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Posts Tagged ‘search engine marketing’

The financial gain from a position in the top 5 search results for a major keyword can be very substantial, one example is a keyword that went from the bottom of the second page to the 4th position on Google.

A client’s website had a ranking of 18 for their primary target keywords on the second page of Google’s natural search engine results. Considering the number of companies competing for a high ranking on this keyword, a position on the second page seemed like a good accomplishment, but the volume of sales leads was disappointing.

SEO Works

A marketing strategy focused optimization efforts on improving the natural keyword ranking for this one target keyword. Eventually, the ranking for the keyword first moved to the number 9 position, and then to the number 4 position of the first page search engine results. The improved search engine ranking for this single keyword generated an increase in sales leads far more than expected, which subsequently converted to an increase in sales revenue amounting to over $1,000,000.

Tracking the Moves

The list below shows the search engine ranking relative to the number of sales leads that were generated from the company’s primary target keyword:

• Nov 08 – position 18 = 6 leads
• Dec 08 – position 9 = 31 leads
• Jan 09 – position 9 = 126 leads
• Feb 09 – position 4 = 102 leads
• Mar 09 – position 4 = 207 leads
• Apr 09 – position 4= 221 leads

Summary of Results

The increase in the number of monthly sales leads can be seen as the target keyword ranking moved up over the six month time period. The full benefit of the keyword moving from the 18^th to the 9^th position is reflected in the January total because the change occurred later in the month of December. The same applies to the move from position 9 to position 4 because the change occurred later in February.

For marketing managers and business owners who are wondering about the difference between having a major keyword listing on the first page of search results compared to the second page of results, this case study should provide some insight based on our experience.

It also shows an example of the potential benefit from having keyword search results listed above the fold of a web page as opposed to below the fold where viewers must scroll down to see more search listings.

Based on these results, there is clear evidence that a higher organic search engine ranking can dramatically affect sales lead generation and company revenue, in this case over $1,000,000.

Wriiten by Rick Smith at 10thDegree.com, contributing to the application of measureable data for internet marketing agency and online advertising agency – automotive seo websites.

There are a number of steps I always follow when optimizing a site for SEO (note these are just the high points, there are others that I don’t mention here, but these WILL take you a long way):

1) For a new site, I will include the keywords in a non hyphenated domain name (if you can get a .edu or .gov TLD do so, otherwise a cheap .info will be ok)

2) I like to rename the URL to each money page to include the main keyword for that page.

3) Implement Google Analytics for the site and ensure the tracking script is added to every page.

4) Go through the “money” pages and make sure that the title, descriptions and keywords meta tags are unique and optimized for the keywords on the page. In a competitive niche (over 1 million result pages in Google), I would limit the keywords to one main phrase, a couple of local modifiers and one or two more closely related terms per page.

5) Review the non-money pages (i.e. pages that don’t matter from an SEO perspective) and ensure the title and meta description tags are not duplicates of any of the money page tags. Google Webmaster tools will identify this for you once your site has been registered and crawled.

6) I nofollow any links to overhead pages from all of the pages on the site other than the home page. I leave the home page links as follow links, since I want the SEs to index all pages on the site and having privacy, contact, disclaimer, etc overhead pages add to Google’s view of the “trust” for the site. On all other pages I just want the link to the home page to be a follow link, so I can build up the page rank of the home page. I handle this in Dreamweaver by using two different site templates. If your main keyword page is something other than the home page, modify your approach accordingly.

7) I then optimize each page’s content for it’s main keyword, etc. It’s critical that each word or phrase used in the keyword META is found on the page to avoid keyword spam penalties.

At this point the on page optimization is complete enough to start with link building. As you may already know, building links is tough. I use articles, blog posts, submit forms on relevant sites, reciprocal links, etc. There are ways to short cut this process, without going black or even grey hat. Contact me at Mississauga Search Engine Marketing if interested.

Internet Marketing Success Video

Blogging can be a fantastic way to get more traffic charging full speed to your website.

The good news is that setting up a Blog for your website is surprisingly easy but there are a few caveats and things you need to change to ensure your blog is setup correctly to get maximum exposure in the search engines.

Before we start discussing what you should and shouldn’t do with Blogs, let’s take a step back and define what a Blog actually is.

A Blog can be thought of as a simple, public online diary where you can write entries (posts) into the diary.

Being public, the posts can be viewed by anyone who happens to surf by your site, and hopefully you have lots and lots of people reading every post you make, and contributing to your Blog in the form of adding comments, looking at relevant links you add to your blog, watching audio and video, and hopefully linking to your blog from their website, if they happen to have one.

What is particularly attractive about Blogs, is that the entire process of Blogging is very simple to do, mainly due to the great quality of Blog software available that you can install on your website.

Decent Blogging software provides all the functionality you need, the management of posts by yourself (and others), the categorization of posts (something that is essential) and even the process of telling other blogging websites every time you make a new post automatically.

Automatically telling other sites about your posts is a huge plus since it’s getting known on the Internet, without the need for you to be having to manually “submit” your blog in order for people to find out about it.

Now in my opinion, one of the most important things to ensure is that you don’t just use the Blog as a sales page (I recommend you leave the selling of your products and services to your actual sales page on your website).

Obviously you will want to talk about your products and services, and the benefits visitors will get in using them, but I believe it’s important not to have an all out sales pitch, as that will tend to turn off visitors who may be seeing your message for the first time. I also recommend you talk about non-business stuff, information about you, the person, some of your interests, things you have found of interest on the Internet, etc.

When considering finding out more about search engine optimization; it pays to visit professionals to help you achieve the best and most rapid results.

When people read these personal posts, they get to know the real you, and form a relationship with a “real person” and not a nameless website, and this can only assist you in future sales with these people.

A Blog also allows (and in fact encourages) participation by visitors, who can post responses to your entries, and this is often a great way to stimulate interesting conversations. Good Blogging software will allow you to remove spam responses (where visitors or programs “write” messages directing people to their site) as well as to moderate conversations that are in appropriate or off-topic.One of the best reasons to use Blogs is to help you rank highly in the search engines. The search engines love Blogs, provided they are providing relevant and quality content.

To give you an idea of how important search engines see Blogs, Google bought one of the largest Blogging sites out there (blogger.com). Having a focused relevant site with interesting and useful content can only help you in your journey to find true search engine love.

If you have read any of the other articles on this website, you’ve probably gathered that I preach relevant useful content. Blogs are no different than other web traffic techniques, you need to ensure it’s relevant, and ensure your separate your posts into logical categories.

For example if you have a website about software development, you may make posts discussing programming generally, other posts about training for software developers, and more posts about a specific computer language like Java.

It’s vitally important that you don’t lump all posts together for several reasons. Firstly, people coming to your Blog may have a specific interest in some of your posts (training for example) and may find it hard and frustrating to easily find all posts you have written on training if you have not clearly defined categories (and allowed posts to be searched/sorted by these categories).

Likewise the search engines may view your Blog as less relevant if you lump all your posts together, than another Blog that has posts clearly defined in categories. Search engines definitely prefer categorization of information and reward websites that categorise correctly with high search engine rankings.

The most popular open source blogging package is wordpress. Check that out online.

WordPress is a free blogging package (yes nothing to pay!), and is extremely flexible and easy to use without sacrificing anything in power and flexibility. I use this package and recommend you do too.

Because of its popularity many Web host’s have it available for installation on their websites for you with “one-click” installs.

As a Small business owner,  you want your company’s Website to be featured near the top of all important SERP’s (search engine results pages) for the search terms important to your business. To achieve this goal, it’s important that you understand a variety Search Engine Marketing tactics that will insure that your Web Site beats the thousands — often hundreds of thousands — of other Websites competing for top ten listings on the same search terms. What follows are some insider ideas on the best way to do SEO.

The most important tip is to recognize the way search engines operate. Search engines don’t understand images but instead, depend on comparing the keyword phrases that the searcher put into the search box with the words  that might be present on your Web Site. Therefore, you should always try to place all keywords and key phrases as you can into the Web Site. Determine the type of words that your visitors would type into the search boxes and try to incorporate them  into your site. If you have included photos in your Web Site, make it a point to place “alt text” tags to all these photos so that the SE’s can include them to the web site content.

Your key phrases should also be part of the domain name because the SE’s examine them. This is a critical Search Engine Optimization trick. If your business is Pete’s Paving in Charlottesville, VA, or Waynesboro, Virginia, you would well-served to get the URL CharlottesvilleAsphalt.com or WaynesboroPaving.com.

Your title tag, located near the beginning of your web code, should contain the relevant terms as should your meta description and meta keyword tags. Your meta tags will not be seen on your Web Site but will be featured in simple text form as the search engines display their results. Thus, it is important to include words that entice the visitor towards your site in your description tags. Don’t just dump the same key phrases in your domain name, meta tags and your file names since the major search engines will interpret that as spam and just put your site in the “SandBox”. As an alternative, try to include a variety related terms that are similar to your keyword phrases.

Use local words in your body content to further ensure top search engine placement for your local market. If you business isin the Waynesboro, Virginia area, be sure to include some of those terms in your search terms.

Patience is key because once you have completed the required modifications to the Website, it may still take a bit of time for the SE’s to recognize that fact and push you up the search ladder.

Be certain that your body copy is cut-off to about 300 words and that the relevant keyword phrases are injected throughout the page instead of just grouing them at the top or bottom.

If you implement these tactics, you will be pleasantly surprised to see the SE’s increase your site’s rating. Continue to implement different Search Engine Marketing methods to keep your site on top because your competition will be trying to pass you.

At long last! There is a way to achieve first-page organic ratings in search engines without having to battle the entire planet through the Google gauntlet.

Successful search engine marketing has been elusive for thousands, if not millions, of people who have the desire to start a profitable online business.

As someone reading this page, you obviously have an interest in search engine marketing. You may be just a beginner in the SEO game, or perhaps you’ve been swimming upstream for quite awhile. In either case, how would you answer this question? If you had a lucrative new enterprise in front of you, and you had the choice to fight either the U.S. Air Force or a 98-pound couch potato to get there, which would you choose?

Chances are you’d pick the second option. Perhaps a shuffle or sandbox or an algorithm change knocked you off the front page of Google for no discernible reason. Maybe you have a truly breakthrough product or approach, but can’t make it happen in Google BECAUSE THE WHOLE WORLD IS BATTLING IT OUT THERE.

Note: What if you had a great site that ranked 100th in Google and got about 100 hits a week? That same site, optimized for MSN, might attract 100 page views per day. Which scenario do you think will be more lucrative? Get in on the ground floor of the latest discovery in search engine marketing.

Traffic is essential for Internet marketing success. On the internet, traffic is how you survive.

The Ultimate Search Engine Loophole is what it says — the real deal. A real loophole.

I’m not saying it’s a magic button or anything. The decision you make now has the potential to create life-changing results and income.

There’s not an ounce of hype in that last sentence.

You are literally just one converting offer away from life-changing income with the ability to easily rank for virtually any keyword you want.

Especially considering our “either you rank or get a refund” guarantee – is their honestly any reason not to get access to this method and start generating some serious traffic from MSN right now?

Search engine marketing via online advertising can be an unbelievable source of instantaneous sales for your web based business. Or, when incorrectly implemented, pay per click is a great way to burn money like a  big pile of dried up Christmas trees on fire. When you are after broad traffic like search engine optimization it is important to recognize that more narrow phrases like internet marketing in florida will turn into leads at a much higher pace and be much less of an expense. If you have tried pay per click and have had less than total success, the problem can only be one of two reasons.

The first is that your site is not converting your internet traffic successfully into profits or the second possibility is that errors were made in key phrase research, ad copy, and/or ad placement. There are some best practices that can be used with search engine marketing that cost very little yet bring thousands of traffic to your site and company. Buying ads for very detailed targeted key phrases is highly profitable. In fact, it is these highly targeted key words that produce the greatest return on your investment.

For example, a local car dealership in Gainesville Florida, is wise to be buying the more specific phrases that are the most likely to actually end up in a customer. Phrases such as used car gainesville fl will convert that traffic into auto leads at a much higher rate than the broad, and wildly expensive terms  like “cars” or “trucks.”

Do you recall the Christmas trees on fire? Yup, that’s your cash when you’re advertising with the broadest keywords. It is unworkable to try to convert such broad online traffic at high rates as these are the most pricey terms you can buy.

With the right strategy and the correct words, your search engine marketing campaign turns your pennies into dollars. When your ad campaign is targeting your most profitable words and phrases with persuasive ads, the more you spend the more you make. Right then is when you must exercise self discipline. When you are packing your mattress from the long tail key terms you naturally want to display ads for the broader ones. Stay away. Those broad terms are nothing more than your personal Christmas tree on fire.

SEO increases the quality and the traffic rate of a web site by means of multiple techniques. The acronym SEO comes from search engine optimizer or optimization, and it represents the work of web masters who try to make web sites captivating and appealing to search engines. SEO varies from one site to another and also depends on the target. If you want a certain search engine to get you somewhere higher in the results page rank, you are going to apply certain strategies and tactics different from the ones you would use for another search engine. That is why SEO guys may end up specializing in certain areas depending on what they have focused on more.

The complexity of SEO results from its very versatile and ever-changing nature. Newer and more complex, catchier strategies are developed on a daily basis and a lot of documenting and reading needs to be performed in order to become and stay proficient in this field of activity. To a certain extent some users are satisfied with the content of as SEO book that aims to increase the business profit online. Others tend to disagree with this idea as one book would not be enough except for the moment when it was released on the market. After some time, SEO will surely have suffered modifications and marketing strategies will have been renewed. The book you will have relied on until then may not be so useful anymore. That is why, joining a forum and keeping in touch with other specialists willing to share their knowledge, will be more lucrative than buying books.

SEO implies that the specialist you hired is well informed about what a certain search engine wants in a site. Based on this elements, she/he will operate all the changes and improvements necessary to maintain a top position in display result pages. If top position is not what your site relishes after having hired someone to carry out SEO, or if your page rank has not increased at least, it is recommended that you get a better specialist. Some say that SEO can be carried out by the site owner. However, the tasks are pretty demanding, and the web master is surely not the same with the business owner most of the time.

Check out RealEasySEO.com for the latest in SEO tips, advice, and resources.  We also provide top notch SEO services to small businesses trying to establish their presence on the web.

If you run a small business with less than twelve employees that serves mostly local customers, then you should have a web presence!

More and more, your prospective clients are giving up those cumbersome Yellow Pages paper books for Google and other online search engines. It’s easy and quick to research “Internet Marketing Services Charlottesville Virginia”. If you don’t locate the service you are searching for in the city of Charlottesville, you can very simply widen your research to “Internet Marketing Services Central Virginia” or even “Internet Marketing Services Central Virginia”. (How much time and how many heavy telephone books would be required to do a wide regional search like that with the Yellow Pages?)

Online Marketing For Local Businesses

If your offline business doesn’t utilize the net to promote itself, keep in contact with its customers, expand its reach, and take your competitor’s prospects, you can believe that it’s competition will do it to you… and it could occur very soon.

For some local business owners, shifting from conventional OFFline promotion to the ONline world is a very difficult thing to do. Many brick and mortar firms hold on to “the way it’s always been” and reject online marketing.

How do you move your company from “the way it’s always been done” to an net marketing mind set?

Moving Your OFFline Business ONline…

Online marketing doesn’t always call for a web site. Email promotion by itself can make a big difference.

For a small brick and mortar company to succeed with a promotional campaign on the web would probably call for the commitment (and salary) of a full time employee. Setting up a simple direct-response web site, getting a keyword rich domain name, search engine marketing, email marketing, article publishing, and additional web promotion are time consuming chores. After your web site or email opt-in methods are created, promotion is the primary task. Nonetheless, unless it is carried on on a regular basis, it will not produce the desired results.

An internet site is dandy, but it’s easily forgotten unless it is promoted continuously and updated regularly.

Employing a qualified external internet marketing firm is a realistic answer for local businesses who want to add a web factor to their marketing, but who don’t want the additional work.

Altogether, bridging the offline/online gap should not be looked upon as major hurdle. There are services — right in your own locality — that can help. Here’s a idea…  Why not Google “Internet Marketing Yourtown Yourstate” or “Online Marketing For Local Businesses Yourtown Yourstate” and see what you come up with? It’s the way smart business is done now!

Crowd Mountain, a new membership web site, was set in motion by Michelle MacPhearson on March 1, 2009.  The function of Crowd Mountain is to train members in all aspects of online business building and search engine marketing. Michelle has created an Internet bootcamp, which may be an online first.  The first thing new members will have access to are the six bootcamp modules.  Michelle has made bootcamp training modules that cover:

• Niche the Niche: how to do accurate research before beginning a new website.  Members get access to a 17-page workbook that can be downloaded and printed, and six training videos.
• Optimize for Size: how to build and SEO (Search Engine Optimize) optimize a website for earning money.  Members get access to a downloadable workbook, an automatic affiliate profit rendering and SEO enhancer plugin, and five downloadable web site themes that are already SEO optimized and can be used with any niche.
• Content Architecture: how to determine what type of content to add to a internet site, and how to to publish it.  Members have access to selective information on what kind of content Google really wants, a custom-tweaked plug-in to make finding and publishing that content child’s play, and a private plugin that Michelle had made just for Crowd Mountain that will make constructing your web site around a set of long-tail keywords tremendous simple.
• Monetization Station: how to earn money with a niche site with advertising, affiliate programs, or your own stuff.
• Search Engine Assault: how to get Google to love your web site and send organic traffic to your Internet site.
• Power Networking: how to use social networking to become an authority in your site’s matter.

This is only a sample of what Crowd Mountain members have access to.  The rest you can read on the Crowd Mountain website.

How is Crowd Mountain?

To date, I have only seen and viewed the tutorials available in modules one, “Niche the Niche”, and two, “Optimize for Size”.  The reason for this is because Michelle is releasing one module per week, to prevent confusion and info overload.  Because the website is only a little over a week old (at the time of this writing), these are the only modules available.  So, this Crowd Mountain critique is based on two things: the two modules I’ve already experienced, and my previous experience of Michelle’s training.

Considering the two modules I have seen, they are outstanding.  Contained in the first module are not one, but three, training videos that instruct how to do keyword research.  The three videos deal with three different niches (one niche per video), so viewers get a very good understanding of the proper way to do keyword research.

The second module is all about how to properly establish a new WordPress blog so that it is SEO’d properly from the beginning. Michelle instructs how to install and setup the plugins that she believes most significant for site SEO.  I was familiar with some of the plugins, but, after viewing her videos for them, realized I had been using them incorrectly.  So, even in an area that I thought I knew, I learned something.

One of my favorite tools, which is exclusive to Crowd Mountain members, is the Task Manager.  Michelle had this program tailor-made just for this site.  The Task Manager software keeps track of what has and hasn’t been done on every website you enter into it.  Most tasks are ones produced by Michelle, but users can add their individual tasks if they like to include activities that Michelle doesn’t include.  This makes the Task Manager completely customizable to each member’s wants or needs.  I am loving this software!

Also available is a Snooper program: “The Snooper was made to look inside Google’s algorithm and literally SEE what link building and social media sites Google likes the most. Those are the sites to focus on – if they’re already in favor, piggyback your own sites on them for quick ranking.”  Is it truly as powerful as Michelle claims?  Yes!  Is it really easy to use?  Yes!

Special Bonus for Pioneer Members

If you join within the first six weeks of the site’s launch, you will have the unique chance to present questions to Michelle for each module’s live Q&A, which is typically held on the Friday after each module’s debut.  There is just one Q&A session per module, so don’t miss this chance to ask Michelle anything pertaining to that week’s module.

As stated on the Crowd Mountain website, “As a pioneer Crowd Mountain member, you’ll actually be able to attend the live session and ask your own, personal questions about the material and get answers directly from me.  Late comers will only get the recorded Q&A and will not be able to ask their personal questions.”

Visit Crowd Mountain and determine if it is right for you.  I can honestly say that everything Michelle states will be delivered, and then some.  Crowd Mountain is an excellent opportunity to learn, from the ground up, how to make an income with internet sites.

Owning and handling a web site is not such an easy task. Popularity, customer attraction strategies, good relevant traffic, these are the elements that ensure the survival and the profit generation in the virtual world. If you rank pretty low in results pages of search engines, this means that your site is not so much looked for and checked by Internet users. And the lower the traffic you get, the less popularity and income you will obtain. And this is where the SEO solution comes into the picture. Taking into account that search engines are the ones ruling the entire business, you need to perform search engine optimization to your site so that it will become visible to searchers. If you are a newbie in this field you can contract somebody to come up with the SEO solution for you until you manage to learn a bit about what optimization is and become able to carry it out yourself. You can come across the right SEO solution in a book, on an informative site, in a virtual magazine or on a forum; be grateful for it and move on with the implementation.

Experts often warn about the difficulty to operate site optimization not to mention that it is a constant job. However there are others who will declare that implementing one SEO solution or another is not very difficult and can be done by yourself without having to pay somebody. Whichever the case, time is crucial, how fast can you make the site profitable? When we talk about a viable SEO solution, the thing that you should have in mind is the DO-IT-YOURSELF variant. Constant reliance on a company to perform the optimization could be a waste of money or a luxury you can’t afford, therefore, you’ll have to concentrate on training and learning how to run the web site alone and with great results. So go on and apply one SEO solution or another depending on what optimization method may work best for your site. Don’t trust rumors that at the end of the SEO process, there is not much left to do; there is constant work and an increasing need to keep up to date with the changes on the market. Optimization should be performed all the time and should cover the design of the website too. Some SEO specialists seems to ignore certain aspects of your site and the partners you work with, that is why the best SEO solution is to become informed and trained yourself in order to take the matter into your own hands and do the best optimizing job for your site.