Feb
05
Program Provides All of Our Clients with Effective and Affordable Tools to Build Strong, Lasting Customer Relationships
Augusta, Georgia – September 1, 2009 – One Source graphics today announced they have joined Constant Contact‘s Business Partner Program. One Source Graphics is able to provide their clients from multiple industries with an easy-to-use email marketing and online survey products to help them build strong, lasting customer relationships. Constant Contact® Inc. is a leading provider of email marketing and online survey tools for small organizations.
“Our customers are always looking for effective ways to grow their businesses,” said Tony Mack, creative director, One Source Graphics. “Constant Contact’s customer communication tools give our clients a valuable addition to our core services. Constant Contact’s ease-of-use and affordability made the partner program a great solution to meet our clients’ marketing needs.”
“Email marketing and online surveys are proven tools that help small businesses connect with their customers and build successful customer relationships,” said Len Bruskiewitz, senior director, Partner Programs, Constant Contact. “We are pleased that One Source Graphics chose Constant Contact to provide their clients with our products and services, and we look forward to working with them to help grow their clients’ businesses.”
As a Constant Contact Business Partner, One Source Graphics is able to provide their clients with email marketing and online survey capabilities. With SpeakUp!SM Email Marketing, Constant Contact’s email marketing product, One Source Graphics’ clients can quickly and easily create professional-looking emails, manage contact email list, measure email campaign results from clicks to open rates, and review who joined email lists. With ListenUp!SM Survey, Constant Contact’s online survey product, One Source Graphics’ clients have an easy-to-use tool to gain insight that will help them meet customer needs, generate new ideas, and grow their business or organization. ListenUp! Survey also helps One Source Graphics’ clients analyze responses quickly, create targeted email lists based on survey responses, take action, and follow-up with relevant email communications.
About One Source Graphics
Our passion is creativity and our goal is to use it to get the best design solutions you could ever imagine. At One Source Graphics we know that good ideas generate big sales, and that’s the final outcome we aim to generate for our clients in each project.
We don’t believe in appearances by themselves if they don’t come together with a concept applied to a specific objective. We build a unique idea that suits your needs and encourages your customers to do business with you.
That’s where we make THE difference.
We are convinced that every piece of communication triggers something in the customers of the companies we work for. From something really simple (and complex at the same time) like a logo, up to a TV commercial, every work has the chance to make an impression. A logo is much more than a symbol. It’s the way people will identify your company. And we are here to make sure that you communicate the message that will drive your business to success. This is a great opportuity that we certainly know, you cannot reject.
The dedication and responsibility that we assume within every project is consistant with the passion that we feel for design and our commitment to quality. Our 110% satisfaction guaranteed policy reassures that your success will be our success.
About Constant Contact, Inc.
Launcehed in 1998, Constant Contact, Inc. is a leading provider of email marketing and online survey tools for small organizations, including small businesses, associations, and nonprofits. To learn more, please visit Constant Contacts or call (800) 974-5580.
Constant Contact and the Constant Contact Logo are registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All Constant Contact product names and other brand names mentioned herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Constant Contact, Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.
Please direct all press inquires to:
One Source Graphics
Tony Mack
Creative Director
TonyMack@OneSourceGraphics.org
Fax: (866) 516-0124
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- onesourcegraphics org (10)
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Feb
04
If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.
Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.
Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.
Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.
There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and service like this one:
http://www.webposition.com/products/pricing/default.htm
Or if you want professional help try the following sites:
http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission
http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html
Don’t use the automatic submission services.
Here is a list of the most popular Search Engines and directory companies:
Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler
Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap
Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The following links gives info on other search engines and directories:
http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm
100 Search Engines in 100 Days – Table of Contents
5 bonus “search engine” posts
search engines 1
search engines 2
search engines 3
search engines 4
search engines 5
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Feb
03
Powerful Twitter Software
Builds Your Following On Steroids!
Click to watch demoTwitterbot - Windows Systems Only
- Mass Unfollow People not following back!
- Mass Follow a target users Followers!
- Schedule your Tweets to run 24/7 on autopilot!
- Mass follow people discussing your niche!
- Acts like a real user, keeping you beneath the radar!
Dear fellow Internet Marketer,
Do you understand the power of Twitter for driving traffic to your websites and offers…but are frustrated by maintaining a quality targeted following?
I understand your pain, I manage multiple Twitter accounts and I don’t have the time to manually unfollow all of the deadbeat users, to build a targeted following or to sit at the “frickin” computer all day long wasting my time writing tweets and doing maintenance.
I needed software to automate my activities, so that I could be more productive, concentrate on making more sales and twitterbot sure makes my life easier.
Twitterbot keeps you well “under the radar” too I have never had an account banned whilst using this software as it emulates a real user and does not use the API.
This software is so easy to use and has been designed with simplicity in mind. After watching the tutorial video, you’ll be up and running in minutes and getting your twitter account really work for you.
If you want to make a go of marketing on twitter then Twitterbot is the answer to your problems.
Tony Mack
2012
Lets look at the features in detail
Multiple Account Management
The software comes with a profile creation feature, this means that you can set up your twitter accounts once and then load them as required. This makes managing multiple Twitter accounts a breeze! This is a feature which you would associate with much more expensive applications and therefore you can expect the price to increase in the near future.
Keyword Search
Enter the keyword you want to target and then hit the “Keyword” button. The software will then find people who are actively interested in this subject and add all the users it finds for your keyword phrase!
User Add
You can enter the name of a popular user in your niche eg. johnchow in the Target user box hit “User” and the software will follow 200 of John’s followers. Pretty cool huh?
Mass Unfollow
This is undoubtedly an extremely valuable feature of this software as it enables you to remove all of the users who are not following you back. If you want to build your following you need to be able to remove these users or you may well find yourself stuck at Twitter’s 2000 follower limit.
Schedule posts
The software will automatically schedule posts from a text file, so you can relax whilst your tweeting is put on autopilot. All you need to do is create a list of tweets advertising your sites and offers and the software will run 24/7 getting targeted traffic to your sites and offers.
Windows System Only
Only $19.97
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Feb
02
One need to choose those keywords that are frequently searched for and which is in high demand, but not being already used by many other websites and competitors, and thus has low competition. There are a number of keyword research tools that can help you find them.
Apart from the Wordtracker which was already discussed in an other article, we have some more equally important research tools like the Overture, Google AdWords Keyword and Guidebeam.
Overture’s http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ keyword suggestion tool is free and much quicker to use than Wordtracker. It works more like the Wordtracker but doesn’t tell you how many websites are targeting each keyword phrase. For example if you type ‘Computer’, the Overture search suggestion tool will tell you that during the last month the word ‘Computer’ was searched, say for example 459550 times at Overture.Com. Similarly ‘computer game’ was searched 302210 times. Also, given one word it will tell you all relevant combinations of that word, which are based on actual searches done by people. If the word you keyed in is not a common search term then you will not get any results. It means that very few people have actually searched for that word during the last month.
Even Google Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Features of this tool include,
• Sorting the results of your desired keyword search by popularity, past performance history within the AdWords system, cost, and predicted ad position.
• Easy keyword manipulation where you can select a few keywords here and there or add them all at once.
• Searches for keywords present even in any webpage URL specified by your search. It can also expand your keyword search even further to include those pages that are linked to or from the original URL page.
• More keyword results are generated based on regularly updated usage statistics database. This helps you to get new keywords or phrases.
Guidebeam http://www.guidebeam.com/ is an interesting resource. Type in a phrase and it will suggest a large number of related searches. The numbers generated against each phrase are Guidebeam’s estimation of how relevant that phrase is.
These softwares are useful for researching how people search the web and then optimizing your own web pages so that more people find your web site.
Other Posts about Keywords:
keyword: An alternative way to make money online by building micro niche websites that target localized traffic
keyword: Analyzing website traffic
keyword: Build a website and they will come
keyword: custom database software hiring critical success strategies
keyword: Eight strategies to advance your page-rank on Google in Alaska through simple web design
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Feb
01
A major survey on corporate trust just came out, and the news isn’t good.
Of people surveyed in 20 countries, 62% say they trust corporations less now than they did a year ago (2009 Edelman Trust Barometer).
People do business with people they like and trust, so how can you inspire trust during the current crisis of credibility?
Buyers are increasingly turning to real experiences to give them the confidence that products, services, and people deliver what they promise. In the age of Amazon.com reviews and eBay feedback, prospects are looking for anecdotes from other happy customers.
Capturing the experiences of your most successful customers not only boosts your credibility but also educates buyers and shows them the payoff of your solutions.
Here are 25 ways to use customer success stories in your sales and marketing to increase buyers’ trust.
1. Web sites: Your site is often a buyer’s first impression of your company. Start building the relationship on a foundation of credibility by highlighting your successes right from the homepage and anywhere on the site where you talk about the benefits of your solutions.
2. Newsletters: Run customer success stories in newsletters that go to prospects, customers, employees, and partners.
3. Blogs: When making a point in a blog post, use a customer success story as an example.
4. Direct marketing: Highlight a customer’s success in a mailer, either as a full story or an overview, to prospects and customers. Read the full story
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Jan
31
Just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they were looking for. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The customer having visited your site, now ensure that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around. Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, may be by keeping the information at a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.
Understanding Your Target Customer
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely you make much money. Website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website. Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.
Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that are thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.
Some other tips:
Spearhead Your Marketing Efforts With the Right Kind of Brochure Design Solution
25 Ways to Build Trust (and Sales!) With Customer Success Stories
5 Simple Steps to Small Business Success on the Internet!
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Jan
29
Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn’t be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.
If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will probably be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.
Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.
Suppose you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is got by simply dividing the total number of keywords, by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%
The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines and you should never exceed it.
Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.
Simple steps to check the density:
• Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.
• Go to the ‘Edit’ menu and click ‘Select All’. Now go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Word Count’. Write down the total number of words in the page.
• Now select the ‘Find’ function on the ‘Edit’ menu. Go to the ‘Replace’ tab and type in the keyword you want to find. ‘Replace’ that word with the same word, so you don’t change the text.
• When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.
• Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.
Other Keyword Density Articles:
Keyword Density: Four critical Web Design Rules
Keyword Density: Protecting Your Search Engine Rankings
Keyword Density: Website Maintenance Plans
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Jan
25
The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you – the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue.
At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffic that is directed to your website. That’s what search engine optimization is about.
You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage.
The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage’s title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name.
Then click on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other.
The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords – the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site.
Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format.
To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not
highlight, it is probably in graphic form. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings.
Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it’s worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula.
To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, click the “view” button on the browser menu bar, and select “source.” This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name=”keywords” content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps.
Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page.
If you type in “free link popularity check” in a popular search engine, the search engine will then show you what sites are linked to your site. In the case that there aren’t many sites linked up to yours, or that the sites that are linked up have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffic to your website.
Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can’t boost your rankings yourself. Don’t ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way.
One Source Graphics has been practicing and implementing SEO for over 10 years and has the proper tools and knowledge to increase your website’s organic rankings, increase visitors and help you business grow. Let us help you take your business to the next level today! Give us a call at 800-974-5580 or simple fill out the form below:
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Jan
23
There are many ways to promote your website and one of the most efficient ways is to use search engines. Search engines are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services, and products online. Because of this, it is essential that your website appears quickly in search results.
The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of which offer what is known as “paid inclusion.” This means that you pay the specific search engine an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.
Of course, every search engine already has an automated program commonly called a “spider” that indexes all the web pages it locates online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines, as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.
A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed. If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider will index your page immediately.
The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around the annual fee. Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search engine’s index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines, your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually index your page without the additional cost. There are both advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide whether to spring for the extra cash or not.
The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing. Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index your pages and when the paid spider will is a matter of months. The spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the regular spider will never locate them at all.
Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will show that result in a matter of days.
First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten page website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to pay each engine their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on your company.
Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google, Yahoo, and AOL, do not offer paid URL inclusion. That means that the search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.
Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show up in Google, Yahoo, or AOL results.
One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the regular spider to revisit your pages.
The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL inclusion is to decide if it’s a good investment. To figure this out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on to see a profit?
If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best investment for you; the biggest search engines do not offer it, and they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.
Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently. If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid inclusion in this case will guarantee that your pages are being indexed in a timely manner.
You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that the paid spider will index them.
Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine, although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to locate them immediately.
As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your business goals.
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Jan
20
Advertising your services or products on the Internet is
both extremely effective and extremely competitive. There
are several ways to go about attracting traffic to your
website; Pay-Per-Click is one of the options you can choose
from, along with developing an SEO, or search engine
optimization campaign. Both pay-per-click and SEO are
targeted to get your website placed as close to the top of
search engine results as possible. One of the differences
is that it takes minutes to set up a pay-per-click campaign
versus months for a good SEO campaign.
Pay-Per-Click is a simple type of paid advertising that
most search engines, including some of the largest ones,
now offer. It requires a bid for a “per-click” basis, which
translates to your company paying the bid amount every time
the search engine directs a visitor to your site. There is
the added bonus that when a per-click site sends your
website traffic, your site often appears in the results of
other prevalent search engines.
As with all marketing campaigns, there are advantages and
disadvantages. If you understand the process and monitor
your pay-per-click campaign frequently, it can be very
effective. One of the greatest advantages is that you never
have to tweak your web pages to change your position in
search engine results, as you must do in a typical SEO
campaign. What you do have to do in a pay-per-click
campaign is pay a fee.
Another advantage is the simplicity of the pay-per-click
process. You just bid and you’re up and running. It doesn’t
demand any specific technical knowledge, though the more
you know about search engines and keywords, the easier -
and more effective – the process will be.
The downside is that pay-per-click is essentially a bidding
war. A higher bid than yours will lower your position on
search engine results. This means that you will have to
raise your bid to regain your position – which can
obviously become quite expensive, especially if you are
bidding on a popular keyword.
In order to determine if pay-per-click is a cost effective
form of marketing for your business, you must do some
computing to figure out how much each visitor to your site
is worth. You can compute this value by dividing the profit
you make on your website over a given period of time by the
total number of visitors for that same time period. For
example, if your site made $5,000 in profits and there were
2,5000 hits, each visitor would be theoretically worth 50
cents. The basic formula is profits divided by visitors.
The figure of 50 cents per visitor is the point at which
your business breaks even. The idea, of course, is to show
a profit, not to merely cover your costs. Therefore, you
are aiming at a figure less than 50 cents per click.
Be aware that the most popular keywords often cost
considerably more than 50 cents a click. The only way
around this is to bid less for these phrases or you will be
paying too much for each individual hit.
The key (pun intended) to success is to learn everything
you can about search engine keyword research. The good news
is there isn’t a limit to the amount of keywords you can
add to your bid because additional keywords do not add
additional cost. This translates into a lot less hassle for
you because there is no need to optimize your site to index
a particular set of keywords.
Obviously, some keywords are much more effective than
others are, but they will not cost you anything except time
to set-up your account in your pay-per-click bid. Of the
popular search engines that offer pay-per-click, one called
Overture provides an online tool that will give you the
data on how often particular keywords are entered into
their search engine. They also offer suggestions for
keywords after you enter a description of your site.
In pay-per-click, this written description is crucial. You
must understand that the object of your description is not
to generally attract visitors, but to be as specific as
possible so that only those visitors who are likely to buy
your service or product go to your site. You must use
expert marketing copy to guarantee that your description is
both precise and enticing to attract the most ideal
candidates to your site. This description is your most
powerful tool to insure that your bid is profitable.
Another essential element of pay-per-click advertising is
that you constantly monitor your bid. It is very important
that you bear in mind that the results of the top search
engines providing pay-per-click advertising, which are
Overture and Adwords Select, usually appear on other
popular search engines. Because of this, the competition
for top ranking is intense, and very often you will find
that the bidding price balloons too high for pay-per-click
to yield a profit.
If this happens, it is advisable to withdraw your bid on
that particular keyword and try another one. Remember: when
you pay too much per click to make a profit, you are in
essence losing the bidding war.
Since losing is not acceptable, you must have a plan in
place to closely track the effectiveness of your keyword.
It is advisable to monitor your keywords on at least a
monthly basis.
Not only is careful monitoring important, but the analysis
of visitor behavior can produce invaluable knowledge about
consumer motivation, habits, and trends. Expert monitoring
and consumer analysis is essential to your overall business
needs, and will also insure that your pay-per-click
campaign is a success.
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Jan
19
Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales.
You’re probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word – plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you’re probably wondering, how do I make my link popular?
Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.
The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don’t be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.
There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” – pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!
The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.
So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.
The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.
You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper – and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.
The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are
also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects – and both of your sites’ link popularity.
Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some 
research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.
When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.
Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It’s a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don’t
sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.
Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.
Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.
By the way – make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!
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Jan
18
Your website’s ranking on search engines is a vital element of your overall marketing campaign, and there are ways to improve your link popularity through legitimate methods. Unfortunately, the Internet is populated by bands of dishonest webmasters seeking to improve their link popularity by faking out search engines.
The good news is that search engines have figured this out, and are now on guard for “spam” pages and sites that have increased their rankings by artificial methods. When a search engines tracks down such a site, that site is demoted in ranking or completely removed from the search engine’s index.
The bad news is that some high quality, completely above-board sites are being mistaken for these web page criminals. Your page may be in danger of being caught up in the “spam” net and tossed from a search engine‘s index, even though you have done nothing to deserve such harsh treatment. But there are things you can do – and things you should be sure NOT to do – which will prevent this kind of misperception.
Link popularity is mostly based on the quality of sites you are linked to. Google pioneered this criteria for assigning website ranking, and virtually all search engines on the Internet now use it. There are legitimate ways to go about increasing your link popularity, but at the same time, you must be scrupulously careful about which sites you choose
to link to. Google frequently imposes penalties on sites that have linked to other sites solely for the purpose of artificially boosting their link popularity. They have actually labeled these links “bad neighborhoods.”
You can raise a toast to the fact that you cannot be penalized when a bad neighborhood links to your site; penalty happens only when you are the one sending out the link to a bad neighborhood. But you must check, and double-check, all the links that are active on your links page to make sure you haven’t linked to a bad neighborhood.
The first thing to check out is whether or not the pages you have linked to have been penalized. The most direct way to do this is to download the Google toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com. You will then see that most pages are given a “Pagerank” which is represented by a sliding green scale on the Google toolbar.
Do not link to any site that shows no green at all on the scale. This is especially important when the scale is completely gray. It is more than likely that these pages have been penalized. If you are linked to these pages, you may catch their penalty, and like the flu, it may be difficult to recover from the infection.
There is no need to be afraid of linking to sites whose scale shows only a tiny sliver of green on their scale. These sites have not been penalized, and their links may grow in value and popularity. However, do make sure that you closely monitor these kind of links to ascertain that at some point they do not sustain a penalty once you have linked up to them from your links page.
Another evil trick that illicit webmasters use to artificially boost their link popularity is the use of hidden text. Search engines usually use the words on web pages as a factor in forming their rankings, which means that if the text on your page contains your keywords, you have more of an opportunity to increase your search engine ranking than a page that does not contain text inclusive of keywords.
Some webmasters have gotten around this formula by hiding their keywords in such a way so that they are invisible to any visitors to their site. For example, they have used the
keywords but made them the same color as the background color of the page, such as a plethora of white keywords on a white background. You cannot see these words with the human eye – but the eye of search engine spider can spot them easily! A spider is the program search engines use to index web pages, and when it sees these invisible words, it goes back and boosts that page’s link ranking.
Webmasters may be brilliant and sometimes devious, but search engines have figured these tricks out. As soon as a search engine perceive the use of hidden text – splat! the page is penalized.
The downside of this is that sometimes the spider is a bit overzealous and will penalize a page by mistake. For example, if the background color of your page is gray, and you have placed gray text inside a black box, the spider
will only take note of the gray text and assume you are employing hidden text. To avoid any risk of false penalty, simply direct your webmaster not to assign the same color to text as the background color of the page – ever!
Another potential problem that can result in a penalty is called “keyword stuffing.” It is important to have your keywords appear in the text on your page, but sometimes you can go a little overboard in your enthusiasm to please those spiders. A search engine uses what is called ”Keyphrase Density” to determine if a site is trying to artificially boost their ranking. This is the ratio of keywords to the rest of the words on the page. Search engines assign a limit to the number of times you can use a keyword before it decides you have overdone it and penalizes your site.
This ratio is quite high, so it is difficult to surpass without sounding as if you are stuttering – unless your keyword is part of your company name. If this is the case, it is easy for keyword density to soar. So, if your keyword is “renters insurance,” be sure you don’t use this phrase in every sentence. Carefully edit the text on your site so that the copy flows naturally and the keyword is not repeated incessantly. A good rule of thumb is your keyword should never appear in more than half the sentences on the page.
The final potential risk factor is known as “cloaking.” To those of you who are diligent Trekkies, this concept should be easy to understand. For the rest of you cloaking is when the server directs a visitor to one page and a search engine spider to a different page. The page the spider sees is “cloaked” because it is invisible to regular traffic, and deliberately set-up to raise the site’s search engine ranking. A cloaked page tries to feed the spider everything it needs to rocket that page’s ranking to the top of the list.
It is natural that search engines have responded to this act of deception with extreme enmity, imposing steep penalties on these sites. The problem on your end is that sometimes pages are cloaked for legitimate reasons, such as prevention against the theft of code, often referred to as ”pagejacking.” This kind of shielding is unnecessary these days due to the use of “off page” elements, such as link popularity, that cannot be stolen.
To be on the safe side, be sure that your webmaster is aware that absolutely no cloaking is acceptable. Make sure the webmaster understands that cloaking of any kind will put your website at great risk.
Just as you must be diligent in increasing your link popularity and your ranking, you must be equally diligent to avoid being unfairly penalized. So be sure to monitor your site closely and avoid any appearance of artificially boosting your rankings.
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Jan
17
Search engines are the vehicles that drive potential
customers to your websites. But in order for visitors to
reach their destination – your website – you need to
provide them with specific and effective signs that will
direct them right to your site. You do this by creating
carefully chosen keywords.
Think of the right keywords as the Open Sesame! of the
Internet. Find the exactly right words or phrases, and
presto! hoards of traffic will be pulling up to your front
door. But if your keywords are too general or too
over-used, the possibility of visitors actually making it
all the way to your site – or of seeing any real profits
from the visitors that do arrive – decreases dramatically.
Your keywords serve as the foundation of your marketing
strategy. If they are not chosen with great precision, no
matter how aggressive your marketing campaign may be, the
right people may never get the chance to find out about it.
So your first step in plotting your strategy is to gather
and evaluate keywords and phrases.
You probably think you already know EXACTLY the right words
for your search phrases. Unfortunately, if you haven’t
followed certain specific steps, you are probably WRONG.
It’s hard to be objective when you are right in the center
of your business network, which is the reason that you may
not be able to choose the most efficient keywords from the
inside. You need to be able to think like your customers.
And since you are a business owner and not the consumer,
your best bet is to go directly to the source.
Instead of plunging in and scribbling down a list of
potential search words and phrases yourself, ask for words
from as many potential customers as you can. You will most
likely find out that your understanding of your business
and your customers’ understanding is significantly
different.
The consumer is an invaluable resource. You will find the
words you accumulate from them are words and phrases you
probably never would have considered from deep inside the
trenches of your business.
Only after you have gathered as many words and phrases from
outside resources should you add your own keyword to the
list. Once you have this list in hand, you are ready for
the next step: evaluation.
The aim of evaluation is to narrow down your list to a
small number of words and phrases that will direct the
highest number of quality visitors to your website. By
“quality visitors” I mean those consumers who are most
likely to make a purchase rather than just cruise around
your site and take off for greener pastures. In evaluating
the effectiveness of keywords, bear in mind three elements:
popularity, specificity, and motivation.
Popularity is the easiest to evaluate because it is an
objective quality. The more popular your keyword is, the
more likely the chances are that it will be typed into a
search engine which will then bring up your URL.
You can now purchase software that will rate the popularity
of keywords and phrases by giving words a number rating
based on real search engine activity. Software such as
WordTracker will even suggest variations of your words and
phrases. The higher the number this software assigns to a
given keyword, the more traffic you can logically expect to
be directed to your site. The only fallacy with this
concept is the more popular the keyword is, the greater the
search engine position you will need to obtain. If you are
down at the bottom of the search results, the consumer will
probably never scroll down to find you.
Popularity isn’t enough to declare a keyword a good choice.
You must move on to the next criteria, which is
specificity. The more specific your keyword is, the greater
the likelihood that the consumer who is ready to purchase
your goods or services will find you.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Imagine that you have
obtained popularity rankings for the keyword “automobile
companies.” However, you company specializes in bodywork
only. The keyword “automobile body shops” would rank lower
on the popularity scale than “automobile companies,” but it
would nevertheless serve you much better. Instead of
getting a slew of people interested in everything from
buying a car to changing their oil filters, you will get
only those consumers with trashed front ends or crumpled
fenders being directed to your site. In other words,
consumers ready to buy your services are the ones who will
immediately find you. Not only that, but the greater the
specificity of your keyword is, the less competition you
will face.
The third factor is consumer motivation. Once again, this
requires putting yourself inside the mind of the customer
rather than the seller to figure out what motivation
prompts a person looking for a service or product to type
in a particular word or phrase. Let’s look at another
example, such as a consumer who is searching for a job as
an IT manager in a new city. If you have to choose between
“Seattle job listings” and “Seattle IT recruiters” which do
you think will benefit the consumer more? If you were
looking for this type of specific job, which keyword would
you type in? The second one, of course! Using the second
keyword targets people who have decided on their career,
have the necessary experience, and are ready to enlist you
as their recruiter, rather than someone just out of school
who is casually trying to figure out what to do with his or
her life in between beer parties. You want to find people
who are ready to act or make a purchase, and this requires
subtle tinkering of your keywords until your find the most
specific and directly targeted phrases to bring the most
motivated traffic to you site.
Once you have chosen your keywords, your work is not done.
You must continually evaluate performance across a variety
of search engines, bearing in mind that times and trends
change, as does popular lingo. You cannot rely on your log
traffic analysis alone because it will not tell you how
many of your visitors actually made a purchase.
Luckily, some new tools have been invented to help you
judge the effectiveness of your keywords in individual
search engines. There is now software available that
analyzes consumer behavior in relation to consumer traffic.
This allows you to discern which keywords are bringing you
the most valuable customers.
This is an essential concept: numbers alone do not make a
good keyword; profits per visitor do. You need to find
keywords that direct consumers to your site who actually
buy your product, fill out your forms, or download your
product. This is the most important factor in evaluating
the efficacy of a keyword or phrase, and should be the
sword you wield when discarding and replacing ineffective
or inefficient keywords with keywords that bring in better
profits.
Ongoing analysis of tested keywords is the formula for
search engine success. This may sound like a lot of work -
and it is! But the amount of informed effort you put into
your keyword campaign is what will ultimately generate your
business’ rewards.
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Jan
16
Since search engines are the first stop for people on the Internet looking for goods or services, the position your website appears in search results is an important factor. If your URL shows up far down the results list, the chances of the consumer never finding you increase incrementally. Once you achieve a high search engine position, it is essential that you make sure you maintain the high ranking you have worked so hard to achieve.
This means you must come up with a strategy to monitor your search engines positions. This strategy is crucial to the success of any marketing campaign. Think of your search engine positions as your online portfolio. Would you let your stock portfolio be ruled by chance and market fluctuations, or would you keep close tabs on your stocks so you could buy and sell when the time is right? This is the way you must consider your search engines positions.
Be aware that at first, after you have launched your search engine campaign and done all the right things to increase your rankings, you will most likely see a continual upward climb. What you need to be on the lookout for is the moment that upward climb reaches a plateau. When this happens, your search engine position campaign moves into stage two, the monitoring and protecting stage.
In stage two, do not be concerned about the short-term fluctuations in your positions. These are similar to the subtle rising and falling of stocks in a portfolio. Short-term movement is an integral part of the whole process. It’s the long-term changes that you must watch for and prepare to act on immediately.
Analyzing the long-term trends of search engines positions is imperative. The way in which search engines rank websites may change at the drop of hat. If you are unaware of these changes – many of which are subtle yet can be deadly to your ranking – your position may drop to the bottom of the list before you can get your bearings. To prevent this kind of precipitous drop, you must create a system to monitor your positions on a monthly basis. Devise a chart to keep tabs on your top ranking positions or your top pages, and make sure to watch “the market” closely.
Each search engine uses a formula to compute website rankings. When a search engine changes this formula in any way, it may raise or lower your ranking. Some search engines use a number of different formulas, rotating them so that a formula doesn’t become overused or outdated. Depending on which formula is being applied, your search engine position may suddenly drop or rise in rank significantly. Therefore, you must check your positions frequently in order to catch when a search engine changes formulas and what effect it has on your positions.
You must also deal with your competition – a crucial factor you must always be vigilant about. Your competitor’s position may suddenly rise, automatically lowering your position. Or their position may drop, pushing your position higher. Each month, expect position changes due to the continual changes that are occurring in your competitor’s position, and be prepared to adjust your marketing strategy to compensate for decreased rankings. Monitoring these fluctuations will also give you vital information about how to improve your website to increase your position in search results.
Of course, you must discern what the most popular search engines are in order for your monitoring efforts to be effective. Right now, there are ten popular search engines that direct most of Internet traffic to your sites. The challenge you face is that these top ten may change from month to month.
This means that your must not only monitor your search engine positions, but you must also keep track of the ranking popularity of the search engines you are monitoring. Find out which search engines people use most frequently every month and be sure to live in the present! People are fickle about their favorite search engines, and it takes constant vigilance to follow their dalliances. The search engines they loved when you first launched your campaign may be old news in the next few months. You must adjust your list of engines according to the whims of the Internet users. Check out
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html
for a current list of website favorites.
Another factor to monitor carefully is a sudden drop of your positions in all search engines. This is not the same as monthly fluctuations – this is a neon red warning sign! It could mean a number of different things.
It all your search engine positions have plummeted, it may indicate that search engines spiders – those sneaky programs that seek out your site and rank their positions - have found some type of problem with your website. If you have recently changed the code, for instance, the spider may become utterly confused and consequently drop your positions disastrously. If a spider creeps up on your website when it is down for adjustments or changes, you may actually disappear from a search engine index entirely. Or a search engine may drastically change its formula, and suddenly all of your websites come up as irrelevant. If that search engine is a current favorite, it may create a domino effect, causing all of your position to drop in all search engines.
Some search engines rely on the results from other search engines, and it is vital that you know which engines these are and keep track of all the engines they influence. The biggest problem here is that search engines will sometimes change affiliations, and this can create a major shift in the geography of the Internet. For example, recently Yahoo decided to display only results gleaned from Google. So you must not only monitor your own positions, but you must keep abreast of seismic shifts in the landscape of the Internet as a whole.
Finally, pay attention to your keywords. Keywords are the foundation bricks of the entire search engine system, and they demand individual scrutiny in your monitoring efforts. If you have found that a number of your positions have plummeted, it may mean that a page of your website has become invisible or inaccessible to search engine spiders. Or the competition for that particular keyword or phrase has recently rocketed into outer space. In either case, you must act quickly and efficiently to regain lost ground.
Your search engine marketing campaign is an investment. If costs you time and money on a continual basis. Protect this investment as diligently as you would your financial portfolio. In the same way, track your positions from an objective perspective, and monitor your positions on a regular basis. Make sure your time and effort reap rewards by keeping your eye on the big picture – your long-term marketing campaign.
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Jan
15
A Search Engine Optimization Company can be an invaluable asset in your Internet marketing campaign. They specialize in knowing how to raise your search engine positions, monitoring those positions on the regular basis, and adjusting their strategies to account for undesirable results in any given month. Since this takes a lot of time, effort, and specialized knowledge, it can be in your best
interest to go to an outside source rather than try to maintain high search engine positions on your own.
However, like every business, there are good companies and there are lemons. Knowing the right questions to ask and the criteria to look for will help you in choosing an affordable, effective search engine optimization company.
When looking at different companies, begin by considering the approach they employ to raise your search engine positions. Steer clear of companies that use cloaked, doorway, or bridge pages to raise your positions. These techniques violate most search engine policy, and in the worst case scenario, will only get your website severely penalized, if not removed entirely from a search engine’s index.
A cloaked page is a page that is created which is invisible to the regular visitor to your website. The cloaked page is coded to detect a search engine spider and divert them to this special page, which is set-up to artificially boost your search engine position. Doorway or bridge pages utilize the same concept, but often reside on an entirely different server. Google, one of the largest and most important search engine on the Internet, will remove your website from their index if they detect you have cloaked pages. Never, never employ any company that uses this technique!
Another important element is to get a guarantee that the company you hire will not work with your competitors while they are working for you. Obviously, this would seriously compromise the effectiveness of the search engine optimization campaign. Be aware that some companies will use the success they achieve for your website to sell their services to your competitors. So get your guarantee in writing, and make sure it is legally binding.
Of course, one of the most important factors you want to check out is the company’s track record of results. However, don’t take the company’s word for it. They will undoubtedly be slanting their results in order to sell their services to you. To go beyond their simple statement of success, ask them a few pertinent questions, and verify their answers.
Ask them which engines they have achieved the best results on. The ones that are important are the most popular engines, and these are the ones you want to see good results on. Since the popularity of search engines can change with the landscape of the overall Internet, check out the Nielsen Netratings page at Search Engine Watch. You can access this at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/article.php/2156451.
Next, find out what keywords and phrases they are claiming great results with. It’s easy to get high rankings with unpopular words. For instance, the keyword “cat leashes” will get high popularity ranking because no one else would think of using it. What you are looking for is good results using popular keywords. Check out the software Wordtracker, available at www.wordtracker.com. You can order a free trial, or a subscription ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This software rates the popularity of keywords and phrases based on actual search engine use.
Next, look for good results over an entire site that the company claims to have successfully worked for. You want to see a wide range of positions over a number of different search engines using different keywords or phrases for the entire site. Request a report for any client the company claims to have done well for. This report should show good positions on a number of the most popular search engines for a variety of different, popular keywords and phrases.
When you are checking out search engine optimization companies, make sure they have actually done the work they are claiming to have done. Some companies will use other company’s results in order to get you to sign on with them. If you are in doubt, call the company they are showing you results for, and ask for the name of their search engine optimization company.
It’s important to keep in mind that a successful search engine optimization campaign will result in maximum exposure across a wide range of popular search engines using a variety of keywords and phrases. This is the formula for a successful campaign, and you should keep it always in the forefront of your marketing strategy.
Ask the search engine optimization company you are considering for a report that shows you rankings across a number of popular search engines for a period of at least six months. Remember: search engine marketing is a process that is continual, and you need a company that not only understands this, but keeps constant tabs on your search engine positions. That company must also be able to adjust its strategy in the event that search engine rankings drop.
Since search engine marketing is an on-going process, your positions must be constantly monitored. If you want your search engine optimization company to do this for you, request a sample of a monthly report. It is essential that this report should show rankings for the most popular search engines. Don’t be impressed by a report that only shows great results for a limited number of small search engines. These are fairly easy results to acquire. Also confirm that the popular search engine results they are showing you are indeed the popular search engines currently.
Be sure the sample report the company shows you is in a format that you can easily understand. For example, it could be in the form of a chart that covers a period of at least six months and presents data such as the top 50 positions broken down on a monthly basis or the top 5 pages each month. Then, ascertain that the company you are considering actually monitors these positions or pages every month, and that the sample report they show you includes findings and recommendations for the specific site. This insures that the company will actively monitor and make adjustments to their strategy on a continual basis rather than simply gather statistics on your positions. You need a company that is actively participant in your search engine marketing campaign, not just an information gatherer.
Obviously, your finances have to figure into your choice of company, but bear in mind that a search engine optimization company is crucial the success of your marketing campaign. It is not just a casual accessory. If you cannot afford a company that will do a thorough and reliable job for your website, you might consider waiting until you do have the finances in place.
If you have to find a company and can’t wait for your finances to catch up, you may be able to find an affordable company that will also be able to supply quality, reliable work, such as a fairly new company. Just remember that there are risks involved with using a company without a proven track record – and that risk is your money! Don’t take that leap unless the company can supply you with a least a few references.
References are the most reliable indicator of a good company. Don’t use a company that won’t show your references because of any reason, confidentiality included. Remember – even doctors will provide references! The firm you choose should provide you with a minimum of two references, one that is from the past, and one that is current.
When you contact these references, be prepared to ask precise, specific questions so that neither of your time is wasted. Ask them what their experience was like with the company, such as their availability to answer questions and deal with problems and their ability to meet deadlines. Ask the reference to rate the overall performance of the company.
Find out if the company requested that the reference make significant changes to their web pages that affected the visitors coming to their site. You are looking for a search engine optimization company that can balance the needs of both search engines and site visitors without compromising either.
The most essential question to ask is whether the work of the search engine optimization company resulted in higher profits for the reference. Without profits, it doesn’t matter whether your positions are at the top of the list or not.
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Jan
14
Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.
If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.
However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.
To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100.
If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.
You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.
Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.
Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.
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Jan
14
Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.
Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data – the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.
There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of
information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.
The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.
The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.
It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.
Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.
If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.
As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.
Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is. Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.
After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor – meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase – the more valuable that keyword is.
However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed – or should I say misdirected – to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.
Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand
recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.
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Dec
23
No business can survive these days without a website. More and more people are doing most, if not all, of their work via the Internet and that includes buying products and services. Even for people who plan on purchasing something in an actual store, they still conduct their research online before making a decision. For this reason, your business’s website is one of the most important pieces of your business plan. With a well-developed, well-designed website, you not only reach potential local customers, but you reach possible customers worldwide.
The Six H’s of a Website
Your website needs to have all the vital information that people are looking for—who, what, where, when, why and how. You need to tell people who you are, what your business is about and what you have to offer, where you are, when you are open or available, why a customer should choose your business over all the others and how they can get in contact with you. These questions are what visitors to your site will want answered.
Navigating Your Website
Once people go to your website, they need to be able to navigate through it easily. This means that when they go to your contact page, they do not want to sift through useless information that does not tell them how to contact you either by phone, mail or e-mail. Make sure that every click a visitor makes brings them exactly to the information they are searching for—otherwise, frustration will take over and you will lose a potential customer.
SEO is a MUST
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a serious matter to any business that wants to make the most of their Internet presence. You want to make sure that you are in one of the top groups of businesses listed when someone does a search for something like car covers, for example. The higher you are on the Google ranking, the more visitors you will have at your site. Let’s face it, how many of you go to page twenty looking for a car cover (or any other company)? Most people will stop their search after the first one to three pages. Maximizing your SEO is essential in getting people to your site as often as possible. The higher the ranking, the more visitors you will have and the more profit you can make.
Don’t Skimp on Creativity
Your website should not just give information. It should also be memorable and have eye appeal. Many visitors will not remember a website that lacked creativity, imagination or a sense of originality. Websites that have lots of graphics, color and varying fonts and text will likely attract visitors and keep them at your site. An interactive aspect to your site is another high-tech way of generating interest and keeping people on your site with the possibility of having them return or refer your sites to friends and family.
Whether you have an existing website that needs revamping or are looking to create a website for your business, One Source Graphics knows what it takes to create an Internet site that optimizes your Google ranking while giving it a unique and creative flair. Our team of graphic experts can guide you in developing a website that meets your business’s needs, generates traffic and provides visitors with a navigating experience they will not soon forget. Please call us to set up a consultation with our creative graphic design team and see how we can turn your business into an Internet sensation.
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Dec
21
If your business relies heavily on your Internet presence, then you know the value of SEO—search engine optimization. Put simply, SEO is what gets you and your business to the top of the Internet search food chain. Let’s face it, when you do a search on the Internet, do you look at all the hundreds or even thousands of results that your search finds you or do you stop after the first twenty or fifteen or ten? For most people, they are satisfied after the first few results, which leaves all the remaining sites unviewed and unvisited. This means that the lower your business appears on search results, the less likely you are to get visitors that have the potential to become customers. This is where SEO can have an impact.
From a marketing standpoint, SEO is the best and fastest way to get thousands (possibly millions) of people to visit your website, see what you have to offer and become a customer. The ability to reach so many people from all over the world was unheard of decades ago. But now, it is an everyday occurrence. You can buy just about anything from all over the world with a click of a button and without being limited to your local area. The Internet has become a worldwide mall of products and services. But optimizing your business’s search engine standing is not as easy as it may sound.
An entire industry has been built around SEO. Many web designers are now well-skilled in not only creating websites that are visually appealing and easy to navigate, but they also know how to design it to incorporate SEO principles to maximize visitation to your site. The use of specific keywords is a common method used by designers and SEO experts. By using keywords that are connected to your site’s business, industry, location, services, products or any other relation, you increase your website’s chances of moving up the search result listing. Of course, these experts also know how to creatively use images, coding and cross linking to give your site more bragging rights when it comes to where you rank search-wise.
Of course, there are other methods of SEO that are used that are considered deceptive—this is known as black hat techniques. Fortunately, once a search engine realizes these techniques are being utilized, the site usually loses its high ranking and it is back to square one for them.
If you are looking to improve your site’s SEO, One Source Graphics, Inc. should be your go-to company when it comes to SEO expertise. We can assist you in your SEO efforts as well as in every aspect of graphics design—from the initial idea to the final product. Our expert graphic designers know how important a good website is to your business so we take every step to ensure that you not only get the best SEO ranking, but also leave a lasting impression when it comes to the visual presentation of your site. We know that at the end of the day, a memorable website is what gets people to return and become more than just a visitor, but a customer as well. Please view our online portfolio or call us at 1-800-974-5580 to set up an appointment and discuss how One Source Graphics, Inc. can help you with all of your graphic design needs. [hr_shadow]
SEO Starter’s Package (Take Us For A Test Drive)
Price: $255.00
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Nov
30
Website Design To Bring Better Visibility To Online Business
HTML / Joomla / Search Engine Marketing / Search Engine Optimization / SEO / Web Pages / Web Pages & Web Graphics / Wordpress Posted by Tony Mack
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Engaging Website Design To Bring Better Visibility To Online Business
The greatest challenge in website design is tuning the right chord at right time with the right target audience. In this era of high-end technology, having a website with an engaging look and design not only reveals the identity of a company but also serves as an effective way of building big profitable business relationships. There are plenty of website design companies in Augusta who build their services and promote their website design, but fail to provide that much needed level of professionalism, needed to prove the effectiveness of the website. Whichever, brilliant website design in Augusta you incorporate, if it is not optimized for search engines and lacks proper web marketing strategy, there remains always a chance of your site not being able to serve the necessary purpose. So, be it the launch of new product or service or conveying business ideas, One Source Graphics can serve your purpose the best way with right type of website design solutions.
Know What Are The Keys To Quality Website Design
Having an aesthetically designed website is just not enough. With digital marketing getting immensely competitive, it seems important to make sure that your website is well designed and ranks high in search engine. Let’s take you through some of the important things, necessary to build a quality website design.
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Consistent design
Having an appropiate design all throughout the pages help users in knowing where exactly they have come over and where they need to go to find their requirements. The feel and design of the site must remain consistent throughout as that helps in creating a sense of ease for user, enabling them to stay on the site for longer period. Remember , it is through consistent web site design only, the whole message of the site gets conveyed in right manner.
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Visual Appeal
It would be wise to create a website, which your target audience will find pretty appealing. A designer must take good care of the factors like font styles, high resolution graphics, right color contrasts, layout and more to create an everlasting impression.
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Easy Navigation
One of the vital aspects of successful website design is easy navigation. Find out how easily navigable the site is for both search engine spiders and visitors. The more clear and logical the structure of the website is, the greater is the chance of retaining the navigational aspects of website design. Remember, without a simple and user-friendly navigation, browsing through the website becomes a real challenge for the prospective visitors.
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High quality Content
In the web world, the power of words is simply unsurpassed. No matter, how aesthetically beautiful the website is, it tends to loose its sheen if the content seems badly written and incorporated. At One Source Graphics, we take good care of such things and thus enhance the aesthetic appeal of site.
So, make your online business speak with engaging website design!
