Source: ezinearticles

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!

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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

If you are operating an online business you need to know how Search Engine Optimization can help your venture develop. Whether you have products and services to sell, are trying to generate some money through affiliate marketing, or simply have a content website that you need good traffic flows for, a robust SEO campaign will be fundamental to its success. So, how can SEO help your business exactly?

First of all it is important to understand what SEO is. As the name suggests, it is the system for ensuring your website is optimized for display in search engines. This doesn’t only mean giving your website excellent visibility, but also ensuring it is rated and indexed correctly. It also means making your website a valuable resource to these search engines. The more valuable your site, the higher ranked it will be and the further up the list of results it will appear.

Okay, so we have explained what it is and how it intends to help. But what do you, personally, have to do to get SEO to work for you?

Other than ensuring your website is amongst the best of its kind, (and why wouldn’t you?), the single most important SEO factor is the page title. Ensure it includes the relevant keyword or words, and any misspellings or related words you can think of. You should also try to make all URLs keyword friendly, but don’t overdo this and risk coming across as “spammy”.

Some people often go too far, and write their page content to appease the bots that Google, Yahoo and others have searching the web. However, to date, no bot has dipped his, or her, hand in their respective script pocket and purchased anything. Write attractive copy, to attract the customer.

Introduce a site map on your site. Spiders will be unable to index pages if they can’t find their way around them. And be sure to anchor text properly, any linked-to pages with “click here”, will not be picked up by spiders as they crawl by,

There are many, many techniques involved in strong SEO. However, whilst some do have longevity, it is important to constantly monitor and update how they perform. What worked today, may not work tomorrow.

Search engines are whimsical things, and subject to change their parameters at the drop of a hat. Remember to diversify your resources. Whilst one search engine may account for over fifty percent of your traffic, what if this disappears overnight?

It may be worth hiring the services of an SEO company. However, do your research well and seek testimonials. If your budget does not stretch to that, become a student. There are many online and offline resources for building your own SEO methods to help.

SEO is critical today, as traffic is generated according to how prominent your site appears. Page 23 of the results rarely gets looked at! The more prominent you are, the more hits your site gets, the more hits you get, the more will turn into revenue generating sales, the more sales… Well, you do the math.

Source:ezinearticles.com

From and SEO perspective, there are two important aspects of site navigation crawl ability and navigability. Some of your competitors in the SEO business will look only at the first of these, but both factors are equally important.

First we need to consider Crawlability, or how accessible the sites pages are to search engine spiders. In the ideal case all of the sites content will be accessible by human visitors and spiders within three mouse clicks from the home page.

Second we must consider navigability or how accessible the rest of the site is to visitors who enter through any of its landing pages. No matter where a visitor lands you want to guide them back in to your site’s sale funnel

Improving Crawlability

Spiders are not the most capable site visitors. They don’t accept cookies, they cant fill out forms, and they don’t necessarily understand JavaScript. They cant see the contents of images (or image maps), they don’t have the flash plug-in installed and they are easily confused by simple drop-down menus and other common elements of site design. If we want spiders to crawl a website, we have to make it easy for them

In addition to making all content accessible, we must ensure that the same content is never accessible through more than one URL. When a spider believes that it’s being given duplicate content it may stop crawling and flag the site as uncrawlable.

In order to eliminate crawlability issue, on the perfect site, all content would be accessible within three mouse clicks of the home page. This isn’t a hard -and -fast rule, but in my experience it greatly improves sites crawlability. All of the links would displays as plain text hyperlinks. A site map, hyperlinked from every pages of the site would include links of every page on the site

Such a structure would be ideal for spiders, but its not so great for usability! In the real world websites have to work for human visitors and there may be many elements of the user interface that don’t fit into this ideal picture.

Improving Navigability

Solving a sites crawlability issue will allow search engines to find all of the sites important content. While it might sound good in theory, this situation creates new challenges for us. Any page that’s indexed by search engine might become a landing page for a searcher,

For the homepage, category pages and products/service pages, this is not usually a problem because these pages are almost always fully integrated with the site navigation system and it’s easy for visitors to find their way to other pages on the site.

As we discussed above information and support pages may also attract clicks and as long as these pages are part of the overall navigation scheme this won’t be a huge problem. However, these kids of pages are not always designed as entry pages. Often they are intended to be destinations. It might seem strange for a web hosting company to place advertisements on their tech support pages, since these pages are usually targeted to their exiting customers. However if these pages attract visitors from search engines advertising on them is actually a very good idea from a navigability perspective.

Information pages are often implemented as pop-up windows. This is a technique that’s used to keep visitors on the “money pages”, while providing answers to their more specific questions. This functionality can become problematic when we look at it from an SEO perspectives, however if we make pup-up window crawlable, we need to ensure that visitors arriving at those pages from search engines can navigate to the rest of the site

In this day and age, one of the important things business owners need to know is how local search marketing works. Local search marketing is what search engine algorithms are after to give more relevant information for every query on the Internet. There are some important steps that must be done first before trying to rank your website pages in the search engines. Organic search marketing has become more competitive than before and there is no magic bullet on how to perfectly run local search marketing. However, there is a guide that will prevent local small business owners from falling away in the competition.

Those who want to rank in local search engine result pages must know the value of research. Research is the very first important SEO move to understand. Research must be very focused on a certain part of the Internet that you are trying to conquer and this is known as the “niche”. Skipping this part is like recklessly heading your way to profit loses which in fact, many SEO experts agree that finding a niche is the most important part of the SEO journey. Below is a checklist that you can follow in starting your local online marketing.

Answer these basic questions: What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve? What do you want your client to do if they find your website? As you answer these questions, you can easily write down your specific goals. One example is this, “I want all local small businesses in every city of Australia to find my website and persuade them to opt in my email list and download a free report titled, ‘Discover the Secrets to Placing Your Business Online!’”

What are your specific keywords that relate to your business? These keywords are the bridges for your potential clients to find your site. What words might small business owners type into search engine query boxes if they want to hire an organic local search marketing specialist? Is it “local search marketing”, “search marketing specialist”, “internet marketing services”, or “small business internet marketing”? There are many geo targeted keyword variations and permutations that you could use to locally get your ideal customers.

In addition, don’t forget to record your best performing keywords and focus on them. It is known that 20 percent of your keywords produce 80 percent of the production, and 80 percent of your keywords produce 20 percent of the total performance. This is very true in local internet marketing and must be kept in mind.

Analyse the current local websites which are ranking in the top three pages of a particular group of choice keywords. Why they are on the top and what are the factors that made them to effectively rank well? Investigating and knowing your competition will help you strategise your way up to conquer the first page of local search results. Use Google Local, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Ask City, City Search, and Yelp to check all competitors. List all your competitors and study them. Use Yahoo site explorer to check their backlinks and see how you can do better.

Organic local search marketing will give you the highest return of investment and it is long term compared to other internet marketing methods. Search engines give priority to websites with high information relevancy and trustworthiness. The more you focus on the basic steps of local search marketing the more you will earn a good reputation both in local search engines and your visitors.

Source:ezinearticles.com