SEO Review

Website (and business) marketing is not a one off exercise. Whether you have a brand new website or one that you’ve had for a while, you need to continue promoting it in order to bring you more visitors.

You need to constantly work on it, fine-tune it, discard methods that are not working and implement new ones.

The following 6 methods are simple to implement and can be done for free by you today.

1. Email Marketíng

Your first step should be to send an email to your existing clients announcing the existence of your website. You should also ask your customers to forward your email onto their friends, family and colleagues.

Think Web Pages, not Websites

If you are starting a new business and don’t have any customers yet, send an email to people you know who may be interested in your products/services.

Remember to email your clients every time you make changes, add new offers or features to your website to remind them to come back.

The next step could be to send your announcement to an opt-in email list. Opt-in email lists contain people or businesses who have requested to receive information about certain topic(s). There are many companies who can provide you with these lists.

Under no circumstance should you EVER send unsolicited email (spam) to people you either don’t know or who have not requested to receive your information.

2. Search Engines & Directories

Submít your website to as many search engines and directories as you can. (A search engine is a searchable database of websites collected by a computer program (called a crawler, robot or spider). When you enter a keyword, the search engine looks for keywords in its database, and any relevant records are displayed.)

Currently there are thousands of search engines and directories on the internet. Some of the main ones include Google, Yahoo, MSN. When submittíng your website to the search engines, you can either do it manually by going to the search engine website and adding your URL (website address) or you can employ the services of a Search Engine Submission company, who will do it for you.

Search engines try to rank sites that contain good content higher, so you need keywords and phrases on your pages that best describe your service and products. For example, if you are a florist, use words such as "florist, online florist, virtual florist, wedding florist, florist in Sydney, florist on line, flowers, floral, bouquets, floral arrangements etc." as many times as possible to ensure high search engine ranking. To find out what keywords your customers may be searching use Google’s Keyword Tool or Wordtracker.

Once you decide on your keywords, use them in:

(a) Your website’s domain name

(b) The title of your page – This is displayed in the top bar of your browser window.

(c) The heading of your home page.

(d) The first paragraph of your home page.

(e) Meta tags – Keywords, description.

(f) Titles of your graphics.

While it is important to use keywords as much as possible, it is also important you use them only if they are relevant and do not sound awkward. If you spam your keywords, you may be penalized or even banned by some search engines.

If this all seems too overwhelming, you can employ the services of a Search Engine optimization company, who will make your website’s content more search engine friendly to make it rank higher.

3. Link Exchanges

Find websites whose business complements yours and add their website to your links/resource page. Then contact the company and ask for a reciprocal link. For example if you are a wedding dress designer, you could contact businesses that sell wedding cakes, jewellery, flowers and also venues, celebrants etc. By doing this your website will become a valuable resource for your visitors, since it will provide information they need. They may return to your site over and over to find more information.

On the other hand, you will have visitors coming to your website when they follow a link from your link partners.

Results in search engines are determined by the material you have presented on your site and by other off-page factors such as how many other sites link to your site. The more links you have pointing to your site from relevant websites, the higher your site will rank.

If you need help with this task, you can employ the services of a Link Exchange Company. They are generally inexpensive and can save you hours of time.

4. Email Signature

Every email you send should have an email "signature." This is text that is automatically attached to the bottom of your email message. This text can be used to publicize your business. You can include your name, business name, email address, street or postal address, website details, phone number, fax number, company slogan, description of your company and its products/services. You can set up different signatures for different purposes.

To set up your signature using Outlook Express:

Step 1: Select Tools > Options from the menu bar.

Step 2: Click "Signatures" .

Step 3: Make sure that you select "Add signatures to all outgoing messages" – within the "Signature settings" section. It is up to you whether you would like your signature to appear in "replies" and "forwards"

Step 4: Click "New" (you can change the name from "Signature #1" by clicking "Rename") – within "Signature" section:

Step 5: Type in the text that you would like to appear at the end of your email messages – in "Edit signature" section:

Step 6: If you’re happy with this, click "Apply" and "OK".

5. Office Stationery & Merchandising Materials

It is extremely important that your website is included on ALL your office stationery so that customers can see it over and over again. That way they are more likely to remember it. If you’ve just had your letterheads printed, you can always add your website address on your wordprocessor, when printing your correspondence. For brochures, business cards etc, consider having small labels printed up. Your office stationery should include not only your website address, but also your email. Consider adding your details to:
    â€¢ Letterheads
    â€¢ Business Cards
    â€¢ Flyers
    â€¢ Brochures
    â€¢ Labels
    â€¢ Packaging
    â€¢ Merchandise bags
    â€¢ Catalogs
    â€¢ Invoices
    â€¢ Fax headers
    â€¢ Display units

6. Set up a Blog

A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. Blogs are typically updated daily or weekly and can easily be managed by you. They provide a way for you to communicate with your customers directly, give you an increased presence on major search engines, allow you to stay ahead of your competition and so much more.

You can easily publish the following information in your blog: Articles, Media releases, Industry news, Surveys – so you can get feedback from your customers, Testimonials, Product reviews, Interviews, Case studies, Links to complementary businesses, Frequently asked questions and problem resolutions, Inspirational quotes, Research findings, etc.

Blogs give you an increased presence on major search engines, like Yahoo! and Google. If you use Blogger(Google’s Blogging Tool), every message you post creates a new page on Google so in a very short time you could have a lot of pages pointing to your website, bringing you lots of new visitors.

Don’t be scared to try some of these marketing methods – you have nothing to lose!

About The Author
Ivana Katz of Websites 4 Small Business makes it easy for you to get your business on the internet. If you’re looking for a professional and affordable website designer, visit Websites 4 Small Business and download a website plan for free.

Obtaining one-way quality links is often cited as the “Holy Grail” of online success. Especially if you take the SEO route for getting high rankings for all your profitable keywords in the search engines. It’s no wonder then, achieving top spots for valuable and popular keywords should be the ultimate goal of any webmaster or online marketer.

How well you do in this “link quest” will largely determine the success or failure of your site or online business. Assuming of course, you’re going after free organic traffic from the search engines and not using Pay Per Click or other means of succeeding online.

Benefits:

1. Improves, doesn’t replace. You keep your existing accounts and payment setups.
2. Works with most popular ad networks: Google AdSense, Yahoo, ValueClick, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, BlueLithium, and more!
3. Easy, one-time setup. Don’t muck around with code every time you want to change something.
4. Consolidated reporting gives you insight into traffic and monetization patterns that are making you money.
5. Used by hundreds of well-known sites. Now open to publishers of all sizes.

Link building and achieving top placements in the search engines (especially Google) has been my main objective for over ten years of online marketíng. Over the years, I have tried hundreds, if not thousands of link building methods in order to get those links. I would like to discuss briefly some of those methods and then explain in full detail my four favorite and most effective proven ways to get quality one-way links.

First, some general tips on how you should approach your link building from the get-go. You must realize the web is based on content; web surfers/users are looking for quality content. If you can supply valuable content that surfers want, you will build your links naturally. People will see your content and want to link to it. This process is often referred to as link baiting – you make your content/offer so irresistible, they will not only want it but they will go out of their way to tell others about your fantastic content.

Be careful not to link to “spammy” link farms and it’s probably a good idea to always check the Gooogle PageRank (PR) of any site or page you link to on the web. Many cautious webmasters/marketers won’t link to anything less than a PR3 page but use your best judgment here.

There are numerous ways of getting quality links:

• place your links in directories – free and paid
• join online forums and place your links
• do recommendations and testimonials
• viral videos with your embedded links
• join social media sites like MySpace, Facebook, etc.
• use hub traffic sites like Squidoo and Hubpages
• use Google sites like Google News, Google Docs, Google Knol
• use Wikipedia to build links
• use Yahoo Answers and those types of sites
• use eBay and sites like Craigslist
• use viral ebooks and software programs

Now, I have used all of the above link building methods and many more over the years but I would like to explain to you my most effective link building techniques – these are the proven methods that have worked for me. No doubt you may have heard of many of these link building methods before… but here goes:

Article Marketing

This is still one of the most effective ways to build good one-way links to your site. I know this is “old school” but it still works. There are rumors Google is cracking down on article links but for now links in your article resource boxes are still very effective.

From my own experience, article marketing is my most effective technique at building links. My sites and my onlíne marketing were going nowhere until I started writing articles. Now I do aggressive article marketing using all the major online article directories…

The Top 5 I Use Are: EzineArticles, GoArticles, Isnare, Ideamarketers, and Buzzle.

Now just look at my stats from EzineArticles alone and you will know why I use them.

Account Statistics

Articles Views: 421,327

Profile Views: 2,573

Articles Published: 4,787

URL Clicks: 49,480

Emailed: 115

Live Articles: 203

I have roughly 200 articles which have been viewed over 400,000 times which has sent around 50,000 visitors to my sites. Plus, I have around 5,000 places where my articles are published. And this is only for one online article directory – I have my articles in hundreds of them.

Whether you’re just a webmaster or into marketing online you must realize all this stuff is a “numbers” game. The more content you have out there, the more links you have on the web – the more traffíc and visitors you get coming to your site. It’s not rocket science, it’s simple math. The more links you have, the higher probability someone will click them and come to your site.

The same goes for high rankings in the search engines, the more good quality links you have, the higher your rankings. Article marketing will give you highly targeted keyword links to your web pages. I also use SubmitYourArticle which will automatically submít my articles for me to many dífferent article directories. I use this service to save time, but you can hand-submit your articles.

One last point about article marketing – you’re not just using articles to build links, you’re also using articles to “pre-sell” yourself, your site and/or your product. It’s a very effective way of funneling interested visitors/buyers to your site. Many of my sales are already made before visitors reach my site.

Add This Bookmark

Now I am not really into the “social media” sites but that has not stopped me from using them to my advantage. And it would be a BIG mistake not to use these social media sites for your link building.

Sites like MySpace, FaceBook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Linkedin… and thousands of others are very important for link building. They are becoming even more important as Google moves away from articles and focuses on the “real interactions” taking place on these sites.

Couple of years ago, I added the free AddThis Bookmark to all my sites. This is a simple code which lets your visitors bookmark your site or content in any or all of the major social media sites.

What actually happens is that your visitors are building your links for you. I have gotten hundreds of links from these sites just by placing this simple bookmark on my sites. Truth be told, I nearly laughed at this idea at first – sure visitors to my sites would automatically bookmark and build links for me? No way that would happen?

Wrong again!

This really works, so if you want this simple way of building links, just use the Addthis.com bookmark to your site or pages.

Google Alerts Link Building

This method of building good quality one-way links does take a little more work, but it is extremely effective, especially for getting high rankings in Google.

Here’s how it works:

You sign-up for Google Alerts for your major keywords that you’re promoting. Google will send you email alerts whenever a new page/site/link is created containing your keywords. You then go to those newly created pages to make a comment and add your link.

Many of these new pages will be on blogs so you can easily add your comment and link. The trick is to add valuable comments/content which the site moderator will approve because it adds to his/her site’s value. Many will also approve your link because your link is related to their site and this is just good SEO practice.

The key here is to put yourself and your site in the whole discussion of related blogs, sites and forums relevant to your content. You want your site in the whole mix of things so that relevant links will flow naturally from the discussion. Now all your links won’t be accepted, but you can easily add 2 or 3 links each day with very little time spent on this. Great way to build links, hope you can give it a try.

Press Releases

I am just starting this method of link building, but what I have seen so far tells me this is a very effective way to build links. It’s not cheap, I use PRWeb and I believe it’s $200 for a release. You can get a cheaper price at around $80 but you don’t get the full benefits at this lower price.

Press releases are very effective because you can embed your links with your “anchor text” into the body of your press release. Other sites pick up your release and place it on their site with your keywords/links embedded. This seems more like natural link-building which the search engines love, especially Google.

Again, depending on your marketing budget, press releases can be a very effective way of building links. I have noticed sites going from a PR0 to PR4 in less than 6 months using this method and also getting top 5 rankings in Google in the process. Keep in mind, sites displaying press releases are usually already highly ranked in Google so some of their PR juice is passed on to your site.

I hope this article has given you some fresh ways of building your one-way links. Consistently build these links to your site over an extended period of months or even years and you will succeed online.

About The Author

The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous websites. For the latest web marketing tools try: BizwareMagic.com .

If you liked the article above, why not try this Free 7 Day Traffic Course at: MarketingToolGuide.com . 2009 Titus Hoskins.

If you are an experienced webmaster then you probably know that creating back links to your website is one of the best things that you can do to improve your Search Engine Ranking Placement (SERP). Google openly discusses the importance that their algorithms place on back links and even recommend that webmasters who want to improve their traffic use back links. Both Yahoo! and MSN are starting to talk openly about the importance of back links in their search algorithms as well.

There are a number of strategies that you can use to create back links to your website. Some of these strategies include emailing webmasters and asking them to place a link to your website, submittíng your site to directories, distributing free reprint articles, and paying for links. All of these have their pros and cons, and some have a better success ratio than others.

How Many Back Links Does Your Website Have?

Take a look at your website and see just how many back links you actually do have. Do not do this for only one search engine, but for all search engines where you are trying to get good SERP results. To check your backlinks, simply type into the particular search engine’s box – link:http://www.yourdomainurl.com . Of course you will replace the yourdomainurl with the name of your domain.

The more back links that you have to your website, the better off you are. Not only do back links help your SERP, but also the visitors of pages where your back link is listed may just choose to visit your site.

A common mistake that new webmasters make is that they create back links, but they have all of these links pointing to their home page. It is great that you have 50 back links pointing to your home page, but take a look at other pages on your site. How many links are pointing to these pages? The answer is probably zero unless you have utilized deep linking in your link building campaigns.

What Are Deep Links?

Deep links are links that go to specific pages within your website. For example, let’s say that you have a home improvement website that has a large number of pages and articles on it telling people how to do projects. If all of your back links are pointing only to your home page and you have none pointing to specific article pages, then you are not getting the full benefit of your linking activities.

Think about it this way, if I go to your website and find a piece of information that I find particularly helpful or interesting and I want to tell other people about it, how will I do it? When I tell all my friends on my blog about this great page of yours, am I going to link to your home page? No, I am going to copy and paste the actual webpage address out of my browser, into my blog. That is deep linking and what is considered to be natural linking by the search engines.

What Are Natural Links?

Natural links are those links that are created by people other than the website’s marketing team. Suppose I posted a link in my own blog that said that the "most easily understood tutorial, I have read, for creating a php-xml parser" was: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-xml-parsing-rss-1-0 , and I put my quoted text into the link. That is a natural link, because I created the link with no prompting from the management at SitePoint.com.

Difficulties In Creating Deep Links

There are a few problems that you will run into when trying to create deep links to your site. One problem is that if you ask a Webmaster of another site to link to you, they will most likely just link to your home page. When you submít to directories, the vast majority of them will only allow you a link to your home page, not a deep link. Even if they do allow you to submit a deep link, they will not allow you to submit 10 deep links.

Success Tips For Creating Deep Links

Deep linking is quite a bit easier when utilizing free reprint articles as a part of your link building campaign. This is because you can put whatever link you want to put in the "About The Author" box. The About The Author box is required to stay intact in all websites that are using your article. If you intend on writing a large number of articles to promote your domain, then you will want to optimize your results by putting a different deep link into the About The Author box for each of the articles that you write.

Another method of doing this is free and easy, but requires a bit of time. Take keywords in each page of the text on your website and make a hyperlink on that word or phrase to another page on your site. This is very easily done if you know how to do basic HTML. The ultimate goal here is to have every page of your website linked to, at least once, by another page on your site. You will want to spread these out among your domain’s webpages, instead of having just a couple of pages linking to the other 50 pages.

Another reason to spread your links across all of the pages of your domain, is that users are likely to be turned off by a page that is almost all hyperlinks; those pages often appear spammy or cluttered. A good idea for any Webmaster is to create these internal deep links when you create a new page. It is much easier to spend a couple of minutes from the beginning, rather than trying to go back and do all of them at a later date.

Incorporate Deep Linking Into Your Linking Strategies

Deep linking is as important a consideration as back linking! It does not matter which page visitors use to enter our websites. If they like what they read on our internal pages, they are more likely to view other pages on our websites. If they view other pages on our website, they are likely to find our homepage, and we will get a chance to tell them why they should buy our products or services.

Deep links to our website help to ensure that the search engines will have good cause to show our internal webpages as well as our homepage. For every page in our website that gets great SERP, our chances of getting a sale are increased significantly.

We have 15 pages on our website, eight of which provide real content to our prospective clients. All eight of these pages have a significant number of back links pointing to them. 48% of our visitors land on our home page. 37% of our visitors land on our internal pages. As a result, 85% of our traffic lands on our website as a result of our back links, either directly or through our natural search placement in the search engínes. The remaining 15% arrive on our website through bookmarks, personal referrals, and paid listings.

Deep linking works. Give it a shot.

About The Author
Trey Pennewell is a writer, who writes about online marketíng. Learn more about our Pay For Results SEO services at: LinksAndTraffic.com. Trey also manages article approvals at the free article directory located at: TechCentralPublishing.com.

As we enter into what many enlightened souls are calling the most dire economic times since the Great Depression, online marketers need all the help they can get – regardless of the source. You have probably heard of Google; but chances are almost 100% certain, you have never heard of me. Lucky you!

Actually, the only thing you need to know about me is that I am a full-time online affiliate marketer and I make a very comfortable living from the web. Last year (2008), was my best year online so far, which left me scratching my head and saying what recession?

But that may be something of a false positive, as I will never know how much I could have made if the economic times had been good instead of bad. Plus, judging from my own limited experience, selling and marketing online may not have been hit as hard as those businesses in the real world in 2008, since consumers are doing everything to save a penny and shopping online has become a much cheaper alternative for many.

As we enter into these uncertain times, online marketers and webmasters need all the help they can get. Recently, Google mailed a small booklet to its Adsense users; in it Google gives "6 Top Tactics For Tough Times." It is obviously referring to its Adwords PPC (Pay Per Click) program and clients but Google’s advice can be applied to your general online marketíng.

These tactics include: (quoting directly from the Google mail-out)
1. Focus your ads on low prices and savíngs.
2. Use Value-related keywords.
3. Ensure your ad groups are targeted and relevant.
4. Don’t waste money on irrelevant clicks.
5. Make it easy for customers to buy.
6. Focus your money on your high-performers. (End Quote)
Sound advice and I especially like the idea of focusing your marketing on low prices and savíngs mainly because people want bargains in tight economic times. I also like the fact that you must make it easy for your customers to buy… something as simple as putting your "order/buy link" above the fold can improve your conversions.

Also, targeting value-related keywords, is a very effective marketing tactic. Relating your keywords to "discounts, bargains, cheap, inexpensive, lowest prices…" will help improve your sales. So too, is catering to phrases that suggest the searcher is in a buying mind-set: gifts, presents, gift ideas, wedding gifts… shoppers searching those words are ready to buy.

Plus, focusing your time and money on your high-performers is solid advice. Sometimes succeeding online is simply finding a market niche that works/performs – then running with it. Once you have found the keywords and products that perform well with your site or sites – focus the majority of your time and energy developing those niche markets.

Now here are some of my most effective marketing tactics that have worked for me and tactics I will be relying on in the coming years – even in these hard times.

Make Keywords Your #1 Goal

This is the single most important factor for my own online success. You have to make keywords and ranking high for them in all the search engines your main objective if you’re marketing online. Might sound obvious, but many beginning marketers don’t truly understand how important getting top rankings for your chosen keywords will be in your online success.

Target less competitive long tail (multi-worded) keywords to get started and slowly work your way up to more popular keywords. Center your marketing around getting those first page listings (Top Five) for your keywords. Achieve this goal, (especially in Google) and it will be almost impossible for you not to succeed and make a profit with your online marketing even in bad times.

Autoresponders, Líst Building & Online Relationships

Keeping in contact with potential buyers is mission critical. You must use autoresponders to send follow-up messages to build trustful relationships with your potential customers.

So building a large contact líst is essential. That’s why the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace can be very effective marketing tools for building this online contact and trust. Truth be told, all these social networks are, more or less, just glorified autoresponders and líst builders!

Your Unique Selling Position

You must give potential customers some very good reasons for them to buy from you or your links. Offering special bonuses and discounts works wonders for your sales. Some of my most successful pages simply consist of coupons and discounts offered by different companies. If buyers can save $100’s OFF by buying thru your links, they will.

Always remember, besides looking for the best deal or bargain, consumers are also looking for a quality product. If you’re into affiliate marketing, only pick top quality products to promote. Picking top brand names also makes it easier to make sales. So too is only promoting popular online merchants like Amazon which can be an effective marketing strategy. Most importantly, always remember consumers are also looking for INFORMATION on the products they are considering buying, give them helpful information and you will succeed.

Go With The Flow

If you’re marketing online, you have to follow what’s working for you. Most times you will try countless ideas or tactics – once you have found a process or system that works, really work it or scale it up. Making your first dollar is the hardest, but once you do something that earns you that dollar, just repeat that "something" a thousand times.

Tracking what works is very important so keep a close eye on your site’s traffic logs to find where your customers are coming from. Something like Google Analytics is simply priceless for "fine-tuning" your site and your internet marketing. It will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

Target Recurring or Residual Income

One of my most effective marketing strategies is to promote and sell products and services that give you a recurring or residual income. Make one sale and get paíd for years or for the life of that referred client. Concentrate on services like web-hosting, telephone, marketing programs… once customers sign up to these services, they will likely keep them for years. I am still earning income from sales I made five years ago.

Building a large residual income could be the key to surviving in tough economic times. This will be income which will carry you or your business over the rough patches since it is based upon past performance and not on your current selling situation.

Automate Everything

The real beauty of marketing online and using computers… you can automate just about every process in your marketing system. Make it a point of automating everything you do… use autoresponders to follow-up with potential buyers, use automatic check-outs, automatic reporting… just set-up your whole internet marketing system that runs itself with little or no supervision from you. This will free up your time to concentrate all your efforts on marketing/promoting your site or product. Besides, nothing beats coming back from a vacatíon and finding out you have earned the cost of your vacatíon and then some – all the while you were lying in the sun and miles away from any computer.

Find The Top Online Marketers

If you’re just starting with internet marketing, you need to find the top successful marketers and "model" what they’re doing. This is relatively a new industry and you have to seek out the experts and pioneers who have set the groundwork. When I first started marketing online, I was quite fortunate to come into contact with some web marketing heavy-weights such as Marlon Sanders, Ken Evoy, Neil Shearing… and SEO experts like Brad Callen and Aaron Wall.

Make Google Your Friend

Whether you love or hate Google doesn’t matter, you just have to make it your number one ally in your online marketíng. Google has just about conquered the world-wide search market, Yahoo and MSN are still important, but Google is the deal-breaker when you’re selling stuff online. Consumers have enormous respect for Google, a number one listing for a lucrative keyword simply means money in the bank.

I have found using Google Search, Google Adwords, and Google Adsense have played a more than significant role in the success of my own online sites and marketing. Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Alerts, Webmaster Tools… all have been invaluable and an enormous help in achieving my "web-based" lifestyle and livelihood. Of course, Google has also driven me around the bend more times than I can count, but no one is perfect. Besides, when it’s all said and done, anyone marketing on the web must truly embrace Google if they want to reach their highest level possible.

About The Author
Everyone has a story. Mine is called: "In Search Of The $100 Click or How I Found A Full-Time Online Income And Came To Love The Internet". Everyone is profiting from the web. Find out how you can too at: marketingtoolguide.com. 2009 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.