This is the second part of our keyword article. I hope you have learned something on the first part. So here's the second part.
Where and how to look for keywords
In order to find the best keywords for our website we need to gather information from a variety of resources. Some of these resources may include:
Brainstorming: Getting your brain to go on a magic carpet ride is one of the best ways to find relevant keywords for your website. Don't just settle for asking the obvious question, what does my website sell? Ask questions such as: "What is this product made up of?" or "Who is using my services?" or "What problems do my products solve?"
Finding the main and secondary keyword phrases should take less than a month for even 2 or 3 websites. This does not mean your keyword research has ended forever, but finding the 4-5 word long secondary key phrases can be done with the free keyword research tools if your budget is tight.
Free keyword research tools: You can gain access to the powerful and free Google external keyword tool to expand your keyword list. Unfortunately the Google external keyword tool only gives a search volume indicator instead of the actual search numbers. Another very valuable feature in Google external keyword tool is the "Site-Related Keywords" finder. By simply entering the website URL of your competitors, you can find out in seconds which keywords they target on their web pages.
Another free keyword research tool available without creating an account is the Overture keyword inventory . As of now, August 2007, this tool only shows the January 2007 search volumes as it's being phased out, but Yahoo! is promising a replacement. If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account you can still gain access to their keyword tool albeit without the search volume numbers.
Related search terms suggestion tools: One of the fastest ways you can find hundreds of related keywords is to use online lexical or thesaurus tools.
Creating a large initial keyword list that includes a large number of synonyms and acronyms is essential to effective keyword research. Discovering related phrases that are not simply stemming from the original keyword term is a cornerstone of semantic latent indexing . Semantic indexing can be described as the grouping of related documents based on not only direct relationship between words, but the meaning of the words as well.
Some of the search engines provide a related search command list in their search results. Try Clusty by entering a search command and take a look at the "clusters" side bar. You can get dozens of ideas from the keyword clusters by playing with different combination of keywords. You can also visit Technorati a well known blog aggregator and social media tagging site to help unlocked your brain and generate new keywords. Enter a search term and observe the "Related tags" section directly under the search results.
Visitor statistic reports: These can be generated from web server log files or from script based visitor statistic programs. This can help you uncover new keywords for your website by discovering what the visitors are typing into the search engines to find your websites. In some cases, you'll find keywords you didn't expect to come up for in the search results. You should further research those keywords and uncover new keyword niches.
Site search engines: This can be a great source of new keywords and a potential data mining source. As well as further analysis of the average number of keywords, keyword length and other important keyword metrics.
Top ranking competitors: These websites are already well optimized and contain keyword rich web pages. Why not leverage their efforts and harvest the best keywords for your own website? With the help of the SEO Studio keyword analyzer you can extract hundreds of keywords from their META keywords and HTML page content in seconds.
A few examples of good keyword selection practices
Selecting the best keyword takes experience and a little know how, but it's always helpful to see how the pros do it, so here are a few basic steps for keyword selection.
Using your favorite keyword research tool Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery or the Keywords Analyzer, type in the main keyword phrase. Start with the broadest possible search terms, this way there is less chance of missing keywords that might otherwise be overlooked.
Look for 2-4 word key phrases that have at least a daily search volume of 200 or more. Since the top 3 sites will receive 60 of all searches, it follows you can expect at least 120 or more unique visitors for those keywords phrases. In some cases, you may want to lower the minimum search volume threshold to as low as 50 if the search term is well targeted for your business.
At this point you should have at least 20-30 really good secondary keywords in your basket.
Hopefully most of the keywords you have selected will have little competition. Some of the keyword tools we have recommended will also tell you the amount of competition for each keyword, but you can also verify these numbers manually by typing the search terms into the search engines with quotes.
It's very important that you use quotes around the keywords to let the engines know you are looking for an exact match. The rule of thumb we use to assess keyword competitiveness is around "100,000" websites. Anything above a hundred thousand results is fairly competitive and requires a fair amount of optimization and link building.
Keyword Explained
What is a keyword? It's anything people type into a search engine. It could be made up of one word or several keyword phrases joined together. Every person uses their own method of searching, and that makes researching those keywords that will connect their websites with the right visitors very difficult. Keyword research starts with the understanding that finding lots of related keywords that deliver targeted traffic is the ultimate goal of any keyword research.
Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.
Ideally, every webmaster wants visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, you need to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to your website.
If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.
Thinking like your customers
Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.
All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.
You know your business and market too well. The industry terms and words are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.
Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?
As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it? The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.
There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind-boggling.
Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.
This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.
Keyword research is like a job interview process
In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to radiate a wide net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier.
What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.
Tune in for Part II of keyword research.
Sending thousands of visitors to a site who have no interest in your product, let alone in buying it, is just wasted effort and doesn't do any good for your business. If possible, we want to find the customer who has a clear knowledge of what they want and is close to buying something soon.
Ideally, every webmaster wants visitors who are seriously looking to buy in the near future. In order to achieve this, you need to find the least competitive keywords with the highest number of searches that are the most relevant to your website.
If you are just starting out, it definitely would be to your advantage to target lower competition terms. Having success with low competition terms will lead to increased confidence to target more competitive terms with higher search volumes.
Thinking like your customers
Thinking like your customers is easier said than done.
All merchants are guilty of thinking in terms of features and specs of the products and not thinking in terms of benefits it can provide to the customers.
You know your business and market too well. The industry terms and words are in your every day language. No wonder when you start your keyword research you have a very narrow keyword focus. You become your own worst enemy in exploring other ideas.
Here is an example: what is the most popular search term, "cheap flights," "cheap seats," "low fares" or "discount fares"?
As you can see it's not that simple to pick the best keywords, is it? The hardest part of keyword research is to keep an open mind about all possible search methods people might use to look for the same thing. Keyword research is part science, part intuition, and imagination. Since we can't get into the heads of every possible potential visitor to your site who may be interested in your products or services, we have to rely on keyword research tools to tell us what people actually search for and how often.
There are a handful of very powerful keyword research tools that are worth using, but the amount of information you can mine from them is mind-boggling.
Another great resource for proven keywords is to look at your competitor's website. We are talking about finding the highest ranking competitors on the search engines using your target keywords. Once you find the top 5-10 competitor sites, perform a quick review of their keywords on the web pages.
This can be a lengthy and slow process, but luckily there are free Keyword Analyzer tools that can dig up keywords from your competitor's sites in a snap. We'll cover in detail how the Keyword Analyzer can be used to add hundreds of keywords to your keyword research project.
Keyword research is like a job interview process
In order to find the right candidate you may need to interview hundreds of applicants to find the perfect fit for the job. Well, the keyword research process is very similar; you have to radiate a wide net first to capture all the possible combinations of keywords known to man. Even then, it's almost guaranteed you will discover new keywords you have missed in the original research only a few weeks earlier.
What this tells us is the keyword selection and refinement process never ends, or at least it should not end until you are happy with the number of visitors you are receiving to your site.
Tune in for Part II of keyword research.
SEO Crash Course
SEO stands for search engine optimization. You probably already know this, but it pays to be safe so let’s take a quick look at what this acronym is really all about. SEO is the art and science of identifying the right markets to promote via Web search, and then helping the search engines rank your sites highly within their results.
Good and effective SEO involves creating pages and sites that are easily indexed and reviewed by the special software used by Google and other search engines.
These special software programs are referred to as spiders or robots, and they
literally crawl the entire Web (thousands of links per second) in a never-ending
effort to index and rank all files within the search results listings.
SEO also includes generating a large number of quality back links to your
website and individual pages, as doing so will increase the number of “votes”
the search engines see when they index your sites.
These two areas of SEO are called on-site and off-site SEO respectively. This
article is about offsite SEO, or link generation.
Keyword Selection
Choosing the right keywords for your site is important. Obviously your keywords and keyword phrases need to be targeted and descriptive, but you also want to select a number of phrases that are not being used by all the competition.
Online, as elsewhere, most people go for the low hanging fruit. Most of your
competitors will be trying hard to get traffic using the simplest, most obvious
keywords that come to mind.
The trouble is, this usually means thousands of people are optimizing for the
same search terms. What you need to do is find good keywords that are being
ignored by most webmasters.
For instance, the key term “Web Design” is wildly competitive. On the other hand “affordable we design” and “cheap web design” are much less competitive, while still being queried by many people every month.
Keyword Usage On-site
You’ve probably heard that your site, in order to be search engine friendly, needs
to have a solid keyword density and properly optimized tags. This is true, but
none of these elements are as important as the back linking strategies and
tactics you’ll learn in this article.
Making your sites search engine happy:
Good Title Tag - Your HTML Title tag for every page needs to be your top keyword phrase(s). It’s ok to use two or three keyword phrases and separate these with the | pipe character.
Keep your title short and to the point. If your site is about Web Design your title needs to be simply < TITLE >Web Design | Affordable Web Design Service< /TITLE >
Correct Use Of Heading Tags - Most of us use < H1 > tags to create big, bold headlines for our sales pages. This is great, but you also need to understand that search engine spiders read anything between < H1 >. < H2 >, etc. as important keyword content; it’s a good idea to add one or more of your top keyword
phrases here.
Smart Keyword Density - Be sure your main keywords are used often but naturally within your content. Should you use a 2% keyword density, 5%, or what? I have no idea and this has never stopped me from nailing top search engine rankings virtually at will.
If you want to study keyword density that’s great, but for now the least you should
know is to be sure and include your keywords within your page content. Be sure
not to “stuff” your pages with ridiculous, unnatural use of any terms as doing so
could get you penalized by Google and other engines.
Take good care of these basics and you can literally spend the rest of your
time building the right kinds of back links.
Watch out for the next part of our SEO Crash Course.
Good and effective SEO involves creating pages and sites that are easily indexed and reviewed by the special software used by Google and other search engines.
These special software programs are referred to as spiders or robots, and they
literally crawl the entire Web (thousands of links per second) in a never-ending
effort to index and rank all files within the search results listings.
SEO also includes generating a large number of quality back links to your
website and individual pages, as doing so will increase the number of “votes”
the search engines see when they index your sites.
These two areas of SEO are called on-site and off-site SEO respectively. This
article is about offsite SEO, or link generation.
Keyword Selection
Choosing the right keywords for your site is important. Obviously your keywords and keyword phrases need to be targeted and descriptive, but you also want to select a number of phrases that are not being used by all the competition.
Online, as elsewhere, most people go for the low hanging fruit. Most of your
competitors will be trying hard to get traffic using the simplest, most obvious
keywords that come to mind.
The trouble is, this usually means thousands of people are optimizing for the
same search terms. What you need to do is find good keywords that are being
ignored by most webmasters.
For instance, the key term “Web Design” is wildly competitive. On the other hand “affordable we design” and “cheap web design” are much less competitive, while still being queried by many people every month.
Keyword Usage On-site
You’ve probably heard that your site, in order to be search engine friendly, needs
to have a solid keyword density and properly optimized tags. This is true, but
none of these elements are as important as the back linking strategies and
tactics you’ll learn in this article.
Making your sites search engine happy:
Good Title Tag - Your HTML Title tag for every page needs to be your top keyword phrase(s). It’s ok to use two or three keyword phrases and separate these with the | pipe character.
Keep your title short and to the point. If your site is about Web Design your title needs to be simply < TITLE >Web Design | Affordable Web Design Service< /TITLE >
Correct Use Of Heading Tags - Most of us use < H1 > tags to create big, bold headlines for our sales pages. This is great, but you also need to understand that search engine spiders read anything between < H1 >. < H2 >, etc. as important keyword content; it’s a good idea to add one or more of your top keyword
phrases here.
Smart Keyword Density - Be sure your main keywords are used often but naturally within your content. Should you use a 2% keyword density, 5%, or what? I have no idea and this has never stopped me from nailing top search engine rankings virtually at will.
If you want to study keyword density that’s great, but for now the least you should
know is to be sure and include your keywords within your page content. Be sure
not to “stuff” your pages with ridiculous, unnatural use of any terms as doing so
could get you penalized by Google and other engines.
Take good care of these basics and you can literally spend the rest of your
time building the right kinds of back links.
Watch out for the next part of our SEO Crash Course.
SEO and Link Building
Not All Links Are Created Equal:
Every website or blog owners want their site to rank high in search engines and a very popular way of doing this is by building links. But you need to know that not all links are created equal.
Many links are more valuable for your site rankings than others, and certain types of links can even pull your website’s rankings down. So to make sure we are getting those valuable links we need to know more about the links we are getting.
Inbound | Outbound Links
When it comes to links there are a few different types, some which you may be aware of and others to which you probably have not given a lot of consideration. So, before we start talking about the types of links you want and the ones you don’t, let's dig deeper into our links.
Outbound links
Outbound links are links that you have on your site which lead to other sites. For example, if you were writing about directories and you linked to the directory site so your readers can access the directory or get more detailed information about it, that would be an outbound link from your site.
Inbound links
An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. To give you an idea, if you have a friend who has a site of their own, and they find a useful article or page on your site and link to it, this is an inbound link.
General links
A general link is a link to your main home page or your site's index page.
Specific links
This is generally a link to a specific section or posting on your site. For example, if you run a blog and someone links to the URL of a specific blog posting, in order to use your site as an example, reference or to provide information, then they have given you a specific link to your site. It should be noted, of course, that both general and specific links can be either inbound or outbound.
Low ranking versus high ranking sites
It is important to know that not all sites worry about the places where your inbound links come from, but some do. Just to be fair.
*Low ranking sites - This are sites that has linked to you but does not have a high traffic flow. This will be the bulk of sites.
*High ranking sites - These are sites with generally high traffic flow, and high rankings in search engines. These sites are usually also very well known.
Each of the search engines has an algorithm that determines how a site will be ranked. It is important to know that there are two main types of algorithms: those that count your inbound links and those that do not.
The theory behind the ones that do count your inbound links is that these links shows your popularity, and therefore your relevance to readers. The non-inbound links counters have the philosophy that, as a site administrator, you have no control over who, if anyone, can link to your site, and you should not be penalized for that.
Link Building No NO!
*Hire a link building service. At first, this seems like it would be a great idea; after all, you are guaranteed links to your site. But you should know that most search engines have a method in place to recognize when a site is link spamming, which is what these services are actually offering you. When you turn the work over to a third party, you lose control of the situation, and that is a problem because you are unable to control the quality and relevance of the links to your site.
*Doing it Yourself. Build links with every site you can get to agree or make a comment on. Well, this idea is great. You have the ability to exercise control, but you just aren’t doing it. Before you go off half-cocked you should think about why we practice SEO in the first place. We do it because higher rankings draw in readers, which brings in advertisers and revenue. Linking to or from an irrelevant site will not help you in the long run, and may even cause search engines to mark you off as surely as if you had paid a service.
Doing It the Right Way
Build your links wisely; worry about the long term and not immediate results. The path to doing this is surprisingly straightforward.
First make two lists. The first list should be of sites that you can build links to by yourself. The first list will include blogs in which you can post comments (and links), and the second will be sites with which you want to build a linking relationship in the content that the site publishes. Now choose your top 10 from each list.
On your self link building list, be sure that your comments or postings are not spam-like in nature; be relevant and thoughtful. For your second list, get the contact information and send polite and professional emails suggesting a shared linking arrangement. You have to be able to give as well as take here.
Build your self posted links slowly, focusing on one or two comments a day over a few weeks or months. For the second list, once you have sent out the emails, all you can do is wait. After a few weeks have gone by you can move on down your list to the next 10. Just be sure to honor your prior agreements or you may find yourself with angry link partners on your hands.
Every website or blog owners want their site to rank high in search engines and a very popular way of doing this is by building links. But you need to know that not all links are created equal.
Many links are more valuable for your site rankings than others, and certain types of links can even pull your website’s rankings down. So to make sure we are getting those valuable links we need to know more about the links we are getting.
Inbound | Outbound Links
When it comes to links there are a few different types, some which you may be aware of and others to which you probably have not given a lot of consideration. So, before we start talking about the types of links you want and the ones you don’t, let's dig deeper into our links.
Outbound links
Outbound links are links that you have on your site which lead to other sites. For example, if you were writing about directories and you linked to the directory site so your readers can access the directory or get more detailed information about it, that would be an outbound link from your site.
Inbound links
An inbound link is a link to your site from another site. To give you an idea, if you have a friend who has a site of their own, and they find a useful article or page on your site and link to it, this is an inbound link.
General links
A general link is a link to your main home page or your site's index page.
Specific links
This is generally a link to a specific section or posting on your site. For example, if you run a blog and someone links to the URL of a specific blog posting, in order to use your site as an example, reference or to provide information, then they have given you a specific link to your site. It should be noted, of course, that both general and specific links can be either inbound or outbound.
Low ranking versus high ranking sites
It is important to know that not all sites worry about the places where your inbound links come from, but some do. Just to be fair.
*Low ranking sites - This are sites that has linked to you but does not have a high traffic flow. This will be the bulk of sites.
*High ranking sites - These are sites with generally high traffic flow, and high rankings in search engines. These sites are usually also very well known.
Each of the search engines has an algorithm that determines how a site will be ranked. It is important to know that there are two main types of algorithms: those that count your inbound links and those that do not.
The theory behind the ones that do count your inbound links is that these links shows your popularity, and therefore your relevance to readers. The non-inbound links counters have the philosophy that, as a site administrator, you have no control over who, if anyone, can link to your site, and you should not be penalized for that.
Link Building No NO!
*Hire a link building service. At first, this seems like it would be a great idea; after all, you are guaranteed links to your site. But you should know that most search engines have a method in place to recognize when a site is link spamming, which is what these services are actually offering you. When you turn the work over to a third party, you lose control of the situation, and that is a problem because you are unable to control the quality and relevance of the links to your site.
*Doing it Yourself. Build links with every site you can get to agree or make a comment on. Well, this idea is great. You have the ability to exercise control, but you just aren’t doing it. Before you go off half-cocked you should think about why we practice SEO in the first place. We do it because higher rankings draw in readers, which brings in advertisers and revenue. Linking to or from an irrelevant site will not help you in the long run, and may even cause search engines to mark you off as surely as if you had paid a service.
Doing It the Right Way
Build your links wisely; worry about the long term and not immediate results. The path to doing this is surprisingly straightforward.
First make two lists. The first list should be of sites that you can build links to by yourself. The first list will include blogs in which you can post comments (and links), and the second will be sites with which you want to build a linking relationship in the content that the site publishes. Now choose your top 10 from each list.
On your self link building list, be sure that your comments or postings are not spam-like in nature; be relevant and thoughtful. For your second list, get the contact information and send polite and professional emails suggesting a shared linking arrangement. You have to be able to give as well as take here.
Build your self posted links slowly, focusing on one or two comments a day over a few weeks or months. For the second list, once you have sent out the emails, all you can do is wait. After a few weeks have gone by you can move on down your list to the next 10. Just be sure to honor your prior agreements or you may find yourself with angry link partners on your hands.
SEO: 10 Ways To Get More Website Traffic
Having a website means a need for traffic. This traffic needs to be as targeted as possible to the website you are promoting, whether it is your own web site or an affiliate program. This is the core of the business.
No traffic means No business, More traffic means More sales
But the question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic?
Below are some of the most popular methods.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.
This method, when done properly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google's rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.
You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).
Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that will walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.
Link popularity
Link popularity is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.
Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds apparent value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.
The popular type of content could be:
This means exchanging links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This creates a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality web sites related to your niche and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.
Ezine advertising
Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.
Article Submissions
Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become 'viral' when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.
Here are the list of the most popular Article Submission Sites:
EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com
Amazines.com
ArticleTrader.com
SearchGuild.com
WebWorldIndex.com
ArticleSphere.com
BusinessKnowHow.com
PromotionWorld.com
ArticlesFactory.com
ExcellentGuide.com/article
ContentDesk.com
ArticleCube.com
AfroArticles.com
ArticleBiz.com
Forum Posting
In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion's primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.
You've Joined: now what?
Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum's topic.
Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.
Social Bookmarking
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.
Here are some of the most popular Social Bookmarking Sites:
Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.
Directory Submissions
Submit your website url's to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.
So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.
No traffic means No business, More traffic means More sales
But the question is - How do you get this highly targeted web site traffic?
Below are some of the most popular methods.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Of all the pay per click search engines, Google Adwords is the largest and most popular.
This method, when done properly, will increase your exposure, and give fast results. You must keep up to date with Google's rules, so be sure to read them. You pay a one off fee when you register and set up your campaign. You can have your campaign up and running in minutes. There is a minimum bid, but of course you will have to pay more than this. But the beauty of Adwords is you can set a daily budget of how much you are willing to spend.
You can create as many campaigns as you want, and then test your ads (changing the headline for example).
Google provide tools to help you with your campaigns, and have exellent tutorials that will walk you through everything from signing up to creating your Adwords campaigns.
Link popularity
Link popularity is achieved when other sites have links to your site. If a high traffic site has links, the search engines perceive both sites must be popular. The important thing is to have quality web sites linking back to your site.
Why should anyone want to link to your site? If you have quality content, this adds apparent value and makes your site popular, so others will want to link to you.
The popular type of content could be:
- Free downloads
- Free reports, articles, ezine or newsletter
- Video
- Links to other good sites
This means exchanging links with other quality sites. You can create a links page on your site. This creates a resource that visitors will want to return to. Find quality web sites related to your niche and contact the webmaster about exchanging links.
Ezine advertising
Most ezines accept advertising. Ezines are online or email newsletters. They are used to build a relationship between a webmaster and a web site visitor, with news, updates, special offers etc. But as always they should have quality content. You place an ad in ezines that are highly targeted towards your niche. Prices depend on the ezine, and also the position of the ad. The most expensive is the solo ad, where yours is the only ad.
Article Submissions
Submitting articles is a great way to build back links and web site visitors. Your articles can become 'viral' when others want to re-publish them on their sites, or use them in their newsletters and ezines. You include links to your site in the author resource box offering more free information. The resource box is your chance to convince the reader to visit your web site.
Here are the list of the most popular Article Submission Sites:
EzineArticles.com
GoArticles.com
ArticleDashboard.com
SearchWarp.com
ArticlesBase.com
iSnare.com
SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle.com
ArticleCity.com
IdeaMarketers.com
ArticleAlley.com
Web-Source.net
SelfSEO.com
Amazines.com
ArticleTrader.com
SearchGuild.com
WebWorldIndex.com
ArticleSphere.com
BusinessKnowHow.com
PromotionWorld.com
ArticlesFactory.com
ExcellentGuide.com/article
ContentDesk.com
ArticleCube.com
AfroArticles.com
ArticleBiz.com
Forum Posting
In order to be successful using forums there are some things that are required. Do Your Homework: Prior to joining any forum, you must do some research. Join relevant forums that are in some way related to the promotion's primary sales market. Choose popular forums. There is no point in wasting your time and energy on forums that few members and few posts. Page raking and the amount of active members are two good ways to check for this. Choose forums that allow sig tags. Read the rules before joining and pay attention to them.
You've Joined: now what?
Keep your sig tag short and update it regularly. The ideal thing is to limit yourself to one link, preferably to your main website. Never create posts that are nothing more than an advertisement. This is a universal rule. At best this kind of post will be deleted by the monitors, at worst, you will be banned. Be an active member on the forum. Plan to spend at least an hour each day there. Get to know the users. Introduce yourself with intelligent questions depending upon the forum's topic.
Use Your Sig file to the best advantage and within the rules. Some Forums have places where you can advertise and give special deals to members.
Social Bookmarking
In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.
Here are some of the most popular Social Bookmarking Sites:
- Backflip
- barksbookmarks
- BibSonomy
- Blinklist
- Blipoo
- BlogBookMark
- BlueDot
- blurpalicious
- Bmaccess
- Bookkit
- BookMarkAll
- Bookmark-manager .
- bookmarktracker
- Bookmax
- Buddymarks
- Bukmark
- Chipmark
- Citeulike
- Claimid
- Clipclip
- Cloudytags
- Complore
- Connectedy
- Connotea
- Contentpop
- coRank
- Crowdfound
- de.lirio.us
- del.icio.us
- Diigo
- Digg
- Dropjack
- Easybm
- Enroll
- ez4u
- Favoor
- Folkd
- Freelink
- Freezilla
- Fungow
- Furl
- Gather
- Getboo
- Hanzoweb
- Hyperlinkomatic
- i89.us
- Icio
- Ikeepbookmarks
- Iloggo
- Jigg
- Kaboodle
- Kinja
- Lifelogger
- Lilsto
- Linkagogo
- Linkarena
- Linksnarf
- Listerlister
- Ma.gnolia.com
- Markaboo
- Marktd
- Memfrag
- Memotoo
- Mister Wong
- Mixx
- Mobleo
- Multiply
- Murl
- MyBookmarks
- Myhq
- MyLinkVault
- mySiteVote
- MyWebDesktop
- Newsvine
- Newsweight
- Oyax
- Philoi
- PlugIM
- Propeller
- QuickieClick
- Rambhai
- RawSugar
- Searchles
- Segnalo
- Simpy
- Sitebar
- Sitejot
- Sk*rt
- Slashdot
- SocialDanger
- Socialogs
- Sphinn
- Spotback
- Spurl
- Squidoo
- Startaid
- StumbleUpon
- Stylehive
- Syncone
- Tagfacts
- Taggly
- Tagne
- Tagtooga
- Tagza
- Technorati
- Tedigo
- Thinkpocket
- Thoof
- Totalpad
- Urlex
- Uvouch
- Vmark
- Voteboat
- Votelists
- Vuju
- WeTogether
- Whitelinks
- Wink
- Wirefan
- Xilinus
- Xlmark
- Yahoo! Bookmarks
- Yattle
- Zlitt
- Zurpy
Viral Traffic using free reports - ebooks etc.
Directory Submissions
Submit your website url's to the search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization, (SEO), is making web pages attractive to the search engines. The better optimized your web page is, the higher a ranking it will achieve in the search engines. Most people searching the internet only look at the first couple of search results.
So optimizing for the search engines focuses on techniques such as making sure that each web page is using the appropriate title tags and meta tags, and that the keyword or key phrases for the particular pages are distributed throughout the content. Search engines find and catalog web pages using spidering software.
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