When you are looking for something on the Internet, what do you usually do? You go to a search engine. Where do those results come from and how do you put your website up there too?
The mother of all marketing tools online is the search engine. There are many to choose from and there is no reason not to be listed in as many as you possibly can. However, there are only a few which garner more than 80% (between them) of the Internet’s searching traffic. These are usually referred to as the “Top Ten Search Engines.” They are, in no particular order: Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, AOL, Excite, LookSmart, Google, and the Open Directory. (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…)
Yahoo!
With the new Yahoo! “Pay-For-Review” model it might be relatively easier for sites to get into the directory but getting traffic from your listing is altogether a different story. And now with it’s new annual recurring payment policy you have to be extra careful while submitting your site for a review.
Here are 8 things to keep in mind while submitting your site to Yahoo!
1) Selecting your domain name is the most vital step in getting a top ranking in Yahoo! and also other directories like Dmoz and Looksmart. Make sure your domain name is “Keyword Rich”. You can make your domain keyword rich by simply inserting hyphens to separate words in your domain name. Yahoo! gives more relevance to sites with keywords in their domain name. (more…)
Many do-it-yourself webmasters and online entrepreneurs have been led to believe that search engine positionining is a black art, and that no mere amateur can hope to compete with the “experts.” If you are among them, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to drive free, targeted traffic to your website.
There are only three steps you need to take, if you want to quickly increase your site’s visibility in the search engines. The three steps are: positioning, optimization, and link building. In this short tutorial, I’ll explain what’s involved in each one, and show you just how easy it can be. If you can give me even 10 minutes of your time today, you’ll be well on your way to top rankings.
If there is one message I’d like to get across to you, it’s “don’t fear the search engines.” Not everything that you have been told about them is true! If you would like to increase the amount of traffic flowing to your website, without spending a dime, I urge you to read this article with an open mind. (more…)
How to Get Search Engine Traffic
Of all the traffic my websites have generated the past few years (literally millions of visitors) ONE traffic source stands head and shoulders above the rest…
Search Engine Traffic.
Specifically, traffic from google.com and yahoo.com – the leaders in finding things on the web.
The traffic is top quality. These people are finding my sites on their own, so they are my best potential customers. And the traffic flows continually regardless of my advertising budget.
Considering the highly targeted nature of this traffic and the fact that it flows to me virtually without cost, search engine traffic simply cannot be beat. (more…)
When We Really Worked For The Money
I remember when a website wanted to be found it had to adhere to the rules and algorithms for Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Webcrawler, OpenText, Infoseek, Lycos, Yahoo! and Northern Light. An entire industry was born from the need to satisfy the demand to get into those search engines because each had its own algorithms, indexing and ranking criteria.
Someone needed to know how each engine worked, how each directory worked, how to make pages that would be indexed by each of them, where to put them so they were separate from the versions that needed to meet the requirements of another engine, keyword density, how often to submit, how to read search engine logs, how to track indexed pages, how to track visitors, how to build meta tags, how to construct a page so that crawlers could navigate JavaScript, what dynamic links couldn’t be crawled, FLASH workarounds, frames workarounds, MSFrontPage code workarounds and then the killer skill of all, how to get a page to rank well and beat the competition. (more…)
Search engines are still one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your web site. This is because it is highly targeted traffic. A person searching for a particular phrase on a search engine, gets taken to your web site.
It makes sense then, to make your site as attractive as possible to the search engines, so your rankings will improve, giving you more visitors which leads to more sales – your ultimate goal.
Here are 17 powerful strategies you should implement, to substantially increase search engine traffic:
1. Keyword Density – the ratio of keywords to on your visible page to non-keywords is called Keyword Density. i.e. if you have 100 words on your page and 3 of those words are “boat” or “boats”, then you will get a keyword density of 3% of your text for the word “boat”. (more…)
