may end up wasting your time.

The reason people even care about such things is that it’s often a good strategy to build your web content one step at a time with consideration given to the search terms you know people use to find such content. Therefore targeting lower demand search terms first and gradually building up content that crosses the boundaries of those terms within your main niche can be a great way to get traffic and build authority while moving towards competing in a highly competitive niche.

Source:ezinearticles.com

For any business that doesn’t follow the headlines of the search marketing industry closely they could be asking themselves many different questions in today’s market place on how to market a website. Search marketing today is not what it was 5 years ago. The search industry grows changes and evolves and many businesses are struggling to keep up with recent marketing trends on the internet. The digital marketing era is move very quickly. Changes come as technology grows and the movements are rapid and often times without warning.

Years ago the goal for any business online was to be number one in the search results. Rankings are still very important but there are many different areas a website needs to be visible in not just rankings. Social media and personalized search are changing the way online marketers approach their internet marketing efforts. Ignoring websites like Facebook and Twitter will limit anybody’s exposure online. There are over 100 factors that determine where a website ranks online. The efforts a company might be applying from a few years ago just might not be enough anymore. The days of being scared to get into the social media landscape should be over. Companies and businesses cannot wait any longer to start building their own online communities. The days of creating a science project to market a website are over and business owners, managers and CEO’s really need to realize that marketing a business online truly takes a fierce and aggressive marketing approach. It is not about quantity any more but about quality.

Personalized search is slowly infiltrating the search results every single day. More and more search users are starting to freeze search results and bookmark helpful links in order to not be bombarded by useless spammy links that really do not benefit anybody. This is an area that is only getting starting in the online community. As things grow stronger it will become even more evident that websites need to put on their marketing caps and really approach their website as a business entity and not a recipe. SEO recipes do not work any longer. We are already starting to see these changes take effect in search results every day. More social feeds are making their way into the search results along with a variety of new features that users can use to strengthen their search experience. Don’t be ignorant and think the ways of yesterday are the only ways to market an online business. Things are changing very quickly and it is up to every single business owner to stay on top of the industry. Those that chose not to keep up could find themselves becoming invisible over time.

Source:ezinearticles.com

You hired an SEO expert to help improve your search engine rankings and bring traffic to your site. It’s a wise business move, and one that can bring in lots more sales. Your initial impression was that this work would be done once, and that once your website was updated and indexed through the major search engines, you’d be finished. But, now, you find out that your SEO expert thinks you should be blogging. Here’s why.

Search engines use what are called spiders to find websites to include in their results. These spiders look for the keywords that the searcher used. They look specifically in your titles, headers, anchor text and Metatags. The more they find, the higher your rank, put in simple terms. That’s why your SEO expert is ensuring that your keywords are in all the right places.

But, here’s the catch. Spiders like fresh, regularly updated content. If your SEO expert puts good content out there and it never gets touched again, it will eventually cause your site to fade from the rankings. Regularly adding and updating content keeps the spiders on your site.

Blogging is a great way to do this. By becoming a blogger, you’re making a regular commitment to update your site with fresh content. You can also make your site more of a “go to” resource for your regular customers by blogging. Sharing tips of the trade and other helpful information keeps visitors coming back and helps strengthen your image as an expert in your field. If you don’t want to blog yourself, you can always use a ghostwriter who writes the blog under your name. All you have to do in this case is provide the subjects for the blogs or keywords to your writer.

If you don’t want to blog, you can simply add articles on a regular basis to your site to keep the content fresh. This is another area where a ghostwriter can help you by contributing articles regularly that appeal to your readers.

Source:ezinearticles.com

Cache – after finding the cache pages, this tool shows a preview of the search result. Additionally, the site PageRank is displayed.

Code to Text Calculator – checks the percentage of text within the page.

Copyscape – finds the content duplicate of your page on the Internet.

Google Banned Tool – checks if the URL is banned and indexed in Google database. The reason why your site is banned if it is banned and your new website is still unindexed are told by this tool.

Meta Tag Generator – creates a search engine friendly head tag for your site.

Poodle Predictor – gives you a preview of your site in the search engine results ahead of the time when search engine cached your site. This website optimization tool prevents your site from having an undesirable description.

Title and Meta Tag Generator – allows you to create instant meta tags including the title, description, abstract, keyword and robot meta tags to be able to achieve an enhanced search engine ranking.

Search Engine Spider Simulator – show the web pages precisely how the SEs would view it. The simulator also shows the followed or crawled hyperlinks once the search engine visits a specific URL or web page.

Similar Page Checker – is a tool used to check the similarity of two pages in a percentage type. Make an effort to keep your page similarity as small as possible so that SE penalties will be avoided.

Web Page Analyzer – investigates your page if it’s SE friendly via series of basic tests. It gives a report on the good and bad SEO used in the webpage.

Source:ezinearticles.com

Having a blog on the Internet that gives people some good information doesn’t do a lot of good if people don’t know that it’s there. If you want people to be able to find your blog, something that is important is that you have good Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

Whenever you put one or more words into a search bar to look for something, the SEO of a website is what helps bring up those websites. For example, if your blog is about Harry Potter, you are going to want to be sure that your blog includes popular terms such as Harry Pottter, JK Rowling, and other things that are related to Harry Potter. Think about the things that people look for when they are interested in Harry Potter, and the kinds of things that come up when you search.

It’s always a good idea to use your own experience when you are optimizing your blog for searching. Think about what has worked, what hasn’t worked, and use them for your own blog SEO. This way, when someone puts one of the terms that you put in your blog into a search engine it will be one of the sites that comes up.
Of course, there are other factors that come into play that determine where your blog will come up in the list, but everyone starts somewhere.The more keywords that your blog uses, the more people will come to your blog. It just takes time and patience.

Source:ezinearticles.com

Here are some common concerns you might be feeling:

1) Google is smart. Why should I do anything special to my web site?

Google may be smart but at the end of the day, it still needs your help. Well written content, well designed navigation, well constructed code all make a huge difference in whether or not Google “gets” what your site is about. Leave out any piece of the puzzle and Google might get confused. A confused Google is a Google that gives up and moves on to some other site instead of giving your site the attention it deserves.

2) All of you SEO firms talk a lot about keyword research… frankly it seems like a waste of money. I already know what my products are called!

It’s true – You are an expert on what your business does but your customers aren’t experts and they are the people you’re trying to reach.

Even though you might call something one thing, they might be using a completely different way to describe it. Since people find web sites through keyword searches and Google uses your keywords to rank your site, you need Google to know that even though your product is called XYZ, when someone else calls it ABC, it’s still the same product.

Keyword research helps you determine how your prospects are searching for you and it lets you know which terms are the best chance for reaching the right people. Leave this part out and you pass up sales. Can you afford to do that?

3) I’ve already written my web site, why would I hire someone to revise the content on it? Isn’t that a waste of money?

The truth is that going back and revising content for a web site is a lot harder and more time consuming than simply allowing an SEO firm with strong copywriters on staff to write your content right from the start.

It’s not that they won’t do it – they revise content all the time (almost every site needs at least some re-writing in order to best capture visitors and search engines) – but you’ll be a lot happier with the results if you get an SEO professional on board right from the start.

If you’re just starting out with a web site or considering re-doing it, consider letting an SEO firm in on the process from Day One. You’ll wind up with properly optimized text that is compelling both to visitors and search engines and you won’t have to spend any amount of time re-doing someone else’s work. It’s a win-win for everyone.

If it’s too late (you’ve already written your site), remember that well-optimized content can be the difference between ranking on the first page of results and the 50th page of results. Since visitors generally don’t go past the first couple of pages, can you afford to be anywhere else?

4) You keep talking to me about links and off-page elements. Why does this matter? I already let you design my site, write it, code it…!! Isn’t that enough?

Five years ago? Yes. Today? Not so much. Sure, there are some sites that seem to do well without paying any attention to this but believe your SEO professional when they say it is pure accident and it won’t last forever.

Just like you wouldn’t send a product to market without any marketing materials, you shouldn’t send your web site out onto the Internet without working on promoting it. There are a lot of ways to do this but the most effective way is to apply sustained efforts to building links from good sources like press releases, articles and appropriate directories. And depending on your industry there are also huge opportunities available to participate in the social media space (YouTube, Facebook, etc.)

Is it time consuming? Absolutely. Hard? It can be. Boring? Once in awhile. But it’s also necessary. And an SEO firm that doesn’t talk to you about these things is doing your site a disservice.

And even if you do everything else right but leave this part out, your web site and your business will eventually suffer. Just ask the sites that enjoyed prime time placement with no effort right up until one of their competitors got on board with marketing their site. Don’t put yourself in that position. It is much easier to work hard consistently than it is to scramble at the last minute!

Source:ezinearticles.com

Everyone has been ‘buzzing’ around the new social media platform launched by Google recently – Google Buzz. There is nothing outstanding about the layout – it’s a sort of Twitter meets FriendFeed design. The major difference (and advantage) Buzz has over the existent social networks is that it is integrated into your Gmail account. There are many other interesting features which have been discussed in much detail across the internet, hence in this article I will just concentrate on SEO implications of Google Buzz.

For Search Engine Optimizers, the two interesting aspects of Google Buzz are:

1. The ‘implicit’ priority that Google Buzz will get on the Google Search Engine
2. The ‘auto-following’ – you can leverage Gmail to grow your social network more rapidly (compared with Twitter) since Buzz has a built-in viral feature by auto-following contacts

For the past few years, Google has moving towards a trend know as ‘real-time’ or ‘blended’ search. On your search result page you won’t only see organic (free results) and sponsored ads but also images, video, Twitter, MySpace and news posts (all as it happens). The opportunities for SEO here are:

1. Google may interpret links from these posts to your website as having some marginal impact on your PageRank.
2. People may read your tweets, news posts and thereby directly o to your website
3. The posts themselves may show up on Google searches and give you some temporary visibility for free and for your target keywords.

I may be speculating here but I believe that Google Buzz might get a slight advantage when it comes to ‘real-time’ search, after all its Google’s baby.

Or look at it this way – Google is in all ways the dominating Search Engine – a huge monopoly, huge profits to link products to attractive packages and important products to give away for free. Buzz is already linked to Gmail and Google says that public Buzz will be indexed on Google search engines (have a look at the launch video). Google is also indexing Twitter posts; all of this encourages an SEO to see Buzz as a powerful tool.

Also take a look at YouTube, video posts on Google are heavily biased towards it with respect to other alternative video services. Not really sure if Buzz will outrank Twitter but there is a vast opportunity to be exploited from an SEO perspective.

Another important point is that you can get a real link from Google.com Many SEO people still like to get links, especially from an authority domain. All your buzzes are extra pages with their own clean URL. The links don’t use the infamous no-follow attribute that makes them useless for search engines.

I believe Google Buzz has a vast opportunity that can be exploited by search engine optimizers. So buzz your way around!

Source:ezinearticles.com