All Hits Are Not Created Equal

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After all the debate over website design, shopping carts and credit card processors,every website owner eventually comes to the startling realization that they need one more thing to survive – website traffic!

Without website traffic it’s the same as building an expensive billboard and, instead of placing it alongside a busy highway, you hide it in your basement where nobody can see it.

Upon realizing they need traffic, most website owners run out and start blowing chunks of money and time trying to get “hits” to their sites, but they fail to realize that all “hits” are not created equal.

In their quest to get eyeballs to their websites, most online operators don’t realize there’s a big difference between driving “general” traffic to your website and driving “targeted” traffic.

Just getting any traffic is the same technique TV advertisers use. They flash ads on the screen in front of people who can’t afford or don’t need the advertised product.

Since general advertising can’t hit specific targets, they hit everyone and hope that someone in their target audience is actually watching at that moment. Spam, banner ads, “safe-lists” and similar traffic techniques fall into this “general” category.

“Targeted” traffic is made up of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say or sell online. These people either share the same interests or have an immediate need or problem they are trying to solve.

“Targeted” traffic is best because the people hitting your website have a much higher likelihood of actually making a purchase.

Targeted traffic comes from people following recommended links on other sites, typing in relevant keywords into the search engines, or even reading articles you’ve written on a particular subject and then clicking over to your site for more information.

If you don’t already know where to find the best sources of targeted traffic for your website, you will need to experiment with lots of different sources to find the ones that bring visitors who give you the most “bang for your buck.”

The fastest way to determine which avenues provide the most targeted traffic is by using an “ad tracker”. An “ad tracker” is a simple program, residing on your web server, that tracks how many visitors your site gets from a particular source and how many of them purchased.

Though it sounds simple, most businesses don’t do this! Most businesses can’t tell you their visitor to buyer conversion percentage and, therefore, don’t know exactly how much they can invest in traffic generation and remain profitable.

Whether you pay for your website traffic with cash (pay-per-click search engines, ezine ads), or you pay for it with the sweat of your brow (article distribution, free search engines), you must identify your best and most profitable sources of targeted traffic that convert into buyers, subscribers, or leads.

Failure to identify and track where your buyers come from and then calculate how much they really cost you ultimately translates into failure for your online business.

Sure, you may not be a search engine optimization professional, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get the results you need, even if it means identifying a need for professional help. You can get so many great results from your SEO if you are using the tips that are provided in this article.

There are two coding strategies that can really improve your search engine results: the NoFollow tag and the robots.txt file. Both of these features tell search engines not to index parts of your site. This might seem counter-productive, but using them to block off the areas that contain few links and little content you can force search engines to concentrate on the most important parts of your website.

Tailoring the meta tags of a website for search engine optimization is a profitable endeavor. Meta tags are not usually visible to website visitors, but their content is thoroughly checked by search engines. This is a great area to pack with the most salient keywords the website owner wants to associate with his or her site.

SEO is extremely important, but if you take the idea too far you can actually drive away search engine traffic. Following SEO practices that are unethical is called black hat SEO and engaging in these methods can get you banned from Google and many of the other major search engines.

To keep your search engine ranks from suddenly dropping, regularly mix up your methods. While you shouldn’t abandon anything that’s working, trying something new will make your site feel fresher to the search engines looking at it. It can also keep your site from plummeting when search engines change the way they rank pages.

When setting up a page using SEO techniques, don’t be tricked into thinking additional advertising will boost your search engine ranking. Although advertising on other sites may drive traffic to your site and thereby increase income; it will not boost your rankings.

One good way to get people to see your website first on a search engine is to use keywords. The key words should be affiliated with your website or product that you are selling. If you use too many keywords, you will be labeled as a spammer which will hurt your traffic.

Social media doesn’t begin and end with Twitter and Facebook, so consider branching out. Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicio.us, and other bookmarking or article sharing sites are a great way to expose your content to a larger audience and drive traffic back to your website. Spend enough time each day to make sure that the word gets out!

Use your keyword phrase in the first sentence of the first paragraph as Google likes keywords near the top of the page. Don’t overuse the phrase throughout your article because Google won’t reward you for it and might even punish you with a lower page rank for keyword stuffing your page.

Don’t be afraid to give SEO all you have to give for your site. Your visibility online depends on your ability to ensure that you are giving it everything you can, and using tips like those detailed in this article to ensure that you follow the best steps possible in your methods.

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Primer

Once your small business has an established website, you’ll find that the top three search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) will provide the bulk of your traffic – with Google probably sending you more visitors than all other sources combined. Sure, you can submit to directories and exchange links with other websites, but they will not directly provide much traffic. Now, it’s probably fair to say that you should focus almost all of your online marketing efforts to ranking well in the most popular search engines. Below, I’ll list some tips to help you do just that.

Target Specific Key Phrases

Try to think what keywords a potential customer or client is going to use to search for a business in your industry. Now, take those keywords and make them more into more specific key phrases. For example, if you are a website designer, then you would want to use a key phrase to give your term a geographical focus like: “Windsor Ontario website design”. Or, if you specialize in small business website design, use: “small business website design”. You want to stay away from keywords that are too general because they are very competitive terms. If you choose to target “website design”, you’re going to be competing against every other web designer around the world – good luck!

On-Page Optimization

Now that you have chosen just a few specific keywords, we need to include them in your website so the search engines will know that your business relates to those terms. Try to only target one or two keywords or key phrases per page. Be sure to include these keywords or phrases in you Title tag, Meta Description tag, and Meta Keywords tag. Don’t worry about the Meta Keywords tag too much – the search engines (Google Especially) give this tag little or no weight when determining search engine relevancy. Here are some more ways to include your keywords or phrases in your pages:

H1 or H2 Tags: why not include an H1 tag right at the top of the page with your key phrase. Follow that up with an H2 tag including another key phrase or word. But, make sure that you use both tags, in use them in the proper order – H2 following H1.

Body of Page: make sure you include your key phrases in the text in the body of the web page. Make sure that it sounds natural, though. Don’t include it too many times or you may be penalized for “key word stuffing”.

Bold, Italics & Underline: in the body of your web page, try to use these tags to emphasize your keywords.

Bulleted Lists: try to include your key phrases in a bulleted list. Remember, it should look natural.

Alternate Text Tags: include alternate text to describe the various images on your website. This tag allows blind Internet users to understand what images you have on your site. Search engines index this information and you can use it to your advantage by including a couple key phrases.

Include Relevant Content

Content is now king when it comes to search engine optimization today. Why should your website be important if it doesn’t include any information that could interest a visitor? Including information and articles regarding your product, services, or industry is the best way to let the search engines know that your website really matters. There are hundreds of article directories that allow you to freely use their articles on your website. All you are asked to do is provide a link to the author’s website at the end of the article. If possible, try to write a few articles yourself so you can have some original content. Google and the other search engines will know if you are using someone else’s article. There’s nothing wrong with this, although they will give you a lot more credit if the work is original. My last suggestion: update your website on a regular basis. At least every month you should be adding some new content to your website. The search engines want to give the high rankings to websites that have fresh content added on a regular basis.

Conclusion

Search engine optimization is not an exact science. Nobody really knows how the search engines determine where a site will rank in the search results. The preceding article will give you the basic knowledge to obtain a decent position. You will have to continually fine-tune your website and analyze a competitor’s website to improve your positioning. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t end there. There are a number of off-page factors that determine how well your website will rank. I will discuss these factors in a later article, but this is a good place to start for now.

Strategic Tips For Increasing Search Engine Optimization

Sometimes you can throw everything but the kitchen sink at your site and it still manages to stay stuck in place or even moving in reverse. This is because you’re employing the wrong tactics in order to move up the charts. Check out these solid SEO tips when you’re tired of putting in maximum effort for minimum results.

If your site hasn’t taken advantage of the social networking trend, you could be missing out on significant opportunities. Creating an online presence on the major social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) can create exponential increases in the quality and quantity of sites and users that link back to your original site. In turn, this makes your site more relevant in search engine results.

To make your search engine optimization work for you, consider adding more content to your website. Even businesses that require face-to-face interaction should have content on their website for potential customers to browse. This builds confidence in your customer and paints you as the authority. Quality content matters, but you should always take quantity into account as well!

Many people have websites with similar content and similar pages but one page is more important to them than the others. In order to optimize search engine results simply take the link of the page that you wish to come up first in the search results on your sitemap. This will make it more likely that the crawlers/spiders find it first, instead of the backup page you don’t want users to really worry about.

Think about including a blog on your webpage if you want to increase the chance of appearing on the most searches. Search engines are looking for updated content, so if your page is outdated, this is your best road to take. Include a blog on your site for more visitors and greater sales.

As you design your website and add new technology to it you need to make sure it continues to be accessible to all browsers on all platforms. Consider cell phones, tablets, and different screen resolutions as you test and tweak your code. The larger the number of people who can appreciate your site, the greater your audience will be.

Google has fast become the world’s most popular search engine. Making sure that people can find information on your company via Google is vital. If someone searches for your company via Google and finds no relevant information, they assume your company doesn’t exist. Buying advertisement space on Google searches is a great way to be seen.

When trying to fully optimize your search engine placement, it is a good idea never to publish the same article or blog post under two or more different URLs on your site. Search engines look specifically for this strategy and penalize heavily for it, so do yourself a favor and keep all URLs, totally original.

It’s actually harder to find good SEO information than it is to put it in practice once you do locate it. Remember to always use short and simple tips like these to fix the problems with your site to improve your overall search engine rankings. If you can follow these tips, you can begin to climb up in the ranks.

If you run a blog or other web site that profits mainly from site visits, you can use search engine optimization to boost visitors and your income! Read this article for tips on how to make your URL get noticed by lots of people that regularly use search engines to find web sites.

Make use of social media to increase your search engine rankings. If you frequently post status updates or other content to your company’s profile on social media sites, and then link back to your main site, you increase both the number of links to your site and the chances that someone will see and click on that link. Avoid spamming social media, however, as this will damage your company’s reputation.

When you’re thinking of getting inbound links, don’t forget about locations outside of a website. Twitter, Facebook, and even email are great places to convince people to link to you. Twitter and Facebook are very important as people tend to trust what their friends post even more than an expert website.

Mark important keywords by bolding, italicizing or underlining them. Google looks for these markings and determines that those words are keywords for your content. It will then weigh those words more heavily. Take note: Don’t bold, italicize or underline words they you do not feel are keywords, as Google will misinterpret them as important.

Be sure that all the links on your website are pertinent. If you are selling energy crystals, don’t put links on your website for a roller skating rink. Remember that everything on your website should offer value and pertinent content to your customer. That is what will keep people who are genuinely interested in your product or service coming back to your website.

To make a specific page of a website more search engine friendly, include keywords in the page’s URL. If the URL contains numbers or symbols that people are unlikely to search for, the page will be less likely to get high search engine rankings. Including important keywords that are relevant to your site will significantly improve your page’s traffic.

Use the blogging community to promote your blog. Ask people you know to post a link to your site, and comment on different blogs. You can also write guest posts on blogs related to your business: most blogs will allow you to link to your site when you do that.

In order to track the effectiveness of your search engine optimization, check your organic search results often. Some browsers will list the sites you visit frequently near the top of the page, even if they are not ranked that well. So be sure to clear your browser cache before checking your position or open your site in a private browsing window.

If you want more traffic on your web site, using search engine optimization is the way to go. This makes your blog or site more accessible and visible to people who may like to read it. Remember the tips in this article to ensure that you get more site visitors who use search engines.

If you’re like most people with a website, you started it because you want to share something with people. But if no one is looking at your website, how will that happen? The best way to get people to notice you is by using search engine optimization, or SEO. Here are a few methods to implement so that you can reach the people you’d like to reach.

Make sure that you do not include only keywords in your META description tags. Like the rest of your webpage, search engines will look for keyword stuffing and will penalize you for it. You must keep your descriptions as grammatically correct at all times in order for them to work for you.

If you need to change the structure of your website and offer the same content under a different URL, make sure the old URL redirects to the new URL or to a page with a link towards the new page. A page with a 404 error will lower your rankings in search results.

Content within iframes is hidden to search engine spiders, so only put content there that you don’t want indexed. Iframes are good for advertising or low priority content which you don’t want to use as part of your search engine optimization strategy. Do NOT put any copy in an iframe or it will not be indexed!

SEO means nothing to your site if you don’t take the time to build, expand and enhance your personal branding. Design a memorable logo, slogan, and use effective typography and layout design on your site. Even if you have higher rankings in the search engines, they will mean nothing if customers are dissuaded and decide to leave immediately from your mediocre site.

Getting your website listed by Google and other search engines will guarantee you more visits. List your home page first and add other pages if necessary. Describe your website with the right keyword. The more visits you get, the higher your website will appear in the list of results from a search engine.

Avoid unnecessary, miscellaneous data on your website. This strategy goes hand in hand with reducing the length of your page to maximize quality. Miscellaneous data and extraneous facts will only lose the attention of your visitor, which can lose your sale on the spot. Use vital information to your company that explains exactly what you are about.

Some search engine optimization companies promote the use of meta tags and others do not suggest you utilize them. Whatever you choose to think about meta tags, if you do decide to use them then you need to make sure to add them to your website correctly. If you do this, then it will highly increase the amount of traffic to your site.

Use these techniques to make sure that your website is ranking well and that people are seeing your website in search engine results. Because you want people to visit your website, or you’re just wasting your time. Use SEO to help your site gets noticed, and you’ll be able to share your website with everyone.

Website Marketing Tools

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Solid Website Marketing Tools

There are several website marketing tools that you can use to promote your website and your business. Many of these are free. You can put your website on Facebook and Twitter to gain visibility and status. The popularity of Twitter has lead many software designers to develop ways to automate Twitter marketing so you can find quite a few free and paid tools that have to do with that.

If you create a free blog on WordPress or Blogger and write about topics that are relevant to your business, you can then provide a link to your website at the end of each article or in a sidebar. Some tools include software which can automate your blog postings and updates, for example.

You can also do article marketing. Again, write informative articles about your business and submit them to the many article directories. Each article will then link back to your website or blog, creating more backlinks and higher rankings by the search engines. Here is where you can benefit from the many website marketing tools called article submitters. You can do this through a submission site or pay for a software that duplicates your articles, makes the necessary changes to them so that they are not considered the same by the search engines, and so that you don’t get penalized, and then submits them to the right article directories. You can advertise your website on the free advertising sites like Craigslist or USFreeAds. There are certain tools that can help you do this automatically as well.

In order to do any of your website marketing, you will need to do keyword research. There are several tools that can assist you here as well. For example, Google, Yahoo, and Bing all have free tools that can help you find the keywords that you should be focusing on in your marketing. If you want to get more details about these keywords, or to find them more quickly, you can then purchase one of the many keyword research marketing tools that are on the market.

Videos are an extremely effective way to market your website today. YouTube is the most popular but there are hundreds of other video sites where you can upload your videos. And you can also use a free video submission tool to submit your videos to all of the sites.

Another of the solid website marketing tools to market your business is the press release. If done correctly, a press release can get you immediate attention, leads and sales. Many online press release sites are free and you can upgrade to get other services like having the release written for you and keyword optimized.

Why Artists Love Instagram

A lot of people use Instagram to photograph their meals, their desks, their coffee mugs, the pattern on the paper towel they used in the pantry and practically everything that they can think of worthy to be photographed. Suddenly, everything has become fair game in the world of Instagram. People have become more visually interconnected with instant photography becoming more… instant.
Instagram has given the world an opportunity to take a look at the world in a different perspective. Instagram provides are a perspective that is unique, a perspective that is truly personal and a perspective that tells the world a story. Now, Instagram allows us to tell the whole universe how we view our world with the help of swatches of filters available that came with the free software. This is the single biggest reason why artists love Instagram. Instagram suddenly gave artistic people an avenue to show their artistry and creativity without much need of fancy machinery and gizmos. At the private confines of the smart phone we enter a world where we can see things not only through rose-colored glasses but with different other filters as well.
Like any other social media, Instagram also holds its fair share of muddled brains wading through slurry full of photographs taken by girls showing their new headbands or the venti cappuccino they just ordered from the local Starbucks. But, going beyond the mundane and mindless usage of Instagram shows a more serious side. A side which artists can build upon as they use the platform to advance their art and show it to the world, and even have a chance to promote a piece or two on sale.
One great thing about Instagram is the ability to publish or upload a photograph in one sweeping action. When you choose to upload a photograph chances are you can also promote it on other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Foursquare and even the ubiquitous email. Suddenly, more people can take a look at your pictures with relatively little effort. Therefore, Instagram allows artists to grow their visibility and awareness hoping people get to notice their work and probably end up selling some pieces… here are some of the reasons why artist could not get enough of Instagram.
Artistic awareness. Using Instagram to introduce the universe to your work is perhaps the most obvious thing for an artist to do with the social media platform. As mentioned earlier, the ability to publish a picture and announce it simultaneously across all platforms makes it a viable pusher for information which is otherwise unavailable if no one dared to invent this gizmo.
Use hashtags to localize relationships. One thing that is great about Instagram is the use of hashtags similar how it works with Twitter. Hashtagging enters a different light when you use it to localize relationships, where you can target potential local clients, where you can invite local art aficionados to your exhibits, and what not.
Use hashtags to let people find you. Hashtags are also useful in letting people find your artworks as they are bunched with other works.
Artists will always find a way to love Instagram. Why not? The natural leverage of Instagram will give artists an advantage being visual creatures. What a person cannot explain, the eyes could easily understand. If you are fledgling artist, it is best to harness the power of Instagram to build your portfolio and get noticed. Who knows, you can get that big break you are waiting for when all of a sudden a follower appreciates your art and buys it.

3 Fastest Ways To Get Traffic To Any Website

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After all the debate over website design, shopping carts and credit card processors, every website owner eventually comes to the startling realization that they need one more thing to survive – website traffic!
Without website traffic it’s the same as building an expensive billboard and, instead of placing it alongside a busy highway, hiding it in your *basement* where nobody can see it.
Upon realizing they need traffic, most website owners run out and start blowing chunks of money and time trying to get “hits,” but they fail to grasp that there are really only three (3) reliable ways to get traffic to any website.
Method #1 – Buy Traffic Currently, the fastest way to get traffic to any website involves using the little classified ads on the right side of search giant Google’s results pages.
Called Google AdWords, the system allows any advertiser to open an account with a $5 activation fee and start seeing their ads appear on Google within about 15 minutes.
Advertisers only pay when visitors actually click through from their ad on Google to their website or affiliate link.
Overture.com also sells traffic by the click, but they make you wait three to five days to go through their editorial review process before allowing ads to appear on their network.
You can also buy advertising on dozens of other pay-per-click search engines.
They all follow the same basic model of only charging advertisers for targeted visitors who read an ad based on a keyword search and decide to click through for more information.
Log on to www.payperclicksearchengines.com for a list of over 600 choices ranked by market penetration.
A word to the wise on pay-per-click advertising: Watch your costs and track and measure everything. Even though you can get traffic for as little as a penny, you should track your results by search engine and by individual keyword if you want maximum success.
Many a company has lost its entire advertising budget paying only a nickel or a dime per click, but not watching their conversion rates and pouring money into keywords that don’t convert… while neglecting the keywords that do bring sales (mainly because they don’t know which is which! ).
Method #2 – Borrow Traffic If you need traffic to a website, then borrow it from people who already have it… especially people with lists of loyal subscribers or traffic from search engines, affiliates, or other steady sources.
“Endorsed Mailings” and “Reciprocal Linking” by other people represent the two fastest ways to borrow someone else’s traffic.
If they maintain a list of subscribers, convince them to send an email out to their people telling them why they should check out your site.
Also, negotiate a prominent link on their web pages to siphon off targeted visitors who find their website.
Often the best way to persuade someone to do this involves paying them a commission, agreeing to do a similar mailing, or providing a link to them on your site (or a combination of all three).
Imagine how much traffic you could get if someone with a list of 10,000 loyal subscribers told their people to go look at your website!
Method #3 Recycle Traffic The most economical way to get traffic involves turning one-time visitors into regular, repeat visitors that you direct to multiple sites over time.
You do this by pulling website visitors into your sphere of influence by enticing them to sign up for your newsletter, autoresponder sequence, or “mini-course. ”
Then you keep in contact with regular articles, special reports, and recommendations enticing them to visit your own and other people’s websites.
Ultimately, every website owner should orient all of their marketing efforts towards this end of developing a stream of recycled traffic, because it costs the least and creates the best return on time and money invested.
It doesn’t matter if you promote your own product, promote only as an affiliate, or some combination of the two… if you don’t recycle traffic and get more than one hit out of each visitor, you’re making one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make online.

How You Can Start Optimizing Your Site Today

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Search engine optimization is one of the hottest trends in market websites for boosting their popularity and rankings on the internet. Keywords help to enable websites to attract potential customers. The competition for search engine rankings is very fierce so websites must be aggressive in their marketing efforts. This article can help you to understand the techniques used by many marketers today.

While employing search engine optimization practices on your website directly is important and necessary, it is significantly more important that you have a strong SEO strategy with regards to other websites linking to you. This means that you must promote your website through social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and also get popular websites to link to you. A great way to get website owners to link to your website is to offer to link to theirs from yours.

Do your research on the search engine crawlers. Many search engines use different methods and qualifications for their rankings, but mostly use a similar type of crawler. Read up on the types of crawlers they use, what they can and cannot see, and how you can use these to your advantage.

When you’re trying to optimize your site for the search engines, don’t neglect local keywords such as the name of your city or street. Many people include these terms when they are searching for businesses near them, so you may end up capturing more traffic than you would have otherwise.

You can optimize your content by placing a limit on the number of outbound links that stem from the site itself. Even the largest page on your site should have no more than 40 to 50 outbound links; your top page should be limited to only 10 outbound links. Too many outbound links compromises the overall integrity of the page, which can affect site ranking.

Use a link wheel if you want, but be cautious. Link wheels allow your site to gain many links to it, quickly increasing your rankings. However, you must be careful not to have your site grow too quickly, because search engines are aware of this tactic and may blacklist you if they believe you are doing it.

In regards to search engine optimization, you should avoid using Flash in your website design. Although it can make your site more interesting by providing pretty graphics and eyecatching movement, search engine spiders can’t read Flash content. As a result, if you have Flash in your website it often will not be indexed well in the search engines. By sticking with standard graphics and text instead, you stand a much better chance of having your site listed near the top of the results for your keywords.

As discussed earlier in the article, one of the hottest trends in the competitive world wide web market, is the use of keywords, in regards to search engines. Traditional advertising methods do not work for the internet. By understanding how this works and what it means to you, you can stay competitive in the internet business arena.