I spent some time recently talking to various Search Engine Optimization firms. These are people who offer to increase the visibility of your web site for a fee. Other than pretending to be interested in their services (I’m not), I was completely honest about my site, my present statistics, and my goals. We’ll cover all that, but first a statement you probably won’t find surprising:
There’s a lot of snake oil out there.
Well, you probably knew that. On the other hand, I did have some pleasant conversations with a few people, and even got a few snippets of free advice. Some of that advice might have even been worthwhile, though most of it was rather generic and nothing you couldn’t find easily on the web. (more…)
Advertising your business in the correct manner is a sure shot key to success. Advertising helps you to reach out to a larger number of people from other websites. You definitely cannot expect these many people to come to you on their own.
But Advertising is very, very COSTLY! And if you don’t watch out, you may actually be going broke after paying your advertising bills, if your ads do not generate revenue. So, you should make sure you get value for your money.
With my own experiences in this field, I have drawn up some questions for Webmasters who are new to the field of Website Marketing. Take a good look at them EVERY TIME you make your advertising plan. (more…)
Profitability with Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising comes down to how well you have chosen your keywords.
Choose too generic a term and you will lose your shirt – and fast. Choose too specific a term and you’ll miss out on traffic your competitors will get.
For example, let’s say you offer a travel guides for sale online – here are some possible keywords with associated monthly traffic counts and top bid as of the time this article was written: (more…)
Remember those little quizzes you used to see in magazines with headlines like: ‘How Compatible Are You and Your Partner?’ or ‘Are You Dating Mr Wrong?’. Well, we thought it might be fun to create a 5 min quiz for you to test the compatibility of your site with search engines. Your total score will give you an idea of whether your site is destined for a “high ranking honeymoon” in the engines or headed towards separation from the indexes. Pens ready?
Here we go: (more…)
Email is a unique opportunity when you’re marketing. It’s like being a business owner and having the customer standing right in front of you, a captive audience. Treat this person as the target market and make your signature block, your sig, work for you.
It’s part of branding. Everything about you, and everything that comes from you, is consistent and bears your stamp.
If you’re in a professional service, such as coaching, add a quotation that reveals something of who you are and what your philosophy is. Use it with, or instead of, a tagline. (more…)
Whatever your home-based internet business is, you must have people visit your website. The best way for this to happen is to have a high search engine ranking. This takes time, skill, and money.
For those of us that have limited budgets and can’t afford sponsored links, full page ads, or speedy URL insertions, there is an alternative — The Pay Per Click (or PPC).
The Pay Per Click is geared towards business owners who have outgrown free classifieds, but are still not turning enough profit to advertise in the aforementioned way. (more…)
Search Engine Friendly Pages
Your web site may look beautiful to your eyes, but what about to the “eyes” of a search engine? If you can understand how a search engine “sees” your site, than you can design the site or make the necessary changes so that your site will get a higher ranking in search results.
The first thing to consider is that search engines do not see pictures or other graphics. If you have rendered some very important text (loaded with keywords) as an image, a beautiful multi-colored gif for example, the search engine will not index these keywords. There are some wizard-oriented web creation tools that may automatically change your text into a gif or jpg image. It may look like text to you, but not to a search engine. Thus, you have to weigh the relative importance of good images against the need to give the search engine some- thing to chew on, some “spider food”. Usually a balance has to be struck. At one extreme are pages that contain only images. For example if you have an entry page with a beautiful image of the ocean and a beautiful sunset with one word saying Enter. It may be dramatic looking, but it is not very interesting for a search engine. Similarly sites that are only Flash images, don’t give anything for the search engine’s “spider” (robotic gather- ing tool) to gobble up and put into the index. If you want to use Flash, consider making a hybrid page, one that has some elements, such as informative text (rendered in HTML) and a section in Flash. Keep this in mind and make sure that your important concepts and keywords do appear on your pages in a text format. (more…)
Google Search Engine Optimization
Google is by far the most popular search engine available today for both ordinary surfers and webmasters.
Surfers like it because of the highly relevant results it gives, and the speed it gives them at. This is due to its complex text matching algorithm and of course the PagerankT system that this engine uses. More on the PagerankT system later.
Google is popular with webmasters and Internet Marketing companies due to the highly workable ranking system it uses. (more…)
Search Engine Optimization
Many small businesses simply do not have the resources to hire a search engine optimization (SEO) company to promote their web site. There are countless resources online for do-it-yourself (DIY) optimizers where professional SEO’s offer general recommendations and advice. This article is my opportunity to offer more of my SEO experience in the form of a 10-minute optimization process.
This process will be effective for any page designed in HTML with at least 1 paragraph of html text but for the purposes of this article, I will concentrate on the all- important home page. (more…)
First of all, for beginners, I’ll give a brief definition of a domain name.
Your domain name is the same as “www.yoursitename.com”. It’s also known as your URL or Website Address.
For example, www.webmastercourse.com is my site’s domain name or my web address.
The domain name must be registered and approved before you can call it your own. The reason it works this way is because two websites having the same domain name cannot reside online at the same time. If someone types in www.webmastercourse.com, he/she will go to my website and no one else’s.
Registering your domain name and awaiting approval gives the registration company opportunity to check with every other company around the world to be sure no one else has already applied for your domain name “first.” (more…)
