Google is the clear leader among search engines, so this should be your primary focus, however, Yahoo! and MSN do hold a substantial part of the internet using community? attention, so they should not be ignored.A  It should be remembered that while Google does get the most traffic, Yahoo! and MSN can provide better results when it comes to certain specific categories of interest.A  This is why it is so very important that you cater to all three of the major search engines for your SEO and not just Google.

Since ranking is such a lengthy process, it is important that you continuously monitor and improve your site and its keywords with tracking in order to keep ahead of your competitors, and to ensure that your site keeps its high ranks.A  This requires continuous optimization through growth and updating.

When it comes to the Big Three, the SEO techniques that matter are as follows.

Google:

A Whenever you launch a website, submit it to a search engine, or update a site, a spider from one or all three of the big search engines may crawl your site.A  However, unless you provide that spider with significant keywords for ranking your site, you will never actually achieve rankings that are anywhere near where you want them to be, other than your business name itself.A  Therefore, make sure that when you are building or adding to your website, it has keywords within its text and in its coding to allow the spiders to index and rank in a way that is favorable to you.

A Use keywords that will ensure better rankings.A  To best complete your SEO, you need to understand that some keywords will provide you with better results than others. However, if these test keywords are already being used by quite a high number of other sites, since the market in your industry is competitive, then it is unlikely that the best keywords will ensure the best ranking. The only time that the ideal keywords will ensure the best results for you is if your service or product is extremely unique or new so that the keyword has not already been used extensively throughout the world wide web.A  In fact, if you are supplying a new product or service, then you will almost certainly receive great search engine ranking, since the Top Three adore fresh new content. In extremely competitive markets, it may take up to six months for you to see the results you want from your desired keywords. In such cases, a pay-per-click campaign may be required.

The reason that the search engines give such preference to websites offering things that are new and unique are as follows:

A It gives them the opportunity to provide something new

There is less competition against something new or unique, so as long as the website has proper SEO, then great rankings are almost automatic.

MSN:

A MSN is typically much faster for crawling, indexing, and listing sites.A  In fact, if you have done your SEO properly, you can achieve a high MSN ranking within a month, even within the most competitive markets.A  Therefore, while Google may be your long term SEO goal, MSN can provide for you on the short term.

Yahoo!:

Though Yahoo! can provide you with a steady traffic flow, actually getting listed can present quite a challenge.A  While some websites will be crawled as early as a month from their submission, this is a rare occasion, with the standard being closer to three or four months.A  Once the site is crawled, however, it doesn’t take long for it to be indexed and ranked.A  As long as your SEO is good, then you may achieve a good rank and see results before Google has even thought about sending a spider your way.

Though there are practically countless search engines out there, it is the Big Three that have you covered for both the short term and the long term for your SEO.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Internal Link Structure, Footer Links Optimization for Search Engines
2. Search Engines use automated Spiders
3. How Long Does It Take For A Website To Move Up In The Search Engines?

Click thrus are the main thing you need to focus on when creating an advertising campaign. Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or online advertisement of any type. It is the highest quality traffic you can have coming to your site.

Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will need to get to your site to convert a sale.

If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your web site, you can then use that information to predict the results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with this information, you will then have a lot more confidence when spending money or time on any type of online advertising.

If you are looking to generate high quality click thru’s to your web site, you will find that this is not the easiest thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure means nothing if you don’t generate click thrus to your web site. If you want to generate true targeted traffic to your web site, you should definitely take a good look at these types of advertising.

Email Marketing – Email marketing is probably the most direct way to generate click thrus to your web site. You can either hire a third party company to mail to their lists or you can build a list of your own.

Email is great because you can instantly reach large numbers of interested prospect and start to generate click thru’s within hours of sending your message out.

This method of marketing does have its drawbacks. It is getting more and more difficult to send email, because of SPAM regulations and extensive filtering by ISP’s. Fortunately, many marketing tools are coming out to help the average person start and maintain a list without knowing a lot of technical knowledge.

The best way to use email marketing is to build an opt-in list of prospects that you can mail to over and over again. Using a third party list or company to email will cost you a fortune if you do it over and over without building a list of your own. This is why it is important to concentrate on building your opt in list. Many of the people who opt in to your list will eventually become your customers if you have a solution to their problem.

Coregistration - This is powerful list building method many Internet marketers have been using for about 3 years now. Coregistration advertising is the process of generating opt-in email leads to add to your mailing list or autoresponder for marketing purposes. Using this form of advertising, you can build a large list of qualified prospects in little time.

The quality of coregistration leads can vary from company to company so it really pays to understand how they are generated and how old the leads are. The best types of leads to buy are called Opt-In coregistrations where individuals have specifically responded to your ad for more information.

You can also get other type of leads that are cheaper, but they are not as high quality as the leads generated specifically for your business. In addition, these cheaper leads are harder to deal with when mailing your messages.

Once you have these leads in your email system, they become a source of targeted click thrus every time you mail out to your lists. In addition, you are basically getting free advertising once you have your own list. Coregistration helps you get to that point quickly if you use it correctly and if you find some solid lead sources.

Search Engines - Search engines have long been a source of rich, targeted traffic, but competition and strict search engine rules make it difficult to simply put up a web site and take advantage of this type of traffic.

You could hire a search engine optimization company (often called SEO’s) to help you get your site placed, but this usually costs a minimum of $1000 up to $5000 or more and a significant amount of time to get results. Most web site owners would be better off applying basic search engine optimization techniques themselves and saving their money. These techniques can include gaining link partners, frequently adding fresh content, and utilizing relevant keywords. The results of these efforts can be just as rewarding as using an SEO company in many cases.

Once you get listed, you will start to receive targeted click thrus to your web site from people specifically searching for what you offer.

Pay Per Click Search Engines - If you are frustrated with other types of traditional advertising and you want a direct relationship between what you spend and the amount of advertising you get, you need to look into pay per click search engine advertising.

You can sometimes get traffic to your web site for as little as $0.10 per click. Once you try to advertise using pay per click search engines, you will find that many of the best keywords will cost you much more than this (sometimes $1 to $5 or even more)! The key to this type of advertising is to do research to uncover low cost keywords so you can bid on them get traffic to your site.

Using this strategy, you should be able to use pay per click search engines to easily produce targeted clicks to your web site.

PR and Media - If you are looking for massive exposure at a very low cost, pr and media could be your ticket. A solid pr campaign could easily bring hundreds to thousands of targeted click thrus to your web site.

Getting your business in the news can be a difficult task and you need to either hire a solid pr company that promotes from a marketing standpoint or you need to learn how to do some basic PR yourself. Hiring a PR company can be expensive, so it may pay to simply find an experienced freelance writer who will help you.

PR/media can be hit or miss and it can take some persistence to start getting stories published and to start driving traffic to your web site. But for the amount of time and effort you spend doing PR, it can really pay off in the long run in the form of hundreds, thousands to even millions of dollars in free advertising.

EBay, Amazon and Other Large Sites – Large traffic sites that allow visitors to participate, open accounts and create profiles are great places to get free exposure for your web site. There is a lot of traffic generated by sites such as Amazon and Ebay which gives you the opportunity to harvest some of it through creating user profiles and participating with their communities.

This is a simple, low cost way to generate traffic to your site since it does not really cost anything to setup accounts with these sites.

Banner Ads – Many people say banner advertising is dead, but it still continues to be a great source of Internet traffic for many web site owners. The best part about banner advertising is that the prices have gone down significantly, so if you can create a banner that works, you can get a lot more quality exposure in comparison to other types of advertising.

The quality of your banner ad and your target audience will determine how many click thrus you get from your banner campaign, but many banner campaigns range anywhere from 1% click thrus to 8% click thrus, or sometimes as high as 20%. So if you are planning on doing any banner advertising, test a banner on a small level, and see how well it converts, and this will give you an indication of how well it converts on a larger level.

Affiliate Marketing/Joint Ventures – Affiliate markting and jv advertising are both similar in nature and. Most professional web marketers would say that it delivers the highest quality click thrus available on the web today. This is because these types of marketing are “endorsement” marketing where you have a particular person with certain credentials promoting your product. This personal referral often generates visitors who are hungry to see what you offer.

You can use this type of marketing by writing a letter to a potential partner who has a large customer base or by installing affiliate software on your web site and advertise for affiliate partners. Using an online affiliate program is very cost effective because you reach targeted visitors online and you only pay for leads or sales (usually a percentage of your sale or a set dollar amount).

Popunders/Guaranteed Visitors/Expired Domains - These traffic sources have been around for a while now and are all heavily promoted forms of advertising. But in comparison to the other forms of advertising, it does not perform as well. Personally, I have experienced sending millions of visitors from this type of traffic with hardly recognizable results.

Most of this traffic is not very targeted because the web site visitors did not get to the site by choice. Instead, they were solicited from third party advertisers using popunders or tricky web pages, which does not make that person a qualified visitor to your web site. There are some networks of advertisers who can provide quality popunders at a reasonable price.

Click thrus are a way to measure the quality of advertising because you can usually figure out how those clicks relate to your sales. That is why it is important to focus on how many click thrus you can produce when creating, marketing and advertising your web site. So next time you by any type of web advertising, try to get some indication of how many targeted click thrus you can expect to generate from that particular campaign, and you can get a good idea of how many sales you can generate.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Online Advertising Methods
2. Search Engine Optimization and Web Promotion
3. Benefits of Internet Marketing SEO

Internal Linking

With all the talk out there about linking, one might be under the impression that the only links that count are those from other websites. While these links certainly play an important role (as will be discussed in part eight of this series) these are certainly not the only important links.

When you’re about to launch into your link work why not stop and consider the ones that are easiest to attain and maximize first. That would be, the ones right there on your own site and those which you have total and complete control of. Properly used internal links can be a useful weapon in your SEO arsenal.

The internal linking structure can:

1. Insure that your website gets properly spidered and that all pages are found by the search engines
2. Build the relevancy of a page to a keyword phrase
3. Increase the PageRank of an internal page

Here is how the internal linking structure can affect these areas and how to maximize the effectiveness of the internal linking on your own website.

Footers Links

Footers are the often overused and abused area of websites. While they are useful for getting spiders through your site and the other points noted above, they should not be used as spam tools. Footers are longer than the content areas of pages from websites linking to every single page in their site from them. Not only does this look bad but it reduces that value of each individual link (which then become 1 out of 200 links rather than 1 out of 10 or 20).

Keeping links in your footers and margins up-to-date is a part of site maintenance and most businesses do this regularly. It is the area of new content in which some businesses slip up. Keeping your cross-site SEO structure maintained can be difficult, and is one of the many reasons to retain your SEO consultant beyond the initial optimisation of your site.

Keep your footers clean, use the anchor text well, and link to the key internal pages of your website and you will have a well optimized footer. You will also want to include in your footer a link to a sitemap. On this sitemap, link to every page in your site. Here is where you can simply insure that every page gets found. Well worded anchor text is a good rule on your sitemap as well. You may also want to consider a limited description of the page on your sitemap. This will give you added verbiage to solidify the relevancy of the sitemap page to the page you are linking to.

You know how when you break a toe, the doctor will often “buddy tape” the broken toe to its neighbor to provide support as it heals? Well, You can buddy tape your pages by letting four or five of your highest ranking pages concentrate their link-mojo to your newest page, the one that may be slightly wobbly and needs to build up its strength. This is a good idea whenever you launch a new page.

Sometimes you need to do some housecleaning as well. Getting rid of off-topic pages and doing a 301 redirect to another page (or your home page) that’s been indexed. Some people will buy a new domain name made up mostly of your keywords, then redirect your old site to the new one. This is a little controversial, and can be painful in the short term, because it will take a few weeks for your rankings to get back up to where they were. However, the rankings should come back stronger in the long run, assuming you’ve done your due diligence with optimizing.

If you take care of these on-page optimization techniques, then think how powerful your off-page optimization will be!

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Related posts:

1. Improve Link Structure of your Website
2. Internal Linking improve your SEO Ranking
3. Maximizing your SEO results with using the big three search engines