Archive Page 2
SEO has become the necessity of the online business. It is the best means of showing the availability of your website. SEO is the appropriate method of improving the visibility of a website in major search engines.
It gives you better chances of attracting various customers and increasing your online business. SEO methods should be carried out in an ethical way. There are many people adopt unethical means to register themselves on the top of search engine links. But they forget that working unethically will land them in trouble. Ethical SEO practices are the best way to create a position in the search engines.
Ethical SEO is the proper way to increase traffic to your website. Basically, ethical SEO is concerned with the SEO techniques in general. One should always be careful about the methods used in the SEO business; it is because practicing illegitimate means will lower your business. It is always mandatory that the ethical SEO firm should have valid reasons for their search engine strategies. Even the support data offered by them has to be appropriate.
The main aim of SEO business is to improve the links of an online business, on the search engines. Ethical SEO is concerned with designing the best strategies to attract various customers through search engine links. The main advantage of the ethical SEO practice is that, it can give an authoritative place to your website in the search engines. It is because the ethical practice will not include any illegal means of advertising the website. Moreover, it should be noted that ethics always pays good in the long run, while unethical means can sink your business.
One of the important parts of ethical SEO practice is the type of content present in your site. The content always decides the number and type of visitors that will gain access to your website. The content has to be highly informative and catchy so that the visitors are able to get the complete information about a product or service. One should always take extra care about the content as it should not look like a school essay. Mainly, the content helps to enhance the popularity of your website. Another thing to be noticed in the matter of content is that it should be saleable. Saleable means that it should give appropriate information about the products, so that the visitors can turn into purchasers.
Ethical SEO requires a lot of hard work and patience. It is not like an unethical practice that can make you available on the search engines within few minutes and reaping nothing for you. An ethical SEO practice will take some time to develop each and every possible strategy to get implemented in a permanent way. The implementation of ethical strategies will bring loads of visitors to your online business. Moreover, the ethical SEO practice will give you highly beneficial and reliable results.
One has to be extra cautious about the matching of titles and its content in the site. If the title on the home page is not matching the content in the article page, then you have a problem. This is a problem because the visitor will search for the detailed matter of the keyword. If the content does not match, the visitors will never return to your website. This will mean a loss to your online business. So, it is always better to practice ethical SEO methods.
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So you?ve got a website setup but you?ve got no one visiting it; that?s the dilemma and reality of many people who come online and think ?hey I can setup and website and make loads of money online?.
The thing is this scenario is far from a reality for most people who embark on online ventures.
You need to treat you online business like any other business, you need to do research on your market, set targets, goals and form a strategic plan to follow to guide you on your way and to keep you on track. Once you?ve got this in place your life will be much easier.
There are many different ways to get more traffic to your website; here are some simple strategies and proven online techniques which I use to drive traffic to my website:
- Article writing and distribution
- Link exchanges
- Submit your site to online directories.
- Posting in targeted forums and discussion boards
- Joint ventures
- Recruiting affiliates
- PPC search engines such as Google Adwords
- Basic search engine optimisation
- Writing and submitting press releases
- Write great content that people want
- Using feeder site such as a blogs or a Squidoo
There are also other techniques such as using traffic exchanges, posting on classified ad sites and using safe lists, however the one I?ve listed above are the ones I primarily use.
I?ll briefly discuss each one and how you can use it to get the best results for you online business.
Article writing and distribution ? This article itself is and an example of this; I write the article and distribute to thousands of websites across the internet and at the bottom of each article I have a resource box with a link back to my site in it. Now if I?ve done my job, the resource box at the end of this article should grab your attention or induce your curiosity so that you click the link and check out the great free ebook I?m promoting. Article distribution is also a great way to get more links back to your site which should help your search engine ranking.
Link exchanges ? Find websites that are related to your own and contact them to do a simple link swap. The key here is to find good quality sites that are directly related to your site but not competing, this way your products or services will complement each other, not compete.
Submitting your website to online directories is a great way to get back links and generate traffic to your website. Just do a search on google and you?ll find thousands of sites to which you can submit your website.
Posting in targeted forums is a great method to raise your profile and credibility within a niche and in turn attract people back to your website. Use the search engines to find forums related in your niche, answer questions, help people and give good solid information. Don?t spam the forum by posting ads you?ll kill your credibility and reputation.
Joint ventures - Contact other website owners in your niche and set up some simple joint ventures to cross promote each others products or services. Or offer them a good percentage commission on clients they refer. There are many ways to set up joint ventures so I suggest you do your research before trying to set one up.
Recruiting affiliates is a great way to rapidly and dramatically increase your business, I used this to double my sales on one of my products. Offer them high commissions and provide loads of promotional tools to. I created an affiliate ?mini-site? for one of my products and gave it away with great success. The more you help them and the more incentives you give them the greater the results you?ll experience. Another strategy you can use is to encourage your customers to become affiliates, as they?ll have intimate knowledge of your product or service and should be more than happy to recommend it.
Basic search engine optimisation ? When you build your webpages incorporate the keywords and phrases you uncovered in you market research into your pages. Try to put your primary keyword into at least your title and header tags within the page. But remember you?re creating the site for people not search engines.
PPC or pay per click is search engines such as Google Adwords or Yahoo search marketing are good way to get traffic to your site, but you have to pay for it. As the name suggests you pay per click. With Google Adwords you can set up a campaign and be receiving traffic inside of 10 minutes. Write compelling ads; I also find that if I use the keyword I?m targeting within the ad I get best results. Also if you only want really targeted visitors disable your ads from being shown on the content network as they will not nearly be as targeted.
Writing and submitting press releases is a great strategy and is one which I use very often. If you haven?t used this strategy before I suggest you go to PRweb.com and read their tips on writing press releases. I submit my press releases through PRweb.com and PRleap.com but there are a lot of other sites out there though so make the most of them.
Write great unique content that people want. The key here is to give people what they want, if they have a problem give them solutions. There is an expression which you?ve probably heard before, ?content is king?, and it?s as true today as it ever was. Give your visitors great content, let them interact, share their views and give them a reason to come back and tell their friends about your site.
The last method we?re going to look at in this article is using blogs or a Squidoo as feeder sites for your main sites. You can set up free blogs at Blogger.com or use Wordpress; you can then use these blogs to link back to your other sites and generate you more traffic. Search engines love blogs at the moment as they are usually updated regularly with fresh content You can use a technique called blog and ping to get your blog picked up and found quickly, it?s really easy, every time you make a post go to pingomatic.com or pingoat.com, send out a ping and your done I?ve found this strategy works very well.
You could also setup a Squidoo and become a lensmaster to raise your credibility within your niche and send more people back to your main websites. In fact if you pick up a copy of the free ebook in my resource box I show you how I got my Squidoo lens ranked #14 in Google in just a few short weeks.
There are a few strategies to dig your teeth into, try and incorporate as many strategies and techniques into your marketing plan as you can, there are many more out there other than the ones discussed, but these should get you started down the right path.
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When advertising, you need to promote your U.S.P (Unique Selling Point), your products, and yourself. What sets you and your product apart from everyone else?
Maybe you generate a newsletter with individual content where there is a expressed desire from a specific group of people, or you recommend your own special product that no one has seen yet.
That?s a huge benefit! That?s what you have to sell in your ad campaign, and those are the things you need to do in order to become successful.
The public looking at your ads and reading your follow up letters are going to judge you and your whole business not only by what the materials have to say, but also by their features.
Be sure to send a compelling, forceful and persuasive message.
Invest some time and money on your marketing materials, the results will be well worth it.
Look at other adverts on the Internet, See what attracts you, this will most likely attract others too.
Do you see what I mean? Your advertising campaign will be the propultion to your business success.
By now you will be thinking “How do I create one of those ads?” After all, it?s the words that will sell your product.
Write a good advert and your campaign will take off.
Let your friends and family take a look at it and get them to tell you what they think.
Don’t place your advert in a car publication if you are selling Golfing equipment.
you won’t get the response that you are looking for.
But placed in the right publication it should be very successfull.
It?s very important that you know from the onset exactly where to place your ad. If you spend hours on an advertisement and then you put it in the wrong publication and get no response at all, that?s a complete waste of time, effort and most importantly money.
My best advise is that you always work on your ads.
Write them down, leave them for a while, go back to look at them again, let others look at them and after a while you will get a feel for your ad and you will see if it works or not, if not then you have to start from the conception and write a new one and follow the same procedure again.
The Internet is full of ads, start surfing around and read other adverts, this is the best way to learn what is working and what is not. You will probably be able to tell in no time at all what is a good advert and what is not.
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Setting-up and optimizing your website doesn?t mean that traffic will start pouring in from Google the next day. It is important for all website owners to understand what the Google Sandbox is, and what to do to make the best of their time within it.
What is the Google Sandbox?
The ?ageing delay? commonly known as the Google Sandbox was designed to stop people setting-up multiple websites and pointing them to each other in a way to inflate link popularity. The Sandbox effects new website domain names by holding them in a sort of ?online purgatory? state where any site hoping to rank well for any competitive keyword phrases will not appear in the search engine results for a period varying between 6 ? 12 months. Nobody knows for sure how long it takes to get out of the Sandbox but it is vitally important to know it exists.
The Sandbox can have some very detrimental effects for small businesses that don?t have the big marketing budget to get the word out there any other way. However, it does provide the company owner with the incentive to use the time within the Sandbox to carefully optimize their site so once it gets out it can jump straight into the top 10 ? 30 results.
The Google Sandbox shouldn?t be a reason for too much woe. New sites aren?t affected in the same way when it comes to getting listed in Yahoo and MSN, so website owners can benefit from traffic from these other websites whilst they continue to optimize for the big day when they are let out of the website into the Google search results.
How do I get out of it?
To put it very simply? you can?t. Getting in to it is the first thing you should be doing. If you don?t have a few links pointing from other websites to your site Google will never know it exists in the first place.
So what can you do?
Create valuable inbound links so that the googlebot spider can find your website in the first place and put it into the Sandbox.
List your site within directories that can provide you with a steady stream of visitors.
Conduct a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign such as Google Adwords or Yahoo Overture to drive visitors to your site.
Think creatively and conduct any off-line marketing campaigns that will send visitors to your site.
Most importantly?
Take the time to develop your website and business in such a way so that when a large amount of visitors start to arrive from the Google search results you?ll be ready and able to deal with this increase in traffic.
Analyze your website statistics so you can see where people come from and where they go to. Once a person visits your website they will be very quick to judge what they do and don?t like.
If you can understand at the early stages of your online presence what your visitors don?t like and where and why they leave before buying, inquiring, or whatever it is you want them to do on your site it will help you streamline your website in such a way that when you are released from the Sandbox you will be better able to provide them with an excellent service.
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In order to maximize exposure for your websites and reap the most benefit from the traffic exchanges, you need to join a few programs and be able to surf more than one exchange at once.
My recommendation is to download a browser that will open in tabs. There are a few choices available but my favorite is a tabbed browser called AMBrowser. I prefer this browser mainly because of its efficiency in blocking the ever so annoying pop up in all its different manifestations.
What I do to make my surfing manageable is to group my exchanges in bunches of 4 or 5 and then assign days of the week to each group when I will do my surfing of these particular group of exchanges. Once on AMBrowser, which by the way, to the best of my knowledge and experience, will not put adware or spyware in your PC, look to the upper left hand side and click on “favorites.” You will see “add to favorites” on top. Click on that and a small window will open where you will be able to name your folders and save them. It is very simple and straight forward. Create a folder and call it “Monday surfing” or something like that. Assign 4 or 5 traffic exchanges to the folder and save. Repeat in that manner for as many days as you wish to surf. The whole idea is to break down your surfing so that the same is not this monumental, boring-as-hell task involving 20 traffic exchanges where you will have to spend 25 hours a day in front of your PC or laptop. I usually surf for about an hour or so from Mondays through Thursdays.
I begin by opening up AMBrowser, going to favorites, clicking on my day folder and opening all 5 links. The exchanges open up in tabs. I click on a tab, view the website until the counter runs out or until I’m satisfied that I have seen enough. I then go to the next tab and repeat the process for about an hour.
One little trick that will make the surfing experience easier is the following: Once you sign up with the traffic exchange, you will be assigned a link called the “startpage.” This is the page you will be surfing from and it is tagged with your user ID. You often get the link to this page on the confirmation email the exchange sends you when you first sign up. Anyway, sign on to your account, find your startpage link, click on it and save this to your favorites instead of the home page URL. By doing that, you will save yourself the trouble of having to log in to the traffic exchange the next time you are scheduled to surf as the browser will open up (in many cases) right on the surfing page and you will be able to pick up where you left off.
To conclude I will add that the best way to gain the most out of the traffic exchanges is to build (dare I say it?) a downline by advertising your assigned promotion link. Exchanges offer compensation several levels deep where you get a percentage of you referrals’ traffic. So if you recruit a whole bunch of people under you and they in turn recruit more people and so on, that can translate into thousands of free “hits” to your websites a day. There are many people out there who get fifty, sixty-thousand hits a day and more to their websites without them having to lift a finger anymore because they took the time and had the patience to build their downline. I hope to be one of those people within a few months.
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In this second part of “How To Dig Google Adsense Gold” guide, we’ll discuss custom reports and how they can used to your advantage.
Custom reports for google adsense is a pretty common known feature but do we really know what it is? After all it gives you the opportunity to track everything from ad units to impressions and even data over time accumulated and right to your mailbox. Used wisely with google adsense custom reports can increase your cash by telling you exactly what is going on and when it’s going on. Not to mention eliminating the hustle of checking your google account in order to track your earnings let’s say per week.
Getting Started
Log into your google adsense account. And go to the “advanced reports” under the “reports” tab. There choose the settings you want your new report to be and press “Display Report”. There on the right middle side there should be a box and enter your new custom report name and press save. Now keep in mind that whatever settings you had on to show the report are the ones that it’s going to use. From there you can go to the “report manager” tab, under “reports” yet again, and there you can change the frequency say weekly, monthly whatever you feel like. Here also you can choose the email it shall be sent to, and the google adsense folks did us one even better you can choose which format the report will be in CVS or CVS-EXCEL. That’s it you are all done but what do you do with this new found knowledge? Well read on…
Let’s Play Diary Keeper
Custom reporting isn’t just a sport or just a way to get your weekly earnings it’s much better than that. I am going to show you a method I use to keep tract of things going on in my many all about google adsense campaigns. First create a folder on your computer. Name it “Google Adsense Log” or something close. Next inside the folder name a new folder with a weekly name say “Sept-14-to-21″ this way you know what time frame it is. Next go inside the folder and in there save a text file, but not just any normal text file I want you to put in all the details of your google adsense ad units. From color to placement everything covered in my channels article. Now that you know what time frame and what the ads you are you know everything about what you did with your google adsense units. Save that file to that corresponding folder. And at the end of the week save the CVS file you get to that folder. This way you not only have what you did but the fruits of your labor as well. You can use this for a month each time creating anew folder for a new week to see with things you tried worked best. Now this assumes you don’t change your google adsense ad units during the weeks, and just wait for a new week to try something new. At the end of the month you can decide which methods worked to bring you more revenue. This is just one of the many ways you can use google adsense custom reporting to your advantage.
Freeze!
Many of us have experienced events when our google adsense revenue either jumps up really high or goes to zip. We stand mouth wide wondering what we did wrong or right. Well with custom reporting you can see just that. If you use them right and keep up with teach week you can see exactly what you did or what one of your visitors did to bring about such a change.
Good Investments
Using google adsense custom reports will give you all the previously stated advantages but there is more. How many of you have thought about selling your websites? Say it’s getting to hard to keep up with, or you don’t have enough time anymore. Well think about your custom reports and being used as proof of the kind of google adsense earnings a potential client will. After all they stay in your google adsense account so you have proof that those really are the correct stats of your ad units. Adding just one more thing to entice your buyers.
Thank You
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In the old days webmasters could freely exchange links with other webmasters without worrying about being penalized by search engines.
In the old days I mean 2005 and earlier. Things change quickly on the web and the search engines are catching on faster and faster to webmasters trying to artificially boost their search engine rankings.
Old fashioned link exchanges consisted of 2 webmasters placing the others link on their site usually on a designated links page sometimes consisting of tens of hundreds of pages. The idea was to gather as many link partners as possible in hopes of boosting Pagerank and in turn increasing their rankings in the search engine result pages. It didn?t matter if webmasters traded links with site owners who had sites completely unrelated to theirs because in the beginning it didn?t matter. The more incoming or inbound links you had the better.
More and more webmasters caught onto this fact as the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization became popular. The web became saturated with links pages and the search engines caught on. Search engines like Google essentially want their results to be as accurate as possible because it is their livelihood so they began changing their algorithms to factor in such activity amongst webmasters. With some major search engine updates webmasters and SEO marketers soon figured out that incoming links from related sites were better then from unrelated ones. So they continued exchanging links but now with related sites only.
The problem with this is that the search engines can quickly tell who links to each other so it?s a simple way to see who is trying to boost their own rank. Google and probably Yahoo too now penalize sites that have been involved in serious link exchanges. I?m talking about webmasters who have traded links with hundreds of other sites and who have complete link exchange directories on their sites. You will notice sites like this who have resources or link exchange pages that extend to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 pages.
Because this is so easily detectible by search engines it?s time to start doing link exchanges differently. Link exchanges are not going away, so the way links are exchanged has to well, change. Here are a couple of suggestions on doing link exchanges differently.
The Three Way
No, I?m not talking about anything sexual here silly. I?m talking about creating a 3 way link exchange where one of the two link partners has 2 sites and links to his or her partner via their second site instead of directly from their first. This requires one of the partners to have a second site preferably in another location with a different class-c IP. I?d even go as far as to say with a different person named as the domain registrant so the whois information doesn?t show the same info for sites 1 and 2.
This requires of course more resources on the part of the webmaster with 2 sites but it?s not uncommon for webmasters to own more then one site. Directories or information portals are types of sites you could use as your second site. They should contain useful and unique content as well and have incoming links from other related sites. To get a boost of Pagerank needed you will have to submit your site to other directories, maybe publish a press release, articles or even purchase a text link or two. Your second site should be well ranked and give your partners a good reason why they should exchange links via this method. Basically you want to create an Authoritative directory of sites in your niche.
The Blog Way
Blogs seem to have special powers on the web. I?ve seen blogs with blogrolls a mile long and I?ve never heard of a blogger being penalized for linking out too much. Blogs can be a great link exchange medium and you can see this from bloggers who again have long blogrolls and who have high Pagerank. Starting a second blog is actually easier then starting a second website to use to exchange links with. it?s free at blogger.com to start a blog and once you do it?s easy to manage and especially link out to your partners sites. Like the first method you want to create an authoritative resource on the niche you are trying to conquer.
I don?t recommend using blogger.com if you want to actually own your site. You can start a blog at blogger.com but you never really own your site. I would recommend using wordpress, drupal or typepad on your own domain, again hosted on a different host then your first site. When your blog is set up you can blog about your niche related news, discuss or rate other sites in your niche (giving you a perfect way to link to your partners) or simply place your partners in your blogroll list.
So now you have 2 sites in your niche, one you use as your main site and the other you use for exchanging links. This means you don?t have any link exchange pages on your main site, which is great, but what about your partners site? Does he/she have a huge link exchange directory on their site? You don?t really want your link hidden in one of their deep link pages do you? I pass up any link exchange offers made by webmasters who are so kind as to offer me a link on their links page located 3 subcategories deep on a page with 200 other sites.
Here is what you can do. Besides telling them they should scrap their entire link exchange section you can suggest they give you a spot outside their link pages by offering them a full page of content. If that?s too much maybe a paragraph of content including your link they can include on one of their main pages. Maybe a testimonial of sorts they can add to their site. Most webmasters trade links on pages that are similar in Pagerank so you will have to be willing to offer up their link on a page with equal or greater Pagerank.
The above methods are long term and are only suggested if you are serious about gaining one-way inbound links to your site. Although the work involved is great so is the reward.
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“Nothing last forever but the Earth and sky.” - from Dust in the Wind by Kansas.
Google has spent the last year evolving from a search engine to a giant media corporation.
At birth Google was worried about only one thing, search - and that focus is why it became so successful. As Google spreads out many are wondering, are they doing it too fast? Are they letting quality slip? As any company evolves it will make mistakes, but has Google lost sight of its goals?
Google gained large distribution when Yahoo switched to it to drive down Inktomi stock price, only later to buy Inktomi. Google then came to power stealing traffic from Yahoo by providing clean, relevant results, and good search tools for surfers and webmasters alike. Many estimate that Google controls in excess of 75% of the search market.
Microsoft is still working on its search engine. Yahoo recently acquired Overture and is working behind closed doors in much the same way as MSN is. LookSmart has not updated Wise Nut in a long time, is hated by a large portion of the internet community, and is soon set to loose most of its distribution. And Ask Jeeves (owner of Teoma) has its top results powered by Google AdWords. With Google powering Yahoo, AOL and many other sites Google lacks a clear competitor today.
Right now Google can take its huge lead and extend it, or let it slip. No system is perfect and there will always be complaints, but I have to wonder if Google has forgotten why or how it became such an icon.
Many people have reported their Google Toolbar has been failing to return PageRank 90% of the time. While the hysteria around PageRank is somewhat overrated, it would be more assuring if the feature worked often.
One of the biggest problems search engines face today is a lack of quality content on the web. Earlier this year Google introduced a program called AdSense which displays its pay per click AdWords ads on many mid sized web sites. AdSense was designed to help pay to produce better content sites. Soon after Google introduced AdSense they included a related searches link set underneath the ads which made webmasters angry. This technique was siphoning off traffic from websites back to Google with no payment of any kind. Quickly Google had to repeal this move.
Google has also signed its AdSense members to a gagging clause. Beyond that gagging clause many have complained about getting kicked out for reasons they could not even challenge. Then for these same members to see how much money Google had owed them up to that point they had to agree to another set of terms that prevented them from criticizing the AdSense program. But the ads get worse.
Google was in a race with Overture to be the first to provide broad matching on its search terms. Google got there first. The idea behind broad matching is that it will allow Google to sell more of its ad space by providing ads on similar terms that were not yet sold. Overture allows different bid prices on different levels of matching. Google sets a single price on the ads, and this causes a huge problem for those who do not know how to use the system.
First the broad matching ads are less relevant. The term broad indicates far reaching and is self explanatory to its end effect on relevancy - which is in the exact opposite direction of Google’s roots. This new type of broad matching matches many remotely close search phrases to those paid for by the advertiser. Couple near matching with the fact that ad sites and pages are scanned for relevancy (which is frequently inaccurate) and a big problem starts to come about with how to provide relevant ads on the syndicated results.
While many of the SEO experts know how to use negative keywords, tracking, and other advanced features, the smaller advertisers do not always have the resources or understanding to effectively use this new, more complex medium.
Now instead of rewarding businesses for hunting out the phrases that exactly match them (and thus providing higher quality search results), Google is rewarding the largest companies by allowing them to be lazy. Google is shooting itself in the foot by degrading relevancy for short term profits.
Large companies bid on generic cover all terms at prices where they loose money on every transaction until the competition goes under. Not only do these name brands enjoy higher click through rates (due to brand recognition), but those with stockpiles of cash can afford to burn through thousands without a blink. Many small sites can not, thus the sad state of internet media is that it is now consolidating much the same way as offline media is.
It gets even worse for the small website now though. These same ads which they are using may now appear on pages that sometimes do not even remotely fit the ads. I was looking at the GMT clock time zones to ensure my clock was set at the right time today (so I missed daylight saving time). The page which had the different time zones listed a few cities and a group of AdWords. Most of these AdWords were targeting Las Vegas (most likely the most expensive US city). Las Vegas was not even one of the cities mentioned on the list. Not a relevant ad set. Bad for all parties involved.
What is the result of this change to AdWords? Lower quality ads at a higher price. Nick Denton predicted that the expansion of these ads across the web (especially coupled with decreased relevancy) that users will start to ignore them. Much the same way as banners have faded, only a few years may be left before this advertising medium chips away and destroys itself.
What about the regular Google search results? At least they are strong, right? Sometimes they are rather week. Some clients have had search results dominated by the same sets of interlinking sites. Aiming to fight spam, Google is acknowledging this fact by incorporating a new major algorithmic change on the web live. My site went from #17 to #7 to not in the top 1000 websites for “search engine marketing”. While I still have customers that need work done on their sites, this sporadic re mixing is not refreshing in my mind, as well as in the minds of many of my customers.
I have already had concerned emails arrive from friends worried about loosing thousands of dollars a month as their top listing evaporated. All I can tell them is wait and see.
Much of what people have feared would happen to Google after it goes public has already happened. It is clear that competitive open source alternative search engines such as Nutch are not desired so much as required.
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Aaron Wall
author and owner of Search Marketing Info
http://www.search-marketing.info
aaron@search-marketing.info
Site search - a powerful sales tool
When users search for a product or other item on your website, they want quick and relevant results and need instant gratification in order to return.
So try to improve your search usability feature by using a consumer-oriented strategy.
Improve the quality of your website.
Find out as much as possible about your targeted clients and learn to recognize their needs and simplify the way in which they can achieve their goals.
Keep in mind that simple is better.
The best position to place the search box is on the top right of the page. Avoid inserting other text input boxes for other functions in nearby areas. On home pages, search should be a type-in field and not a link, and should be wide enough to contain the typical inquiry.
Label the button “Search”.
Label the button “Search” since users are accustomed to this term, and usually won’t spend time in reading other instructions or awkward labels. Make sure the “Enter” key is working as well. For complex websites you could also place a text link for advanced search, but preferably not from the home page.
Place the search button on the first page.
It is mandatory to place the search button on the first page, but keep in mind that customers might wander a little on your site and might need that option later. So keep your search button available on every single page. It is better to search the whole site by default. Make the search forms and results pages fit into the overall design of the web site: they should use the same colors, fonts, etc.
Site search usability
To improve the search usability on your website, pay attention to the following attributes:
Accuracy and relevance.
Always show the most relevant results at the top of the search list. Place results that match all keywords before results that match single keywords. If results are from different categories found on your website, offer product links and product images. Provide a sufficiently descriptive title. The customer needs appropriate written and visual information to decide if he wants to buy a product.
Synonyms and related terms.
If no matches were found for the original query, show results for identical or related terms, whenever possible. Most users aren’t willing or able to refine their query.
Misspelled search items.
This is one of the main reasons why the search feature returns no results. Provide useful matches and show the misspelled search term alongside the correct spelling. Allow plurals, common abbreviations and hyphenations.
Sort and filter results based on mixed specifications.
Clients want to find specific products on your website. They are interested in price, brand, color, size, etc. Offer them the possibility to sort the list based on one or more attributes.
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Quality link building play a vital role when comes higher search engine rankings
What is link building?
Link building is the process of increasing link popularity and search engine exposure through many channels including, Link Exchanges, Directory Submission, Newsletters and many more.
There are three types of link building
1. Link Exchanges
2. One Way Link Building
3. Three Way Link Building
The most popular and cost effective link building technique is exchanging links with different and theme related websites. One way link building is very costly which is usually obtained through paid inclusions. Three ways link building involves lots of work and is time consuming process in which there will be three domain names which will participate to get one way link to each other.
Search Engine Rankings usually improves with one way links and it?s more effective than link exchanges as there won?t be links going out from the website and hence the credibility of website does not decrease. Link exchanges are not much effective when compared to one way but plays a vital role and usually they are permanent links, and cost effective because of that it?s more popular than any other link building techniques.
I prefer Link Exchanges when compared to other link building techniques off course when it?s done with quality and effectiveness. I will tell you how it should be done.
Few Guidelines for Reciprocal Link Building:
1. The link partner website should be theme related
2. The links coming from websites should have been online for sometime.
3. If the website has good popularity than its perfect. Popularity is now days judged by Page Rank Technique of Google.
4. The link partner website should not be banned by search engines.
5. Link backs to our websites should not come from more than 3 clicks away.
I have applied all these techniques when I was doing search engine optimization for my websites www.tucsonrealestategroup.com www.ojairealestateteam.com www.egoggle.com and www.madisonrealestatewisconsin.com and received huge amount of traffic and search engine rankings which obviously improved my leads and sale generations.
I prefer doing professional Link building and quality link building within the guidelines of search engines which can fetch me high search engine positioning and obtain a prominent placements.
If you are going to start a link building campaign follow the tips when I have mention and you will get astonishing results. The link building process is simple and cost effective which can reduce your costs on PPC and other promotional methods to get traffic as a result you save huge amount of money.
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