·:[ Website Advertising Articles ]:·
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Hey,

Its’ been awhile since I posted anything on this blog. Been busy creating content and planning new and exciting ideas for you. I hope you’re doing well online. If not, stick with me because we’ll do it together and succeed.

In other news, I’d just checked our ranking for the keyword “pay per call advertising” in Yahoo and we’re down by one. It appears Ingenio is finally realizing how important SEO is. FYI: I had a conversation with their legal counsel not too long ago and told him that we plan to dominate that keyword in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

I guess they took my challenge serious enough to ramp up their SEO campiang. That’s all folks. Stay tune for more.

I’d always dream that one day I would make over $100K per year.

And when I finally achieved that goal when I was 30 years old, I was hoping for more love and respect from my parents. It never happened. As a result, I wasn’t really motivated to sustain that level of income from my online ventures. Basically, I drifted into a state of uncaring and whatever mindset.

One year later, I awoke from this dismal lifestyle and plug myself into the Internet once again.

Starting from scratch again, I spawned the idea of creating a pay per call advertising service for small, and local businesses nation wide. This technology would use the current technology of VOIP (voice over internet protocol) and some tweaking of open source codes.

After working on the project for all of 2005, we launched a beta version of our pay per call advertising service on our website called www.flyingspider.com.

Three months after submitting our website to Google and Yahoo, we’re now #1 for the keyword “pay per call advertising”.

I show this great news to my parents and they were elated!

I think the love of parents increased slightly after all of these new developments.

Stay tune for more…

If you missed Part One of this article, click here. Increasing Link Popularity (Part One)

If you missed Part Two of this article, click here. Increasing Link Popularity (Part Two)

Not all sites want to link to other sites, so you will have to do some research when you are looking for possible linking partners. Google is an excellent starting place for your search. Make sure you enter keywords that you think quality customers will also enter to find your own site. Remember, your criteria are quality, highly ranked, non-competing websites that have a links or resources page. Go to these sites and objectively assess them. Look at the quality of the product, the graphics, and the ease of use. Then check out the other sites they are linked to, and determine if your own site would fit in with the crowd.

When you decide you have found a good prospect, you must set out to woo them. The first thing to do is to add a link on your own links page to their site. This is an essential first step; it shows good faith, and ups your chances significantly of their reciprocity. After you have added their link, you must contact the webmaster of their site. Since this is almost always done by email, you want to make sure it is immediately clear that your message is not junk mail. This requires that you tell them right off the bat that you have added a link to their page on your site. A hook like this almost always insures the reader will read on.

Next, be sure to be flattering and let them know how much you appreciate their website. Make sure you emphasize that you have actually visited their site, and that their site is not just a random pick. Give them the address of your links page, and ask them to check out the link for themselves. It’s a good idea to mention that they will not only benefit from the increased traffic your website will direct their way, but you will also increase their link popularity. Briefly, explain why link popularity is so essential, but do this in a sentence or two so you don’t sound like a professor! Finally, tell them you would greatly appreciate if they would reciprocally add a link on their own links page to your website.

Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.Go through this process with as many appropriate sites as you can find, bearing in mind the criteria of quality and non-competitiveness. After you have emailed all relevant sites, be sure to check these website frequently to see if they have added a link to your page. Give it about a month, and if no link appears, try another charming email. Then give it another month, and if your site is still absent from their links page, it’s time to remove their link from your own links page. The only time you want to pursue a link further than this is if you believe a site is crucial to your link popularity and your business needs. Just remember to keep all your communications complimentary and cordial.

Then set up a schedule to check your ranking in search engines frequently to see if your link popularity has improved. This is not achievable in the blink of an eye. It will take some time and a good deal of work. There is no way around the labor-intensive quality of improving your link popularity, which is why search engines regard it with such importance.

By the way - make sure you have a beautiful, streamlined site or you will never persuade anyone to link up to you. Be prepared to keep plugging away at this process, as long as it takes, until you achieve link popularity stardom!

If you missed Part One of this article, click here. Increasing Link Popularity (Part One)

The next thing to bear in mind is the quality of the site you are linking to. Never link to a page you have reservations about your visitors seeing. The last thing you want your website to appear as is indiscriminate and cheap. Linking to sites of poor quality will only lessen your link popularity, if not completely destroy it.

So let’s get to what you need to do to achieve supreme link popularity and improve your rankings to stellar status on all the popular search engines.

The first step, and the fastest way to get your foot in the door, is to get a listing in a popular directory, such as Open Directory Project and Yahoo. If your site is business-related, you will want to be listed on Yahoo, and despite the fact that it will cost you around $300 a year, it will be money well spent. If your site is non-commercial, the listing will be free, but it will take time and follow-up to actually get it listed. Open Directory is gives you a free listing whether you are business-related or non-commercial, but be prepared to make a lot of follow-up inquiries before you see your site listed.

You are aiming to get listed in the highest level of appropriate category, and this just takes some common sense. For example, if your company ships Alpaca wool from an Alpaca farm located in the middle of Nowhere, Tiny State, do NOT submit your listing to “Retailers from Nowhere, Tiny State.” BIG MISTAKE! All you have to do is look a little deeper - and submit your listing to the “Fine Alpaca Wool” category. You will not only associate yourself with culture and quality, but you will be listed in a national category.

The next step after you have attained directory listings is to locate other quality sites that will increase your link popularity. Try to find sites that are in some way related to yours, so not only will your link popularity increase, but your customer base may also be expanded. You want to avoid your competitors and look for sites that are useful to your site’s visitors. Let’s look at the Alpaca Wool site example. Linking up to a site that sells knitting supplies would be helpful to your visitors, and the chances of the knitting supply site wanting to link up to your site are also greater. By linking to a related site that will be relevant to your website’s traffic, you are increasing both of your site’s business prospects - and both of your sites’ link popularity.

Search engines are the gateway to the Internet; they are the first tool that potential customers use to find the products and services they need. This is why link popularity is so imperative. If the customers do not find your website, you have no possibilities of making any sales.

You’re probably wondering what the blazes is popular about a link! Well, in a word - plenty! Link popularity refers to the ranking assigned to your website by the search engines, and it determines the ranking your page gets when keywords are entered into a search engine. So, you’re probably wondering, how do I make my link popular?

Search engines are discretionary, giving status and ranking to sites that have links to their pages from related, quality sites. It’s a simple formula, but a very important one. Google created the system, and now virtually all the most popular search engines employ it to rank your web pages in their indexes.

The more commonly used your keyword is, the harder it will be to achieve link popularity, but without achieving this step, it is almost certain your site will never rank highly on any search engine. But don’t be discouraged; there are tried and true ways of achieving link popularity using the most competitive keywords.

There are a few things you should be aware of. The first is that just linking up with a large number of other websites will not achieve link popularity. In fact, it may have quite the opposite effect. This is particularly true when pertaining to websites that are nothing more than “link farms” - pages containing line after line of indiscriminate links. Search engines may aggressively discriminate against your website if you are associated with a link farm, so steer clear of them!

Read Part Two

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1. Remember to always include meta tags for your homepage. Meta tags are HTML statements which are used to describe certain elements on a webpage. Generally speaking, meta tags are commonly read by many search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Most search engines used meta tags to index a website’s title, description, and keywords. In short, meta tags helps search engines to classify a website so that a search engine user can find information on a website for a particular keyword(s). And if you’re not using meta tags, you’re missing out on good traffic from many search engines.
2. Create a website that has unique and interesting content. Generally speaking, anything that is published online can be considered "content". The value of this content is only good if a person or a group of people find it valuable for themselves. Personally, I think search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN prefers written content over things such as images or videos. So if you have some writing skills, remember to write articles about your area of expertise and share it online. And if your expertise if truly unique, you could write an ebook and charge people to read it. In most cases, if people find your article or ebook useful, they will give you a free link to your website without you asking them for one.
3. Build brand awareness of your website. You can start by writing new and refreshing articles in your area of expertise and then distribute them to online newsletters or ezines. In most cases, the publisher of the ezines will accept a little blurb about your website or your skills set at the footer of your article. I’ve seen many writers include their website and a brief description of their skills set in the article footer. Plus, if your article was published on a static webpage, you are potentially creating a one way link to your website. This one way link to your website is an excellent and effective method to increase your Google Pagerank, search engine ranking, and link popularity.
4. Start a one way linking campaign. Most of you reading this article have never heard of one way links. It is the most acceptable method to increase your Google Pagerank, search engine ranking, and link popularity. In fact, it is the only acceptable linking method according to Google’s Pagerank explanation. I’ve used it successfully to make very good money on dozens of websites. FYI, reciprocal link exchanges are considered a "scheme" by Google. They’ve
   frowned upon this practice and discourages webmasters from using it as a method to rank higher in Google.
5. Hire a programmer to make a needed webmaster tool. Many webmasters are not aware of this little known secret — it’s not really a secret. Programs and scripts are what makes the Internet what it is today. When there’s a need for something, someone out there will think of a way to make it available to everyone. Just look at the popularity of hotscripts.com and other webmaster resources. These sites have become an invaluable tool in itself; every day more scripts are being added. You can join this popular bandwagon and make it work for you. Research the need for a webmaster tool and hire a programmer to make it for you. Nowadays, there are many places to find a good programmer. Try scriptlance.com. Once you’ve made your program, promote it for free on your homepage. Gradually, other webmasters will find your program to be useful and link to your homepage. Pretty soon, you will have hundreds if not thousands of sites linking to your homepage.
6. Start a personal or business blog. Blogs are a great way to express your feeling or publish your knowledge on a website without censorship. Like many of the advertising tactics dicussued above, you could potentially get many free one way links from other relevant websites by simply starting a blog. To increase your exposure, submit your blog to a blog directory. Here’s a popular one: http://www.blogwise.com/. There are a lot more and you can find them by doing a search in Google, or other search engines with the keyword "blog directory". Check out my work at home blog.
7. Submit a new release about your products or services. This is often an over-looked marketing strategy. If you have an interesting product or service that could help another person or business, write a compelling news release and send it to a syndicate free online press release distribution services like PRFree. If your news release is accepted it will be published on their website and archived for many months if not years for others to read. Being accepted by PRFree falls into the same category as your one way link campaign strategy. It’s a cost-effective and free service so use them to your advantage.
8. Sponsor an offline event. If it’s within your advertising budget, you might want to consider sponsoring an offline event such as tradeshows or conventions. This is a good strategy because once you’ve paid your sponsorship fee, your website will be on the host’s convention website. And like many tradeshows and conventions, the host’s website will be frequently visited by decision makers, vendors, and other interested groups. Not only will you be listed on a high traffic website, but you are also receiving a one way link in the process. 99% of the time, your text link or logo will be prominently displayed for years to come on a webpage which has a high Pagerank and your website will continue to receive residual targeted traffic from interested groups.
9. Stay tune for more…
10. Another useful tip is coming soon.

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing andmonitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business. If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors who made a purchase. Then divide that result by 100 (25 ?00 X 100).

If your website is set-up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine optimization campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your search engine rankings, or employ a search engine optimization company to do the work for you. In either case, after your have improved your search engine positions, make sure you keep on top of them by regular monitoring and adjusting of your efforts to maintain high positions.

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for a visitor to your website to accomplish the action the site is set-up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret the data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, the data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don’t understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let’s start by examining the most basic data - the average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are the most accurate measure of your website’s activity. It would appear on the surface that the more traffic you see recorded, the better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at the behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as “hits” and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.

The aim is to use the web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then the challenge is to figure out what that problem is.

It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and
after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been.

Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by
making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page.

If, on the other hand, you notice that visitors are spending a lot of time on pages that you think are less important, you might consider moving some of your sales copy and marketing focus to that particular page.

As you can see, these statistics will reveal vital information about the effectiveness of individual pages, and visitor habits and motivation. This is essential information to any successful Internet marketing campaign.

Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly. However, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. This is normal unless you notice a exit trend on a particular page that is not intended as an exit page. In the case that a significant percentage of visitors are exiting your website on a page not designed for that purpose, you must closely examine that particular page to discern what the problem is.

Once you pinpoint potential weaknesses on that page, minor modifications in content or graphic may have a significant impact on the keeping visitors moving through your site instead of exiting at the wrong page.

After you have analyzed your visitor statistics, it’s time to turn to your keywords and phrases. Notice if particular keywords are directing a specific type of visitor to your site. The more targeted the visitor - meaning that they find what they are looking for on your site, and even better, fill out your contact form or make a purchase - the more valuable that keyword is.

However, if you find a large number of visitors are being directed - or should I say misdirected - to your site by a particular keyword or phrase, that keyword demands adjustment. Keywords are vital to bringing quality visitors to your site who are ready to do business with you. Close analysis of the keywords your visitors are using to find your site will give you a vital understanding of your visitor’s needs and motivations.

Finally, if you notice that users are finding your website by typing in your company name, break open the champagne! It means you have achieved a significant level of brand recognition, and this is a sure sign of burgeoning success.