Keywords form the basics of any internet search. A user visits a search engine, types in a few keywords relating to whatever information they want to know, and the search engine returns results in the order that it deems most appropriate.
Now, the question is, how do you make it so that when a (potential) customer is looking for information about your product, they find your site among the top returns on the site.
The answer lies in keyword optimization.
Keyword Selection
Keyword optimization begins by selecting the keywords you want to optimize your size for. Keyword selection is an incredibly detailed process, and books could be (and have been) written on it. We’ll take a very brief look at it here.
Begin your selection process by looking at your site, and thinking of a few good descriptive words and phrases for each page. These should describe the contents of the page, and should be phrases that you would type into a search engine hoping to get to the information on your site.
Once you’ve selected these, you a keyword selection tool like Overture or WordTracker to give you more ideas about how often your terms are searched for. If you have some really common words on your list, you’ll probably want to drop them for less popular words. Pages outside of the top 10 rankings don’t really get looked at.
Thus it’s much better to be top-ranked for an uncommon keyword than bottom-ranked for a very common keyword.
Optimization for Search Engines
Once you’ve selected your keywords, you need to know where to place them on your site for optimal response. The Title, Heading 1, and Heading 2 sections of the page carry the most weight as far as search engines are concerned. So make sure to put your target keywords in those slots.
However, make sure that you’re writing for your users as well as the search engine crawlers. One of the most difficult parts of SEO is making titles that both incorporate keywords, and make sense to readers.
Content Generation
The third step toward the keyword optimization of your site is keyword-based content generation. This is where the waters get a little bit murkier, as search engines do not reveal their specific crawler algorithms. There are a number of things we do know though.
First, you should be using the relevant keywords at least a few times. However, this is a fine line to walk. In the past, there was a lot of talk about keyword density. It’s more generally accepted now that if you write a 500-word article, you should be able to drop in the target keyword 3 or 4 times. What’s more important though, is the quality of the information.
Search engines are getting more sophisticated, and they’re getting better at determining if content is well written. Moreover, they’re getting extremely apt at indirectly reading whether an article is well-written. Search engines understand that if an article is well-written, it will be linked to and shared via social media. Thus links and sharing are weighted quite highly.
On the other hand, if the search engine determines that your content is poorly written, the number of times that it incorporates your target keywords will not matter, as your rankings will be negatively affected.
Social media exploded onto the market in the last decade. It has completely revolutionized marketing and selling online. In some ways, it has even replaced search engines. After all, any well established business will have a Facebook page, displaying their product offerings and with a convenient link back to their main business site. Facebook may be the largest social media site, but it is not always the best for building customer relationships. Twitter is a phenomenal site for engaging potential customers in conversation and staying current with industry trends.
The super fast nature of Twitter is what makes it so valuable. The short posting length and easy network building offered by the site make it a way to quickly establish your business. You will need to post several times each day, but the short format makes it easy to do. While forums like Facebook require you to plan out an entire post and offer pictures, video and links to compete, Twitter posts are much more basic in nature. There are a few do’s and don’ts about what to post, but as long as you use the following tips, you will see increasing success with Twitter marketing.
1. Be Informative – Sending out fifty Tweets per day detailing your activities is not effective. People want valuable and helpful content that is industry specific. Even in a few sentences, you can inform people about a variety of topics. Use Twitter to post links to larger format pieces to gain additional traffic. For example, if there has been a new change in your industry, post the bare facts and include a link to the full article. That is value to social media users. Those who are interested can click the link, and those who are uninterested are not pressured to read about things they are not interested in.
2. Be Available – Twitter is all about direct communications with potential customers. Make sure that you routinely answer questions and offer information. The more direct interaction you engage in, the more people will come to you for information and the more your following will grow. At some point, you will not be able to interact personally with each commenter, but you will still be able to respond generally, letting them know that their comments are being read.
3. Be Interesting – When you only post re-tweets, you are simply posting the same information again and again. Those that are interested in your industry will probably have seen it before. A re-tweet or two is fine, provided you also post original content. Twitter is an ideal place to announce upcoming sales, new product lines or service changes. The ability to link to your main site allows you to only post teasers, which then results in many hits for your site.
With Twitter, more than any other social media site, it is important to keep things simple and concise. Twitter is not the place for fluff. Only post information that is current and interesting to keep your audience engaged.
The end of the year is fast approaching and with it new Google definitions of what makes a good search result. Beating the Google Algorithm is the purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. The Google Algorithm is the method that the search engine uses to sort and rank search results. The placement on a search engine results page (SERP) determines the amount of exposure a business will get. If your website does not appear on the first page or results, it will not get much traffic. Niche marketing is the focus for online sales, since there is much less competition for niche rankings. However, Google constantly struggles to bump down listings that are not comprised of quality content. There are many things that are considered to determine your final rankings, and many strategies you can pursue to improve those rankings.
The first step in any SEO plan must be the design of your website. Meta tags and titles are very important, as they allow the search engine to index your site. Also, back linking is a good solid way to improve position on SERPs. If your site is linked to be other trusted sites, it looks more trustworthy to Google. Article posting can improve your score some what, providing the content is new and fresh. Google responds very poorly to duplicate content and your site could take a nose dive in the rankings if you do not provide fresh news. Buying domain names that exactly match your keyword phrase has been helpful in the past, but is no longer a good strategy. All of these tactics are well known, and many companies already exploit them.
A new thing to consider is the importance of usage data. Every time an Internet user clicks on your link from a SERP, certain information is tracked and stored. Bounce rate, click-through-rate, time on site and more are tracked by analytics programs. Google then correlates that information and uses the results when making determinations about page ranking. If Google is watching your usage data then so should you. When your bounce rates are high, it negatively affects your ranking, so focus on strategies to minimize your bounce rate. For those unfamiliar with the term bounce rate, an example would be a person clicks on your link and then immediately hits the back button and continues browsing search results. To Google, this reaction says that your site is not a good match for that keyword. Since their goal is to provide quality search results that meet the needs of Internet browsers, they will demote you based on browser response.
The only way to avoid having negative results from usage data is to provide quality web content. If your website is a product sales website make that clear on your search result. This will reduce the number of bounces. Ensure that your home page is engaging and informative. The longer people stay on your page the better it will look to Google. Place enticing links on the first page. The more people that click through, the better your eventual results.
Online marketing is filled with content all about businesses and what they can provide. Most content is filled with “we”, “us”, and “our”, which are not words that explain to the customer how products help them. Marketing is often written using a formula, and while it is important to include what works, all marketing materials need to be individual.
When you read marketing materials they tend to all sound the same. Even websites tend to look alike, since many companies use template designs. The use of templates can allow small businesses to put together professional looking sites at a moments notice, but they do look like templates. Without customization websites tend to look the same. The fear of making a mistake often keeps many businesses trapped in a cycle of boring marketing campaigns. A risk may be a waste of thousands of dollars, but it can also really pay off. Unique advertising is much more likely to generate customer responses versus canned advertising that people have seen before.
Marketing dollars need to be spent carefully in order to generate sales rather than just generate expenses. You should also be able to track how effective a marketing campaign is, so that you know what efforts should be repeated or expanded upon and which shouldn’t.
The first thing any business looking to update their marketing strategy to put the focus back on their customer should do is revamp your website. Take a look at the content and start removing references to the company. Get rid of words like we, us, and our and instead include words like you and your. Instead of focusing on what makes your company special, focus on what a customer needs and wants. This doesn’t mean that you should change the information provided on the site, only the perspective from which it is presented. When you tell a customer all of the ways your product solves their problem, rather than all the innovative solutions you provide, it causes customers to perceive your company as caring. When customers perceive a company as putting their needs first they are more likely to choose them as a provider.
Marketing is all about perception and product. Creating the perception that you company is an industry leader, but not providing the service a customer expects from that level of provider, won’t win long term clients. Focus on providing excellent service, so that when your new, customer centric, marketing campaign brings in new clients you are able to meet their expectations.
Customers aren’t interested in what your company does, only on what it can do for them, to fix their problems. Give them the information they need to make a purchasing decision, based solely around their requirements. Let the customer drive the sales pitch. Give them the opportunity to explore what you provide based on their needs, and they will find the solution that fits and make a purchase. Keep all marketing targeted to give purchasers the information they need to find the products they want.
SEO (search engine optimization) can be difficult to manage. There are so many parts and pieces that intertwine to create a solid SEO business practice that doesn’t violate search engine policies, it can be difficult to keep track. This is especially true with search engines such as Google continuously changing the algorithms that they use to detect duplicate content or other items that that they do not consider worthwhile. SEO is important to businesses since it determines the page rank of websites. A properly optimized site is ranked and indexed by major search engines such as Yahoo, Google or Bing and will begin showing in search results. The trick is to get the optimized website to show on the first page without spending thousands of dollars.
The first tip for getting a website to jump to the first page of search results is to choose niche keywords. Highly focused keywords have less competition, so creating a site that will show up first for those keywords is fairly easy. Once you have chosen your niche keywords, there are some things you should remember about content. First, keyword density should never be greater than 4% in your content. That means that the key word should not be used more than four times for every hundred words. If the keyword is a long-tail, consider keeping it down to 2%. If a keyword exceeds that percentage it is considered keyword stuffing and many search engines will automatically reject sites suspected of using black hat SEO practices.
The second important thing to include is keywords in Meta tags. Always fill out the Meta tags and descriptions so that Search Engines can find and index your website. Meta tags should always include some basic information about the company and the meta keyword written in grammatically correct English. Always include the keyword in the title of the page. This will help it to be searched easily. Including the H1, H2, and H3 tags on your page will help to increase your ranking.
The third tip is all about content. Quality content is the key to not only driving traffic to your website, but also closing sales. Optimizing your site to the point where the only real information on it is all about keywords doesn’t create revenue. Ultimately, SEO is solely used to drive traffic to your website. From that point the content on the site must speak to customers and convince them to finalize a sale. Content should inform, instruct or amuse customers and engage them as much as possible. Incorporating expert articles on your website can be a great way to provide content to potential customers that will simultaneously build trust. When potential customers can see first hand that your company is an expert in its field they are more confident in doing business with you. The trick is to provide a wealth of information in such a way that it doesn’t overwhelm.
If you chose the right keywords and incorporate them at a rate of 2-4%, provide well written Meta tags and descriptions using your keyword, and have fabulous content, your website will become a success. Other methods of online marketing may drive traffic more quickly to your site, so also consider adding a social media piece to any marketing plan.
In recent years, Facebook has emerged as one of the most visited sites in the world, amounting to hundreds of millions of visits per day. It would therefore be unwise for any serious marketer nowadays to ignore the wide reach and branding opportunities presented by this social networking site. However, although many online marketers are aware that Facebook has huge traffic potential for their individual businesses, very few networkers know precisely how to use this social network to their advantage.
First, you must know what methods do NOT work on Facebook. If you learn to identify and avoid these marketing mistakes, you will be one step closer to your goal of driving traffic from the world’s currently largest social network.
The ultimate traffic method that you should avoid is spamming. Adding random user profiles is a huge no-no on Facebook, and can actually result in your account getting banned. Another thing you should avoid is constantly sending “sales” messages to your friend list, hoping they will click on your link. These two things are what desperate marketers do, so don’t do them. Instead, you should employ a Facebook traffic building strategy that is ethical, effective, has the ability to build relationships, and most important of all, SEO friendly.
Your quest for Facebook traffic starts when you build your “fan page”, or quite simply, your Facebook page. Your Facebook page allows you to brand yourself, connect with people who like you and your offer, and also to follow up with masses of people at the click of a mouse. It would take an entire book, course, or manual to know everything there is to know about building facebook fan pages. However, when you create your fan page, you should put these three questions on your mind:
1. Does my Facebook page accurately represent who I am and what I do? If your page doesn’t give an accurate representation of who you are as a marketer and what precisely you can offer to the web visitor, then it is very easy for viewers to leave and check out something else.
2. Does my page effectively link to my site and is target rich? This is important because fan pages on this social network appear in search results. Therefore you must strategically optimize your fan page for keywords you want to rank for.
3. Does my page capture the interest of my target audience quickly? People tend to browse fan pages very quickly, as there are hundreds of others competing for their attention. Therefore, the look, feel, design and content of your fan page should be interesting enough to keep your visitors reading. Furthermore, the status updates you post must be interesting enough so that people will want to come back and check on the stuff that you post.
If you keep these three things in mind when you create and develop your Facebook fan page, you will be well on your way to attracting more viewers and get more free traffic to your site.
In the next few words, we are going to discuss some SEO content writing secrets that will help you get a residual traffic stream to your website, turn them into leads, and ultimately convert them into sales and more sales.
First, you need to ask yourself, the question, “Why write SEO content?” Some people have been writing SEO content for so long that they forgot why they are doing it, simply because they have no idea of what they are aiming for and how to succeed. Here’s the reason why you should write SEO articles and blog posts more often: The search engines love them! If you could constantly feed the Google and Yahoo “spider” with fresh new content which contain strategic keyword phrases targeted for a specific audience, you can literally put yourself in front of hundreds of thousands of people online. And luckily for you, that is good for your business.
There are many different uses of SEO content. First, you can use it to generate direct traffic. Many article directories allow you to post your original articles and have your own resource box shown at the bottom. If your article receives direct traffic from the search engines, there’s a good chance that some of your readers will actually click on your resource box and be redirected to your website landing page. That is direct traffic and it’s not rocket science. Simply write keyword rich articles, get views, get website visits, and generate more sales from those visits.
The next purpose of writing SEO content is to generate backlinks to your site. As you may already know, Google has an algorithm that gives a higher search engine ranking to sites which have more backlinks from other sites. Writing search engine optimized articles will help you get those needed backlinks over time.
Now here’s a paradigm shift of thinking for you: Most online marketers simply do SEO for the purpose of pushing up the search engine rankings of their website domain. But there’s another side to this that you must realize. Trying to get your website on the first page of search results might take some time to do, but getting your article pages to rank for certain long-tail keywords is relatively easier! Thus, it is highly recommended that you SEO optimize your articles in article directories, blogs, and other online locations. Instead of focusing on on-page SEO, try to build individual search engine rankings for each of your content pieces submitted online! This way, your main website may not be on the first page of search results, but your articles and blog posts will. Now that’s a greater horde of traffic.
But perhaps the best of all SEO content writing secrets is maintaining clarity and intelligibility in your words. Lots of people who write content for better exposure in the search engines make the mistake of making their articles appear with jumbled phrases and sentences which lack sense. Never do this. Realize that although you are writing your articles and blog posts for better exposure in the search engines, your main marketing targets are real people. Keep on giving away useful information to your intended readers. This is a good branding strategy and will help you build a good online reputation.
Websites that try to be everything to everybody are rarely more that marginally successful as they are not focused on their core customers. This is especially true for websites that cater to specific niche customers and when they stray from the formula they originally developed, they find that their customers may not be as impressed with their diversification as the owner was.
Looking at a well-diversified site may give the impression that they are able to meet the needs of many different types of visitors. A few sites may actually be able to pull that off, but attracting customers looking for specific items or information can actually be much easier. Marketing efforts for sites selling niche merchandise can be more specific in the search engine optimization efforts and if they use things like article marketing, can aim their articles at the customers that are interested in what they have to offer.
With online advertising being as popular as it is, it can also be expensive, especially for an internet business just getting their toes in the sand, and finding a way to target a specific audience can produce a louder bang for their advertising buck. Understand when a site tries to offer something for everyone, their advertising has to target everyone. This can spread their advertising dollars too thin to be effective. However, targeting a specific niche reduces the number of people targeted and can allow for better returns on their advertising investment.
When considering the cost of search engine optimization and the network marketing done to attract visitors, a high number of visitors may seem to be a good return on the investment. However, the number of visitors means nothing if they make no purchases. It is far better to have 1,000 visitors spending $50 each than to have 100,000 visitors and only a handful spend $10. Calculating the return on your investment needs to tell the entire story and not just a sidebar.
For example, if your website sells golf equipment and supplies, reaching out to equine areas of the internet will probably bring in zero results. This is the type of effect that bulk mail, or in this case bulk email, can have on your advertising and marketing budget. You may reach a bunch of horse lovers, but unless they are also into golf, your return will be next to nothing.
The keywords used on each page of your website should correspond to what products or information is contained on that page. You can not use the same keywords on every page, especially if the pages offer different information. Search engine optimization needs to have each page optimized for the individual page to be effective and if the keywords are all the same, a change may be needed to find success.
Regardless of the industry in which you work, marketing is the key to your overall success. Especially when working online, you marketing efforts can reach millions of potential buyers, providing you are using the right market methods to let your business be known. Businesses just starting out often have little money to devote to marketing and must be sure their approach is best suited to their business to bring in the most customers in the least amount of time.
How that is done is often the topic of debate, but once you decide on a method or marketing you should track its effectiveness and if it does not meet your expectations, there is no reason you have to stick with it. Your choices basically include search engine marketing, which should be complete before your website goes live; paid placement, pay per click and even affiliate marketing.
Determining which method is the most cost effective probably can’t be accurately measured until you have tried each one, but if you have success with one that satisfies your sales goal, chances are you should stick with it.
Search engine marketing is possibly one of the most complicated methods of internet marketing in that your website must meet the criteria for being indexed by the major search engines. It rests on how well your site is put together from the beginning and that information on your site will be informational to your visitors. A well organized website can deliver your name to organic search results.
To entice more traffic quicker, pay per click can be more aggressive. You will have to contact search engines and develop a program with which every time a visitor clicks on your website, you pay the search engine operator. This is possibly the least expensive means of gaining loads of visitors but there are downsides to this method of website marketing.
First, you have to bid on the keywords that come up on the top pages of the search engine results and even if thousands of people click on your site, it doesn’t mean they will translate into sales. There are also many users that can recognize search results that are presented as a result of paid pay for click sites as well as paid placement ads. Many of those users simple will not click on those ads, aiming instead for the sites that trust their search engine optimization will place them high in the organic listings.
You can also delve into affiliate marketing to increase your visitors by offering other sites the opportunity to place links to your site on their site and pay them a commission when a sales is made by someone who clicked through their site. Of course, this will depend on how well the site you are affiliated with is marketed as much as that site’s content.
Having a link to your site may also tell the search engines that your site is popular, scoring a few more points, but only if the site’s content is relevant to what is posted on your site. You also should stay away from sites that do not match the morality of your site.
Broadly speaking, backlinking can be defined as consolidating your online presence by getting other websites similar to your own to link back to you and by creating and submitting articles that promote your website to various online directories. Backlinking tends to be straightforward – there are not many mysteries about it. For the most part it brings results that directly correlate with the effort you invest in setting up links and creating quality content to be published on other websites.
Before talking more about backlinking it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s an additional means through which you can increase you traffic. Even if, when done properly, it can bring you a lot of traffic, it’s not something you can use as a primary means of getting visitors to your website. Make sure you have quality content that is optimized for search engines first and only then invest your resources in backlinking.
Going About It
As mentioned above, you can set up backlinks in two basic ways: by convincing other websites to link to you or by creating articles that contain the URL to your homepage and uploading them to various online directories.
• With Links
If you have the resources, you can purchase links directly from listings or other websites. This practice can bring results, but it typically works best for well-known brands that are at least regionally trusted by buyers.
It would be safer if you partner with some of the websites that are similar to your own but that are not your direct competitors. Do this by making friends among their owners and webmasters. This collaboration can be profitable because it will be quite likely that only people who are interested in your niche will be redirected to you. Keep in mind though that you’ll be asked to put links on your site that send to other websites as well, so be careful with who you associate. As a rule, try to have websites that are at least equal to you.
You can also create a cluster of websites centered on the same niche that redirect users between them. Some individuals have been successful doing this but keep in mind that having more websites means spending more money on hosting and on quality content.
• With Relevant Articles
A popular way to do backlinking at present is by writing articles relevant to your website and uploading them to the many article directories available online. Popular article directories tend to pop up in search results, attracting people to click them. If those reading these articles find them interesting and relevant to what they are searching then they are likely to check the URL which is usually included within them and end up browsing your website.
“How To” articles are perhaps the most popular when it comes to backlinking. It’s worth noting that most of the articles that end up in online directories are not directly promotional, but offer relevant information or at least try to. Also, they feature specific keywords in the right densities.