A Good Smack
If you’re reading this and your web site doesn’t contain any body text on the home page, give yourself a good smack and go to your room without supper. When you?re ready to behave and design your site with the search engines in mind, come back out and read this article.
The simple truth is this: search engines read text and not much else. You absolutely, positively need to use text on the pages of your site that you want indexed and ranked highly. Not graphical text that you created in your fancy design software, but actual, visible body text. Not sure if your site uses graphical or body text? A good rule of thumb that I learnt from search engine guru Danny Sullivan is to try and highlight the text with your mouse. If you can drag your mouse over the text when viewing it in a browser, chances are this is body text and the search engines can read it.
Ok, so you’ve created your body copy and your site pages are loaded with good old-fashioned text. But your job?s not over! Now you need to get targeted. Search engines aren’t going to rank your web site about socks highly if your body copy talks about foot sizes. You need to get specific. If you sell socks, then for heaven’s sake, make sure your site copy has plenty of references to the word socks! At the risk of sounding like Dr Seuss, if you want to be found for, big socks, small socks, cotton socks and wool socks, then mention them all. Better still, sort your copy into categories based on your products and services. If you sell blue socks AND red socks, then have a page dedicated to each kind. This allows you to target niche keywords within your copy and meet the relevancy guidelines for logical search queries.
It sounds so obvious, but I’m constantly amused by the number of web sites I see selling particular items without once making reference to those items in their body copy. For example, there are thousands of sites on the Internet promoting web site design services right? Next time you see one; take a look at their body copy. You’ll be surprised how often you?ll see flashy looking sites without a single mention of the phrase “Web site design” in their page copy. Instead they’ll use fancy all graphic pages or Flash movies. Or if they do use body text, it might include cryptic jargonized language like “Internet Solutions” or “online brand building”.
What the heck does this tell a search engine about their business? Absolutely nothing. Are these sites going to be considered a relevant match for search queries about “web site design”? No way! The creators of these sites might think they’re being clever, but they are really missing the boat entirely. What?s the point of having a web site if you are going to sabotage its ability to be found?
Your Website
Anyway, back to you and your web site. So now you?ve added plenty of text to your pages and the copy flows well for the reader. You’ve researched your keywords and phrases using WordTracker or something similar and now you’re faced with the dilemma of integrating the keywords into your carefully written copy. So how do you satisfy the search engine’s craving for keywords without interrupting the copy flow for the reader? The answer is: very carefully.
Let’s take a look at a practical example. We have a client that specializes in luxury adventure travel. Before I optimized their site, part of the home page copy read like this:
>> “We specialize in providing vacations for people who want a personal service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world’s top travel providers. We can put together packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food.
Extensive WordTracker keyword research for the client had determined that the home page should target the following key phrases:
So taking our original home page text, the challenge was to integrate these keywords carefully and naturally so as not to disturb the logical flow of the copy and lose the interest of the visitor. Here’s how I did it:
“We specialize in providing the best adventure vacations for people who want a personal and tailored travel service. We bring to our efforts a fanatical obsession with quality and exclusivity. We also bring a freshness, an outward-going passion for discovery which justifies our growing reputation as one of the world’s top overseas adventure travel providers. We can put together luxury travel packages that include all adventure activities, accommodation, transport and food”.
Note that the key phrase “overseas adventure travel” accommodates the phrase “adventure travel” too. Voila! The search engines are happy because the site contains text content relevant to related search queries, the client is happy because we were able to integrate the keywords without distracting the visitor and I’m happy because I know the site is going to rank highly for the client?s target search terms.
Now go and apply the same principles to your own site…
* Please note that web site content quoted in this article uses British English so what you might think are spelling errors are actually not!
Author Bio:
Article by Kalena Jordan, CEO of Web Rank. Kalena was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australasia and is well known and respected in her field. For more of her articles on search engine ranking and online marketing, please visit High Search Engine Ranking.
On many sites, it’s impossible to lead visitors straight to your primary goal on the home page. Getting visitors to take your most-desired action often means you have to use your home page to channel them down a certain path. You have to guide visitors through a set of choices before they can actually complete the action you want them to take.
It’s true that some websites revolve around a single product or a single service, in which case, it’s easier to move visitors to your primary goal immediately on the home page. However, your website may offer two or more products or services that are somewhat unrelated to each other, or that target slightly different audiences. (more…)
The Gist
With thousands of businesses becoming a part of the World Wide Web there is a growing need for ways and resources with which to promote these web sites. You are no longer competing with only the major corporations but also with the mom and pop sites and others. Its no longer size that’s the name of the game is smarts. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare!
Going once, going twice…
Pay per click search engines are based on an auction system. Advertisers bid on the position of their sites information in the pay per click search engine’s results for a particular keyword. The position the advertisers site holds is not static and changes real-time based on the bids of competing advertisers. The optimum positions are FIRST, SECOND & THIRD.
The rung way
The following are the basic steps involved in a creating your pay per click advertising campaign.
Step 1. Choose the keywords you feel people will search for to find your site.
Step 2. Complete the pay per click search engine’s registration form.
Step 3. Deposit funds into your account. (This becomes fully available for bidding.)
Step 4. Create your listings title and description so they properly identify what your site is offering.
Step 5. Decide how much you are able to bid per click and bid this amount for your keywords.
Step 6. Wait for your listings to be reviewed by the pay per click search engine’s editorial team.
The motion of the ocean?
It’s not the size of the pay per click search engine that should be your primary concern. Large ppcs get more searches and are able to provide advertisers with more traffic; however, this traffic comes at a premium.
The competition is so fierce for many keywords in the larger ppcs that advertisers sacrifice their ROI just to get their site’s listing into the top 15. On these larger pay per clicks I have seen bids go as high as $25.00. Suddenly smaller businesses are unable to compete for their main keywords. E.g.
Large pay per click search engine (traffic quicker)
1000 clicks @ $2.50/click = $2500.00
Smaller pay per click search engine (more affordable traffic)
1000 clicks @ $0.20/click = $200.00
The ideal scenario would be a combination of both in most cases.
What’s in it for me?
You no longer have to wait months for search engines to include your site in their results. Pay per click search engines get you traffic quickly. Some such as ww.netvisits.com will review your site in as little as 1 hour.
The guessing game is over. You choose the position of your site in the results based on your bid amount without the need to spend months optimizing.
You bid amount is subtracted from your account balance only when someone clicks on your link and visits your site.
Text links + descriptions get a higher response than banners. Assuming your listing title and description paint the right picture of what your site offers, users clicking on your link will have basically been pre-approved by your listing’s information which is also known as targeted traffic.
All Aboard
The pay per click search engine industry is growing rapidly. Companies both large and small are already making the most of this marketing strategy to increase their profits as well as their return on investment. Shouldn’t you be using them too?
Surf’s up
Pay per click search engines have and are still making waves in the search engine and web site promotion industries. They now allow advertisers to get rapid quantifiable results to quickly start reaping the fruits of their toil.
Haste makes waste?
Not in the case of pay per click search engines. PPC search engines provide advertisers with targeted traffic for as low as $0.01 per visitor. Advertisers are only charged for actual visits they receive to their site, not for the number of times their link is viewed (impressions). Editorial reviews of listings prior to approval ensure all search results meet the pay per click search engine’s listing standards.
If the cap fits should you wear it?
With the pay per click model you will be paying for traffic to your website aka paid advertising. Answer yes to any of the following questions and there’s an excellent chance that you could benefit significantly from pay per click ads:
How much toll to pay?
So you’ve decided that pay per click advertising could be for you but you are new to this strategy and aren’t sure how much to pay per visit to your site. Not to worry we have a quick and simple way to decide how much your visitors are worth.
*Note* – this is simply a guideline to approximating the value of each visitor to your site.
1. Check your web site statistics for the last 3 months and get the total # of visits, not hits, you received. (If your site is new then you may want to approximate these based on your business plan figures.)
2. Divide this figure by 3 to get the average # of visitors you receive per month.
3. Calculate the total profit received from web site sales in the last 3 months.
4. Divide this figure by 3 to get the average revenue your site makes per month.
5. Divide your avg. profit per month by your average # of visitors per month.
This will be the approximate profit you receive from each visitor to your site. You can base your bid amount on this value decreasing it to the point where you’re making a satisfactory amount of profit per visitor.
Results
In the end pay per click search engines will bring you traffic. You will be able to choose the cost of this traffic, you will receive targeted traffic, you will only be charged for actual visits to your site. For all websites small, medium, “extra medium” and large this is a viable advertising methods that many companies are already taking advantage of and benefiting from.
If you have a website that needs traffic or needs additional traffic then pay per click advertising should be high on your list of marketing tools.
What is click through?
Click through or click popularity is the number of times your web site gets a click when it is displayed in the results of the search engines. It also depends on how much time the visitors, coming to your site from the search results, spend on your web site.
Now a days, many crawler based search engines as well as human edited directories seem to use the concept of click popularity within their ranking algorithm.
Direct Hit considers click popularity to be the dominating factor while determining the ranking of a web site. In Direct Hit, the success of your site depends, on how many clicks your web site attracts and how long they spend on your web site. Apart from DirectHit, Excite, Hotbot and Yahoo! also use click popularity as an important factor in their ranking algorithm. This makes improving your click through an important step of your search engine optimization plan. (more…)
If you’re new to Internet marketing, the many acronyms and abbreviations often used in discussions on the subject can be confusing. To help you get up to speed quickly, here are the meanings of the most important:
ASCII
American Standard Code for Information Interchange – A universally recognized set of digital codes that represent each of the letters, punctuation marks, and other symbols you can type on your computer. What people usually mean by “plain text.”
ASP
Application Service Provider – Company that offers access to software applications and related services over a network or the Internet.
B2B
Business to Business – Refers to trade between businesses rather than between businesses and consumers.
B2C
Business to Consumer – Refers to businesses selling products or services to end-user consumers.
CGI
Common Gateway Interface – A way web servers pass information to and from application programs (to process forms for example). CGI programs or “scripts” can be written in several programming languages, including C, C++, Java and Perl.
CPA
Cost Per Action – Cost to an advertiser for each visitor that takes a specific action in response to an ad, such as subscribing to an ezine, requesting a free trial, or making a purchase. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPC
Cost Per Click – Cost to an advertiser for each click on a promotional link by a site visitor or newsletter reader. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPL
Cost Per Lead – Advertising expenditure required to obtain each new sales lead.
CPM
Cost Per Thousand – The amount charged per thousand impressions (showings) of an ad (“M” is the Roman numeral for 1000). Whilst websites sell ad impressions in blocks of 1000, with newsletters the number of subscribers determines the final price. Also used to describe advertising employing this model.
CPS
Cost Per Sale – Advertising expenditure divided by sales generated to determine the cost to make each sale; or the commission payable for each sale generated by an affiliate.
CR
Conversion Rate/ Ratio – The percentage of respondents to an ad, or readers of a sales message that complete the action desired (usually making a purchase, but can also be subscribing to a newsletter, for example).
CRM
Customer Relationship Management – Improving interaction with customers through better understanding, with the aim of increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty (thus increasing profits).
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets – Used to globally define how elements in a Web page are displayed instead of relying on HTML code in the page. Makes designs more flexible and reduces HTML file sizes.
CTR
Click-Through Rate/ Ratio – The percentage of website visitors or newsletter readers who click on a particular link. Used to measure response to ads or sales messages.
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions – Often used as the title of a page on websites that answers commonly asked questions about a product or service.
FFA
Free-For-All Links – Web pages that allow anyone to add a link back to their own website, usually in exchange for accepting promotional messages from the FFA page owner.
PFI
Pay For Inclusion – Paying to have web pages included in a search engine’s database and regularly updated.
PPA
Pay-Per-Action – Affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for generating a specific action, such as taking a free trial or subscribing to an ezine. PPL, PPC and PPS are usually considered as PPA.
PPI
Pay Per Impression – Where an advertiser pays for each display (impression) of their advertisement (usually a banner).
PPL
Pay-Per-Lead – Where a commission is paid for each sales lead generated by an affiliate. A “lead” is usually defined as somebody who signs up for a free trial, or requests further information, etc.
PPC
Pay Per Click – Ad sales or affiliate commissions where a set amount is paid for each click on a promotional link by a consumer.
PPCSE
Pay Per Click Search Engine – A search engine where the results are composed of advertisers who pay a fee for each click on their listing. Using a bidding system, the advertiser willing to pay the most is ranked highest.
PPS
Pay-Per-Sale – Where a commission is paid for each sale generated by an affiliate. The commission is usually a percentage of the sale, although sometimes it’s a fixed amount.
ROI
Return on investment – How much profit is made after advertising and other costs have been subtracted. A measure of how successful a marketing campaign is in terms of the returns on money spent.
RON
Run Of Network – Where ads (usually CPM banners) are shown (rotated) across the pages of the entire network of sites owned by a company, or controlled by a particular advertising network. Cheaper than only having the ad appear on selected sites.
ROS
Run Of Site – Where ads are rotated across the pages of a single site. Cheaper than only having the ad appear on selected pages.
SE
Search Engine – A searchable database of pages on the Web. Different from an Index (like Yahoo) in that pages are not reviewed by a human editor before inclusion.
SEM
Search Engine Marketing – Similar to SEO (below), and sometimes used to emphasize that generating quality targeted traffic is of greater importance than simply obtaining high rankings. Can also include PPCSEs and other search engine advertising.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization – The process of optimizing web pages to achieve high rankings in the search results of a search engine, in order to attract more visitors.
SEP
Search Engine Positioning – Getting your page listed on the search engine results page. Similar to SEO.
SERP
Search Engine Results Page – The page of listings displayed upon completion of a search at a search engine.
SSI
Server Side Include – A way for a web server to include variable values and information from an external source into a web page as it is requested by the browser. Uses include automatic display of data like the Last Modified date of the page, or storing common page elements in their own files, enabling site-wide updates by modifying a single file.
USP
Unique Selling Proposition – The reason why somebody should buy from you and not your competition. The unique benefits that your products or services offer consumers. What it is that makes you special, different.
I suggest you print this article out and keep it somewhere handy. Refer to it whenever you’re not quite sure what something stands for, and before you know it you’ll be an old hand!
Author Bio:
Online since 1998, Azam Corry helps marketers succeed. Get Free Guides, Tools & Web Marketing Resources at: http://NowSell.com/ Speed profits with resale rights ebooks & packages: http://eBookSaver.com/?a => SPECIAL FROM AZAM: Subscribe Now to Biz Bits eZine & get my Big info-packed eCourse PLUS real-value ebooks 100% FREE! Just BizBits@NowSell.com
What are log files?
Log files are text files that are automatically created when someone accesses your web site. They record the requests made to your web server. These files are opened when the web services of your server starts and remain open as your server responds to requests. The request information is added to the log files in “real time”.
Logs tell you if search engine optimization and other marketing operations are successful. These logs will also show you exactly in which zones you have success and where you need to put in more work. A wealth of information about the activities of your visitors is available from your web server log files. These can be used for various marketing plans and troubleshooting. (more…)
“Which search engines use link popularity as a factor in ranking pages?” Well, that question has become pretty moot these days. Just about every spider based search engine uses link popularity as a factor. So, how do you find out how much link popularity your site has? And how do you know which sites are actually linking to you? In this article, I’ll tell you how you can find out the link popularity of your site in some of the major search engines. (more…)
Intro
Getting your site registered by the Open Directory (http://www.dmoz.org) is vitally important as far as search engine positioning is concerned. In order to see how you can do that, see my article at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?1060&open-directory.htm However, sometimes, it may so happen that try as you might, you just do not manage to get your site listed in the Open Directory. Or, it may also happen that the description under which your site is listed is not optimum.
In this case, the only solution is to become the editor of the category to which you want to submit your site. Here’s how you should go about doing it. (more…)
Search Engine Marketing?
What it Means To Be a Search Engine Marketing Professional
There’s a lot of stuff posted on search engine forums and newsletters around the world about how companies who spam the search engines are unethical, and that it’s important to hire only “ethical SEO consultants” or “ethical search engine marketers.”
But, if you think about it, ethics is not something that’s quantifiable. What makes any given SEO technique ethical or unethical? Isn’t ethics more of a way of life than a method for doing something? Is trying to trick the search engines really unethical? Sure, it’s stupid, in my opinion, but is it really unethical? I don’t believe that those who practice what I sometimes refer to as “shady SEO techniques” can necessarily be classified as unethical. Just as everyone who follows every search engine rule can’t automatically be assumed to be ethical. (more…)
