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.

7 Steps to a better website

Your sales suffer when site doesn't perform well. According to a study by JupiterResearch 75% of online shoppers who experience a site that freezes, crashes, is too slow, is hard to navigate, or has a complicated checkout process will leave the site without completing their purchase or never buy from it again. So what can you do to make sure that your site is running properly? Well we've compiled 7 ways to help you improve your sites performance.

how often do you wait for paint to dry?

What?! never? Well you're not alone. If your site is slow, your sales will be too. JupiterResearch recommends that your site should take no more than four seconds to load or you will loose clients. Google has a couple of great tools to help you measure your sites perfomance. Google's Page Speed is an add on that will help you measure individual pages and find the best ways to speed them up.

Google's webmaster tools is another great tool for checking your sites speed. Webmaster tools will provide you with a chart like the one below showing how your site's average page load time changes over a period of a few months.

For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all websites, separating slow and fast load times. The site in the example graph takes 1.7 seconds to load as of May 17, 2010. This is faster than 75% of sites.

Whenever you add anything to your website – new content, new images, or new pages — check that content is optimized to keep the site streamlined and your pages loading quickly.

Some HTML editors include features that tell you a document's weight – or a page's load time at various connection speeds – and most image editing software products indicate file size load times at various connection speeds for your convenience.

Test on multiple browsers, screen resolutions, and platforms.

Just because your website looks good and functions correctly in one browser doesn't mean it will look as good or even work in other browser, different monitor, or operating system. When developing your website or making any updates we always recommend using all W3C qualified code and checking the site in multiple browswers, platforms, and screen resolutions.

Checking your site in different platforms can be difficult as most businesses or individuals do not use multiple operating systems, but you should be able to check your site in multiple browsers and with different screen resolutions fairly easily.

The five most popularly used browswers are listed below. If your site functions well in all five of these your site will function well for over 98% of users.

Most Used Browsers

• Chrome
  
• Firefox
• IE6-IE8
  
• Opera
  
• Safari

If you have the availability to check your site in multiple platforms here are the five most commonly used operating systems in order of decending popularity.

Most Used Operating systems

• WinXP
  
• Win7
• Vista
• Mac
• Linux
  

Check your site in different display sizes to ensure that your elements stay in the right locations. Screen display sizes also may or may not reflect the actual dimensions of the viewable web page. Many users don't expand their browser to fill the entire screen. A great tool to test your site is Google's Browswer Size. Browser Size shows you exactly what percentage of people will see what aspects of your site. Be sure to conduct testing that accounts for this wide range of variability – not just the standard maximum screen resolutions.

Once you have connected an analytics software to your site you will be able to see what operating systems, screen resolutions, and browsers your clients are using and are likely to use in future. As part of your anlytics checks, go over your trends in browser and platform statistics semi-regularly.

test your links

Have you ever wasted 10 minutes on a site trying to get to a certain page? Probably not. If your sites links don't work, your clients have other sites they can go to. It's always good to manually check your links as no software is intuitive enough to know if the link is going where it should, but if you have a plethora of links you may want to use a link checking software. We recommend the W3C Link Checker, it can check for valid, broken, and redirected links.

test out your error pages

Error pages? I thought the point was not to have errors?! You've seen 404 and other errors come up when you request a page that doesn't exist. Try going to google.com/asljkdfl; and you'll get an error page. Your goal is to help contain clients even when they encounter broken links or other issues on your site. Intentionally put in incorrect extensions of your URL just as a potential client might do, this will allow you to check that the appropriate error pages are in place. It is best if your error pages include helpful information and links to help the client find the appropriate page.

make sure all downloads work

Check to ensure that all your download links point to the correct files and that the download files exist.

check your secure sockets layers.
...what?

Have you ever wondered what the difference in http:// and https:// pages are? SSL is commonly used to encrypt online transactions or other sensitive data on a webpage. If you have secured pages your SSL URLs should all begin with https://. This is an indication to your visitors that the page is protected by SSL, and to you that you are getting what you paid for. Browswers will generally also give another means to identify a secured page such as a "lock" icon at the bottom of the browser, or turning the address bar green.

test your forms

Test to make sure that any forms you have on your site send the information to the right place and that they're only submitted when all the required fields have been completed. There is nothing worse than seeing that you have an interested customer and then finding out their submission doesn't make sense or is missing information... or even worse never getting their request at all! Make sure to try to make a few different errors also. This allows you to see all of your error messages and ensure that they are helpful to the client filling out the form.

what the heck is PageRank?

PageRank? Why care about PageRank? Well, think about this: Google provides listing results based off of combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, and by comparing these two factors they are able to put the most relevant and reliable results first. PageRank is a scale used by Google to reflect their view of a sites importance, and the higher your PageRank the more likely it is to appear at the top of the search results.

SO the big question now is what goes into your site's PageRank? When determining your PageRank Google considers over 500 million variables and 2 billion terms in order to rate sites on their zero to ten scale, but one of the primary factors, and definitely one of the easiest to define, is how many votes your site has. Google interprets a link from one page to another as a vote for the 2nd site. Votes are looked at in sheer volume, but that isn't the most important factor. When looking at your votes PageRank also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are considered to be important weigh more heavily and this gives the linked page greater value.

It is known that other factors, ie the relevance of keyword phrases on the page and traffic to the page also influence the PageRank. This means developing more inbound links is not all you need to do to raise your PageRank, you still need to use other proper SEO and SEM techniques.

So what have we learned? The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon, your sites visitors, SEO, and the quantity of inbound links as well as the quality of the pages providing the links.