SEO Consultants | What to look for

So you’re thinking SEO (search engine optimization) is something that can help your website? Here are some things you should examine when you’re looking for the right SEO company to invest your business’s hard earned money into.

SEO only starts on your site.

In the development or renovation of your site optimization begins through meta titles, meta descriptions, meta keywords, having relevant content, using the proper HTML tags and so forth. However, there are a lot of things that are off site which go into SEO such as link building, putting relevant content elsewhere online, and making sure your site is appropriately indexed. The biggest mistake people make is not keeping up with their outside SEO thinking it starts and ends on their site. If you aren’t actively trying to get organic traffic to your website your rankings and organic traffic can never meet your goals. Having a long term SEO plan that goes beyond your site is going to ensure your organic marketing strategy is well rounded.

Don’t think is the cheapest or fastest means of marketing a site.

Unless you find a company that is doing a lot of work for free, or is offering a great discount, don’t expect your SEO work to be cheap. Search engine optimization is a full time job. In order to get the results most businesses are looking for, it requires constant monitoring and updating. Flat out, with a good SEO strategy there is simply a plethora of things that need to be done often and with a high level of quality. Proper SEO also takes time for content to be searched, relationships to be built with related sites, and submissions to be accepted. When looking to get SEO work done don’t fall into the traps of sites offering prices that are too good to be true or promising quick traffic.

Black Hat techniques hurt more than they help.

Although Google doesn’t say how they weight positive factors going into their ranking, they are clear that black hat techniques are a road that will only take you in the wrong direction. A quality SEO company will support only ethical SEO techniques. If you decide to mess with black hat techniques you can be red flagged loosing all representation within search engines—effectively setting you back and making all of your SEO efforts worthless. Make sure to be very clear on the marketing strategy of your SEO consultants ensuring the integrity of their plan. Stay away from anything that sounds illigitimate ie keyword stuffing, invisible text, meta spamming, etc.

SEO be your site’s biggest ally, or your biggest wast of resources. The difference is in ensuring that it is done correctly! Never be satisfied with your SEO, as there is always be something that can be improved or be done. Look around and contact multiple companies to find the right SEO company for your needs and your budget.

Web Design & Text: SEO vs Style

When coming into the world of online marketing and web design there is a fine line that must be walked. That line is working with the rendering of text. Text is an important aspect to design as well as a page’s ranking so a site simply cannot be designed for one or the other— you have to find the right balance.

The tricky part is trying to keep page content coded in the proper HTML tags (h1, p, strong) for search engine and accessibility purposes, but not to limit the designer. Different operating systems, browsers, screens, and settings can all alter the way a web page is displayed. For example some users will have different fonts on their computers leading to the site appearing differently for different users. Consequently, choosing a particular font does not guarantee that your text will actually display in this font to all of your users and back up fonts will are necessary.

You might ask, what’s the big deal if text shows up in Times New Roman instead of Monotype Corsiva? Well, it doesn’t affect your SEO, but it will effect your user experience in two primary ways. First is stylistically— the fonts you use emphasize important text, help develop your site’s branding, and play a huge role in design. The second is more function than form. A change in font can make content more or less legible and even cause layout issues stemming from variations in font spacing and sizes. A change like that can play a huge role in if a visitor stays on your site and where they navigate. These two factors alone can drastically hurt your conversion rate. This leads us to the question, what is the best way to display the fonts you want across multiple platforms and still remain search engine friendly?

While there is no perfect solution there are a few options for the designer to navigate while adapting their design to the needs of the user.

CSS
Most sites today are going to be largely designed based on some form of CSS. However, like the other options straight CSS does have a downfall. If the font you desire to use is not something that comes standard on most computers there is a large chance that the average user will not see the full potential of your site as previously mentioned. You have the ability to select your primary and alternative fonts, and even a font family that allows the closest option if your specified choices are not available.

Image Replacement
Web designers can cope with font issues by using images of the text exactly how they want it to appear instead of coded text. But like I said, none of these options are perfect. The use of image replacement limits you to the use of “alt” tags for SEO purposes. Alt tags are meant to represent the image using text, however they are considered less relevant when compared to properly coded content. There are black hat techniques such as hiding your text and primarily displaying your images, however Google does warn that “Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors.” It can be interpreted that “untrustworthy” feelings can lead to negative repercussions within your rankings— leading back to the ideal motto, do it right the first time.

FLIR
Face Lift Image Replacement, or FLIR, plays off of the concept of image replacement using PHP. Text can still be coded correctly in HTML for search engines, but be swapped out with an image for the viewer ensuring consistency across users. Sounds like we have found the best solution right? Well as FLIR is reliant on PHP’s dynamic interface the text cannot be selected, which decreases site usability. Again close, but still a considerable downside.

sIFR 2.0
Our last option is Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, or sIFR. sIFR combines Flash, Javascript, and CSS to create the text replacement. Just like when using FLIR, you still get the SEO benefits, however instead of an image your end result is a Flash file. sIFR still has some major drawbacks including the dependance of Flash (which with the development of HTML 5 may be on the way out), increased load times, and difficult to predict changes in CSS layouts.

With the development of new technologies every day we may have a solution to this problem right around the corner— but for now, when choosing a web designer make sure you are both on the same page of how you would like your site for both form and function.

What's in a Niche Market?

What is in a niche market? No, but really. The perspective on what a niche market actually is and why it may or may not benefit your marketing approach has become muddled.

Here we will evaluate what a niche market is, the goal niche marketing will serve and the beginnings of how it can be achieved.

Originally this term would have referred to a person coining a trade and becoming the only available specialist for commercial purposes. Like for instance, watchmaking. Today this form of a niche market is nearly impossible--especially with internet business marketing.

Today a niche market could be more accurately termed as a “focused market.” Meaning that when marketing online the approach will be completely different than any other form of marketing. While the purpose is still the same--to catch and keep attention. The way attention is achieved is by tapping into what keywords individuals are searching and capitalizing on them. Just as a corporation would want to advertise their business during a television show receiving the highest views of a certain age their product would be of interest the same can occur online, but even better.

To begin marketing in the niche fashion you first need to evaluate which keywords are being searched most often that are relevant to your product. If the demand is their you will have something to work with. In addition, other areas of research for determining a focused market should be:

* Competition & Saturation
* Potential Cost (for PPC budgeting)
* Commercial Intention (is there any?)

Once the keywords indicative of the niche market are located it is time to go to work. Some general rules to ensure you are achieving the overall goal while marketing online should be:

Provide Direct Results

If your target market revolves around a product such as the specific type of baby stroller like a “Travel System,” not only is it important to achieve a conversion through the advertisment placed on a Google or the content created on an exterior site. It is also important to optimize the landing page for the succinct purpose it has been marketed. Do not worry about placing your Umbrella or Double Strollers there as well. This was not your focused purpose and will decrease your probability for sales.

Test Your Market

Keywords are never enough to tell us the intention of our market. We will need to test our ads, content and pricing. Never assume you have completed the test market phase, because in reality you haven’t. There will always be more traffic to drive and more sales to produce.

For more on a niche market approach and the most effective business internet marketing techniques follow ideal this.

Achieving organic traffic, what is a site to do?

To open the topic I would like to pose a question. What is it that you have control of within search engines and online? Honestly... not much. You can’t control the searchers, you can’t control the search engines, so what can you control? Mostly your optimization, and that’s what we want to introduce in the succeeding information.

Lets go through the process from start to finish. First the searcher comes up with an idea of they want and they go to a search engine to find it. We can’t control what search engines they use, what phrases they search, or what results they select. Sounding a little pessimistic? It’s actually a lot better situation than it sounds, with online searching we actually have a leg up. Online we can actually track what people are searching and market towards their demands. Using tools like Google’s adwords keyword tool we can research the best possible phrases to market towards within our respective industries.

So now have done the research and we know what people are searching for, meaning we can market towards their demands. That brings us to the next thing outside of our control, how the search engines place us in the results listings. We can control how much marketing we do and our marketing strategy, but with search engine’s hard to understand ever changing algorithms and ways of determining relevancy we can never tell where we are going to rank. However, there are two aspects of control we can exercise to positively influence the flow of organic traffic. First is the display information you provide to the search engines including your page title, description, and URL. And second is your website itself and the keywords used on it. These will be your factors in achieving online marketing success.

Let’s look at your display information first, starting with your page title. Consider your title 55 characters to success. You need to use your title to introduce your website to the world and draw attention to your site. Using your primary keywords in your meta title will help you twofold. First, it will embolden them when they are used in search —drawing more attention. And second, it will help your optimization efforts as your page title is one of the foremost priorities in the eyes of search engines.

Next, your meta description. The description is even more important than your title when it comes down to the eyes of the searchers. Research suggests that 80% of all searchers will look to the meta description before making their choice among the results, that means you need to make the most of it. When generating a description you need to make it appealing to readers by making sure that it is relevant to their search, utilizing a complete thought, and has some kind of call to action or incentive. When writing your description there are character limits as well to prevent your thought from ending prematurely in an ellipsis. Google will display up to 160 characters, Yahoo! 165, and MSN 200; to be safe staying below 160 is your best bet.

And now to the final aspect of your display information, your URL. Your domain name is again important to both the searchers and the search engines. You want to have a domain name that first and foremost relates to your market. You want your URL to be short and to the point, this will help keep things memorable and eventually leads to customer retention and brand building. When possible directly containing your keywords within your URL is beneficial for optimization purposes.

And now moving on to the second item within your control, your site! Within your site there are various optimization techniques all stemming from keyword optimization. Ensuring you are utilizing keywords and phrases that are in demand within relative content on your site is really what search engines want. Proving your site to be relevant will help your display information be shown to the right searchers, and —presuming it is done correctly, your display information will then draw searchers to your site were the rest is in your hands!

So say you develop a site optimized within all recommended guidelines and you’re getting organic traffic, what next? Well optimization never really ends, but you’ve made it to a great starting point and it’s time to transition your focus from SEO to SEM. Utilizing the keywords you’ve found to be successful throughout the process of identifying your market strategy you can now open yourself up to new worlds of article marketing, blogging, social networking, and more!

4 Ingredients For a Delicious Marketing Strategy

Though there are many methods to developing traffic, just like creating a meal. You can do it extravagantly with high costs, very complex and intricate to bring out the most in every bite, and you can create a simple well balanced meal with all of the staples. Here are some of our favorite ingredients to creating a delicious marketing dish. Hopefully you can create and share some new and exciting recipes as we do.

A bit of Blog

Running a frequently updated blog is always a good idea. A blog linked to your site will generate additional traffic by providing a quality link from a site with quality related content. Your market will grow to see you as an authority when you are putting valuable information in front of them. You will also be showing search engines that you're related to the new content and frequent updates.

A dash of Article Marketing

Creating articles for your business online gives you many of the same benefits of blogging, such as the ability to put new and interesting content in front of your viewers. Linking articles to your website however do it with an added twist. You may not be fully in control of the guidelines and approval of your articles, but receiving a link from a highly ranked article site such as eZineArticles.Com gives your article and link even more credibility because of the more stringent requirements. Article directories can also give you a new audience apart from people who may have never found your blog.

A pinch of Link Building

Sure, it is a known fact that just like sugar is sweet, links from highly ranked sites help your search engine ranking. Just because you know it to be true doesn't mean you should leave it out because it's common. You wouldn't take the sugar out of your grandma's famous apple pie just because someone else's grandma uses it too would you?? Continuing to submit to directories, social bookmarking sites, and other websites related to your own will really help boost your search engine ranking. Even having friends or family link to it from their website, forums, personal blogs, or facebook page can benefit.

A smidgen of time

Once you've mixed the ingredients you need to let it cook. One major factor that Google likes to looks at for search engine ranking is how long your website has been around. Brand new websites tend to be ranked lower on the search engines, simply because Google doesn't allow these fresh websites to scale the search engines until they've been around for a while. More or less making sure your site is ripe for the picking. Being around longer will also naturally give you more traffic and further boost your search engine ranking. No matter what you do Google will take between 3 and 30 days to change your search engine ranking so don't expect instant results.

It is also important to remember that no company, online or off, steps right into the market and immediately dominates it. It takes time for sales to build up. They say that on average a customer will visit your site 3 times before purchasing. However, when they get their product and like it as well as your service, they will potentially become a return customer, refer their friends to your site, etc. It is important to not only give your marketing strategy time, but time to let your sales catch up to this time gap.

With these weapons in your pantry of productivity you have the tools to get traffic. But remember, you need to track the effects when you change a recipe. Every time you make an alteration to your website be it text, images, promotions, or Ad Campaigns, it is important to track the results. You need to know what ingredients are affecting your success. Every change that you make has the potential to effect your bounce rate, click through rate, or even your conversion rate. Noting things such as where your traffic is coming from and what searches you're appearing on will help you find out what efforts are the most fruitful.

Real rapport is measured by raving fans

With running a business there are aspects related to marketing and getting clients to you, and there are aspects of gaining them as a client and keeping them happy. Establishing and building your rapport with your clients is important to understanding their needs and making them happy. When you have rapport, the sales and fulfilment processes move forward with both parties on the same page. When you don't have it, every step becomes more and more arduous.

There are a lot of techniques out there to build rapport, but unfortunately a lot of them are short lived or in-genuine. The truth is building rapport is already part of your day to day life. When you want your relationship to improve with someone you know where you want it to go and you know what you need to do to get it there. You already have the skills. Running a successful business with true longevity comes from meeting the customers needs and wanting your service to be a real benefit to them. If you understand that you are already likely trying to build true rapport, but we’ve put together these three simple tips to help you make the most of it.

1. Get out of the rut

Through everyday communication we get into the habit of having undirected conversations. We don't realize the end goal when we initiate communication and that often leaves it lacking personality or needed information. This is all to frequent when dealing in regular customer service. The conversation is so often question and answer based and both parties come in preoccupied with the tasks they want to see completed. Keeping in mind how you want your relationship to improve with a company or an individual through the course of a conversation can help ensure both parties come out satisfied. Being able to empathize with your customers helps you understand that there may be more to helping them to simply answering their questions.

2. Guide the conversation

Guiding the conversation and understanding the clients needs are the best ways to get the client the right product or service for them. You are the expert in your product and you need to make sure to get that across. Through guiding the conversation using questions, you can probe their feelings as well as use their own reasoning to establish your authority in the matter. Asking the right questions will help solidify the information you already know to be true and gain their agreement. If something needs to be completed on the client’s part, don’t be afraid to hold their feet to the fire. Give them a call to action and make them want to take the next step.

3. Join them on their path to their success

It’s a common cliche that a business’s success is based off of it’s client’s success. Isn’t it sick how often these overused stereotypes are true? You want to make sure to help them find what will really make them happy. Your clients come to you having thoughts and ideas that are already occupying their attention, make sure not to ignore these if they don’t meet up with your goals. Find the best solution to satisfy. If the conversation is progressing the way the client wants it to you will often see that the conversation’s momentum progresses as well. When you can get your client excited about your service meeting their goals, your service becomes part of their mental path to meeting those goals and that is how you create not just customers, but fans.

As you ponder these simple tips remember this final piece of advice, you don't need to be in a face-to-face situation to establish rapport. No matter how you are working with your clients you can establish rapport; be it over the phone, on an instant messenger or live chat, or even through email if need be. With online business your first contact with a client is more often than not through in direct means, meaning you have to be even more clear and receptive.

The Basics to Building Back Links

Building back links to your site can be a valuable means of increasing your websites ranking. Google and most other search engines use links to determine the quality of a website. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards your ranking. Many people have questions about the best practices for organic link building and here are many different perspectives, but our approach is always to follow what is outlined in Google’s webmaster guidelines and that is what we want to outline for you.

The best marketing technique for new websites is to get involved in their niche community. Building your brand and reputation alone can drive people to your site. If you are providing quality long-lasting, unique content people will want to recommend it to others by linking to you. Great content is the best tool for organic link building. Interacting and contributing with the community though publishing articles, posting on forums, and through blog commenting and posting can have unmeasurable benefits when you are contributing in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site.

When looking for a promising way to create valuable content for your target group and earn great links try to find a topic that will help them. Think of issues or problems your market might encounter and present them with solutions. Visitors are much more likely to appreciate something like research results, your experience, a tutorial, or a practical tool than reading a sales pitch. Valuable information grows your credibility in your niche market as well as increases your brand visibility. This can help you gain quality, merit-based links that direct traffic and improve your image as an authority.

Directory submissions are another common way to promote younger sites in Google’s index. When submitting your site to directories always make sure they are focused on your niche and well moderated as there are great, topical directories that add value to the Internet, but most directories are of lower quality and are generally of no benefit. It is also common to see mass submission services. Most of which are useless and not likely to benefit your site unless it is a quality service ensuring that all links are topical.

There are also other ways to develop links that are not going to be as valuable as the aforementioned. With social media services constantly growing viral marketing techniques are now becoming a larger strategy to increase the visibility of a site. However, these short-lived tactics are wear off quickly. As powerful as viral marketing can be, and as much traffic as you can get, you shouldn't rely on them as a long-term strategy or your only marketing effort if you are looking to create a site with long term potential.

It's important to understand that developing a sites longevity through legitimate link building is a long term effort. There are those who advocate for short lived methods of link building, but if your site's visibility in the Google index is important to you it's best to avoid buying links, mass submissions, or randomly participating in link exchanges. Google considers these to be some of the worst ways of attempting to gather links and it is likely they will have no positive impact on your site's performance over time. Buying and selling links is actually in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results if discovered.

I hope this information has been helpful to you and you have an idea of where you stand as far as a quality link building strategy. As an after thought, when developing links you can use Google webmaster tools to view links to pages on your site located by Google on the web and check your progress. The data Google provides is comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded . All you need to do is prove you are the webmaster for the site by adding a small piece of code to the header tag.

In order to help you analyze the data lets look at the two categories links are divided into, external and internal.

External Links

External links are considered to be the links that reside on pages outside of your domain that link to your site. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, any link not coming from a subdomain of idealthis.com, such as a link from www.overtairsoft.com, would appear as an external link to your site.

Internal Links

Internal links to your site are come from within your domain. For example, if you are viewing links for www.idealthis.com, all the links that originate from pages on any subdomain of idealthis.com, such as www.idealthis.com/carte or marketing.idealthis.com, would appear as internal links to your site.

We hope you enjoyed this article and remember, there is always more great info to come!

Quality Website Guidelines | Google Webmaster

How do you know when your site is a-okay? Let’s take a look at what the mecca of the internet has to say.....Google Webmasters. Today we will look at the 3 different aspects the infamous Webmasters evaluate: Design and Layout, Technicality and Quality. Please keep in mind that the instructions to keep a quality and optimized site can be highly detailed. With the risk of one post turning into a novel we have limited to only the basics. As always there will be more to come.

Website Design and Layout

Navigation - Every website has a different way of guiding their users. Make sure your website navigation is easy, clear and concise. Here are a few tips provided from Google Webmasters:

• Linkage! Make sure every main and essential page has a minimum of one available link and clear route.
• Site Map. When all else fails your users and the search engines need a site map. This is a great way to show the search engine how vast and detailed your website is and also help your users find what they are looking for.
• Do not over link any certain page.

Content - Your content plays a huge role in who arrives at your website and what actually happens on your site. Whether you are looking to convert and increase sales, generate more contacts to increase clientele, create a new email list for marketing purposes or whatever, your content determines what occurs.

• Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your purpose and content.
• Think about the words users would type when searching for your website, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it. (This is the first step toward Search Engine Optimization)
• Use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.
• Make sure that your elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and and keyword rich.
• Check for broken links and correct HTML.

Website Technicality

Userability - This may not be a word, but it should be. Online today the look and feel, the content, the prices of your products are all useless if your visitors cannot view the site correctly or if the site takes an longer than our 30 second attention span can take. The follow is some great advice and tips from Google Webmasters to keep in mind:

• Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.
• Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.
• Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.
• Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Every search engines goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience.

Quality Assurance

The Basics - Every website and business online would benefit from adhering to following basics. Much of these are a given, but with businesses struggling to achieve profit the illegitimate practices can seem enticing. Stay away from them!

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.
• Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate Google’s Terms of Service.

Specific Guidelines - There are some very specific and direct guidelines provided for what you should not do. Google is big on quality content, quality marketing techniques, and honest online business practices. It will always be in your interest to follow these directives.

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don't send automated queries to Google.
• Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
• If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

5 simple internet article marketing tips

Are you new to article marketing or looking to improve your articles? Well before go into too much depth trying to find what you are doing wrong take a look at our 5 Simple internet article marketing tips and make sure that you are covering the basics first.

Article marketing tip 1, quality is important.

When you are writing articles the number one thing to keep in mind is that in order for your articles to be effective they need to be informative to your target audience. It is good to make sure that your article conveys either new information or a unique viewpoint, is easy (and maybe even fun) to read, grammatically correct, and on the same topic as your site.

Article marketing tip 2, make sure to develop an effective article title.

Developing an article title can be tricky business. You need to appeal to the publisher, the search engines, and above all the readers. Make sure to take some time and research out some long tail keyword phrases that will be of the most benefit to you and to include some kind of enticement to draw the eye of the reader. You can find more tips on our blog posts of yore for developing effective article titles.

Article marketing tip 3, be consistent in submitting to multiple directories and publishers.

When it comes to article marketing you are going to need to write more than a couple articles to see significant benefits. It is good practice to submit articles on at least a weekly basis as long as you are maintaining your website. This will allow you to diversify your marketing and keyword strategies with many long tail keyword phrases.

You will also want to stretch your articles to help you get the most out of your elbow grease. If you go through all of the trouble of writing an article and then only submitting it to one directory you are wasting your time. When you write an article you are able to submit it to multiple directories as well as alter in and resubmit it to multiple directories and gain the benefit of an exponentially larger number of back links to your site. Say you write one full article, alter it and create three different versions, and submit each version to 30 directories. This is going to give you the benefits of 90 articles linking to your site for only a little more work than 1 (especially if you have an article submitting software).

Generally when you are altering your articles by hand you can create these new altered articles without running into duplicate content issues and you are able to generate more content at a quicker pace. There is software available for creating altered articles that can save you time, but doing it by hand will make for higher quality articles. There is software available for submitting articles as well, most article marketers consider this to be a very sound investment, but again you will get the best quality when doing this by hand.

One final thing to remember when submitting, you will want to make sure and find the highest ranked directories as well directories that have a good publisher following when submitting in order to get the most benefit for your efforts.

Article marketing tip 4, have purpose and know what you’re talking about.

Don’t just go into an article writing blind. Before you write an article just because you found a good keyword phrase research it and know your approach. Define your goals with the article, are you going to measure your articles success by its click though rate? comments? converting visitors? the traffic of the article? or something entirely different?

If you are trying to write a converting article consider something like a product or service review. A product review is going to make sure that you are getting very targeted traffic with commercial intent, if you are aiming for high click through rates you may want to be sure to include a call to action or incentive to follow your link.

If you are a retailer and plain on writing a product review, actually review the product. This means using it and give your valuable input. If it is your product or service it can be beneficial to get a guest article writer or guest blogger to review your service in order to get a point of view outside of the company to ensure client trust in the article.

Article marketing tip 5, learn what works for you and your writing style.

Everyone has their own writing style and every blog is going to have a different feel. Some articles are very serious such as articles contained within news sites, and some articles are very laid back and personal touch like something you may find on a family blog. You can decide how you want your article to feel before you ever start writing it or just see how it turns out. As with anything to do with marketing testing and optimization is very important to Internet article marketing.

Before you start trying to determine your best performing articles think of the goals you had for them as discussed in tip 5. Keep an eye on your article statistics and find which ones perform their purpose best and then determine what it is about those articles that are making them successful.

Articles can out preform others for many different reasons. You want to look at things like the writing style, the title, your keyword saturation, and your calls to action.

Remember, no matter how long you have been involved with internet article marketing there is always more to learn. Make sure to always be implementing these five simple steps and you will be writing better articles and have a more effective article marketing campaign.

Optimized Link Building: It's A Popularity Contest

It seems lately all we hear about is networks. How good of reception does your mobile device get? How large is your network?

Today we are going to be talking about networks but not in the traditional sense. I am not referring to social networks, wireless carrier networks or sheer people to people networks. No, what I am talking about is your link network.

So first of all let’s take a look at why this should be a subject of interest. We all well know now that the bigger the network the better. But that is certainly contingent on the quality network as well. Every network really is only as strong as it’s weakest link.

With any website who is it that we are first trying to impress? The search engines, right? Of course. It is all a popularity contest. But this contest if more difficult than high school. This one has algorithms set in place to determine you real popularity. Math....determining popularity....what? While Google and others may be dealing with math we can simplify a bit and forget about that. Today, I want to teach you how to become popular online. First, we will cover how to create quality and optimized links. Second, I will talk to you about different ways to generate keyword optimized links from online authorites. And lastly, I am going to put you to work!

How to create optimized links?

First we have to understand the bare bones of how a link is created. This is where HTML will come into play. Keep in mind that when creating content in most places online today they will have a tool for you to create you own link. But for those who still do not we still want to be ahead of the game. Below is an example of the HTML for an “embedded link” (the embedded part of that phrase means that it is a link hidden within text. You don’t see the actual URL any where).



Now it is important to remember that your “phrase for optimization” as noted above will also be the phrase the link to your website is found in. For instance, if I were trying to optimize our site for the keyword phrase “Link Building” I would have a link that, in final, shows up like this:

Link Building

And if you actual did click on that you would find it takes you directly to the {ideal}this website.

Now we know that “how” of link creation and optimization. Let’s take a look at where you would want to be placing links like these and why.

If you remember, this is a internet marketing popularity contest. So there are a few things to remember when popularity is a factor. Rule #1 is the person who knows the biggest people in the biggest places is in! And links are the ways other websites will reflect whether or not they really “know” someone. So how do we know who are the biggest websites? And how do we get a link our their site to ours? Check out the following definitions for a little help:

Page Rank: a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page, used by the Google that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

Reciprocal Linking: A link offered to another site on the condition that you gain one in return. For example, you might provide a link to Site X on your links page provided Site X has a link back to you.

Essentially you are able to locate websites with higher page rank than yours, exchange links, and therefore raise your level of importance online in the eyes of various search engines. The page rank system is build on a scale from 0-10. The higher you number the better.

Next you are also able to create relevant content (such as an article or press release) that you may also place optimized links in as well. A very common and revered place for doing this is through eZineArticles.com



This is a great place to generate content that will be indexed as a web page itself, is relevant to your niche market or website, and provide yourself with a great link as well. Here is how you do it:

• First write an article of at least about 400-450 words in length minimum.
• Make sure the article is relevant and not advertising or too promotional.
• Create an account with eZine in order to submit your articles.
• When submitting your article (usually toward the end of the article) place your embedded and optimized link in the text.

This article directory currently holds a page rank of 6. This is a great rank and is likely higher than yours. It will be a great start.

This is not the only way to get links online that will optimize you for search engines. We will be talking more about other forms of creating quality content online with link optimization in future posts.

developing an effective article title

Developing an article title can be tricky business. You need to appeal to the publisher, the search engines, and above all the readers. Publishers generally always have requirements for titles that if not followed they will not even give your article a second glance. No matter how well written your article is, it can be turned down for an inappropriate title. With search engines and readers the main idea is to write a helpful and specific title that reflects what your article is about to your readers and incorporate your keywords if they sound natural and make sense. Follow these general article guidelines and you will likely have an article that pops in the eye of the reader, is optimized for search engines, and meets most all publisher standards.

When developing a title the idea is to create a something that tells the reader specifically what the article is about. To do that you are going to want to be as descriptive as possible without exceeding 100 characters. You will also want to consider the audience you are trying to reach and the keyword phrases they will utilize to find your article and utilize your main keyword phrase in your title.

Resist the urge to use a minimalist keyword-only title, this is going to do little to attract readers. For example, Airsoft Gun may be a short title utilizing your main keyword, but it does nothing to tell your reader what the article is about. Your article title should reflect what the article is about to draw them in, but also to ensure that when they get to your article they find what they are looking for. How to find the right Airsoft Gun would make a much more effective title. You also need to resist using a list of keywords as a title. Airsoft Gun, Airsoft Rifles, Airsoft Pistols does not make sense, does not help the reader, and is clearly just an attempt at loading your title with keywords to publishers.

Publishers will never allow promotional titles, but you do want to entice potential readers. This means that you cannot explicitly state your purpose in the title be it promoting your services or products (its always a good idea to keep that out of the article body as well if you would like to see it published), but you still want to provide them with an incentive to read your article.

Punctuation and capitalization should be used to serve a purpose. You can use exclamation and question marks to emphasize a point, but you do not need to worry yourself over proper grammar when creating an article title. Those of you who have worked with PPC management understand the importance that one punctuation character or one capital letter can play on click through rate.

Make sure that you utilize some time of seduction or propose a question in your title to deep the reader interested. Just as providing an unfinished thought in your META description by going over 168 characters and creating points of ellipsis ends a readers momentum utilizing a period to end your article titles can do the same. Some article publishers also restrict periods or punctuation at the end of titles so be prepared to adapt your title if utilized.

External and internal search engines can weight your title keywords heavily and your title is what gets readers to select your article over others so you need to be sure and put as much effort into your title as you put into your articles. If done properly your article title will speak volumes about the quality of your article, will help your article to be picked up by more publishers, and will bring in more qualified traffic.

5 reasons your business needs a facebook page

Facebook has quickly become the number two site on the internet only behind google in traffic. Started in March of 1997 Facebook has grown to be an international sensation. It all started as a social network to keep up with friends, but now it has become more than the initial developers ever could have imagined.

Facebook has many aspects that you can utilize to develop your business including free and paid advertising. Pages are one of the most effective means of advertising on Facebook, and best of all they are free to set up.

Pages are a recent development of Facebook that allows you to create an account for your business that acts and looks like a user profile. This allows you to connect and engage your target customers and have your message amplified to all of their friends. Here are 5 benefits of a Facebook fan page to your business.

First, pages are public. Much of Facebook can only be accessed after login and this prevents search engines from indexing the pages. Fan pages however are not behind a login and that means that search engines can index the page. This allows you to optimize your page for not only internal but external search engines and reap the benefits of both.

Second, you have freedom over your page. You can edit mostly anything on a page under your control which allows you to utilize SEO techniques in editing or removing sections and controlling the information throughout.

Third, Facebook automatically runs your news feed. When someone joins your fan page your updates are published in their news feed automatically. This helps develop your viral marketing strategy as well as with branding your business.

Fourth, you can create links on pages. The links are somewhat limited as you are not allowed to use any anchor text on you pages and you are limited on location. However that doesn't mean they are a wast of time as the link will be coming from a PR 10 site and that in on itself can help your rankings even without the added benefits of good keywords in your anchor text.

Fifth, you have the ability to send updates to your fans. Last, but definitely not least, on the list is the fact that you can send updates to your fans at will. This allows you send messages longer than the 420 character updates about new products, services, etc.

7 Steps to a more effective adwords campaign

Overall, having the experience on your to successfully manage an AdWords campaign means increasing your return and investment (ROI), and the overall success of your company.

No matter how long your Adwords campaign has been running you can ALWAYS improve it. There are plenty of things you improve your campaigns performance in getting you more traffic and doing it more efficiently. That means you can get more traffic with it costing less, how great is that?! We are going to outline some basic things you can do to help get the most out of every penny in your Adwords campaign.

How much money can you make for Google today? It is important to understand that your ads placement can depend on several factors, primarily it's performance and how much you're willing to pay. Google does this to maximize their profits, but it helps with yours too. If you are willing to pay more, they will place your ad higher and increase the chances of it being clicked on. However, if your click through rate is poor your ad will be penalized and you will have to pay more for the same ranking as someone with a better performing ad.Getting higher conversion starts before clients ever get to your site. The more relevant ad you show your customers to their search query will increase your click through, and the more relevant the landing page the more likely they will find what they are looking for. You always want to create different AdGroups for each category within your website. This is going to allow you to optimize the best keywords and set the best landing page for each search query.

Out with the old, in with the new. In addition to making specific AdGroups you will also want to make new ads regularly for your AdGroups. Creating different ads will allow you to maximize your profits because you will be able to continually improve your ads, fine tuning your click through rates. When creating new ads you can emphasize different products, different benefits (quality, price, free shipping, etc.), or simply try new phrasing. The default setting on your AdWords account will have your Ads cycling automatically showing the more successful Ads for more regularly. This means by creating new ads you are simply increasing your chances of success, and learning what your market reacts to by comparing ad performance. Create as many Ads as you'd like, but make sure you keep track of them as you will want to remove the ones that are clearly unsuccessful. Which brings us to our next point...

Take out the trash. One important step in making your campaign more efficient is to clean out keywords and ads that don't perform well. If your cost depends on your performance, why keep keywords that are dragging you down? After you have had enough time to see how well they are performing, up to a month or two depending on your budget, pause or delete the keywords and ads that aren't performing for you. Removing factors that hurt your overall performance will make your campaign more economical.

Don't be shy when it comes to adding new keywords. Don't hesitate to try some new keywords on a regular basis, but do hesitate to add keywords that are irrelevant. Keeping in mind that being specific to your product and market is important any time that you come across a keyword that will work with one of your AdGroups give it a shot and see how it performs. You can also check the AdWords keyword tool to look for new keywords regularly.

Just because your ad is, doesn't mean your site is. The last thing you want to do is go about investing too much in your adwords campaign just to get traffic. You want to make sure that your site is converting too. A successful website will have a conversion rate between 2-3%. This means that for every 100 visitors you will make 2-3 sales. If your site is performing, you will use your conversion rate to determine your AdWords budget as well. If you have a 2% conversion rate, 1 in 50 customers purchase, you can do multiply your bid by 50, and subtract this from your profit margin on the product or service that ad is promoting. This will allow you to see your adjusted profit margin after advertising costs.