Article Marketing Is Equal To Viral Marketing

Article marketing is a cost-effective method of marketing your Web site and services, and driving up your search engine ranking in the process. Studies allege that Article Marketing is 7-10 times more effective strategy than regular advertising. Writing and submitting your own articles is equivalent to FREE ADVERTISING on the Web. In general, this form of marketing is where you write an article about a topic that is related to your website content, using highly searched keywords in strtegic places throughout. This is an extremely powerfull form of advertising for your business and when mastered, can literally help your business earn money on auto-pilot.

Now that you've heard about the Article Marketing Revolution. Your next step should be to start writing about a niche topic, that your business website revolves around and a highly searched keyword. Your first entry into the world of article marketing is mastering the fundamentals, but remeber that submitting your writtings to the free directories is not a one time event, but a process. Discover user submitted websites on article marketing and related content to research just what people are writting about and what niche topics publishers and webmasters are looking for to reprint. Then take a look at marketing your affiliate programs, within your authors resource box at the bottom of your article for addittional income streams . The true key to good article marketing is to remain constant and consistent. With the challenges involved with reciprocal link building, generating incoming links through this method has proven highly effective.

The viral effect of article marketing is a benefit that I love about this method of promotion. Viral marketing has its own terms like anything else, and instead of making you run around the Net trying to find linking partners,your articles will do that for you day and night, automatically. Because it's both free and viral, article marketing is obviously the most cost-effective of all advertising methods on the internet today. The benefits of utilizing this free resource can be, and very often are, extreme and immediate. A well-written, useful article will acquire hits and encourage viral marketing for years to come for your business website. Not only will the search engines find you through all the links from your articles, they will reward you with free traffic. Your consistant writing can also help you gain name recognition as an expert in your field.

Start Your Own Online Home Business With A Money Making Site

In the past I have fallen for the hype and wasted a lot of money because I really did not know what I was doing or did not have the experience and knowledge to put everything together to make an online home business work, so here are some tips to start your own online home business off on the right foot and how to make money online.

When you think about it, having a successful online business means that you will need to own your own domain, which will enable you to alter, add to and change your web site when necessary. You ideally need the opportunity of offering a free newsletter that visitors to your site can subscribe to, so you will require an autoresponder to be installed and a series of follow-up emails will need to be written. You will require products to sell and ideally you need to use companies who ship the goods on your behalf, otherwise you will need to get involved in accepting payments and shipping the goods, which you will have had to purchase first yourself. These are only a few of the basics and one can see that it can be very involved and complicated.

But let us look at what else may be required, just so that you are fully aware of what starting an online home business is all about. Owning your own domain and having access to your source code gives you the freedom to do what you like to your site, which means you have control of your business, but this will require knowledge of html. Internet Marketing is another animal altogether! You need visitors, lots of them, to your site to generate signups and sales, so ideally the online home business opportunity should offer a full training program and a forum where you can go to discuss your business, get assistance and ultimately you can offer help to others.

The ultimate of course is to find a business-in-a-box. This means that your website will come fully set up with the affiliate programs loaded and you will be able to select your own domain name and then be in a position to add any other programs to the site. The all important autoresponder should also be installed and ready to fire off emails to your subscribers, plus you will be able to add more follow-ups to your autoresponder.

You will be able to install a link exchange program to create linking partnerships, a stat counter, add banners or text links, change the colour and design of your site, choose your keywords and optimize your site for the search engines, link your blog to your site, add an article directory, stream fresh content onto your site, upload ebooks, software and more. Literally, you can do whatever you want as you have full control of your own online home business.

You may well be thinking that this is all too complicated and you do not have the knowledge, but that is the great advantage of joining an online program that sets your money making site up for you and with a comprehensive training program in place and an active forum which you can join and actively participate in, you will have all the help you need.

Starting an online home business does not mean that you are going to be generating an income immediately. You need to give yourself time to work through the training, learn and implement all that you can. It is a step-by-step process that takes time but each step you take builds your business. The marketing and advertising of a web site needs consistent, ongoing work, as you need to build momentum to ensure that your money making site is visible to as many people as possible.

If you have decided to start your own online home business you are in for an exciting time. You will experience frustrations and setbacks, but these can be overcome with the support and backup. The secret is just to press on and never quit. Remember, Rome was not built in a day. The learning curve may be steep, but work hard and have fun and once the momentum kicks in with your marketing and advertising you will start to make money online and reap the rewards of all the hard work you have put in.

Blogs And Search Engine Ranking - How To Get To The Top

It is generally easier to improve search engine rankings for a dynamic blog than it is for static website pages. Blogs and blog posts are liked by search engines because they are frequently updated with new content, they are rich in text and links , and they tend not to have complicated HTML.

Optimizing a blog to improve search engine rankings is similar to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post is similar to optimizing a single web page. By using the following tips and techniques, you can achieve an impressive search engine ranking for your blog. For additional tips to optimize your blog, visit http://www.optimizeblogtips.com

1) Ensure that your blog can be easily spidered by the search engines. 'Spidering' refers to the process by which search engine software robots crawl web pages. A navigation sidebar should be present on all pages of your blog. You also want your previous blog posts to be accessible from each page of your blog so that they can be spidered easily.

2) Obtain links from other blogs and websites. Links pointing to your blog or blog posts are vital to improve search engine rankings. These backlinks should come from websites and blogs dealing with similar topics to your blog ie. they should be related in some way to your blog. To get high-quality links back to your blog, submit your blog and RSS feed to blog search engines. Blogs based on similar themes are often willing to exchange links with other blogs which creates blog networks. Some bloggers use 'trackbacks' to build links( a trackback is a form of communication between blogs).

3) Frequently update your blog content. Search engines love fresh content. Make regular posts to your blogs in order to improve your search engine ranking.

4) Include your primary keyword in your blog's URL. Your domain or subdomain should include the main keyword that you want to optimize your blog for. If you are wanting to brand yourself or your business, consider including your name or the name of your company in the domain. For more information about personal or business branding, visit http://www.onlinebrandingsecrets.com

5) Place your main keyword phrase in both blog header meta tags as well as in the title of your blog posts. For example, if you are trying to optimize your blog for the keyword phrase 'natural asthma remedies', make sure this phrase appears in title of each of your blog posts as well as in your H1 or H2 meta tags.

6) Don't forget to include your keywords in the anchor text of links if you are linking to other pages in your website or to other blog posts. Linking your blog to your website is a great way of generating quality traffic.

7) Place your other keywords in the body text of your blog posts as well as intermittently in your article titles and links. Don't overuse keywords in your text as your posts will tend not to make sense and they won't read well.

8) If you change the domain name and hosting for your blog, you run the risk of losing loyal visitors, traffic and search engine ranking. If possible, keep the same blog domain and host.

By using these simple, yet effective blog optimization techniques, you too can achieve a top search engine ranking for your blog. Only once you have done this, can your blog start reaching its true profit potential.

Google Adwords Success Tips Vol. 1

When you use Google Adwords and can’t be certain of what keyword matching option you must use, then you can enter all three variations you have in your keywords list. For instance:

Art Posters
“Art Posters”
[Art Posters]

After using them for some time you can check the clickthrough rates of the keywords and delete the ineffective keyword combinations.

Always use the negative keywords feature. For example if someone uses the search term “free art posters” then you should use the negative keyword –free in the Google appropriate field and in result your keyword “Art Poster” will not be displayed.

By doing that you avoid the freebie seekers who are not targeted in your offer and as result you improve your clickthrough rates and reduce the cost of your campaigns. You can also use similar with the “free” term such as:

-no charge
-no cost
-costless
-chargeless

and so on.

The keywords number factor. The age of creating an ad group and load 4000 keywords instantly is over. Although there is not a specific rule for how many keywords you should use, follow Google’s recommendations on the amount of keywords. Google recommends: maximum 100 Ad groups per campaign and 750 keywords per Ad group.

Targeted but not over targeted. So many people loose money because of that reason. If you have yoga training center in Florida it’s obvious that people from New York won’t be interested in your services. So displaying a general term such as “Yoga” or even “Yoga training center” will display your ad on Google Adwords and prospects with no interest in your offer will click your Ad which means extra cost for your campaigns and not transformed into sales.

On the other hand if you use a specific term like:

“Yoga Training Center in Florida”

You have more targeted clickthroughs, targeted prospects and eventually more sales.

But there is a drawback on that tactic. If you are extremely targeted and use a keyword of over 6-7 words it’s highly possible that no one will search for that term and have no clicks or even views for your Ad.

How to find keywords? You could use the Google keyword suggestion tool but because so many other Adwords users use it, the keywords from that tool are very expensive.

Other tools you can use are:

Overture suggestion Tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion

123promotion Tool: http://www.123promotion.co.uk/ppc/index.php

Good Keywords: http://www.goodkeywords.com

These tools are free but if you want a more sophisticated and advanced option you can use word tracker paid service: http://www.wordtracker.com

Use always the plural form of your words. Don’t use “Yoga Training Report” but also “Yoga Training Reports”.

Exploit the misspelling errors. Research indicates the 12%-15% of the search phrases and words are misspelled. So don’t use only the term “staff” but also “stuff”.

Use hyphens. For example use both terms like: “Yoga Training Center” and “Yoga-Training-Center”

Use Acronyms: If you use the phrase “internet service provider” in your campaigns you can also use the acronym ISP in your Ads.

Use of domain names. This is powerful because it’s the most targeted term you can find. If your website’s domain name is www.yogatrainingcenter.com you must use it as keyword term.

Traffic Building – Look Out For The Potholes

A website is only as good as the number of visitors it attracts. You need visitors to be successful in marketing and selling your products or services. Without traffic even the best looking website is doomed for failure. Unfortunately there are many scams on the internet designed to trap desperate webmasters.

You finally have your website published and you are as proud as any parent would be of a new addition to the family. Well, nearly as excited. You cannot wait for visitors to flock to your site and to gulp up everything you have to offer them. You expect to hear the cash register ringing all the time. You expect to sit back and watch the money roll in. After a while you cannot help but acknowledge that nothing is happening and that you are probably the only visitor to your website. Sounds familiar?

The above scenario is all too common on the internet and most successful webmasters started their first website anticipating huge results that never happened. They only started to become successful once they realized that the internet is not a get-rich-quick scheme but that building a successful website takes time, dedication and hard work, like any other business.

As soon as you realize your website is not getting traffic you reach a crossroad – You can take the straight and narrow road that requires more work, but that will take you to your destination, or, the broad road that seems easier to travel on but is actually only a mirage.

Many internet marketers make the mistake of taking the broad road, the easy road. It looks easy at first glance but turns out to be a road leading to nowhere. A typical case of good from far but far from good. Taking this road often involves doing business with dubious sites promising you huge amounts of traffic in exchange for cash. Money that you can often not afford to spend but feel obliged to spend thinking it is the only thing you can do to get people to visit your site. It is the same as a musician giving free tickets away to his concert in the hope that people will buy his album once they have heard him. Actually it is worse. It is more like a musician paying someone to get people to visit his concert. He does not really know where these people come from and are not sure at all whether he will sell any albums to them. If he does sell some albums then he normally does not even make enough money to reimburse himself for his initial investment in getting people to his c!
oncern.

This may sound a bit dramatic but is happens every day when internet marketers start getting desperate for traffic. There certainly are sites out there that will deliver the traffic at the right price. Problem is that it is not the type of traffic you need. You may end up getting many “hits” but don’t be surprised if you get no sales as the people clicking on your site are often poor people in third world countries that get paid cents to click on sites but will never buy anything on the sites they visit. Sad but true. By the way, never subscribe to sites that offer to click on your Google™ Adsense™ adverts in your website. Such clicks are fraudulent. Google™ will find out about it and you may be banned from ever using their tools again.

There are many schemes out there designed to trap desperate webmasters. As a rule, do not spend any money to obtain traffic when you just start out. There is an enormous amount of valuable and free information on the internet that will help you to grow your business. Read up as much as possible on the internet and if you feel a need to invest money at a later stage in legitimate programs like Google™ Adwords™ you will be able to make an informed decision.

Remember that if something sounds too good to be true that it normally is too good to be true. Stay on the straight and narrow road and you will reach your destination.

Tips for Increasing Your Website Traffic

Website Traffic Is The Key To Success

Most online publishers know that website traffic is the amount of visitors your website receives. The best gauge to determine how well you are doing regarding traffic is unique visitors. Generating those unique visitors is the single biggest challenge faced by most webmasters.

You have a wonderful website and attractive content but your website traffic is still low. Internet marketers know that with little or no traffic there is little or no income. Therefore it is imperative that you increase your website traffic to ensure a more successful business.

So now that we have discussed why website traffic is so important, how in the world do you get that traffic and keep it coming? How do you generate higher website traffic is a question that is asked by hundreds of thousands of internet marketers around the world. The basic answer is: Building website traffic is simply marketing your website so that it can market for you. But how does one market their website?

You need to use a combination of methods. You cannot focus on just one method and expect to get significant amounts of traffic. Also, keep in mind that building traffic to your site is a process and not a one-time event. It is something that requires regular effort.

All Website Traffic is Not Created Equal – You Need Targeted Traffic

Website traffic is one thing, but targeted traffic is everything. The easiest way that I have found to increase targeted website traffic is to focus each website page or blog post on a specific niche in the market. An excellent way is to ask a "how to" question and write about your solution.

How to Get Traffic

One way to get traffic is by writing articles for your niche market and submitting them to article directories and ezine editors.

Another vital strategy for increasing your site traffic is to use inbound links to bring in traffic from other sites. Make it a priority to spend time every day increasing the amount of incoming links to your site. Social bookmarking is a great method to increase links exponentially with little effort.

If you can get a regular routine of writing articles, posting them to your site, and submitting them to social bookmarking sites, that is a powerful combination to increase your traffic.

A third very powerful tool that can dramatically increase your website traffic is a viral ebook or report. There have been several examples of this recently with free reports by Rich Schefren and Mike Filsaime "The Manifesto" and "The Death of Internet Marketing." Another report that started a buzz was "The Death of Adsense" by Scot Boulch.

Discussion boards, or forums, are another great way to increase traffic. If you are in a niche where people like to talk and discuss the topic, this can be a great way to increase traffic. Post comments around the web that you are starting a forum on such-and-such a topic and they will come.

Pay-per-click, such as Google AdWords, is an excellent way to generate traffic. But be careful. It's very easy to end up spending thousands of dollars for traffic that doesn't generate any revenue unless you know exactly how to do it. Perry Marshall is Mr. AdWords, the one that everyone goes to for learning AdWords. Purchasing his ebook for a few dollars will end up saving you big bucks if you want to use PPC.

When all is said and done, every internet marketer depends on website traffic to generate business. With a few basic tools such as article syndication, social bookmarking, linking and PPC, and a site that gives viewers what they are looking for, your traffic will increase every month.

Link Building Is One Of The Hardest Things To Do

"In the time spent roaming the Internet jumping from website to website, it strikes me that links is the only real method of travel.

With a rather large number of directories and link schemes that seam to have hit the net; paid and free link exchange directories seem to be the norm these days.

Some of which are rising to great heights in search results and some are not.

Spending some time looking into these directories, i have come to realise that each directory has its own agenda; be it money or Google greatness.

Never-the-less very few directories have one thing in common; quality.

Link building is one of the hardest things to do when creating a successful website, on little or no budget. As your newly uploaded website needs inbound links for it to be seen; let alone get to the top of search results.

There are varying methods of achieving inbound links but require a lot of work and patience. Finding reciprocal link partners with high ranking sites is almost impossiable and i read it somewhere to write articles on a topic related to your site. Good luck finding a topic not already covered.

So whats a new webmaster to do to achieve inbound links and Google greatness.

Well your guess is as good as mine.

But one things for sure; if the big sites continue to ignore smaller and new websites link requests, "yours and my dreams will remain just that."

How To Make Your Web Site And Affiliate Marketing Compatible

People who look for income opportunities, do often come across the idea of affiliate marketing. At first sight, it looks like it's just to have a banner posted on their web site to generate income.

The truth is that you need to do a little more than that. You have to test and evaluate every necessary ingredient in your particular affiliate marketing niche. By testing and optimize you will learn how to get the most out of your efforts.

To be able to make money from your web site as an affiliate marketer. You need to get your site and your affiliate program to work together. It's a team sport with two players, and to win the matches, booth players have to perform well.

Let's have a look why this compability is so important. Your visitors come to your site because they want information on a specific topic. To be able to recommend a service or a product your visitors may be interested in, you must promote something that are related to your sites theme.

If you try to recommend a product unrelated to your theme, it will only result in a click at the back button. Once your visitor spot a banner or a text link that is not related to your page content. He will think you're unprofessional. Or worse, he might think you try to scam him.

To make the affiliate marketing process work, you must keep your content and recommended products or services related. Your customer visit your site to find information and a solution of his problem. First you provide the information, then you recommend a solution for his problem.

Banner or text link placement is also an important ingredient. It will work best if you can weave it in to your content. Try to make it as a well flowing unit. However, Don't hide the fact that your visitor will land on another web site when he click at your link. Build trust and confidence by being honest. To find the most efficient placement, you have to test and evaluate over time.

Once you've learned to master the art of affiliate marketing, it will give you a repeatable income. When your first program is up and running smoothly, It's time to implement the next one.

All products or services have their ups and downs. Therefore it is wise to divide your sources of income. Your site must have one main theme, but there is no reason why you can't have several sub themes. With that, comes the possibility to promote other products or services, that are related to these sub themes.

When you add more than one source of income, it will balance your income. It will help you to gain a stable financial situation.

Why To Improve Website Ranking?

With the increase in the number of internet users all across the world, online businesses are definitely on a great raise. Even in emerging markets like Brazil, China, India; the usage of internet is becoming very huge. Thanks to globalization, penetration of internet and liberalization of economic policies in most of the markets; now you can take your small, home-based business to anywhere in the world with just a well designed and perfectly optimized website.

Having a website, is just a prerequisite to any business in today’s scenario. But, merely having a website is not going to do any good to your business if you are not able to generate good amount of sales and revenue trough your website. To generate good sales, you need to have quality web traffic first. According to the research more than seventy percent of the web traffic all across the internet is just coming through the search engines. So, if you are looking for quality web traffic, you need to improve website ranking on most of the search engines.

To improve website ranking, you need to do lot of things, but not in a rush. You should first analyze who your target audiences are. And then, you need to analyze what are the keywords or phrases that your target audience are using on the internet while doing web searching. This is very important. Because, if and only if your website has a very rich content with full of those keywords, you will have a chance to improve website ranking on any search engine.

You also need to update your content very regularly. This improves website ranking quite dramatically. This is because of a simple reason that most of the search engine algorithms give top ranking while indexing the websites if the content is updated frequently.

So, it is quite evident that you need to have a lot of knowledge on SEO if you want to improve website ranking. Normally, most business owners or webmasters will not have sufficient knowledge that requires improving website ranking. Or, they will not have enough time to do so. In either cases, it is quite perfect if you go to professional SEO consultants to improve website ranking.

In this world of outsourcing, it has been proved that it is always a better idea to outsource the work which you are not good at to a person or a company who is good at that work. To improve website ranking, you can get many professional SEO consultants to work for you. You can even get a professional consultant at a very cheap price if you outsource the work to countries like BRIC nations, INDIA or China.

Do You Know the Fastest Way to Get a High Page Ranking?

There are millions upon millions of websites on the internet. The majority of these site's have poor page rankings. Is your site one of them? Would you like to increase your page ranking? Silly question right? Of course, you want a high page ranking.... we all do. Keep reading and I will let you know a little known secret as to how you can quickly improve your page ranking.

In the early days of the web, search engines would get information about a website from the keywords meta tag. This is no longer true. The reason is that several people began to keyword stuff their meta tags to achieve higher rankings with the search engines. The Search Engines got wise to this and changed the criteria they use when crawling websites. This does not mean you should forego keyword meta tags, it is still good optimization practice to include a keywords meta tag however, this tag alone will not get you a high page ranking.

Before I tell you how you can quickly improve your page rank, I want to touch on Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is very important to the success of your website and to getting good page rankings. If you have not already done so, I encourage you to learn good optimization practices and use them when creating and submitting your website(s). You can learn more about Search Engine Optimization at http://www.terrysinfosite.com

OK, so how do you get a high page ranking? Did you know that most search engines put a high level of importance on the links to your webpage? When a high ranking website links to your site it will make the search engine take notice. Does this mean that all you have to do is get a lot of incoming links to your website? NO, absolutely not! In fact if you simply go grabbing incoming links from wherever you can you could end up getting your site banned by search engines. The key is to get quality links from high ranking sites. All of your incoming links should be from site's that have something to offer your visitors. In other words there content should be relevant to yours. After all, if you are searching for information on 'computer hardware' you aren't going to be interested in a link related to 'dog grooming' now are you? Another very important point needs to be made before we continue; NEVER use link farms. This is important and bears repeating.. NEVER, EVER use link farms. The use of link farms could get you banned. You want to stay focused on your site's content... that includes your incoming links.

OK, here is what you have been waiting for, how to improve your page ranking quickly;

First: Go to Google.com and download the Google toolbar. Install the toolbar on your web browser.

Second: Do a search using one of your site's most important keywords or phrases.

Third: Visit one of the first few site's displayed in the search results.

Fourth: Note where it says "PageRank" on your toolbar. The green bar represents the page ranking for the site you are visiting and ranges from 0 to 10.

Fifth: By using this toolbar and searching with your important keyword or phrase you can find a site with a high ranking and relevant content.

Sixth: Look for the contact information for the site you are visiting and send a request for a link to your webpage in exchange for a link to theirs.

Every link you get from a high ranking site will improve your ranking with the search engines.

Be aware, since these are high ranked sites, some will refuse your request. Never fear, there is a solution. Go back to your search engine and this time enter "link:" (without the quotes) followed by the name of the site you just approached for a link. You should only need to enter the site name, not the complete url. The resulting display will show you all of the sites that link to the one you approached. You can now go visit one of those sites and ask for a reciprocal link. While this is a 'backdoor' approach to getting the link you were originally after...it has been known to work.

Here is a little side-note with regard to negotiating for reciprocal links. This was learned during my years as owner of two businesses. In any negotiation the other side has one thing on their mind at all times...."What is in this for me?" When negotiating for reciprocal links you should stress the benefits that the agreement will provide to them. Try to make your offer as attractive to the other side as you possibly can.

I admit this involves a little time and effort however, a wise man once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with an empty tank and a flat tire." The time and effort you spend is well worth the rewards.

Web Promotion

The main methods of online marketing are the following

Web Optimization

The professional SEO services are the first the and in most efficient method of online marketing. It would be ideal that the site should be realized from the begging after the principles of web optimization, in this way you save time and money.

Increasing link popularity

The popularity of a link is given by the number and the quality of the links who lead to your site. The links are a determinant force for search engines. A quality sustainable link it will not help you only in the ranking of search engines but also will bring you targeted traffic.

The registration in main search engines

The registration in search engines is achieved manually only by human operators. The sites who pledge the automatic registration in search engines are not accepted by Google.

Not only that this method will not help you in any way but it is considerate spam by the search engines and you risk to be penalized.

Registration in web directories

Another method is the manually registration in web directories, depending on your target market and the languages in which your site is realized.

The beginning of a promotion campaign Pay Per Click.

This type of campaign will bring immediate visitors, but with certain costs. If the results of web optimization give results on a long period of time, the Pay Per Click campaigns have results as long as they last.

Developmental systems for affiliation networks

Besides direct sales that come from direct requests from your site, your products, services can be sold through your affiliates’ sites.

Online marketing through advertising banners

Advertising banners are another method of online promotion. Our company makes advertising banners at promotional prices.

How To Analyze Your Search Engine Competition

Analyzing a competitor’s web site may seem like a big job. You should have the mindset that you are going to do this as a learning experience though. This will help you along your way when you may feel like giving up.

Before you even begin to analyze a competitor’s web site you should make sure that you are equipped to do the job. If you do this job properly you can gain a lot of information that will help you to increase your site’s traffic and popularity. These sites can also help you to analyze your own market. After all, if a web site is getting a lot of hits then it must be doing something right. If you take time to see where it is ranked, what key words are being used, how the site is formatted, and what you can do to make your site better while not violating any copyright laws then you will be well on your way to success.

The first thing that you need to do is identify who your major competitors are. The best place to do this is to look in Yahoo’s directory for large companies, innovative approaches and new products. While looking through this directory you should also try to identify any niche markets that your major competitors have not yet identified and exploited. When you find these new niches you will be set for traffic. Another thing that you should do while here is try to get your site listed. Little associations like this are important if you want to start to build up your traffic so that you can conquer a niche or category. Some other associations that you can build occur when you figure out where the big sites’ webmasters are hanging out and you start hanging out there too. Believe it or not, knowing the right people is going to make your business bigger and better.

If you visit Media Metrix 500 you will be able to see what companies are getting the most traffic. Alexa will also teach you about relative traffic. They offer a free browser add-on that shows you how much traffic a site is getting. This will help you to see where your competitors fall in the pecking order.

Once you have found your closest 5 or 10 competitors it is time to closely study them. You really can learn a lot by looking at and analyzing your competitors’ website. The main things that you should be looking for include:

1. Take a minute to see what products or services that they are offering. Make notes of anything that is different from what you are offering. If you see any gaps in what they have to offer think about whether or not you could possibly fill these gaps.
2. Think about how their website looks, feels and functions.
3. Look at the various advertisements they are offering.
4. Act as a client for a moment and think of where their strengths and weaknesses lie.
5. Spend some time trying to figure out their strategy.

If one of your major competitors is s a publicly traded company then you can get detailed information from their SEC filings. Take a moment to jot down who their key players are so that you can read their interviews and speeches. These may also give you some insight into their website.

Once you have gathered all of this information together you need to spend some time summarizing the information for each competitor. Make sure that you highlight their strengths, weaknesses and strategies. This will be useful as you become resourceful in countering and exploiting these sites’ weaknesses.

You can also use this research in order to create a marketing plan. This should include what steps you intend to take in order to deal with this competition in such a way that your website comes out on top. Of course, you are also going to decide whether it is even worth competing with these sites or if you should try to find a market that is less saturated.

Before you even get started with trying to analyze what your competitors do you should know that it might feel overwhelming when you see what the big companies online do. This should not intimidate you though. Instead it should encourage you to concentrate on customer satisfaction.

How to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines

Blogs are naturally search engine friendly and optimizing your blog for search engines is really no different than optimizing your website.

Here are some suggestions to get you started.

Back Links: Backlinks play a very big role in Google's pagerank algorithm. Backlinks are extremely important to your blog's rankings, so make sure you have a large number of backlinks.

Here is a list of places to submit your feed or blog.

http://www.bloggertalk.net/blog_resources-cat-369.html

Make use of the alt description tag: Spider bots cannot read images, so when adding images to your blog it's important to place information within the alt and anchor text of pictures.

Make good use of anchor text: Don't use "click here" or other non-descriptive link text. Always use keywords as your anchor text. Google loves anchor text.

Use relevant keywords: Did you know that in a 48 hour period there was 6138 searches done for game cheats? Wow! It looks like a majority of gamers are cheaters.When creating titles for your blog posts think about the words that web surfers will be typing to find your blog.

'Inventory Overture Keyword Selector Tool' is one of the best-known services for helping you choose the right keywords. Use ‘Inventory Overture Keyword Selector Tool’ to find what people are actually typing in to the search engines. I also suggest subscribing to Word Tracker. Their report of the most popular searches is published each Tuesday and distributed to over 30,000 subscribers.

Technorati.com , is a blog search engine that also lists the top searched for words. The more targeted your keywords are, the greater your return in search engines will be. Use keywords in the body of your post as well as in blog header tags and the title of your posts.

Update frequently: Remember that content is king and search engines love it, so update your blog regularly.

Be sure to read my articles "Link Popularity in the Blogosphere, Major Search Engine Submission: How to get listed in Google, Yahoo and Msn and Blogging- Developing a Readership."

Remember to optimize your blog for both search engines and people. Search engine optimization is hard work and an ongoing process. Invest a little time and learn the proper techniques and not only will your traffic come, but you'll increase your page rank too.

25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips

This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog's traffic and search rankings.

1) Content is king!

2) Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial indexing I would recommend resubmitting every 6 months.

3) Comment on as many blogs as possible. Make your comments thoughtful and not spammy.

4) Link up with popular blogs - trackbacks can be good for SEO as well as your traffic.

5) Write a good article and post it on a site like http://www.digg.com, although this won't help as far as traffic goes (you will get a HUGE boost for a few hours, then it will tone back down, you probably won't get any permanent readers from Digg) and it sure doesn't help with your relationship with your web host, it can create some new inbound links.

6) Use http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ . Instead of the GoogleBot searching for your pages you can tell it where your pages are. This is a great way to get your whole site indexed.

7) Content is king!

8) Get listed on web directories like http://www.dmoz.com/. Although many SEO "experts" think it is overrated no one disagrees that it can help boost your site's rankings.

9) Add some links for feed readers and blog aggregators like http://www.bloglines.com/, http://www.google.com/reader/, and http://myweb.yahoo.com/.

10) Add some social bookmarking links at the bottom of each post

11) Make it easy for your users to find your RSS feed

12) Add a "E-mail This!" link either on the header or the footer of each post

13) Content is king! (see a pattern?)

14) If you write a really good post try e-mailing the URL to some big-name bloggers with a short personalized message. You never know, they might like it and link to it.

15) Try asking some big sites who are in your niche if they would like to trade links. More often than not they will say "no", but at least give it a try.

16) Don't obsess over "get rich quick" schemes.

17) Don't obsess over "get lots of traffic really quick" schemes.

18) Submit your RSS feed to a bunch of RSS directories, http://www.rss-specifications.com/rss-directory.htm has a large list of popular directories.

19) Use http://pingomatic.com/ to notify a ton of aggregators that your site has been updated.

20) Don't obsess over the numbers - it takes time to build up a good reader base.

21) Make your posts as keyword rich as possible. Whenever you can use a word that has to do with your niche, use it!

22) Use lists, especially if your site is targeted towards more tech-savvy users

23) If you have a MySpace page or a home page on a similar service put up a link to your blog.

24) Tag important keywords, using this site ( http://www.richardrodger.com/tags.htm ) you can tag keywords.

25) Last but not least, offer free stuff. Everyone loves free stuff!

The really important thing you have to remember is, just have fun. If your blog is causing you to become stressed out then it probably is not a good idea to continue blogging.

If your readers can tell you are having fun while providing good content they will become permanent readers.

Generating Traffic To Your Myspace Website

MySpace is an exciting online community where members can make new friends, reconnect with old friends, network or even find potential romantic partners. While there are some MySpace members who join the community simply for the ability to stay in touch with their old friends and are not looking to make new friends. These members may keep their websites private to not allow other users to view their personal information and may not spend a great deal of time visiting public websites of other members. However, most MySpace members are interested in making a great deal of friends online and are always looking to generate more traffic to their website.

Create an Interesting MySpace Website

One of the simplest ways MySpace members can generate increased traffic to their website is to create a website which is both aesthetically appealing and interesting to others. The aesthetic appeal of a website can greatly influence the amount of repeat traffic a MySpace website receives. For example members who use garish colors and fonts which are too small or otherwise difficult to read may not receive repeat traffic even if the content of their website is very interesting and engaging. This is because other members may lose interest in the website quickly.

The other part of an excellent website design is interesting and intriguing content. A website which is aesthetically appealing may entice visitors to peruse the content but if it is simply not interesting and engaging the visitors are not likely to spend much time on the website and are also not likely to return. However, MySpace members who fill their website with exciting content are likely to keep visitors interested. When visitors are interested in the content they are likely to return and also to encourage others to visit the website as well.

Visit Members’ Websites

Another way to generate increased traffic to your MySpace website is by visiting the websites of other members. You can use the search feature to find other members who share your interests. By visiting their websites you will get a better idea of whether or not you are interested in being friends with these members. When you encounter other members you might be interested in meeting you can sent them an email or instant message commenting on their website and asking to be added to their network of friends. You can also suggest they visit your website as well. Those who make an effort to meet other members are likely to increase their own web site traffic.

Invite Friends to Your MySpace Website

Finally, MySpace members can generate additional traffic to their website by inviting others to visit them. They can speak directly to friends and family members and encourage them to view their website. Also, those who participate in other online communities such as message boards may include a link to their MySpace website in their signature so those who want to learn more about them can visit their MySpace profile.

MySpace also has an invite feature which enables members to send messages to others to encourage them to start a MySpace account. Members who have friends or family members who do not belong to the MySpace community can send them one of these invitations to encourage them to participate. The invitation can include a link to the members MySpace website to give the others an idea of what MySpace really is.

Social Bookmarking - Link Building And Search Engine Optimization

Social Bookmarking could be the next big thing in web site marketing since the development of the personal blogs.

Social Bookmarking web sites like http://Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble Upon and Furl allow their users to create a set of web site content bookmarks. Submitted book marks are organized by content tags, which are arbitrary phrases or words a user can assign to the content they wish to bookmark. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize web site content using tags.

The most popular Social Bookmarking web site is Digg. Digg is a relatively new social bookmarking web site and has in it's short time attracted millions of members who daily add bookmarks to all sorts of web site content. Over search engines and other bots, social bookmarking web sites have an intrinsic advantage. Users will choose what content they will bookmark, unlike relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.

Users of a social bookmarking web site will read other posters bookmarks and then add them to their own bookmarks if they liked them.. You can even view RSS feeds to see what others are tagging, which is a very cool feature and is a textbook example of a very powerful viral marketing technique.

My own experience and testing shows that 3.2% of all my web site traffic come from social bookmarking web sites, off those 50% come from http://Digg.com, 20% from http://Del.icio.us and the remaining 30% come from various bookmarking sites I am a member of. These sites include Furl and Stumble Upon.

As a search engine optimizer, social bookmarking is another tool I use to promote my web sites. An example would be, introducing a new developed web site. I could wait until Google, Yahoo and MSN found my web site naturally, but that would takes weeks if not months. I could join a link exchange network and exchange links with other web site and have the search engines find me that way. But, then again I would be relying on the indexabilty of the linking web site for the search engine to find me. Or I could add a couple of bookmarks on 3 of the most popular social bookmarking web sites. These large bookmarking web sites are indexed many times a day and the search bots are only looking for new content. Have a bookmark on a social bookmarking web site and could expect to be crawled by the big 3 within hours or at the most, within days.

To successful bookmarker, you need to supply good quality original content. Content that is going to be searched for and will solve a problem the searcher has. There is no point bookmarking content that no one wants. Spamming has become a major problem, but social bookmarking is controlled by it's users. If the content you plan to bookmark is plain spam, the users of the bookmarking web site will just ignore it and move on. Your content will wither away and eventually be dropped out of the social bookmarking web site index.

If you social bookmark properly and supply good quality content, you can expect to gain dozens of quality back links as other bookmarkers, bookmark your content. This technique is a popular tool for successful search engine optimization and the best feature of social bookmarking is that it is free to use. I have not come across any social bookmarking web site that charges the user to use their facility.

Social bookmarking web sites are growing in popularity everyday. Find the ones that best fit the theme of your web site and bookmark with them. But remember, you will only succeed with bookmarking if you have content that is worth bookmarking.

Where To Find Free Images For Your Web Marketing Campaign

The Web is flooded with million images. Try Google image search or my favorite Picsearch.com and know what I mean. You are tempted to grab the best images and use it for your website. And of course you can do it. Just right-click and save these images. They look so great on your websites. But as you can guess you can not do it or you can but on your own risk. A joke about Gettyimages - “they have three employees and two hundred lawyers” shows what you can expect – a big lawsuit against you or a nasty email with a request to delete the images you love so much from you website immediately.

Why? Images are commodity on the Web. A right image at a right place and at a right time can bring thousands people to your websites. Thousands- millions users and pageviews; this is exactly what most (if not all) website’s owners are dreaming about.

The beauty of the Web is that you have a choice. There are images on the web that cost a fortune and you should pay, there are images that cost much less and there are free images.

Rights-Managed Images: Images you purchase for a specific purpose at a specific price (think renting the photo or paying to borrow the image). The price of the picture is usually determined by how you want to use the picture (on the web, in print, etc.). The plus side to using a rights-managed photo is that you will most likely NOT see anyone else using the same photo (or model) promoting another product. The downside is of course the price; rights managed photos can cost you double (even triple) of what royalty-free runs.

Royalty-Free Images: Images purchased outright, either as single images or on disc volumes in bulk, and can be used any way you want, with certain restrictions. Pricing for royalty-free images is usually decided by the size of file you want to purchase; the larger the file (meaning, the better the quality of the image), the higher the price. The good news with royalty-free images is that if you are using them for the web (on websites, advertisements, etc.), you can use the smaller files, thus saving yourself a lot of money. For printing purposes however, you will need to buy the larger file sizes. And typically royalty-free images can be used however you like.

From my own experience working as a web designer for last ten years, I know that there are situation where you should buy and there are situation where you are just fine with free images. I am not talking about the situation where you boss or client asks you to get images from getty or istock, cut these images here and there and use them. This is not legal. I am talking about situation where free images (not royal-free, they still cost money) really free images of good quality can be used for your particular purposes.

One of good example is your Christmas marketing campaign. You want to place a face of Santa Claus on your page or your online newsletter. Or you want to have these attractive Christmas banners with a decorated tree, snow and red bow. You can do with FREE absolutely free images.

I found great Christmas images and I want to share them with you. You can find them at http://www.vancouvergo.com/free Hurry, they will be sitting here till the first days of 2007 then I will move them to an archive. I have other free images to share with you, you can find them on vancouvergo.com, just click "Free images".

Keys to Increasing Website Traffic

The life and blood of any online business is one simple word “traffic”. It’s your life and blood. Let’s face it, it’s quite simple these days to build a website, even without any HTML knowledge. It’s easy to purchase a domain. It’s easy to set up a website. It’s even easy to build an online store. It’s easy to place content on a website. However, all this can be absolutely useless if you don’t have any traffic and qualified traffic. Whether you are a website selling products, services, or acting as an affiliate for a program, you will need traffic.

Your form of business may be selling products. Or it may be promoting products. Or even giving away free content and selling advertising space on your website. Either way, in order to cash in, you need traffic.

I have been doing extensive research over the years to find out what is it that brings in traffic. For starters, you have to realize it requires hard work and dedication. It’s not an easy fix. You will have to be dedicated. With that mind-set you are bound to succeed, as long as you do your research correctly.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what are you looking to achieve? If you are looking to sell products, such as digital products (Ebooks, Software) or actual physical products, such as consumer electronics or clothes, then PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic may be a good and easy option. You will have to set a budget and make sure you know what your ROI (Return on Investment) is. I highly recommend using Google Adword. This is the king of PPC engines. You will get the most qualified visitors. My second option would be to use Yahoo’s Overture as well. However, Google is the quickest. You can start receiving traffic within 15 minutes. Yahoo takes more time and is more difficult to get your ads approved. I would spend my time browsing the internet and searching forums on Google Adwords. There are quite a few with very good tips. Also a few free ebooks you can get on the subject. Get yourself familiar.

If you are not actually selling something, but are looking to get traffic because you are giving away free content and are selling advertising space, then perhaps PPC advertising is not going to be your best option. It may not be profitable for you. You will then want to get a high ranking in the Search Engines. The best way to achieve that is to submit to all the search engines, the top 40. You can easily do a search online. Obviously the top ones are your priority (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). However, bear in mind it may take several months to be listed on these search engines. You will have to be a bit patient.

Also you will want to have as many links to your website as possible. The best way to achieve this, is to contribute to forum discussions, you can place your link to the website on the signature section. However, make sure you don’t spam. Make a meaningful post that contributes to the discussion, otherwise don’t make a post.

You can also post free classified ads. This could be helpful. Also you can create blogs for your website. In fact, create a couple. Make sure you fill them with relevant content and link them to your website.

The key here is consistency. You have to be dedicated and be prepared to put in the work. Once you put in the work, you will be posed to succeed.

Keys to Increasing Website Traffic

The life and blood of any online business is one simple word “traffic”. It’s your life and blood. Let’s face it, it’s quite simple these days to build a website, even without any HTML knowledge. It’s easy to purchase a domain. It’s easy to set up a website. It’s even easy to build an online store. It’s easy to place content on a website. However, all this can be absolutely useless if you don’t have any traffic and qualified traffic. Whether you are a website selling products, services, or acting as an affiliate for a program, you will need traffic.

Your form of business may be selling products. Or it may be promoting products. Or even giving away free content and selling advertising space on your website. Either way, in order to cash in, you need traffic.

I have been doing extensive research over the years to find out what is it that brings in traffic. For starters, you have to realize it requires hard work and dedication. It’s not an easy fix. You will have to be dedicated. With that mind-set you are bound to succeed, as long as you do your research correctly.

The first question you need to ask yourself is what are you looking to achieve? If you are looking to sell products, such as digital products (Ebooks, Software) or actual physical products, such as consumer electronics or clothes, then PPC (Pay Per Click) traffic may be a good and easy option. You will have to set a budget and make sure you know what your ROI (Return on Investment) is. I highly recommend using Google Adword. This is the king of PPC engines. You will get the most qualified visitors. My second option would be to use Yahoo’s Overture as well. However, Google is the quickest. You can start receiving traffic within 15 minutes. Yahoo takes more time and is more difficult to get your ads approved. I would spend my time browsing the internet and searching forums on Google Adwords. There are quite a few with very good tips. Also a few free ebooks you can get on the subject. Get yourself familiar.

If you are not actually selling something, but are looking to get traffic because you are giving away free content and are selling advertising space, then perhaps PPC advertising is not going to be your best option. It may not be profitable for you. You will then want to get a high ranking in the Search Engines. The best way to achieve that is to submit to all the search engines, the top 40. You can easily do a search online. Obviously the top ones are your priority (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). However, bear in mind it may take several months to be listed on these search engines. You will have to be a bit patient.

Also you will want to have as many links to your website as possible. The best way to achieve this, is to contribute to forum discussions, you can place your link to the website on the signature section. However, make sure you don’t spam. Make a meaningful post that contributes to the discussion, otherwise don’t make a post.

You can also post free classified ads. This could be helpful. Also you can create blogs for your website. In fact, create a couple. Make sure you fill them with relevant content and link them to your website.

The key here is consistency. You have to be dedicated and be prepared to put in the work. Once you put in the work, you will be posed to succeed.

How Google Video Search Engine can Solve 2 Major Website Owner's Problems

What is the solution to #1. Getting your site indexed in Google, and #2. Generating quality traffic to your website?

Answer: Use the awesome power of video.

When Google bought out YouTube for 1.67 Billion dollars, it was the shot heard round the world. Now I don't know if you realize it or not %70 of the USA has broad band access, and that is just the US, not to mention the rest of the world.

I have been researching this heavily, and burning alot of midnight oil, and what I found out, is that when Google bought YouTube, YouTube was forced to dump half of it's content, due to liscening issues. I was dumbfounded. They paid out 1.67 million for half the content. Why would they do this? Simple. They knew the speed at which it would automaticaly regenerate itself. The beautiful thing is, they don't have to lift a finger, the public will regenerate that content and more, now that it is a part of the mighty Google.

This is revolutionary, in the fact that video has morphed, or combined with social bookmarking sites, and YouTube and Google Video beta, get tremendous loads of traffic. The third site is Revver, which although not as famous as the other two, still is very poplular and recieves a large amount of traffic.

What does this mean for you, the aspiring marketer?

This means, that if YOU create your own infomercials, right now, and get them loaded to these high traffic sites, loaded with the right keywords in the title and description box, there is a good chance that you will be indexed very quickly.

Google is like a Content Dracula, they love quality, people generated content. Google Video, is a search engine that does nothing but search for videos, 24 hours a day.

This is a quantum leap forward for webprenuers that are just starting out.

Why? It solves two huge problems that we face everyday as business owners. #1. How do you get your site indexed in the major search engines? and #2. How do you drive targeted traffic to your website?

The great thing is, that you can create power point presentations, or screen capture videos, narrate them in your own voice, and viola! You've just made an infomercial, and you didn't even have to own a webcam.

This solves 2 other problems, Fear of video "freezeup" and lack of equipment, such as a video camera, or a Sony camera capable of mp4 video capture, or a webcam.

My favorite tool for this job is Camtasia. It has a feature that I just love, and that is when you use .swf as your medium, you can re-direct the viewer to your sales page, automaticaly. This is fantastic, because it empowers you to "steer" the viewer instantaneously to the sales page, while they are still in the "mindframe" to buy.

So, fellow marketers who are struggling to generate traffic, and get your site indexed, so you can make some money to support your family, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is give Google what they want, be sincere, be yourself, and simply recommend your site to the viewer.

Process on Optimizing your Site through Keywords

There are a lot of things to analyze on your site before you start optimizing your site. Such things are your site overview, nature of business, home page, site dimension and number of pages, product/services categories, page rank and indexed pages for major search engines, link popularity, and a lot more. After that you will go to your onpage and offpage optimization.

Analyze your site and think of a generic word that best fits for your web site. Choosing the right keywords is a strategy for better search engine positioning http://www.searchengines.com/placement.html. Analyze your business carefully and think of all the words that relate to your company or product. Most techniques to improve your search engine rankings have one thing in common -- Keywords. Choosing appropriate keywords is very important. Keywords are what lead search engine users to your site.

That word will act as your major keyword for your site. Then find a keyword tool that will help you generate keywords for your site. There are lots of keyword tools like http://inventory.overture.com. Type in the major keyword that you had thought of and it’ll list all related keywords that you can use. On the tool you’ll see the number of counts your keyword has been searched. Person new on search engine optimization might use the keyword with a lot of counts (I, sure did that before) immediately but SEO experts says that Do NOT use it for a start as keyword searched as many times will just give you a lot of competition and give your site less probability in regards to your visitors. So it is best to start with keywords with a little rivalry. Get some traffic with those keywords and eventually focus on the major keywords.

Examine those sites ranked from 1-10 on the keywords you chose to use in optimizing your site. Check everything about the site that is ranked highly on the search engine. Its URL, see if it is the top level webpage or it is the index page of the site as if it is not you can have a great chance to improve your index page for the target keyword and have a better placement in the SERP’s. Sites page rank. Page rank is Google’s way of giving specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of links you have pointing to your website. Then check their page source, see if their actually optimizing their site for some onpage optimization factors. Factors such as title tag, check if they use the keyword on their title tag which is one of the main reasons why a site is rank well on search engine. Header tags are used to separate topics and range from h1 being very large and bold and h6 which is very small and bold, it should contain your most important keyword or keyword phrases to assist you in ranking higher on Search Engines. Image alt tags are words that will be displayed in place of your image through an older browser or when your visitors have their image turned off, insert a readable keyword phrase within the alt tags of your image and it’ll help you on your rankings. And on the main content if they use the keyword on the beginning and at the end of the page, also whether or not they’ve bolded, underlined, or italicized the keywords on that page. By continuing this process on other keywords that you’ve chose you will have an improved ranking on SERPs.

by: Kristine Joy Francisco