1. Go out and register a bunch of “keyword-rich” domain names. Duplicate the content from your main domain to each of these and link them all back to the main domain to “help” the main site’s popularity.  Make sure that you “Forget” to tell your SEO that you’ve done this.

Not only will this not help, but it may prevent even your main domain from being displayed in some search engines. While the search engines don’t actually penalise duplicate content, they will either ignore or eventually filter out the duplicates – and they might just decide that your primary domain pages are the duplicate ones!

If you haven’t yet done anything like this, but you’re thinking it might be a good idea, save your money.  You’re much better off spending your time effort and money on optimising your actual site rather than a half hearted effort on lots of sites.

2. Hire a web designer who knows nothing about SEO to produce a site for you. Bring the SEO in at the end of the process, after the site is already completed. Forbid your SEO from making any changes to the on-page display of your site.

Virtually any existing site, no matter how search-friendly it is, will need some changes. If your site isn’t search-friendly already, the changes may be significant indeed.

If your SEO tells you that you don’t need to make any changes to your site and everything can be handled “behind the scenes,” then you should think about getting yourself a new SEO! They’re either clueless, or they’re planning to use sneaky tactics that can eventually get you in trouble with the search engines (or both!). Solid, long-term results come from hard work, not trickery.

Of course, the best tactic is to bring your SEO and your designer together from the start, so your site will be search-friendly from the get-go.

3. Neglect to tell your SEO about previous attempts at optimisation, particularly if they involved questionable practices. After all, there’s no sense in dredging up ancient history.

If your previous SEO efforts managed to get your site penalised or banned, your present SEO needs to know this. There are things that can be done to try to rectify the situation, but those things won’t be done if your SEO doesn’t know they need doing.

Even if the tactics used haven’t yet caused any actual penalties for you, it’s important to let your new SEO know what went before, and what might still be lurking about in dark corners of the Web. This will help your new SEO get things cleaned up and avoid any unpleasant surprises on down the road.

4. Start calling your SEO approximately two days after they’ve first started work on your site, asking when you’re going to see your rankings go up for your favourite key phrase. Call back at approximately two or three day intervals from then on out until you rank number one for your chosen phrase, or the SEO jumps off a bridge, whichever comes first.

Optimization takes time to reach full effect. For instance, it may take up to a year before a new site will rank well on Google for competitive key phrases. Even for less competitive phrases, you could potentially be looking at a period of several months before your site’s natural rankings settle in. In the meantime, Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC) can get your site on the first page even for highly competitive terms, as long as you’re willing to pay the cost per click.

5. Focus all your energies on a single phrase. No matter how much your SEO tries to convince you to diversify, or tells you this phrase isn’t going to be all that useful to you, insist on single-minded concentration on this one phrase. After all, your competition’s site ranks at number one for this phrase, and you have to beat them to get bragging rights.

Depending on its size, a well-optimised site should focus on dozens to hundreds of key phrases. There is simply no reason to limit yourself to one, or even a small handful of phrases. If your site doesn’t have enough pages to support all the useful key phrases recommended by your SEO, consider adding additional pages of content rather than shortening the list of targeted phrases.

Follow your SEO’s recommendations about which phrases should get priority. A good SEO will start any project by doing a detailed key phrase analysis to determine which words and phrases are most likely to be used by people who are searching for the kind of stuff you offer. There’s no point in ranking highly for phrases that no one ever uses for an actual search.

Don’t let your ego or vanity limit the potential of your site to rank well for multiple, valuable terms.

6. Check your rankings on a daily basis. Call your SEO to report (and, if needed, complain) about every fluctuation.

It’s a fact of life: rankings vary on a daily basis – sometimes an hourly or even minute-by-minute basis. Checking your rankings daily, or even more often, is simply a waste of time.

Sure, number one rankings are cool for bragging rights, but rankings alone don’t put food on the table.

The true measure of the success of an optimization campaign should not be rankings, or even traffic. It should be conversions – that is, how many people end up doing whatever it is you want your site visitors to do. (Buy your product, subscribe to your membership area, sign up for your newsletter, whatever.)

A good SEO will focus on this metric and will try to help you do the same.

Well, there you have it. Six easy ways to drive any good SEO insane. Now, of course, if you’d rather have a profitable web site, you might want to consider not doing any of these things. The choice is yours.

Quick Guide to Writing a Business Website Homepage

Target audience:

Your business website´s home page must be all things to all the people who type your URL in their navigation bar, whether it´s their six-hundredth visit or whether they just happened to catch your web address painted on the back of your car.

Content:

For the benefit of new visitors, a home page must provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your website. Your first one to three paragraphs should give a quick overview of what visitors can do on your site. For example, you could include a short paragraph each on “buy widgets”, “learn more about widgets”, and “meet other widget enthusiasts”, with links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and message board, respectively.

For returning visitors, the home page must serve as a touchstone for navigating the site, announcing new developments and pointing out especially popular or useful pages. For these visitors you don´t have to write anything new especially for your homepage. Anyone who’s coming back to your site is already interested and is going to want to jump right into the deeper pages of your site, rather than linger on the homepage wondering whether it’s worth their time.

Your home page should include teasers for the inside pages of your site. For instance, you could have a tip of the week, linked to a web page on your site with an article explaining it. Good navigation (list of links to the four to eight most essential web pages on your site) is also a must.

For both new and returning visitors, always give a prominent place to a featured product or service (or two or three) with a picture, one or two-sentence description, and a link to its own web page or its place in your “products and services page,” catalogue or shopping cart.

You should also probably feature a satisfied customer preferably with a photo. But  always include a testimonial quotation, and a link to a case study or customer story on its own web page, which you should definitely find time to write or have written for you by a website content provider.

Title:

Don´t title your home page “Welcome to [name of your site]“. Don´t include that message anywhere on your homepage, in fact. It”s a waste of space. This was normal in the 1990s but it”s pretty outdated now. Everyone already knows they”re on your site. What you need to tell them is what they can do there. Try something like “Buy, Study, and Discuss Widgets”.

Also make sure your title incorporates any keywords you think people might use to search for your product or service on the internet. Search engines decide how to categorise pages largely based on the homepage title and first heading text.

Length:

Ideally, the first few paragraphs of the homepage (the ones aimed at new visitors) should not be more than 100-350 words total. The teasers for inside pages targeted to returning visitors should not be more than about 100 words each.

Making Sure Your Website Has the Best Homepage Possible:

Before your homepage goes live, test it out on a few people. Don’t just ask your volunteers how they like your homepage. Courtesy may prevent you from getting an honest response. Instead, ask them to find how to buy your latest product or if they understand what?s the most important development in your company recently. If they can navigate to the correct page within about eight seconds (the average human attention span on the web), you’ve done well.

You may just want to hire a website copywriter, online copywriting firm, or website content provider to create your homepage for you. After all, you wouldn’t build your own office building, would you? Of course, that´s not an entirely fair comparison; more people will see your business website homepage than will ever see your office building.

What a Business Website Homepage is Not:

• A homepage is not the place to dump a long description of your business. That´s for the “about us” or “company information” page. On the homepage, this information will just bore most people.
• A homepage is not the place where you list and sell all your products (unless you only have one or two). You should have a special products and services page for that, and preferably a shopping cart or catalog. Trying to make people buy right on your homepage is a little pushy. The homepage will also get over-crowded as your offerings expand. Instead, just include a list of product categories with links to inside pages, along with direct links to your biggest sellers.
• A homepage is not the place to include the full text of your announcements and press releases. Just include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. If people want to read the full text, they can. If they don´t, you haven´t bored them to tears.
• A homepage is not your company president´s or owner´s personal blog. It´s OK to rant, rave, or preach the need for world peace. Just don´t do it on wesellwidgets.com

As you´ve probably noticed, a good website has multiple pages. You should have special web pages for special topics: an “about us” page for company information, a products and services catalog, the president´s blog, etc. When you advertise or send out links to your site, you should link directly to the most appropriate page, rather than just the homepage.
Of course, that doesn´t mean you don´t need a homepage, just that you don´t need it to do every single thing you want your website to accomplish.

Reasons why Google drops web sites from its index

The most common reason why web sites are removed from Google’s index is that these web sites use shady tricks to get higher search engine rankings.

If you use cloaking, hidden text, doorway pages or any other technique that’s put in place for the primary purpose of tricking search engines then you stand a very good chance of having your web site  banned as soon as Google finds out. Don’t try to cheat or trick Google, it will almost certainly backfire on you.

Even if you don’t use shady tricks to optimise your web site, your site might be removed from Google’s index if your web site was down, or pages were unavailabe when Google tried to index it.

If you have a new web site, or if you have made major changes on your site, your web site might be put into Google’s sandbox. You then just have to wait until it comes out of the sandbox.

How to get listed in Google

1. Optimise your web page content

Google can only rank your web site highly for your keyword if it can find out what your web site is all about. To tell Google what your web site is about, you have to optimise your web pages for Google.

2. Get good incoming links

Google heavily relies on links to determine the ranking of web pages. The more web sites link to your site, the better your rankings. Make sure that the web sites that link to your site are related to your web site and that the links to your web site contain text that is related to your site.

3. Avoid dirty tricks

Only use ethical search engine optimisation methods to optimise your web pages. Using shady tricks will get you banned sooner or later.

If you used cloaking, doorway pages or hidden text on your web pages before, rebuild your web pages with the ethical methods described above and send a re-inclusion request . Tell Google that you have cleaned up your page and that you don’t use these unethical tricks anymore.

Getting listed on Google is possible. Just play by the rules and make it easy for Google to index your site by optimizing your web page content and by getting good incoming links.

So, what should you do? Well, you will need to do rely on the same thing all internet businesses do when they first start out. Of course, we are talking about pay-per-click (PPC). By advertising with pay-per-click, you pay a certain price per click to be listed near the top of the first page of the search engines for your chosen keyword or phrase. Every time someone clicks on your PPC ad, you pay for that click.

If you have never used PPC before or do not know what it is, perform a search on any search engine and you will notice that at the top or to the side of the search results you will see a section called “sponsored links.” These are websites that are paying a certain amount per click to be listed there.

PPC can be very expensive depending upon what keyword you want to receive clicks for, but there are ways to budget your money wisely so you can maximize the effectiveness of your PPC marketing campaign without having a ton of money to spend. Some of the companies at the top of the sponsored links section might be bidding up to $20 per click for certain keywords. Insurance companies such as Geico and Progressive often bid up to $25 per click for the keyword “auto insurance.”

However, for most keywords, you can bid relatively low and still get a lot of clicks. Each PPC service has a traffic calculator that tells you how many clicks you will receive given a certain bid price and daily budget. So, if you want to spend $0.50 per click, you can put that bid into their traffic calculator and it will tell you how many clicks you can expect to receive at $0.50 per click and how much that will cost per day. The traffic calculator will also tell you what your position will be (the higher your bid price, the higher your position will be within the sponsored links section for that keyword).

There are several PPC programs that you can use to receive traffic. There is Google Adwords (spans several engines, including Jeeves, AOL, and Google), Overture (Yahoo and other engines),  and many others. They are all reliable, and they will all deliver traffic to your website.

The most important part of PPC advertising is knowing what keywords or phrases to bid on. You have to remember that most people using a search engine are only looking for information, and are not seeking to buy a product or service. So, if you are using PPC to get traffic to your website in order to sell something, make sure you bid on a keyword that will bring you customers who are looking to make a purchase and are not there just to glean information.

For example, if you are selling Vitamin A on your website, and you bid on the keyword “Vitamin A,” you are going to receive a lot of traffic from people who visit your website merely to read what is there, because they are probably just looking for information about Vitamin A and do not want to buy it. Instead, you should bid on the phrase “Buy Vitamin A.” In this manner, you will only receive qualified traffic from people that are looking to buy vitamin A, which will increase your sales and allow you to get more bang for your marketing buck.

PPC advertising is the most effective form of advertising on the internet, so you should use it when launching your new internet business. Just make sure that you bid within your budget and use specific keywords or phrases so that you will receive qualified traffic, and you will do fine.

It was found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it.

Asked about the effects of customer ratings on their Web sites, over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year, compared with only 9% who said they fell.

Nearly eight in 10 online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimisation was a significant benefit.

“Tapping into social commerce can be a great way of gaining a competitive advantage, for example through ratings and reviews,” Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said in a statement. “But apart from the early adopters, this is something a large proportion of online retailers are only just starting to think seriously about.”

Unfortunately, companies love the idea of getting their messages into these channels and more and more adverts and marketing are finding their ways into blogs. Marketers are increasingly using  blogs, and social network pages specifically to promote their products or services.

Your Opportunity

Although it’s a shame that there is so much ‘advertorial’ out there , it also presents opportunities for you.   As levels of credibility and trust sink lower, readers will seek out content that is honest and useful. They’ll be hungry for information they can trust, and once you have their trust, you are more likely to be receptive to the products and services that you offer.

What not to do

There are some excellent, trustworthy sites around which support themselves through all manner of advertising and sponsorship deals. The trick is not to remove the advertising, but to clearly separate editorial from advertising.

People understand that information media needs to support their existence through advertising. What isn’t OK is when you try to trick your readers.

It’s not acceptable to:

• Write content that’s thinly-veiled advertising
• Try to make people think a certain page is editorial they can trust, when in fact it’s there to deliver a marketing message
• Write a blog entry that appears to be editorial when you’re being paid a fee by a company to write it
• Write poor content simply to attract readers in the hope they’ll click on an advert

These are the practices that dilute trust and make web users sceptical about the next blog, forum or website they visit.

How to build trust

Online, every marketer is in a hurry to make money. But if you just slow down a little you’ll end up doing better in the long run.

Create valuable, useful and honest content, whether it be in the form of articles, reviews, guides, white papers, or blog entries. Keep marketing messages out of your content. Add them separately, and keep them separate. Over time, people will come to trust your site and the information you provide.Trustworthy content will win in the end

So while we’re in the midst of an explosion of sneaky marketing right now, the smartest marketers will be investing in sites and  blogsthat are genuinely trustworthy. They will be the winners in the end.

When starting up a new link building campaign, there are two basic questions you should be considering :

1. What is unique about your site that others might want to link to?
2. Who might be interested in linking to you, and what information would be of use to them?

Gaining a good understanding of the answers to these questions is a fundamental starting point . It helps you gain an insite into the types of information that you may be able to offer the people in your space, or related spaces. It will very likely also highlight, extra contenmt that you may be able to provide, which will offer added value to your customers and potential customers.

Here are the five things that you should also think about when kicking off a new link campaign:

1. Start by identifying who the major media people are in the same space as you. At this stage dont’ be too concerned about their potential to link to you. This should form a complete list of traditional media, bloggers, government, school, and hobbyist sites that are related to your products/services.

2. Next prioritise the list ranging from top tier players to lower tier players. Links from from any of them will help, but getting a link from a top tier player is worth more effort.

3. Re-examine the current and potential content of your site to see how it matches up with the needs and interests of the top tier targets.

4. If necessary (and it usually is), put in place a content development plan to implement the right types of content to match up with the best targets. Several new articles may need to be written.

5. Begin the process of contacting your targets, and getting them interested in the unique cool content that you have.

Remember, good link building should always starts in the same place – Identifying the targets… Good Luck !

More and more small business owners are feeling the lure of the internet to promote and sell their products and services.  In fact these days, the Internet is often the first place  budding entrepreneurs set up their fledgling businesses. Why ?  Because it is relatively cheap… cheap to setup and cheap to market.

The great thing about the internet is that it is usually very cheap to reach your target market. The problem is, that it is also cheap for everyone else as well.

So how does a small business hope to compete online, when there are some many other businesses – small, large and very large – already competing for their customers.  The answer is remarkably simple – Focus !

How do you sell plasma televisions if everyone sells them? How do you attract searchers for that broad a term? If you need to appear on the first page of search results to get sales, how do you do that as a small business?

The small businesses that are succeeding online are marketing very targeted offerings—extremely specialised products and services. That way, they take advantage of the “Long Tail” effect to get on the first page of search results for something (even if it is somewhat obscure) and they have a good chance of satisfying the customer with what they do best.

But it means that you must specialise, you must focus on a niche. What is unique about your products? Or your business? Or the way you sell them? What is it that makes you better than everyone else for a certain specific target segment? When you answer that question, you’ll know how to market yourself on the Web. You’ll know what that segment is looking for and you’ll know how to attract them with the right message.

A small business must specialise to succeed on the Web. What’s your specialty? ]]> http://webconsulting.com.au/small-business/how-can-a-small-business-succeed-online/feed 1 http://webconsulting.com.au/search-engine-optimisation/the-4-benefits-of-social-marketing http://webconsulting.com.au/search-engine-optimisation/the-4-benefits-of-social-marketing#comments Tue, 19 May 2009 05:13:32 +0000 http://webconsulting.com.au/?p=367 There are basically four different types of benefits that you can expect to achieve from a successful social media marketing campaign: links, branding, sales and interaction.

Below, a look at each of these potential benefits and some ideas on how you can make maximise them for your specific needs.

Links

Making use of social media for link building is relatively popular within the SEO community, and for good reason. Using social news sites as a platform to spread your content (linkbait) can relatively easily produce thousands of new inbound links to your site. Compare that with traditional methods of paying or begging for links, and you can quickly see why linkbaiting is so popular.

The of linkbaiting is to produce a piece of remarkable content that will spread virally and naturally collect links. The big social news sites already have millions of users, so the concept is to leverage these sites to get your story popular enough so that it’s exposed to their user community. A popular piece of content on these sites is seen by tens of thousands of hungry bloggers looking for stories to blog about.

Sites that are best for link building are probably Digg, Delicious, and Facebook

Branding

Social media marketing goes further than just traffic and links. It is also great for improving brand awareness. It doesn’t matter if you have a new brand or one that is well established, using social media can help build or strengthen it.

Social media is also part of a brand experience when users interact in these channels. If the experience is positive, high-energy, interesting or funny, all of these elements will support a unique brand experience and support ongoing initiatives in this area. Positive or negative experiences here can really have an impact on a brand.

A few examples of positive experiences include funny videos, useful content, flash games, and contests based on user participation. Each of these methods help engage a deeper dialogue or interaction with the consumer and can help get closer to the customer.

Best sites for creating branding are YouTube Twitter and Facebook.

Sales

The primary aim for many marketing campaigns is to bring an increase in sales. Sometimes this is done directly and sometimes it can be a very indirect process. It can be hard to create a social media marketing campaign that will result in direct sales. This is because you’re reaching consumers in a non-purchasing stage of the cycle. It contrasts from standard SEO where consumers are looking for what you’re selling and at the point of purchase already. Social media is less intrusive, and part of the reason people engage is because there’s more there than just a selling message. Any content with a strong selling message will generally not be received well.

The best way to generate sales through social media is to show how good your product is in a creative way and compelling way.
Sites that are best for direct sales are YouTube, MySpace or any highly targeted social site.

Interaction

There are a lot of benefits to interacting with your customers through social media. Some of these include improving products or services, establishing trust, being viewed as the authority in your space and creating evangelists.

The most common form of customer interaction in social media is done through blogging. With a blog, your goal should be to establish an open dialogue with your customers. This means that should allow comments on the blog, and you should also be participating on other relevant blogs.

Blogging is not the only way to interact with your customers in social media. Consider reaching out to them in the communities where they hang out but be sure tread lightly as they can very easily have the opposite effect you are hoping for. Remember, social media is somewhere that consumers feel safe from marketers, so you need to have the right approach.

The above are examples for some of the ways social media marketing can be effective today. The environment is still evolving and growing. As we see more participation in different ways, the landscape will pose even more opportunity for marketing.

If you answered yes to these questions – you are in the majority – most business’s make money by selling products or services.  Assuming that you have a good value product/service (which doesn’t necessarily mean cheap) surely the success of your business depends on making the sales process as painless as possible ?

So why is it that so many online businesses seem to insist on placing one hurdle after another in the way of potential customers?

A traditional shopping experience goes something like this :

You go into a shop, you see something you want to buy, you pay for it, and you leave with the item.

Whilst there are undoubtedly benefits in buying things online – it is not always convenient (or possible) to pop down to the shops to get exactly what you want, the process often seems unnecessarily complex, and in some cases a great deal of commitment and perseverance may be necessary.  As a comparison to the above example, here is a typical scenario for buying something online :

• I see something I want to buy
• I convert the price to my local currency (where is my calculator)
• I check to see what the shipping costs are (and if they actually deliver in my area)
• I add the item to my shopping cart
• I go to the checkout
• I’m asked if I’m a registered user :
  If I am not already registered, I need to provide a variety of userid/email address/password/contact details and have to wait for my email address to be confirmed before I can proceed.

  If I am already registered, chances are I can’t remember my login details, so try a variety of userid/email address/password combinations before giving up and requesting a new password.  I then have to wait for my new password to be emailed out before I can proceed.

  By the time I get to check my email, there is a good chance that I’ve now lost interest in / run out of time for / been distracted from or am annoyed about, buying the thing I had wanted to buy in the first place – simply because they made it too much trouble to give them my money and leave with the thing I wanted to buy.

Get the picture ?  These are just a few of the hurdles you may have faced yourself when buying something online, I’m sure you’ve experienced all of these, and could probably list many more.

In light of this it is remarkable really that online sales are becoming increasingly popular – but how many sales from your website might you be missing out on, simply because of unnecessary or awkward steps in the sales process?

Here are some scary stats relating to a “forced registration” process:

75% of people clicking the “forgot password” button don’t come back to finish the purchase.
23% of people abandon the checkout process at the first sign of a registration prompt.
45% of registered customers have bad memories and register multiple times

In most cases you can make it easier for people to give you their money, by streamlining the sales process, removing unnecessary steps, making it quicker and easier for users to complete a sale, and  by not forcing them to register (give them a choice instead).

If you are concerned about the sales process on your own website, you should consider having a Conversion Optimisation Review undertaken – as a means of reducing or eliminating hurdles in your sales process.