I have been reading, with great interest, all the online advice about how to optimize a website. We have a financial planning business in Victoria, BC. Like most towns, there are lots of financial planners, investment advisors, insurance agents, brokers, dealers, and Starbuck’s locations here. Somehow we needed to find a way to stand out, perhaps by getting our meta-tags in order.
For a time, we were looking fabulous in searches on Google, but our site couldn’t be found on Yahoo! Then we got the Yahoo search engine figured out … but promptly disappeared off of Google. Now I thought this optimizing thing would fix it once and for all.
The strategy made sense. You have your title designed, and it ties in with your meta-tags and content. You have your meta-tags match your content. You think about what content you actually want to have. I spent an hour or three on several of our site’s pages optimizing like crazy. Poof!
We were nowhere on Google and now I had successfully torpedoed our site on Yahoo! There were old (really old) dead link pages cropping up in searches for us on Yahoo. The brand spanking new, optimized pages were nowhere to be found. Huh?
Perhaps I needed to wait for the spiders and robots to visit. Day after day I would check. Financial Planning Victoria? Nope. Financial Planner Victoria? Nope. CFP Victoria BC? Nothing.
And then, today, I checked Yahoo and there we were #1 or #2 on Yahoo for all kinds of different search terms! It works!!! We were top ranked for at least three dozen different search terms! Financial Planner Victoria - #1! Retirement Victoria BC - #1! Tax planner Victoria - #1! And so on. I was thrilled.
I sent an email to everybody in the office bragging about it, and then set about creating our e-newsletter which tells clients about our website updates each month. I uploaded the new articles. One was about the wonders of technology. I encountered some weird loading prompts. I checked the website. It was extremely slow in loading. I checked it again. The main page was a dead link this time! I checked again, and while the main page loaded, the navigation bar only loaded partially. Dead link. Slow load. Nothing!
Here I had spent all this time optimizing pages and on the day it works, people will be clicking through to dead links! So I am now leaning out the second storey window, holding the computer by the cords in one hand, whilst finishing this article in the other. Should I drop the computer on the street? Come on! Lemme do it! Please! I’m swinging it around now like a lasso. I think I can hang it up on the telephone wires like an old pair of sneakers!
About The Author
Rick Hoogendoorn is an ‘associate’ and ‘pessimistic optimizer’ with Cheri Crause & Associates Inc. in Victoria, BC. Cheri Crause is a certified financial planner in the same town. www.chericrause.com
Traffic analysis is a key ingredient in online marketing
success. The numbers, charts and graphs provided by your
favorite web statistics software are invaluable.
But it’s not until you begin to interpret those statistics as
part of a larger picture that you’ll receive the full value of
your web analytics software.
A software package can only return so many lines of data. And
most of them do a good job at providing the most important ones.
But your real insights will be found at the intersection of two,
three, or even more of these statistics.
It’s up to you to interpret what you see and turn it into useful
information, rather than staring blankly at the numbers and
recognizing a trend. When you see a trend you like or don’t
like, your natural tendency is to try to emphasize the
conditions that caused the positive trends and eliminate the
conditions that led to negative trends. But how?
By digging. Let’s say your visits are down. Now, you have to ask
yourself why? Perhaps, upon further investigation, you see that
the downturn in traffic is primarily coming from a loss of
repeat visitors. Dig a little further, and you find out that
visitors on dial-up stopped returning a few weeks ago. Now,
think about what could have changed over the past few weeks. Did
you switch servers? Add any large images or problematic remote
javascript code such as Google Analytics?
Now, your digging into the statistics has brought you outside
the numbers and into the reality of your site and the way you
run it. Get into the mind of your typical visitor and see what
they see. Dig around for other statistics that may provide a
clue as to why you’re getting the results that you are. Chances
are, when you stop and think, the answer will come from your own
mind, not one of a hundred pretty charts or bar graphs on your
web analytics software.
Visit Web Analytics
Guide for more valuable insights, articles and FAQ on web
site statistics and analysis.
As you probably know, getting web traffic to your site is one of the three most crucial components to making any money online. In Mark Joyner’s Internet Intelligence Manuscript (Volume II) he clearly explains how any web traffic (not just “targeted traffic”) can be made profitable, by mentally framing, or conditioning your visitors to become receptible to your offer.
One of the easiest ways to mentally re-frame your visitors upon entry to your site, is to walk them through a three-step process that:
A) Grabs their immediate attention with a promise of benefit
B) Pre-Qualifies them before they get to your sales letter
C) Follows up with them over time with new content and reminders of your offer
Keep in mind, web traffic is just one component of the three required to sustain sales.
The other two are:
1. Testing new advertising campaigns and ad copy
2. Tracking and keeping records of your results from each campaign
Here’s an example case study of the three-step process…
On December 16th 2005, my book “The Instant Traffic Formula 2006″ was released to teach internet entreprenuers how to create, attract and monetize responsive web traffic to any web site or affiliate program. As of today, my web site, which uses the exact techniques taught in the book is averaging a 64.86% visitor-to-lead conversion, and an average sales conversion ranging from 4.69% up to 11.36% all-around from the redirect, which is currently netting me just over $1.48 per unique visitor to my site.
Again, these statistics do not take follow-ups into account. These are “straight-out-of-the-gate” type sales that occur within minutes of my visitors signing up to read my sales letter.
And you can do this too.
I follow a simple formula to create web traffic, qualified leads, responsive subscribers, loyal customers and even active affiliates who promote anything and everything I sell online.
You can sum up the entire formula into the three major components I mentioned above, and create a fail-proof success system for your products, services and affiliate programs. After you’ve activated the formula, the best way to keep the momentum of traffic, leads and sales coming in on a consistent and even predictable basis, is in three words…
What those three words are, and how to use them by combining eight other powerful elements is carefully documented inside my book. But here’s the process I used personally on my site:
1. My visitor is directed through a tracking link (or affiliate link) to a lead capture page called a “Name Squeeze” where prospects give their contact information in order to get details of my report.
2. Upon submitting their contact information, they are immediately directed to my sales page for the details, and offer for the Instant Traffic Formula Scientific Marketing Report.
3. My follow-up autoresponder system immediately sends them an email reminding them of my offer, giving a few testimonials of the report and sends them a link to check it out at another time. A few days later, they receive reminders of my offer, more quality feedback of my report, new articles and content about getting web traffic, and again - links back to my sales letter.
The lead capture page serves to “pre-qualify” visitors who actually want to read my sales letter to find out more about my offer. I’ve heard a lot of people claim many visitors (and sales) can be lost by forcing your prospects to “do something” before they get to your offer — but my direct experimentation and results show the majority (64.86%) of visitors who hit my site, sign up.
Once my visitors sign up, they become leads and are set into my autoresponder system to receive consistent follow-ups until they buy, or unsubscribe.
Thankfully, the autoresponder service I use allows me to easily direct my new subscribers to a custom “Thank You” page. Most web marketers still use the “default” thank you page and their subscribers are returned to a “thanks for subscribing - now close the window” type message. Useless.
My thank you page re-directs to a tested sales letter that continues the mental conditioning process by giving in-direct answers to questions that were created in the mind of my prospects upon reading, and signing up from my Name Squeeze.
Now that my three elements are together, I combine them with “CII” or the three most powerful words in all of marketing, and achieve phenomenal and consistent results over time.
Using just this part of the formula alone, can cause a massive shift in your bottom line. However, when the complete formula is both discovered and activated, you’ll have a direct funnel to bring money “out of thin air” to you whenever you like, and for whatever you want.
Do this. Think of something you’d like to have.
Anything. It can be anything. Don’t limit yourself.
A new car, a new house, a nice expensive necklace for a loved one — anything.
Now put a price on it.
That’s your goal. Your intention.
Write it down.
Next, get out a calculator and punch in the price of what you want.
Divide that number by the price for whatever item you want to sell.
Round up to the nearest whole number, and you’ve got a definite number.
This number equals the amount of sales you’ll need to get your wish.
Now use the formula described in this article, and funnel the correct amount of sales into your business, by getting the traffic, pre-qualifying them, and going for the sale using CII to guide you along every step of the way — until you reach your desired number of sales.
Once the sales you’ve accumulated equal your desired amount, you get your wish.
Try it for yourself and see the power in this technique to create anything you want.
Above all, stay focused… keep the momentum… and enjoy your prosperity in the new year!
Jason Mangrum has just released his, “Instant Traffic Formula 2006″ which divulges a complete, scientific marketing formula that brings web traffic, leads, subscribers and sales to any product, service or affiliate program. Click Here for more details…
This introduction to getting more traffic to your website without spending a lot of money is what any business on the internet strives towards and we will cover the basics, which will be followed by a more focused look at other ways to get traffic to your site in subsequent articles.
Anonymous to many there are a few ways of attracting visitors to your site that do not require risking a lot of cash. But consider the fact it’s not that simple and takes more work on your part.
So, if you prefer to work to get traffic to your website, instead of paying for it, then here are a few simple ways to accomplish that:
1. Submit to article directories is perhaps one of the most valuable ways of driving traffic to your website. By writing and submitting articles with a theme associated to your website, you are almost guaranteed of getting traffic to your website for an extended period of time. As long as your articles stays in the directories that you suggest to, people can find it and the odds of receiving traffic to your website is substantial. Some of the submission sites where you can submit to are goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, dime.com, articlecity.com and Marketingtooltime.com.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a procedure that you apply on your web site pages to rank higher in the search engines. Search engine optimization is not hard to learn and there are several software applications that do a good job of SEO.
Search engines first look at your meta tags to determine what your site is about. Here are a few key factors when preparing meta tags:
As you continue to read this article, pay special attention to how parts 1 and 2 relate to one another.
a) Your domain name should have your keyword in it.
b) Title tag for each page of your site should include your keyword.
c) Your keyword should be on the first paragraph of your page.
d) The image alt tags should include your keyword.
e) The directory and file names of each page of your site should also have your keyword.
3.Create a blog that links back to your website.
Blog Posts at Blogger.com are readily indexed by Google and other search engines. By updating your blog you are feeding the search engines. and each time you put new content out, the search engines will spot it and th spiders will come.
Putting your keywords in the content of your pages will help you rank higher in the search engines.
By placing a link in your blog back to your site the search engines will follow the link and your site will get indexed and updated more often .
Blogging is painless and it adds a lot of your web pages to the search engine index that and without these pages you will not be found on a keyword search,
There are several places to get unlimited blog accounts started with some that are hosted free such as Blogger.com, Another popular blog application is Wordpress.com that is hosted on your website.
4. Posting in forums relevant to your theme will give you the opportunity to place your links, to your products and services in the signature line, so you will get visitors from the forum members and search engine, that follow your link.
Make sure the signatures you publish in forums are memorable to magnetize readers and make them click on your related link and come to your website.
These 4 marketing tactics are simple and cheaper ways of getting visitors to your website. By implementing the above strategies on a regular basis would warrant a flow of traffic not only for the brief term but also for the long haul.
Chet Holcomb of Internet Promotions Marketing Tools is a successful marketing expert providing advice for web marketers and webmasters on how to promote your website, or product using marketing tools that work. His numerous articles provide a wonderfully researched resource of interesting and relevant information.
You may reprint this article only if all the authors information is kept intact.
If you can use more new website traffic… and I mean TONS of new profits, sales and leads, I’ve got great news for you.
Now there’s some powerful, inexpensive new ways to bring in all the targeted traffic, leads and customers you’ll ever need.
The kind website traffic that will rocket your internet business right off the charts!
Now you can cash-in on some of the greatest website promotion strategies that Pros use to make BIG money all the time.
If you want thunder storms of website traffic and hungry targeted visitors pouring into your site all day long, then I urge you to read this article — immediately.
If you’re sick and tired of getting just 3 to 4 visitors per day and not seeing anyone buying your products, then here’s some good news.
Let’s get started on your journey to killer monster website traffic…
STEP 1 - Trade Links & Content.
Trade links with other web sites. They should be related to the subject of your web site. Instead of trading links, you could also trade banner ads, half page ads, classified ads, articles, etc.
STEP 2 - Blast Ezine or Newsletter Every Week.
Start an e-zine for your web site. When people read each issue they’ll be reminded to revisit your web site. They’ll see your product ad more than just once which will increase your orders.
STEP 3 - Get Repeat Traffic with Discussion Forums.
Form an online community. It could be an online message board, e-mail discussion list or chat room. When people get involved in your community they will regularly return to communicate with others.
STEP 4 - Get Viral Traffic Writing Quality Articles.
Write articles and submit them to e-zines, web sites and magazines that accept article submissions. Include your business information and web address at the end of the article.
STEP 5 - Let Viral Marketing Work for YOU.
Give away an electronic freebie with your ad on it. Allow your visitors to also give the freebie away. This’ll increase your ad exposure and attract people to your web site at the same time. Everything you may have heard about building targeted website traffic might be true. But this article has shown you some proven ways to convert your website into a ‘non-stop’ traffic machine.
I’d like to make you an extremely bold promise. You can easily transform your website into a 10 ton traffic magnet if you use the ‘5 block formula’ this article has shown you.
You can quickly and easily double your income, sales and profits from now on.
There’s never been a better time for you to get those hungry targeted traffic pouring into your website all day long, than it is today!
Grab FREE $147 ‘Profit Pulling Minisites’ Vault.
Let Murtuza create Your Own “money-making” website ready to take orders in Less than 7 days? Learn how to start an internet business Today
Looking for a way to increase traffic to your web site? More traffic to you web site can increase sales and advertising revenue. Once your web site is completed, the actual costs of running the web site are very minimal.
The challenge now is to get more visitors to your web site. You can purchase PPC (Pay per Click) but that can add up very quickly. If you are paying 10 cents a click, and you get 100 people clicking per day, your costs just went up $10. Now multiply that by 30 days and you are spending at least $300 just for clicks. Out of all those people clicking, very few will purchase anything and your advertising dollars are not working very well.
However, there are some options that will not cost anything but will require some work.
First thing is to list your website at a free web directory, such as http://www-wide-world-directory.com (wide-world-directory) and then seek out other directories that will list you web site for free. This starts producing backlinks (links from other web sites to your web site).
The more links, the higher your web site will rank when someone is searching on of the search engines like Google. When creating links, you do not want the text in the link to say your website. You want the text to be keywords about your web site.
Another option is to use a blog and write articles that are related to your web site. Put a link on the side of the blog. If you provide good content, the search engines will spider your site and again, the link will help with popularity.
James Hendrix has been putting people in business on the Internet since 1996. He has experience with web hosting, development, marketing and search engine optimization.
Last year was the year of search engine marketing and the
experts predict the saga is going to continue full swing until
at least in 2010. When you set out to work on your site’s
visibility, it is useful to know what the professionals that you
cannot afford to outsource the whole headache to are up to and
beat them at the game. Scanning SEO news, it’s pretty obvious
that high search engine rankings still are the
be-all-and-end-all of online marketing, but things are beginning
to move on from here. The new buzzwords that stand out are
accessibility and usability and renewed energy is poured in what
are believed to be new opportunities in areas like local
marketing. But how much bang for your buck will you get this
time?
‘Accessibility!’. ‘Usability!’ Apparently that is what the
professional SEO community is focusing on to get traffic numbers
up for their clients. Evidence the popularity of these words
themselves. A keyword tracking tool like wordtracker shows this
in a matter of seconds. Over the last two months ‘accessibility’
has been scoring a count of 158 and usability more than double
that number, 308. Not a lot of queries perhaps compared to a
word like ‘shoes’ or ‘digital cameras’ or any tangible product
you might be selling, but then –luckily- there are not as many
SEO businesses out there as shoe shops.
So how do accessibility and usability factor in SEO strategies?
Is it again more of the same or are you missing out on vital
elements if you simply improve on your existing optimising
strategies? As your strategy for online marketing is on its way
and you are getting the hang of having the right keywords to
describe your business, it´s time to integrate everything yet
again and focus on your site´s usability and accessibility.
Usability
What is meant by usability is generally how well a site can be
navigated through links, graphics and text. All your optimising
efforts should have one goal in mind: attracting customers. Does
your site still provide valuable information to your human
visitors now that the spiders and robots can read it? This is
key, say the guys at doubleclick.com, who have got good insights
on what’s going on in online marketing in a broad sense.
“Personalization is the hot term for relevancy, with the goal
being to intertwine search with a consumer’s daily activity. As
clients become more sophisticated with increased demands, the
marketplace will yield more efficient results. Technology will
continue to be created to facilitate the massive amounts of data
currently sorted by the engines”, they report. Perhaps it is
totally obvious, but you would be surprised how many strategies
fail simply on wording and text writing.
It’s no use optimising for search engines if the visitors to
your site are not going to be impressed by what they read.
Overly-complex phrasing will have to become a thing of the past
and using common sense, neutral language will open up the
content to a wider audience of search terms. It is best to get a
copywriter to do this for you. If you are not sure whether your
site needs a professional writer’s touch, there are some tools
you can run over it to see if your linked terms actually make
sense in the wider context. Throw your pages through this tool
(free trial of seven days) and consider contacting a freelance
copywriter for a quote if it appears your content is hampered; http://www.ezapplications.com/samples.htm.
There are millions of similar tools out there that can give you
quite a good insight into your content. If you think your
content is a mess, consider hiring a freelance copywriter to
match content and keywords.
Accessibility Accessibility of sites is way more of a
technological issue. You will have what is generally considered
an ‘accessible’ website if it can be read by all browsers.
Providing as much ‘access’ to your site/content as possible
perhaps has a number of added dimensions that you are not aware
of and it is good to pay notice to every aspect of the matching
between your content and the search engines. The various
limitations of browsers other than Internet Explorer and
Netscape are quite distinct and need paying attention to during
this stage of your optimisation efforts. For instance, the Lynx
browser is a text-only browser with no support for tables, CSS,
images, JavaScript, Flash or audio and video content. There are
various tools that replace images in the form of ALT text,
JavaScript through the
There are two good ways you can check how accessible your
website is. Simply download the Lynx browser to see if you can
successfully access all your pages and download the Opera
browser and follow their instructions to enhanced accessibility.
Good SEOs focus on a few standard setting organisations’
guidelines, which are complex systems of rules on unifying
coding. What SEOs make sure of is that users from other
languages and cultures, and users of differing age groups are
not excluded from your site because of some silly technical
hiccups. Where an SEO says he’s making all the difference for
his clients is that he has numerous checklists to make sure your
business in whatever location or segment it is, is optimised. He
likely will market his services saying that he will make your
site more localised than your competition.
There is a lot of scepticism on the strategies in use here and
it remains to be seen whether better accessible local business
site optimisation will actually translate into tangible higher
Return on Investment numbers. Local search appears to be
performing well for national advertisers seeking to segment
markets. The local dry cleaner however doesn’t have (or probably
need) a Web site so the lead is not accurately tracked, and the
value remains doubtful. Don’t buy into it until you see results
from comparable segments to the one you are in!
All lists SEO’s use to make sure your site is technically kosher
are likely variations in one form or another of the lengthy,
prioritised in-depth checkpoints published by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), a forum for information, commerce,
communication, and collective understanding of the web. It can
be found here: http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/. It is not deemed
100% fool proof, but it’s said to be Google-proof. The checklist
consists of general, common-sense priorities that designers and
programmers must take heed of. The bulk of the checkpoints are
likely issues you’ve comply with for years already, but it’s
always good to see if there’s anything new. It could give you
that edge over the competition you need!
Search engines increasingly take their lead from Google and use
hyper linked text for relevancy so checking that your links make
sense all the time is not a luxury but incremental for your
business. Some SEOs will run software that check that if a
hyperlink is removed from the text –something that easily
happens in forms- and determine whether it still makes sense in
the general context of your site. An SEO would replace a simple
hyperlinked word like ‘more’, with a more descriptive term such
as ‘more news and events’, or similar. You get the idea here.
Source code in general is also quite important. Again, w3 sets
the standard and you can run your site through their validator
tool (http://validator.w3.org/) to get it analysed to see if
search engine spiders/robots have any problems splitting your
content/page into sections before indexing it – e.g. header,
metadata tags, headings, normal text, etc. If the spider has
difficulty in calculating the structure of your code, some of
the text could be misclassified or omitted. Find out and
optimise!
We will begin this topic with one assumption, that our home
business comprises selling through a website. Meaning we are
website owners. In which case, we may want to manage our website
ourselves or hire someone to manage it for us. In either option,
it is in our interest to know what goes into making our home
business a success or what we are paying for to achieve success
at it. Internet is full of claims, information, advice and
secrets on how to get success with home business. Some self
proclaimed as well as genuine gurus are selling info packed in
ebooks while some ask you to download videos and guarantee you
can replicate their success. What you have to understand is that
all these people are selling you the same truth…. “Increase
traffic to your site”. Everyone is teaching you the same skill
in their own language. This answers our basic question. The
internet home business entrepreneurs should be constantly
working towards getting more and more traffic to their
website/websites. They may use any school of thought that suits
them. Do a simple link exchange campaign or pay for links on
websites with high traffic. May follow particular ebook guru’s
techniques; take tips of SEO website owners…whatever. Anyhow
their end goal has to be constant inflow of traffic. Increase in
traffic. So home business entrepreneurs, keep this one thing in
mind. There are different ways and means available online to
reach the same end (I can’t repeat it enough-Traffic is the end
goal). Sales and profits will come only if there is traffic. You
might be selling the most wonderful product at the most
reasonable price, but if its not reaching the right audience,
there is little point, you will agree. So work towards traffic,
more hits, unique hits and there is no way you will not make a
successful home business entrepreneur. Analyzing this traffic is
another as important aspect, which we will learn some other
time. It’s a topic by itself. A very crucial one at that. May be
reading statistics gives you a clue that you run a home business
but lot of your traffic is coming from pharmacy sites. It will
help you plan your future course of action that much better.
A prospective client asked me to view his web site and give him some advice on how to make the site better. Unfortunately, his site was such a mess it became the inspiration for this article.
One of the primary reasons to have a web site is to attract and educate visitors. However, this obvious concept seems to be lost on many web designers. The way your site is designed, what’s there and what’s not there, including what’s in the unseen HTML code, can have a great impact on how much traffic your site will generate.
Here’s my list of the most common web site design sins and traffic killers. Use this list as you design your own site or show it to your web designer. If your web designer doesn’t understand these points or dismisses them as unimportant. . .move on!
One word of warning, we are going to look under that hood of that shiny web page and see some of what makes it run from the search engine view. – This is not always for the squeamish.
No title tag or meaningless title tags. – Title tags are part of the HTML structure of every web page. Think of them as the informal name of the page. See for yourself. Go to http://www.ducttapemarketing.com. Look up there at the top of browser window and you will see the words - Small Business Marketing Ideas and Strategies – that’s the title of that page. Now right click your mouse in the page and hit “view source or view page source.” When you do this, you are looking at the HTML code for this page. Now, see that [title]Small Business Marketing Ideas and Strategies[/title] Every page has got them and they are one of the most important aspects of your web site. . .yet most people don’t even use them. NOTE: While you are looking at this source code realize that this is what the search engines see. No matter what your page looks like it won’t be found if this code doesn’t help you get found. More on that.
Your title tags can be a great tool for getting you search engine traffic if they are combined with good page content. Notice that my title tag is not Duct Tape Marketing or the often used Welcome to My Site. My tag is Small Business Marketing Ideas and Strategies. Now, think about this for a minute. Not too many people search for Duct Tape Marketing and nobody searches for Welcome to My Site, but small business marketing, now that’s another story. Most small business owners waste the effectiveness of their title tags with something like: The name of their business or our products. Use title tags and make them part of your site content. Think about what people search for in your industry and name your pages based on that.
Flash Intro pages – Don’t get me started on this one. You know those pages that do all this really cool animated motion graphics and then present you with an entry or splash screen. I’ll admit, these are works of art and I couldn’t design one if I had to, but visit http://www.superclubs.com/home.asp and do that “View Source” trick again and tell me if you think a search engine could tell what that page was about. Remember, search engine spiders can’t see pictures or hear sounds!
Cleverness – There are lots of little things that designers like to do because they can. The question is what’s it costing your site. One of my favorites is that date thing. You’ve likely been to a site that publishes today’s date. Perhaps there is a good reason for that but go on back to view source on one these pages and you will see the price of that little trick. This date trick adds 300-400 lines of JavaScript code at the beginning of your page. All of this makes it hard for those search engines to find your real content. Think long and hard about adding stuff that gets in the way.
No Anchor Text Hyperlinks – Web site designs like to make little buttons and badges for navigation links. Now, this can be okay but this is also a place where less is more. Text with a hyperlink is easily understood by search engines. Remember, they can’t see images. Help them understand what your page is all about. Even if you have images navigation, put text links at the bottom of your page with all of your navigation.
Referral Marketing - This is a text link
Contact info hidden – There are some web site owners out there that don’t want to be easy to contact but I’m guessing that’s not you. Put your address and contact information on every page and make them text. More and more people are turning to their web browser like a phone book. Lots of local address and content links can make it easier to find you in your own town.
Most important content out of order – Search engines read your source code in the order they come on it. Some engines only read a small portion so you should make sure that your most important content is early on your page. Left side navigation columns, commonly found on web sites, appear at the top of the source code and could be hindering your site from receiving proper credit for the content it contains.
No use of Heading tags – HTML uses a series of H or heading tags to help structure a page like an outline. H1 for the most important headings h2 for subheads and so on. Each of your pages will do well to contain a keyword rich headline, much like an ad for the page, and h1,/h1 mark-up in the code to let the search engines know that this is a really important part of the page. Then, do the same with sub sections with h2,/h2 tags. I know that most designers understand these tags when it comes to styling a page but few get the important role they play in the search engine game.
Look, there is plenty more to learn about this subject and certain aspects will change from week to week but now that you have a better understanding of how search engines view your site you can go out there and make pages that get found.
Copyright 2005 John Jantsch
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant based in Kansas City, Mo. He writes frequently on real world small business marketing tactics and is the creator of “Duct Tape Marketing” a turn-key small business marketing system. Check out his blog at http://www.DuctTapeMarketing.com/weblog.php
Many people begin their online road to riches dream by starting up a website and trying to sell a product they have created themselves. They may have written an e-book, recorded a cd of original songs, or knitted some lovely potholders with pictures of cats on them.
Enormous volumes of hype have been published with the claim that the internet is an easy, if not mindless, way to riches. The internet is now a global advertising grid, and millions of people surf each day for things they would like to buy, learn about, or discover. They search for the needle in the electronic haystack that suits their fancy for the moment. Shopping online has now become reasonably safe.
The first problem is, how will shoppers with a credit card and the urge to shop find your website? A count as of January1, 2005, suggested there may be as many as 11.5 billion public webpages published. That was just over a year ago at the time of this writing, so that number can only be much higher today. To expose your little website selling cat potholders to prospective customers may take a little a little work.
Search engines use complex algorithms (mathematical formulae) to determine if the content of a website matches its owners claims. Self-proclaimed experts who follow this route for exposure must research every day to ensure their success. The search engine companies themselves keep their algorithms secret to avoid unscrupulous marketers taking unfair advantage of the whole internet shopping and surfing experience.
So what is a potholder seller to do? Search engine experts can charge upwards of $25,000 to guarantee that your site might be the first to be found when someone enters a search. That’s a whole lot of lovely cat potholders. Some very easy and free methods are available to drive traffic to your website. One of them is writing simple articles. You’re reading this one right now, aren’t you?
Hundreds of “article directories” exist on the web just for this purpose. The main and simplest thing people search for on the internet is information. People want to know about something, and often a good place to find a snippet of information is in an article directory. Thousands of 500-1500 word articles have been written and published on the internet, and people love to read them. If they are short and informative, they will become popular to read, and not too time consuming.
Then once your website is up on the net, write a brief, helpful article about your product. Target the style and content of your writing to suit your friends and customers, and also yourself. The average newspaper is written for a grade 9 level reader, and tabloids are written for a grade 6 level or lower. Writing on the internet runs the whole gamut of education. Explain a problem that needs to be solved, and at the end provide a solution. Sales copy is more involved than this, but an article should be entertaining, or fit the parameters of a possible search.
The most important part of the article, besides the content and the attention grabbing headline, is a live link to your website in the author’s bio at the bottom. More often than not, the reader will click the link, if it is live, to see what other information might be available on that particular subject. This link must lead straight to your potholder website. A reader is less likely to copy and paste your website address into their browser if another similar article is listed in the directory.
Write a short paragraph stating your expertise with cat potholders, and invite the reader to visit your website. This will be your “author’s bio”. If someone does read the whole article, they are often curious who wrote it, if it covers the subject they are interested in. Most article directories will accept html code in the bio box.
Search for the words “article directory”, and make a list of as many as you can. Most directories are free to read and submit your articles to. Registration is usually necessary, with your email as the username. Get another free email address to use specifically for article submission to avoid any trouble with spam.
After you have submitted your article, it may take a few days for publication. Check back to the directory to see if your article is published and your link is working. Then do it all again. The articles will stay published forever, or as long as the directory exists. Over time, people will continue to read your article, and click back to your website. If you submit your article to 20 directories, and 40 people interested in cat potholders read it, that’s 800 more potential customers from one article. If you have the time to write 20 little articles, and submit them to 40 directories, and 40 people read each one over time, well you do the arithmetic.
Article submission is one easy, quick and guaranteed way to direct some website traffic your way, and at almost no cost. Give it a try, you’ll be amazed.
Kelly Archibald.
You are hereby cordially invited to visit the The Online Success Portal for more tips on internet business. We don’t have any cat potholders, but can help you sell them.
