The More 'Hits', the Better?

Conventional wisdom has it that the more hits on your web site, the better. For those who have a web site for their business, you probably strive for more hits. So, let's analyse this.

Firstly, a 'hit' does not necessarily equate with a web page viewed. A web page consists of the basic page (the HTML), plus each graphic image included in the page: each is a separate file. A 'hit' refers to each file served, so a page with five images equals six hits. Thus the relevant statistic from your server report from a marketing perspective is page views.

The second issue is: who is viewing your pages. This is the critical issue. As a comparison, think of the distribution of a paper brochure or catalogue. Would you be satisfied if a brochure on air compressors was distributed to mainly school children or pensioners ? Of course not, these brochures would have been wasted - these people are hardly the target market for air compressors!

So, how do you attempt to draw your target market to your web site. There are a number of actions you can take - here I will deal with two of the essential ones - they relate to Directories and Search Engines. These, of course, are in addition to including your web site address (URL) on all your printed material: letterheads, business cards, brochures, advertisements, etc. plus other Internet related actions.

As you read the next few paragraphs, put yourself in the place of someone searching on the Internet for a product/service like yours. Think of how you respond to search results and directory listings when you are looking for information on the Internet. You make your decision on whether to look at a site based on these Search Engine and Directory entries - and others will be making the same decision on whether to look at your site.

Search Engines.
Search Engines make use of some header information in web pages that is not visible to those viewing the page (and in some instances, part of the page text). This header information is known as META tags by web site developers and there are two main META tags that concern you. They are the Description and Keyword META tags. As well the Title tag is important.

The Title tag becomes the wording for the link to your site on a Search Engine's Search Results page. Hence, it's like a headline and needs to be compelling.

The Description META tag allows you to define the text that will appear under this link. It needs to be succinct description and should be limited to about 20 words.

The Keyword META tag allows you to nominate keywords such that your page will be included in the Search Results when a search is done on that keyword. Keywords can be single words or phrases and their are some tricks-of-the-trade in their optimal use.

All of this needs to be done for every page on your site.

Directories.
Directories are different to Search Engines - their information is organised in categories and sub-categories. As a web site owner, it is up to you to submit your site to a Directory. In most instances, you need to locate the most appropriate sub-category yourself and once in that sub-category use the Submit link and add your details.

Some Tips on Submission for both Search Engines and Directories.

Don't bother with so-called Submission software, I've heard of very mediocre results from these packages. Manually submit to each Search Engine and Directory yourself.

Concentrate on the main well known Search Engines and Directories. There are nearly 1000 out there and most are would-bees-if-they-could-bees. There's probably only a half-dozen or so (now, after the Internet shakeout) that are really worth the trouble. However, in some industries (eg music) niche Directories are also important.

Create a text file of your descriptions, keywords, URL's, etc. Never write a description on 'the fly'. When submitting, do so by copy/paste rather that actual typing to avoid tipos. ;-) Your URL with a typo in Yahoo would be a calamity (just try getting an entry in a Directory changed).

Following these approaches will generate a greater percentage of 'hits' (to use the wrong, but popular, word) from your target market.

David Berghouse
microbiz: Helping Small Business use the Internet since 1995.
http://www.microbiz.com.au

Be a List Builder

How many online business owners do you know that don't have a list? You'll find that anybody who is serious about their business will have a mailing list, and they will be using that as part of their email marketing strategy. It is a simple thing, yet one that needs to be said, you need to be a list builder. Yes, it isn't good enough to start to build your list, and then do nothing about it. You need to continue to grow your list.

You first need to look at how you are going to get an opt in list, many people use the same formula time and time again, but the problem isn't the list they build but the time it takes to build a decent size list. Imagine what it would be like if you had a double-opt-in viral list, can you imagine how fast your list would grow, and remember you are using a double opt in list builder for this. No grabbing an email address without any confirmation, but a double opt in which is always a better way to build your list.

List building is such an important part of your strategy and plan, which you really should have started to build using your downline builder. Imagine what would happen as you find your list is growing daily, and this list is hungry for your products that you are going to sell them.

Suddenly, you'll find you have a viral explosion as people are talking so much about you and your products, which more and more people will want to join. When you start to plan your marketing campaign, you really should consider how you can cause it to go viral. This is one of the fastest ways to grow your business.

Again this is something that a lot of people miss out when planning their business strategy and that is viral marketing. They will have a marketing strategy, but think how much easier it would be if your site went viral.

As you build using this strategy, people will be talking about you and your products. They will be the best sales page around, as they will do the selling for you. You will create raving fan that will become your viral network. Nothing sells better, than when a friend recommends to a friend, especially if it is a really good product.

Take time to consider how to make your network viral, as you get more and more friends involved in your downline builder. Give then that exceptional service, and then continue to sell exceptional products to them. You know the saying, the money is in the list, so think about how much money will be in your list when you have built using this marketing strategy, and it has grown not by one or two people a day but by hundreds in a very short time. This is really the only way to build your list, if you want to see your business explode to become the business that you have always dreamed of.

This article with useful information about the importance of list building to increase your bottom line and ultimately your profits was brought to you by Michael Murphy. Try visiting also his list building site at http://www.downlinebuilderdirect.com

Increase Your Page Rank - What's the Big Deal?

As a business owner on the web, you've probably heard a lot about page rank and ways to increase your page rank. PageRank is a trademark of Google. Google is the most popular site for searches at this time. PageRank can be likened to a FICO score. We know kinda how it's determined, what factors go into the equation but not real certain about the exact equation. Basically the more popular your site is the higher the page rank and the higher it will rank on search results for its keywords. The ranking is from 1 to 10. For example at this time, Google ranks 10 (of course). Popular sites like Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo! rank a 9. EzineArticles ranks a 6. Mom and Pop's discount store down the block may rank a 1 or 2.

It can sometimes take months, even years for a website to get a decent page rank, and list high on search engines. If you want to get your page noticed, learn how to leverage another site's high page rank. If site B has a lot of links coming to it, Google assumes site B is important. If a higher ranking site, site A, has those links to site B, that increases the importance of site B even more. These links are called backlinks.

This is one way that articles are important. When you submit an article to a directory, you have a link in that article that points to your website. When that article gets published in the directory, that high ranking directory is now pointing to your website. Your website now has a backlink from that directory. So Google thinks you have an important website because you're hanging out with another important website. Many e-newsletter publishers go to article directories for content in their newsletters. If your article is good, it may get picked up and published in an e-newsletter. This newsletter is distributed to hundreds, possibly thousands of people, who now can read your article, with your website link. Think what that can do to increase your page rank and your exposure!

Blogging is fast become a very popular thing on the web. Blogs are usually used as a running commentary on a topic. If the blogs are relevant, they can be a great source of backlinks to your site. You can set up your own blog at sites such as blogger.com. You can also set up feeds from other relevant blogs to be listed on your website.

Page rank is not the sole determining factor of how high a site gets listed in results. Be wary of offers to 'guarantee' to increase your page rank. The search algorithm is too complex for anyone to be able to crack it successfully. Usually companies that try to guarantee a high ranking are counting on you buying links to your website. In essence they are trying to fool the search engines into thinking that a lot of places are linking to your site. Don't you think the search engines thought of that. Many people are now being penalized by the search engines if they are found to be using bogus links. Search engines also make sure that the content on the website is good, relevant and fresh. That's another reason why you need articles. Can you imagine crawling all over the web, backtracking links, checking website content, checking for duplicate content, all in less than half a second. Wow!

Find out how you can write fantastic articles to be submitted to directories and other tips to increase your page rank.

Article written by Lynne Jones, A Stay At Home Businesswoman/Mom. http://www.squidoo.com/advertiseyourbusiness Unleash the power of article marketing! Take your business to new heights.

Get a Higher Page Rank by Blogging

Most people who are experienced with search engine optimization would know the basic procedure on how to attain a higher Google Page Rank for a website. With most SEO strategies, one can be sure about an increase of about two or three ranks within three months or so, but it doesn't hurt to gun for more. While SEO is quite simple as long as there is intelligent effort, some SEO services cost money. That is money that could be used elsewhere, so one must look for a better alternative before spending actual money for a higher Page Rank.

Contextual link building is one the most effective SEO strategies available. While you can go on and email people about exchanging links with you, there is actually a better way to gain affiliates to your website. One of these good link building ideas that can be utilized to maximize growth is blogging.

Blog About Products and Services

Blogging can be a sort of regularly-updating advertisement for your online business. It provides news and updates on your products and services to interested parties. By blogging your day-to-day business activities, potential customers can be certain that they can get them whenever and however they can be made available. Make sure that your blog has RSS so that visitors can subscribe and get regular updates to your blog.

Integrate Your Blog with Your Main Site

If your blog is one with your main website, you can have an easier time in increasing Page Rank as it is quite easy to do so with a blog. Within the first three months, it is entirely possible to gain a Page Rank of 3, so if your main website is integrated to your blog, it can share that Page Rank. By utilizing good SEO procedures, it can be easy.

Post Relevant Content Regularly

Regular updates increase the chances of getting a higher Page Rank as Google pings your site every once in a while. This is absolutely helpful if your blog is integrated to your site, so keep the previous tip in mind. By giving visitors the appropriate information, they will be enticed to revisit your site for reference and other such purposes.

Write Blog Reviews of Other Related Sites

By writing positive reviews and critique of other related sites in your blog, you are giving those sites incentive to support and link your site back. This type of advertisement is a powerful method of link building that can dramatically increase your chances in attaining a higher Page Rank within the shortest amount of time possible.

Combine Blogging with Other SEO Strategies

Blogging alone can give your site more traffic and such by a certain degree, but it alone is not powerful enough. Combine it with other tested search engine optimization methods to get the best effect. Such things like link building, keyword density, meta tagging, submitting sitemaps, and so on can multiply the effect that blogging can give you. If you had integrated your main site with your blog, then it will increase your chances even more.

Sunita Biddu is a search engine marketing expert. She also writes tips and articles on SEO strategies. Currently, she is offering manual directory submissions, article submission and various SEO services. To know more about these services, please visit http://www.seo-peace.com

Trackback Blogging

Website promotion is lifting away from the amateur website builder and fast becoming a system where only the professionals or the very lucky few can build sufficient quality related site links to your site in a quick time. The problem being that people who design websites now have to encompass the ability to produce not just a well optimized site, but a site that will attract good quality links.

For some people link building is a very slow methodical process and it takes a long time to establish your website as an authority on your particular niche. What you need is to be able to find and post to all the relevant websites and blogs that are related to your niche. The ideal situation would be to have a program the works by searching the web for blogs on your subject.

Blogs are everywhere now and some carry a substantial page rank by having a program that collects the information about all the appropriate blogs on your subject by looking in the likes of blogger, yahoo and msn and then you can sort out the required blogs via page rank or relevance and then post to these then that would be exceptional. At the moment there is only one package that I know that provides this exceptional service that is trackback spider. This program allows the user to set up specific keyword databases of blogs and then sort them and then post to them using a posting service. This program is able to provide a good rate of quality back links to your site at a rapid rate.

By providing good links to your site you can quickly establish a keyword and anchor text domination of your niche. This provides you with the ability to generate significant income from being able to dominate a search engine for your niche and then to reap the benefits of a top ranking website. Trackback spider also allows you to post internal links from your website.

By posting your internal links from your site you can effectively encourage the website spiders to come and index all of your web pages quicker. By having all your web pages spidered you are significantly increasing your web presence and traffic. Trackback spider also pings all the blogs it posts to therefore encouraging lots of spiders to all the blogs all over the web that they have been updated and there is fresh content that requires their attention.

Trackback spider allows you to add lots of variations of anchor text and it's these anchor text keywords which will allow you to dominate your niche. By creating lots of good anchor text to your site on high page rank sites produce an uplifting effect on your website traffic. Trackback spider allows you to target either high page rank websites or closely related websites which will become more significant as search engines evolve.

I find that this is one of the most essential tools within the webmasters arsenal and I find that it is an extremely useful for being able to produce good links to my websites and produce good links for my clients that require both SEO and link building. Trackback spider is the key tool in my web strategy and I can only suggest check out it's features and ability to lift your website from the bottom to the top by steady progress of good quality link building and automatic pinging.

2008 Andy Bolton 39 Liverpool,
Hot Air Balloons

SEM Services - Get Focused

Search Engine Marketing is quite different from search engine optimization, Not many people understand the difference between the two and as a result of which their website and the Online business is badly affected. In order to avoid such things from happening to your business it is important that you undergo a complete brush over of the SEM services you know of.

People generally tend to get lost about where to begin their search engine marketing plan. Where should they focus first. The focal point as a matter of fact depends entirely on the nature of the website and the niche market. In order to get your SEM services focused, you need to first prioritize the various search marketing techniques that you will be using. To begin with, the most essential search engine marketing technique is keyword analysis, followed by search engine optimization and submission, link building, link analysis and traffic analysis.

Keywords are the most essential search engine marketing tool. They are indeed the connecting feature that bridge the gap between your website and the users. User's generally search of websites using these keywords, and once your website contains the desired keyword, the search engine will rank it as a result of which the user will enter your website. Hence a proper and accurate analysis of the keywords is extremely important as they tell you exactly what you can market for in order to gain traffic to your website.

Next comes the optimization of these keywords in the search engine. The search engines will be able to result your pages only if they are optimized and submitted in the website, make sure that your website is properly optimized for the required keywords before it is submitted in the search directories. The search engine spiders crawl the websites in the web directories before they lust them in the result pages.

A focused approach in SEM services is always more beneficial and adds better results to the searches. Link building with high ranking and similar content websites are a good search engine marketing technique that gets focused results too. The better the link building program of the website the greater the response from the users. Hence in order to have a focused SEM services response it is important to indulge in effective link building techniques.

Amongst all this, one should not forget or subdue the importance of keeping a watchful eye on the whole campaign. This is the only method through which you can learn whether your website marketing is really focused or not.

About the Author- Naman Jain is an Online marketing professional, Presently working with Rupiz Media, one of the leading Internet marketing company, providing Search engine marketing, pay per click services and web development solutions as well.

How To Get Your Site Googled Quick and Cheap!

Not so long ago there was a booming cottage industry that catered to novice internet marketers who were in a bat-outta-hell rush to get their websites indexed by Google.

The purveyors of those services that catered to the burgeoning get-indexed-quickly-by-Google crowd usually directed internet marketing newbies to buy expensive one-way links for the duration of one month from high page rank websites or more specifically, high PR web pages.

Such links commonly cost as much as $800/month (not an expense for the faint of heart, as you can see). But why would someone shell out that kind of money for one measly link?

MYTH 1: Being Indexed By Google Means Lots of Traffic

A lot of new marketers think that once they've got their site indexed by Google, they can sit back, relax, kick off their shoes and contentedly watch the show of internet traffic snaking its way to their website. If you happen to have been (or still are) a student of this school of thought take consolation in the fact that you were (are) not alone, not by a long shot!

How come?

Because seo practioners of the day certainly weren't about to go out of their way to disavow such a misconception; after all it was very much in their interest to perpetuate the myth. How else would they convince you to fork over a princely sum for a mere one-month link? Anyway here's how the technique worked:

When you bought a one-way link on a webpage with a page rank value of 7 and above you were guaranteed of getting your website crawled by the googlebot within 24 hrs at the outmost which by proxy ensured that your site was indexed within 24 hrs. If your link was found on a web page with PR8 and above, your site would be indexed by Google within hours thanks to that high page rank link!

MYTH 2: Being Indexed By Google Means A Turbo-Charged Dash Up The SERPs

The 2nd selling point for acquiring an expensive one-month one-way link was the premise that your website would accelerate up the SERPs once it was indexed by Google. (SERPs stands for search engine rank pages which is just a fancy way of referring to the search engine page that lists relevant websites in response to your query). Obviously the higher up the SERPs your website gets, the greater the traffic flow!

But like any over-inflated bubble this one too had to explode, and so it did in time. With increased awareness and knowledge came new understanding of budget techniques that worked just as effectively. Besides Google effectively nullified the system by introducing the Link-Aging Filter which is an algorithm tweak that negates any influence that any new link may pass to your website or blog until said link has been in place for a certain amount of time. The interval of probation varies from link to link and appears to be based upon the competitiveness of the keyword incorporated in your back-link. The Link-Aging Filter hence effectively nullifies the technique of acquiring short-term links in order to get your website indexed rapidly by Google or accelerate your website up the search engines.

Methods To Get Your Website Googled Quick And Cheap!

1. Submit an original article to a high page rank article directory; don't forget to include a back-link pointing to your website with the anchor text of your choice! This technique works as follows: article directories are content rich sites (a quality Google loves) and assuming that the directory has a high page rank, you can bet that the googlebot (google crawler, google spider, it all means the same thing) will crawl such a site several times a day. When the googlebot comes across your article it will continue its eternal crawl across your back-link to your site and Hey Presto You Just Got Googled! (Well at least your site did.)

2. The second way to get your website googled fast and cheap, is by getting a back-link pointing to your site on one of the popular tagging websites which includes the likes of: Digg.com, Technorati.com, del.icio.us to name but a few. The trick here is not to get lost in the sea of over-popular keywords; in other words, since you're aiming to attract the googlebot not eyeballs (human internet traffic), tag your website with a little-used-little-known keyword! Once again these sites are crawled multiple times a day and tend to have a page rank value of 8 and above!

Budget Internet Marketing Practices

Ba Kiwanuka is the webmaster of http://www.internetbusinessmart.com