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How do you know what type of content is really going to attract the right searchers? In this article I wanted to cover a few very basic tips that you can keep in mind when building high-performance strategies. Remember that good search engine marketing is not about trying to manipulate or “fool the search engines.” Good SEO skills are more about creating genuine relevancy for well-written content that deserves to be found because it is truly the most relevant and useful to your audience of readers.

What students quickly discover in the 5-Day classes is that the optimization skills are not nearly as hard as many people make them out to be (even for the most competitive phrases,) once you’ve been trained and understand the full scope of influences that are at work. The biggest advantage that we have had is all about the “accuracy of information.”

1. Write content that your audience is already looking for within the last 90 days.

True keyword research is not about “guessing at keywords” but its all about researching actual data. How are your SEO research skills using Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery? At the SEO Workshops we teach much more than the traditional “keyword research” methods. We help students learn “Keyword Forensics” and how to quickly tap into the hidden niche trends that 99% of most Webmasters never even notice.

2. Does your Web copy speak to the reader or does it speak about yourself?

Remember that your Web site should be focused on your audience first and appeal specifically to a niche interest. When writing your Web copy, you need to dialog in an appropriate tone and format for the right audience. Some of the most interesting content will have more appeal if it speaks to your audience in terms of “you.” You can, you might, you will, yours, your and youâ€^TMre INSTEAD of we, ours, weâ€^TMre, we will, we can, etc.

3. Focus on writing for the human audience first and search engines second.

While search engine optimization is important to your visibility, try writing your content first. Most people donâ€^TMt write their best when trying to optimize and create content at the same time. Focus on creating highly useful content that is extremely focused on one topic per page. Once you have completed your writing so that you are pleased with it, then go in to do a mild re-write for the search engines.

4. Tips for triggering idea generation and giving your strategies a unique twist.

While many people seem to spend time exploring their competitor’s Web sites, we encourage you to lead the way with new ideas. Try not to be obsessed with what the competition is doing, but be creative and start your own new trends. Spend just a little more time working on your projects this week than you did last week. Setting yourself apart from the competition is easier than you might think and gives you a huge advantage over others.

5. Creating your content so that it “speaks” to a specific audience of visitors.

Think of how your Web copy reads and ensure the dialog flows smoothly. Read your work out loud and see if you can improve the tone of your message With natural expression. Keep your specific audience in mind. How you write for senior citizen (in tone and in format) may differ considerably from writing for an audience of for example “new parents.” Always ask yourself “what is important to these readers?” Rely on researching accurate data to eliminate guess work.

6. Remember strong calls to action

Without a firm call to action, donâ€^TMt expect the reader to naturally guess at what you want them to do next. Plain ordinary dialog that asks the reader to take the next action will usually work best. Dialog that is written for voice (similar to the way a broadcaster writes to project their personality.)

7. Build your search engine optimization skills in the beginning with the “stress free” approach.

If you are new to SEO, you may want to focus on the long tailed niche phrases since most searchers are doing fairly descriptive and intelligent searches these days. Ideally You want to attract those who already know what they are looking for and just need to find your pages more easily. With practice and the right training you can go after highly competitive phrases too but youâ€^TMll find that the best conversions nearly always come from the niches. Also remember that it is the basic SEO skills that carry you through and must come before any of the advanced strategies. The result will be stable top rankings that stand the test of time with minimal fuss.

8. Give your readers a non-threatening reason to respond right now.

What is the objective for your page and does your Web copy work effectively at fulfilling that objective? It may not always be about trying to sell a product or a service. It should not be about fulfilling your needs first but it should be about meeting the needs of why that searcher first conducted a search. Meet their needs and deliver up something that satisfies their search first and then give the visitor a non-threatening reason why they might respond to you. Do you want their e-mail address? or do you just want them to pick up the phone and call? Never lose sight of the fact that the Web is a marvelous two way interactive experience, if you want it to be. Make your Web site a vehicle for relationship building and remember that many readers may actually have the desire to interact and participate through Blogs or other “User Generated activity.” Give your visitors something that involves their participation.

9. Remember that your readers always want to feel like they are in control of their Web experience.

People often use the Web for researching topics of interest or doing preliminary price comparisons or for looking up information. While most people explore the Web for their own purposes, the more that you put them in control of their experience the better. If appropriate, you may want to consider adding addition tools or functionality to your Web site in order to enhance its usability for your specific audience.

10. Did you know that if you write your content so that it naturally “reads very well.”

You will naturally gain some bonus for having created content of quality. By this, I mean content…that reads well to a human being. Don’t stuff keywords all over the place. Instead, use moderation in everything you do. One of the things you need to understand is that “theme based” search engines like Google, are actually using a measure of artificial intelligence (AI) to measure how well your article “reads” based on all of the overall context of your body text (other than the keywords) based on data that a search engine has gathered concerning a specific topic. This is great news for writers because if you are making a transition to writing for the web, you’ll find some search engines are literally rewarding pages that are “well written.”

John Alexander has taught live SEO Workshops since 2002 at http://www.SearchEngineWorkshops.com as well as Online Webinars at the SEO Workshop Resource Center at http://www.SEW-WRC.com

Tags: seo traffic, Website Traffic

Now, going up the list in terms of quality, you will have PPC traffic generation (this isn’t really next long-term, but if you don’t know what you are doing, you can lose your shirt in a hurry with these, so be careful).

There is also ezine advertising, and article marketing, which, when done correctly, can be very profitable.

These are two forms of traffic generation that generally produce a much higher quality visitor than the ones mentioned earlier. Ezine advertising is more costly per visitor, and article marketing, although it can be done on a budget, is time consuming.

Now, everything is relative. You see, you will be spending more per visitor for these visitors, but when they come to your site they already have an interest in your type of product. They are a much more targeted visitor, and as such, are much more likely to purchase from you.

There is not much to say here about ezine advertising, except to try it out and experiment with various ads in various ezines. Again, it is important to track all your traffic and the source of your sales. You see, if you advertise in 10 ezines and receive 10 sales, it is very unlikely that each ezine produced one sale each. One ezine producing 8 sales, and another producing 2 sales, with the other 8 ezines producing nothing is probably much more realistic. For this reason, you must track, and it is also advisable to advertise in several at one time. For example, with the case just mentioned, if you had only advertised in some of the ones that didn’t produce, you would have a bad feeling for ezine advertising, and if you had gotten lucky and advertised in the one that produced the most sales, you would have become over-zealous regarding ezine advertising. But by purchasing several ads and tracking your results, you have a much more realistic picture of what ezine advertising can do.

Article marketing. This has recently become a very popular area of advertising, although it has probably always been effective.

What it entails is writing short, informative articles on the same topic as your book and including a link to your website at the end of the article. You then submit the articles to the various article submission directories. When they publish the articles, ezine directories pick up your article and use it as content for their ezine or newsletter. So, in a sense, it reaches the same market as the ezine advertising, but with a different cost. I say different, because although you are not paying for the article to appear, you also have no control over where it appears. The idea is that if you write a good article, the ezine editors will include it because they feel it is good information for their readers. It is also time consuming to write articles and submit them to the various article directories.

Now, just like everything on the web, there is an answer to that, but now you are spending money again. There are several article submission services out there that can submit your article to the various directories, for a reasonable fee. The advantage here is that you aren’t spending a ridiculous amount of time submitting the articles, but keep in mind that some of the better article directories won’t accept the automated submissions. The key here is to track what you, and check up on your articles to be sure they appear with all your links intact. This goes for whether you submit them yourself, or you have a submission service do it for you.

Ok, now for PPC click campaigns. These are pay-per-click campaigns that work exactly as the name implies. You pay when someone clicks on your website. They also have their good points and their drawbacks. They are wonderful for testing aspects of your web site, because in some campaigns you can have every other visitor go to a different version of your site, and track the conversion rate of different qualities of your page. They are good at simply bringing targeted visitors to your site. The drawbacks, however, are many, and I am not going to cover them here.

As you can see here, there are many different methods for generating traffic, and in some sense they can probably all fit into your strategy for generating sales. It is important, though, that you tailor each sales page or sales letter or squeeze page to the type of advertising you are running. You can have a great source of traffic but if you are ineffective at capturing either email information or the sale, you will not be productive. And each form of traffic requires a little different approach.

Another point here. Since there are so many different ways to generate traffic, which should you try, and should you try all of them? I suggest you choose a couple or three that you might feel comfortable with, or at least understand how they work. Also, do not try to use 25 different types of traffic the first month or two into this project. It is far better to choose two or three and focus on getting good at selling to that customer. It is so easy to get caught up in trying something new every single week, and never really making any money. Stick with a few, and master them.

Westly Lager is a success mentor and coach helping teach people how to work online. With Westly’s experience and expertise you can’t go wrong. See how Westly can help you today by visiting My Internet Business also checkout this My Internet Business Review article

Tags: quality traffic, traffic, Website Traffic

Websites have become far more important for an individual or a business as compared to a few years ago. Today, they have become the company’s or the individual’s online presence. Many of your goals and deadlines may depend on the traffic of your website. Here are 5 ways to increase traffic to your website.

Article Marketing: Probably, Article marketing is one of the cheapest ways to propagate your website if you have flair to write along with all the other qualifications and talents you have. Article Marketing simple means that you have to submit original and factual content about your website and product on the various Article Marketing sites with a short link to your website. This type of internet marketing has been known to borne excellent fruits for anyone who does it seriously. These links, called as link backs in the Web 2.0 parlance, will also ensure that your neighborhood increases, thereby working good for any Search Engine Website.

Advertise: For the initial stages, you may have to go into a tie up with the many affiliate marketing options available to you. Of course, with the course of time, you may have no need to go for affiliate marketing, but it is one essential investment that you may have to do to increase traffic to your website.

Use Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Optimization is another excellent way of increasing the traffic of your website. More than eighty percent of web users today land up on websites via some search engine or the other, and the rest twenty percent are still to get a respectable browser. Therefore, search engine traffic plays a major role in the over all traffic of any website. To make your website search engine optimized is a bit complex, and may require the help of a qualified search engine optimizer. To make your website search engine friendly, you first have to do away with anything that makes it heavy. Secondly, you should cut away all those parts of your website which are not search engine friendly and cannot be read by the search engine crawlers. This includes Flash and Graphics. If you do insist on using graphics, try to get a description of the graphic into the website.

Index and Sitemap: Everyone likes system, and Search Engine Optimizers actually love any site with a sitemap. Also, having a sitemap makes it simpler for the user to access and move around on your website. This will surely increase your chances of being remembered by the web user who came across your website and play an important part in any change to your web traffic, be it good or bad.

Upgrade and Enhance: Once you have your website ready and launched, be sure to add something or the new to it almost every week or month. Of course, this may pose a problem to many webmasters, but the best way of countering this is by at least keeping something new or making something new for the homepage.

Colin Meunier is a Successful Home Business Coach and Mentor!
To learn how you can use a breakthrough marketing system to become more successful in your home business online visit: MLM Lead Generation Tips

Tags: Website Traffic

Driving traffic to your site is one of the first requirements to a successful online business. Without traffic, your site may as well not exist. There are numerous ways you can drive traffic, so let’s take a look at some of them and evaluate them. Keep in mind, this isn’t a comprehensive list, but it is some of the more successful ways. . I invite you to share any other ideas that have worked for you.

• PPC
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Affiliate Programs
• Article Syndication
• Press Releases
• Blogging Banner ads
• Joint ventures
• Offline campaigns (that drive traffic to your site)
• Advertising (on other sites, ad networks and industry publications)

Let’s look at the pros and cons of a few of the methods, to help you determine what methods are viable for your business. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3, as we work our way through the list above and determine the pros and cons.

PPC

Pros:

You can drive traffic quickly — that’s a good thing!

Your traffic is targeted if you select the right keywords — also a good thing!

You can use PPC to test things (headlines, landing page copy) — great way to use PPC, in addition to just driving traffic for sales. Be willing to sacrifice some profits and use PPC to test ideas before you fully role them out.

You control the settings and can turn it on and off any time — control is good.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Website Traffic

Regardless of how good your website is, how good your sales copy is, how good or attractive your product is, unless you generate traffic you will never make money online. This article is going to cover some ways for you to drive traffic to your website for free.Now, if you are like many others you simply don’t have the spare cash to pay out to someone to drive traffic to your website for you. So, you must be willing to learn and put in some effort in understanding what you need to do to get traffic for free. Be prepared because it will take work and you will need to commit to it at the beginning. Once you have mastered the techniques, you can start to ease off some as many of the techniques will start to work on auto-pilot for you.

Being able to get website traffic for free will take a little time to build up. Without question, paying for traffic will get you instant results, but it is very important you learn how to get traffic for free. Believe me, it is a great feeling when you get tons of traffic to your site, and you know you haven’t paid a penny for it!

The first place you should look at to get traffic for free is in forums. Depending on what you are selling, or what your website is offering I guarantee you there is a forum on the subject somewhere. Search out and find those forums using the search engines. Check them out, see what people are writing about or commenting on. Sign up to those forums for free and start answering questions at first without blatantly advertising your website. Within a short space of time, you will begin to get reputation in the forum as being an expert. Once you are recognized as an expert, you can then start adding your signature to all your comments.

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Tags: Website Traffic

“Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true!” I think Homer Simpson really hit the nail on the head with this one. We are told that analytics are the way to go, time and time again. But what exactly does that mean? What exactly do you measure? What is a good measurement? What would are you really measuring to begin with?

Right now it would seem that the most popular form of analytics would be Urchin, now owned by Google. “Urchin 5 analyzes traffic for one or more websites and provides accurate and easy-to-understand reports on your visitors - where they come from, how they use your site, what converts them into customers, and much more.” But while giving you a multitude of numbers what does this really tell us?

So we are still at the very beginning. Before even thinking about running any kind of analytics you first need to define your objective. While this can be a lot easier if you are selling a tangible product, it is not always a clear cut decision. While a quick sale is almost always a good thing, many would agree that the effort made to make that sale far outweighs the profit you may have made. More often than not when dealing with sales you are looking for returning customers. So in this case it’s not a sale you are after but a returning customer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Website Traffic

The tactics I’m going to show you won’t cost you anything but your time, BUT - they are not a quick fix. To get a genuine steadily growing stream of targeted visitors takes time.

Reciprocal links

The search engines look to see how many other websites have links to yours. The more links coming into your site, the further up the rankings ladder you will get.

Find twenty websites that are in the same business as you. Not direct competitors ones that deal with related products or services. Check to see if they have a ‘Links’ page. If so contact them, tell them who you are and what your site is about, and ask them if they would exchange links. It will help if you put a link to their site on your ‘Links’ page first.

Usually they will do so, as they will know the value of incoming links as well. Vary the wording of your email for each site you contact and point out something you like about it. Make it personal.

Articles

Many Internet marketers run away from article writing because they think it’s too difficult. The truth is it’s much easier than you think once you’ve got the hang of it.

Writing articles about your business is easy because you know the subject and are enthusiastic about it. It should be a pleasure to talk about the products or theme of your site.

So here’s the plan:

1. Take one aspect of your product or theme.

2. Think of three pieces of information that people would find interesting and informative, and write these down on paper.

3. Now take each one of these in turn and tell your readers what is so interesting, fascinating and instructive about each.

4. When you’ve done that add an introduction at the top and a concluding sentence or two at the bottom.

5. Finally, compose an ‘author’s bio’ which says who you are what your website is, and include a link to your site. This is a one-way link back to your site.

That’s your article done! Now you need to submit it to some article directories such as EzineArticles.com. Google ‘article directories’ and you will find lots more.

Write one article a week and submit it to a handful of the best high PR directories.

Make your site a search engine magnet

Take time to find the right keywords for your site. You can use a tool like the free GoodKeywords.com keyword finder or online resources like the Google Keyword Tool.

Find ten or twelve high volume keywords and put these on your home page. Don’t be tempted to put dozens. It won’t work.

Now go to each page and put no more than three keywords related to the subject of that page on them, making sure that the page name, the page title and the page description include at least the main keyword for that page. The search engines love this.

Once you’ve got these basic strategies in place you should see a steady increase in visitor numbers. And keep plugging away at all three to get a cumulative effect.

Mervyn Love writes articles on various aspects of Internet Marketing, and his website - fortresspublishing.com - has a wealth of resources and information on all aspects of starting and running an online business. Join his newsletter here: http://www.fortresspublishing.com/MPNsplash.html

Tags: Website Traffic

The title tag has to be, in my humble opinion, the most important on-page factor when it comes to high rankings in the search engine results pages. Found in the head tag of a standard html page, the title is the first place that you can start placing your keywords. Surprisingly some pages don’t define this tag. Worse yet, some overlook it and omit it altogether. Here is a basic example of where the title tag fits into an average HTML page.

Web page content goes here.

Here are five points I always consider when constructing a title.

Limit the length of the title.

Google currently displays approximately 63 characters of a title. The total number of characters displayed varies from engine to engine. While it is not the end of the world to exceed this by a slight margin, (I don’t believe there are any penalties for having a long title) remember that the search engines will cut off anything that goes beyond that which they display. This would leave you with a “…” instead of a complete title.

The title tag can be useful for branding your traffic.

By adding your website or company name to the title tag you can build brand awareness and increase returning direct traffic. While many suggest doing this I would only recommend adding your company or website name to the end of your title tag. While I don’t think it makes much difference to the order, your keywords are placed in the title tag, I suggest that you ensure your keywords are towards the beginning of the tag as it reads easier. Once again don’t forget that the title tag is the first thing that is displayed from each site by the search engines.

Divide your title tag.

When branding your site, break the title tag so that it becomes obvious which is the page title and which is the site name/title. I find that by using the pipe break “|” (that’s the funny symbol above the “\” key) I am able to do this quite neatly. This is also a great way keep your titles consistent. For example:

Instead of:

As you can see it makes it a lot clearer when considering which part of the title labels the page and which part labels the website.

NEVER, I repeat never, repeat your title.

Each page should have a unique title. By giving each page a unique title you are telling the search engines that each page is indeed unique. For exactly the same reason that you don’t name every file the same, (Well, apart from the most obvious reason which is that you just can’t!) as it is easy to distinguish the contents of a file by simply scanning the title. The same principal applies to web pages. This also goes a long way to indexing the priority of each page. If every page had the same title, which page would be ranked more relevant than the next?

Keywords in the title.

I have spent a lot of time optimising websites for real estate agents. While their stock standard pages have targeted keywords in the title, headings and content, it becomes a little more challenging to do the same for each listing. This is usually where the developers come into play. With a little effort the Title can be dynamically created. In my case, it drastically changed the titles I could offer from something such as:

To a far more specific title that really does describe the listing perfectly:

Okay, so I usually go a little further than that, but as you can see the title not only makes perfect sense and describes the page but also is keyword rich for the search phrase “house for sale in suburb” or even area in this case. While this works well for this kind of website, the principles can be applied to any other dynamically created web page.

I have noticed that time and time again the search engines return results with the search phrase in the title. I think we can all agree that if a web page has been titled correctly then the page will be accurately described. However search engines will discount a title that is no more than a list of spammed keywords. I think we’ve all heard the mantra, “create pages for real people not robots,” too many times. I would prefer to change that statement:

“Make well structured, informative web pages that are relevant to what you are doing.”

When you apply the above, search engines have little option but to regard each page highly and rank it accordingly. While there are so many other factors to consider when optimising a page I believe the title to be a crucial element.

Robert Cerff is a search engine analyst and marketing consultant for Prop Data Internet Solutions. He has ten years experience in e-commerce, online marketing and web development. http://www.propdata.co.za

Tags: title tags, Website Traffic