Archive for the 'Increase Site Traffic' Category
Now more than ever, if you want to be a successful business owner, you need a successful business website. Which means you have to make nice with the search engines. And the long-standing rule of search engine friendliness is to create inbound links -- links from other sites pointing to your site.
Ten-ish years ago, when Google started the shift away from code to content (including inbound links) as the preferred way of determining "relevance," the world changed. Immediately, businesses owners started scrambling, and begging, for every link they could get. Thank goodness that's not the case anymore! But inbound links are still important. In many ways they're more vital than ever.
How then, does one go about getting those precious nuggets of hypertext anchor tagging? Social Media maven and "Chief Nut" Kevin Skarritt, our good friend and strategic ally at Acorn Creative, offered up these 10 strategies on his "Nuts and Bolts of Brand" blog. Good guy that he is, he gave us permission to share those key linking strategies with you here. Hit it!
1. Blog Comments
Go out of your way to read other people's blogs. Your Mother always told you that reading is good for you. She was right! But, when you do so, be sure to productively interact with those bloggers. It makes them feel good. It validates what they're writing about. It starts up a relationship between the two of you. AND, here's the best part, it gives you an inbound link to your site.
2. Blog Trackbacks
Start a blog and refer to all of those blogs you're reading in the form of a "trackback" in your posts. Don't know what this means? Check out the entry for "trackback" on Wikipedia, or go deeper with a Wordpress.org tutorial. However you learn more about this linking strategy, please do, because it's a smart, easy, and effective way to get your website lots of inbound links.
3. Pay Per Click Advertising
Yes, PPC advertising is indeed an added marketing expense. However, it's a controllable, predictable means to build ROI, and a great way to build inbound links where you have control over the text used in the link tag.
4. Participate On Industry Forums
Similar to blog comments and trackbacks, participating on industry forums will get you hooked up with other like-minded professionals, keep you abreast of current trends, and you get to build your inbound links in the signature line of your posts.
5. Build Other Pages
Some new social networking sites on the web allow you to create content and post it in their domain as new pages. One great example of this is Seth Godin's Squidoo.com. By creating "lenses" that focus readers on a particular topic of interest, you get to engage readers and create more inbound links to your main site.
6. Wikis
The concept of a wiki (like wikipedia.org) is that readers also become content contributors. Anyone who is registered can log in and change content. Understand that other readers of this information-rich content have zero tolerance for salesy/advertising tactics, so, be careful with this one. Be purely informative and helpful with your newly posted content. If the content survives peer scrutiny, you'll have a nice little inbound link that's potentially seen by millions.
7. Social Networking
MySpace and FaceBook for sure, but there's an explosion of social networking web sites out there. Dive in and start participating. Doing so allows you to interact with other professionals and, you guessed it, builds up inbound links.
8. Social Bookmarking
Different than social networking, social bookmarking is similar to how you used to bookmark sites in your browser but, instead, you bookmark your favorite sites publicly, in sites like de.licio.us, ma.gnolia.com, spurl.com, rojo.com, Google bookmarks ... the list goes on and on. The goal is to have people discover these bookmarks, and then your site. An added benefit to social bookmarking (and blog posts) is you get to "tag" your content with words and phrases that are relevant to the content. These tags are used to identify the content in the search process.
9. Organized Surfing Sites
This is a variation of social bookmarking. There are sites that organize how people surf the web in an effort to make the process of finding the right content faster and more focused. StumbleUpon.com (available as a Firefox plugin) is one of my favorites but others like Technorati (blog content), Digg (blogs, articles and news stories) and newcomer Trailfire (another Firefox plugin) allow users to power-surf, finding your site via inbound links.
10. Link Begging
Don't discount it just yet. Asking another site owner for a link sometimes still works. However, with all of the other options listed above, you'll quickly learn that this tactic is largely time-consuming and unproductive.
Any good car salesman will recite the old adage, "plan your work and work your plan." This especially holds true for your inbound link strategy. Whether you focus on one or set up a tactic to diversify, divide and conquer, don't wait. The success of your website -- and ultimately, your business -- depends on it!
So you've optimized your website, done the keyword research, got the backlinks and everything is ethical. You're sitting proudly on the first page of the search results. Or you've set up a pay per click campaign, bid on your keywords, created some ads and performance tracking is in place. Again, you're at the top of the pile. Either way, you're visible and people are visiting your website. But visitors aren't converting into leads, prospects or customers. What's going wrong? Well your website may be visible, but is it connecting?
Having attracted visitors to your website through prominent search engine placements, it is vital not to lose them by failing to connect. Different visitors will have different priorities and levels of satisfaction. In order to reach and retain as many as possible and to maximize the chances of conversion, you should consider your site's usability and accessibility.
Web Usability
Usability is all about providing your visitors with an effective, efficient and satisfying experience. It's common knowledge that visitors tend to glance at, and scan, pages rather than study them in any great detail. If the message and options are not clear, they may leave. If they don't leave, the chances are that they will click on the first link that seems to be most relevant - it may not be the right one. Repeat the process a few times and soon a visitor can be lost, confused and frustrated. Either way the result is the same - missed opportuníty and little likelihood of a return visit.
The more self-evident your pages are, the greater the chance of converting the visitor into a prospect or customer.
12 Simple Tips for a More Usable Website
1. On the home page make it clear what the site is all about.
2. Make the purpose of each page obvious.
3. Use hierarchical headings to give clear structure to the copy.
4. Make the navigation and links obvious.
5. Use clear unambiguous wording.
6. Make the options and next steps obvious.
7. Remove any wording or imagery that is unnecessary, confusing or distracting.
8. Use consistent conventions throughout. 9. Include site search and a site map.
10. Make information such as contact details, pricing and delivery charges clearly accessible.
11. Make the pages printable by including a cascading style sheet for printing.
12. Don't allow careless errors to make your site look unprofessional.
Browsers Create Their Own Set of Problems
One more tip - just because your website works fine in your browser of choice, do not assume that it will work equally well in all browsers. In fact it is not even safe to assume that it will work equally well in different versions of the same browser. Web designers who have had to cope with the incompatibilities of IE5, IE6 and now IE7 will no doubt testify to this point. It is vital to be sure that your website works on all the popular browsers. As well as IE and Firefox, don't forget Netscape and Opera on Windows and Safari on the Mac. And just to muddy the waters a bit further, Apple has recently announced Safari for Windows.
So now your website is usable, but is it usable by everybody? For some, usability is just a small obstacle when compared to the barrier of accessibility.
Web Accessibility
All businesses in virtually all countries have a legal obligation to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities, otherwise they are discriminating. Given that something like 15% of the population have some sort of disability, that's a sizeable market proportion. If you're not reaching them, your competitors probably are.
One of the many myths surrounding web accessibility is that blind people are the only ones who need to be catered for. Whilst blind people and their use of assistive technologies to read web pages are an obvious and important example, consider also people with other visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive and neurological impairments.
How does a color-blind person cope with page colors?
How does someone with a mobility impairment manage without being able to use a mouse?
How does a deaf person gain access to auditory content?
How does someone with attention deficit disorder make sense of the pages?
Web pages should be accessible to all of them. And it's not just disabled people who will benefit. Older people, people with low literacy levels, people who are not fluent in the website language, people with low bandwidth connections, people using older technologies and people with short-term injuries and illnesses will also benefit.
9 Tips for a More Accessible Website
1. Provide all images with an alternative text description. If the image does not convey any information, provide null (blank) text rather than no alternative text at all.
2. Provide transcripts of audio content.
3. Ensure that the contrast between text foreground and background colors is sufficiently strong.
4. Do not use color alone to convey information. There should also be some other form of visual indicator such as additional characters, images or font changes.
5. Place column headings in the first row of a table and place row headings in the first column. If headings are ambiguous, use the HTML scope attribute to clarify.
6. Never use the HTML blink and marquee elements. For animated GIFs or other moving objects, the flicker frequency must be less than 2 Hz or greater than 55 Hz. But better to have no moving content at all.
7. Link text should clearly state the purpose and destination of the link. Phrases like Clíck Here may mean nothing to someone listening to a screen reader.
8. Provide an option to skip navigation on all pages. This will save screen reader users from having to repetitiously listen to the same navigation, and keyboard users from having to repetitiously tab through every item. Use hierarchical headers to provide the same benefit and to enable navigation through copy.
9. On forms, always associate prompts with controls so that each control is adequately described. Use the HTML fieldset and legend tags to give structure to complex forms.
The Importance of Web Standards
Usable, accessible web pages can only be achieved through strict compliance with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. They provide a platform for consistency, compatibility, stability, flexibility and extensibility. Implementing standards throughout a website's design will address many usability and accessibility issues by default
Last and Certainly Not Least
Usability and accessibility alone will not suddenly convert all your visitors into customers. Content is vital to a website's delivery capability. But at least those visitors may now stick around long enough to look at the content.
It's an unfortunate fact – no matter how good your search engine optimization company or in-house talent is, brand new websites have a more difficult time achieving search engine success for competitive phrases than their older counterparts, particularly on Google. However, the worst thing that a new site owner can possibly do is presume that they are "too late to the game" and decide not to pursue this marketing channel at all. A good search engine optimization company should be able to effectively work with a new website; setting the foundation for a remarkable success story while still achieving steadily increasing short-term benefit.
The Issues
There are many reasons why new websites face an uphill battle. What follows are only a few of the major stumbling blocks:
The Google Sandbox
There is much debate as to what exactly the Google Sandbox is, and even debate as to whether it actually exists. However, recent patent filings on behalf of Google would seem to confirm that one of the factors that Google will take into consideration when deciding how websites should rank is the age of the domain name. More than one search engine optimization company has noted that there seems to be a penalty assessed to new websites, especially those that seem to gain too many inbound links, too fast. This is all conjecture, but this would make sense. Inbound links factor largely in Google rankings, and therefore many sites that were already popular in Google began selling links from their sites based upon that popularity (a practice that goes against Google's terms of service). However, text link buying is very hard to police. The Sandbox makes sense in this scenario, because Google seems to be saying "we may not be able to stop people from buying text links, but they are going to pay a pretty penny for them before we'll give them any ranking boost because of them." This is more conjecture, of course, but it is a popular theory in numerous search engine optimization forums.
Lack of Links
Unfortunately, here, a new website is faced with the opposite problem. Links to new websites are called into question, but without incoming links, a new website has a slim chance of performing well on Google. This Catch-22 is obviously a sore spot for many owners of new websites.
Trustworthiness
For many years, a common search engine optimization company strategy was to set up numerous new websites all for one company, each geared toward targeting a different search term. This was largely due to the fact that search engines used to place a much higher importance on the home page of a website, rather than interior pages. Over time, search engines caught on to this trick, and as a result new domains are now looked at more skeptically. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that while it is relatively easy and inexpensive to set up a new website that targets a certain term, a website that has been around for much longer and has a breadth of content has much more to löse and is less likely to attempt to "game the system".
The Solutions
Does this mean that you shouldn't hire a search engine optimization company to work on your new website? Not at all. In fact, it is in the very beginning of your website planning that a long-term strategy should be put into motion – a strategy that still offers positive results in the short term.
Before You Build
It is important to get your search engine optimization company involved as early as possible before you build your new website. Not only are there many technical issues that you should be aware of before you begin design (such as linking architecture, types of text to use, and balancing your SEO efforts with your brand), but there are also strategies that can be set in motion at the outset that will counteract some of the stumbling blocks listed above. If you involve your search engine optimization company after you have built your new website, much of the work you have done will likely need to be redone with a long term strategy in mind.
Targeting Appropriate Phrases
A good search engine optimization company will tell you that targeting highly competitive phrases with a brand new website can be an exercise in futility. However, this does not mean that you cannot achieve initial success on search engines. The trick is to target less competitive phrases at the outset, and to begin tackling the more competitive phrases later. For instance, let's assume that your company makes custom widgets, and that "custom widgets" is a very competitive search phrase. A search engine optimization company working on your new site might recommend that you instead target less competitive variations of the term, such as "custom made widgets" or "custom widget manufacturing." Since these terms are less competitive, you will be more likely to obtain high rankings for them with your new website. You can thus enjoy highly targeted traffíc in the beginning of your campaign and eventually target more competitive and popular phrases as your site gains traction, quality inbound links, and a reputation for usefulness.
Make Your Site a Resource
A quality search engine optimization company will encourage you to turn your new site into an industry resource. You can do this by providing educational content about your industry in the form of articles, whitepapers, and other forms of non-biased content. There are many benefits to this approach, one of the primary being that such content attracts inbound links without any effort on your behalf. In addition, such a resource area builds your credibility in the eyes of your potential customers and serves to educate them in all stages of the buying cycle, so that when they are ready to make a purchase, you will likely be first in mind.
Build Links
While making your new site a useful resource is a great way to attract inbound links, this does not mean that you shouldn't also be seeking them out. Your search engine optimization company should get your site included in many general directories (such as the Yahoo directory and Business.com) but, even more importantly, in directories that are specific to your industry. Not only do these links help to boost your search engine rankings over time, but they are also a quality source of targeted traffíc.
Keep Your Content Fresh
A search engine spider will revisit your site frequently if your content continues to íncrease and evolve frequently. A site that has been optimized for three years with no changes to its content will usually not fare as well as a site that has content which is consistently updated. It's as if the search engine is saying "Well, this old stuff still looks good, but it certainly isn't the newest stuff out there about this topic." This so-called "freshness factor" can have a large impact on rankings, particularly with new websites.
Although it may seem that achieving search engine success with a brand new website can be a daunting prospect, it needn't be if done properly. Hiring a skilled search engine optimization company is a good first step. There's little use in lamenting the difficulty before you, or feeling that you have already fallen too far behind to begin. As an old Chinese proverb reminds us, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today."
Source: [SEO News]
The key to marketing has always been getting one's product recognized by as large a group of people as possible. Advertising has always been the key to any marketing effort. Companies spend millions on ad placements in trimedia campaigns that encompass print, radio and television.
Print, radio and television have traditionally been the main medium for marketing. However, in the past decades, another form of paid advertising has found itself on the rise, and this utilizes the internet.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing. It uses the web as a medium to spread awareness of its target product. Internet marketing has emerged as a cheap yet dynamic way to distribute information in the global market.
SEM seeks to promote websites - and the products being sold on those websites - by increasing their visibility through search engine results pages.
The development of SEM is an off-shoot of the success of the Internet in the global arena. As more and more people started using the web, more and more sites on a variety of topics started being created. In the mid-to-late 90s, search engines were developed to help people find the information they wanted quickly.
Soon search engines developed business models to finance their services such as pay per click programs.
A pay per click program is a small text ad that appears next to results from an on-line search. A marketer buys the rights for their ads to appear on a web page or a search engine. The ads are tied up to key words. When a searcher types in a particular query to a search engine, the engine not only offers up a listing of relevant websites but also the marketers "ad".
The first pay per click programs were offered by Open Text in 1996 and Goto.com in 1998. Goto.com changed its name to Overture and was purchased by Yahoo in 2003 and is now Yahoo! Search Marketing.
SEM methods include: Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), paid placement, and paid inclusion.
Search Engine Optimization is a strategy by which you attempt to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website by "marketing" it to a web site. Using key words and content to ensure your site shows up many times during searches.
Paid placement is the pay per click program. Advertisers pay when a user clicks on to the links to visit their web site. These are also known as sponsored links or sponsored ads. Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and MSN adCenter are the largest network operators of the pay per click program as of 2007. Minimum prices per click start at US$.01 to .50.
Paid inclusion is when a search engine company charges fees for the inclusion of a website in their search index. This fee structure is ment to ask as a filter against superfluous submissions - websites that try to "trick" the engine by using popular key words that are unrelated to actual content of site - and a revenue generator for the search engine company. The fee is typically an annual subscription rate.
SEM is a relatively cheap and inexpensive way to create traffic on you web site and cultivate brand recognition. A pay-per-click program is cheaper then a trimedia campaign and yet can reach a large number of people globally day and night. As a result, many companies are now taking advantage of the internet to let consumers know what they have.
According to a recent report by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, advertisers in North America alone spend $9.4 billion in SEM in 2006. In 2006, the majority of search marketers (62%) said branding was the primary objective of search marketing campaigns. Nearly as many, however (60%) said that selling products was a key objective. This year, direct sales were the top choice, at 58%, followed by brand awareness at 57%. For more companies, SEM spending is increasing and actually earning a bigger budget then other marketing techniques. It is estimated that by 2011, companies will be spending $ 18.6 billion on SEM.
This growth will be driven by strong advertiser demand, rising keyword pricing and more small and midsized business discovering the effectiveness of SEM.
Currently, SEM is an alternative marketing tool with many possibilities. It's increase in popularity will eventually result in more businesses utilizing SEM techniques and a possible rise in rates for web space. The faith major businesses are placing in SEM - as denoted by the money they are willing to spend on it - makes this fast growing advertising technique that should be utilized by any business seeking to make a name for it's globally.
[Source: Entireweb]
What is Universal Search?
Universal Search is rapidly becoming the next big step in search engine evolution. Universal Search is the integration of multiple kinds of media into search results. Search engine monster Google was the first to release universal search. Google's users recently may have noticed images, YouTube videos, and other forms of media showing up in the standard results page. The other major search engines have all either recently rolled out their own versions of Universal Search or have announced plans to do so. Such a significant change in the operation of every major search engine warrants close attention from SEO companies.
This is not the first time Google has introduced multiple kinds of results on the same search page. For instance, Google has long put pay-per-click advertisements, local results, and book search results at the top of the main search page. It is also not the first time the company has offered searches in multiple kinds of media- Google Image Search is an age-old feature of the search engine giant. However, it is the first time a search engine has been able to put multiple content types within the same ranking system. For instance, under the new universal search system the number one result for a query could be a web page, a news article, a video, or even an adobe PDF document.
What are the aims of Universal Search?
Universal Search is a step towards comprehensive search. Google and the other engines realize that there is information available in more than text on the web. Pictures, videos, and virtually any kind of media can be of use to a searcher. Google has had the tools to search many of these kinds of media, but these search tools have been separated into different tabs and sections of their website. Universal Search is an attempt to bring the most relevant information- from any source or medium- to the search engine user. While currently Google's Universal Search has not added search capabilities for mediums that previously did not exist, it has started to expand its video search past its own properties (Metacafe and other video services are now being indexed in addition to Google Video and YouTube), and it does indicate the industry's interest in fully comprehensive searches. Universal Search, along with Google's new personalized search features, is the company's newest way of bringing the most relevant and effective information to their users.
Drawbacks of Universal Search
There are a few legitimate concerns with Universal Search. For one, Google may be putting itself at legal risk. Google has faced numerous lawsuits from many content distributors- especially newspapers- due to the fact that Google often caches copyrighted material. However, one of the main arguments against Sam Zell (the owner of the Washington Post) and his case against Google was that Google News, the section of Google's site that serves as a news feed, did not have advertising and therefore made no money. Because of this, the headlines and story excerpts used on the page constituted fair use. However, now that news articles are being introduced to the main search page, where Google makes the majority of its money, Google may be in danger of more lawsuits.
Additionally, some critics of Universal Search have voiced concerns that the new system may be unappealing to users. Some feel that the system makes it harder to sift through results. Universal Search breaks up the uniformity of the page and could conceivably make it more difficult to sift through the information. At this point there is no way to turn off Google's Universal Search- a point bemoaned by many industry bloggers. Universal Search is still in its early stages, and Google, as well as the other search engines, may eventually decide to pull the system. However, at this point, it would be extremely unwise for SEO companies to bank on a reversion as the industry as a whole seems to be moving towards universal search.
How does this affect SEO?
Many in the SEO field are worried about Universal Search, and the changes it will bring. While it is still uncertain just how expansive Universal Search will be as Google continues to implement its multitude of features, it is certain that SEO companies will need to react to remain current with effective practices. Until now, on-site SEO has dealt almost entirely with text content. Keyword optimization, meta data, linking and page structure are all text. However, with the advent of Universal Search, new viable options are opening up for the acquisition of traffic. As search expands to cover more and more kinds of content, SEO will as a result expand to cover those same areas. Much the same as SEO has had the goal of making all of the textual content of a website easily accessible to a search engine, so will it become necessary to optimize images, videos, and documents associated with the website.
SEO for different industries may start to take different approaches and have different focuses of optimization. For instance, an SEO campaign for an artist's website may want to focus on promoting images of the artist's work, whereas an electronics provider could want to get a demonstration video of their product to the top of the results page. Search engine marketers that have been paying attention to vertical search (also known as "specialty" search) will benefit the most from the changes brought by Universal Search.
Vertical searches are specialized search features of broader engines or specialty search engines. These index specific kinds of sites and documents on the internet including books, blogs, and other informational documents. Universal Search incorporates results from Google's vertical searches, and content optimized for these searches will be more likely to show up in Universal Search. This should also increase the average user's awareness of other search options in the engines that adopt universal search. Universal Search allows search engine marketers to direct users to the most relevant and enticing information available on their product or service in whatever media it exists.
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