Deciphering Web Analytics

By Matt Jackson

Want to optimize your online sales? Improve your understanding of your target market demographics? Need to improve your marketing ROI? What right minded webmaster or online entrepreneur doesn't, right?

Your web analytics are your gateway to measurable success and provide a lot more information than most people give them acknowledgment for. Yes, they track the number of visitors you receive and indicate your most and least popular pages. However, they also guide you towards your best performing keywords, the countries that provide you with the most active visitors, and essentially provide you with a blueprint of the exact steps each visitor takes on your website.

Armed with this kind of information you should be able to improve the overall perförmance of your website and your online business. You can also improve your marketing efforts, enabling you to concentrate on the more effective, and ignore the least effective.

Keywords, Search Engines, And Popular Landing Pages

For many sites, the search engine is the leading producer of traffíc. An SEO campaign can produce excellent levels of highly qualified leads with comparatively little spend. The key to a good SEO campaign, though, is to continue the optimization process.

Good analytics packages provide detailed information that is vital to your SEO campaign. You can view a líst of the keywords that visitors have used in order to find your site. This information can be used to identify those keywords that are providing the most traffíc and any that can be improved upon.

By reading the referrer of each visitor it is also possible for most analytic programs to determine the search engine that directed visitors to your site. Again, it is possible to use this information in order to improve your optimization efforts, with a little online research.

Landing Pages And Referrer Pages

A good avenue of pertinent information is the líst of landing pages and referrer pages. The landing page is simply the page that a visitor first lands on when they reach your site, while the referrer is the page that directed them to your site.

Don't be fooled into thinking that all of your traffíc emerges on your home page. At least, for most websites this shouldn't be the case. Each page on your site is a potential source of search engine traffíc, and if you have well categorized pages then PPC campaigns should also be page dependent.

Alternatively, if you use any kind of advertising, it will pay to keep track of how each campaign performs. The referrer statistics will help you determine this very fact. If you have links all over the Internet, then this can point you to the more beneficial of those links so that you can attempt to gain more, similar ones.

Visitor Experience

How your visitors reach your site shouldn't be your sole fascination. Once a person reaches the fold of your domain, you should attempt to learn whether they had a positive experience, and, if not, then why not. Fortunately, web analytics typically provide some very good statistics to help you with this.

Visitor and page load statistics. Whenever a page is loaded in a browser it is logged as a page load. However, any single individual can open numerous pages or may even open the same page numerous times. The unique visitor figure is the number of individual people that have accessed your site.

Visitor paths. You can track the actions of a visitor from the landing page to the exit page. This includes every page they visit in between, the amount of time they spend on each page, whether they make a purchase or click any links while on those pages, and more. This information is crucial to determining any problem areas on your site. If a particular page is leading to a lot of people exiting your site, then address it immediately. These statistics can also provide you with hot spots you weren't previously aware of.

Translating The Results

Translating the results need not be any more complicated than actually reading them. Doing so, though, can seriously improve your profits. Here are a few guidelines that can be used when next viewing your analytics.

Lots of Visitors But No Conversions
A lot of people place too much emphasis on driving traffíc to their site, and not enough emphasis on actually converting those visitors to customers. If you find that the pages of your site are frequently being visited, but surfers are leaving without becoming customers then you need to take action quickly. Typically, your site content may need improvement or the traffíc you are gaining is not targeted to the topic of your website. Look at visit lengths and paths to determine which is the case for you.

Visitors are Leaving From a Specific Page
Again, this can usually be combated with improved content on that page. If the content of an individual page is poor, but the rest of your site is good, then you will usually see that your visitors are navigating happily around your site until they reach this one page. Look for broken links, inappropriate content, or just poorly written content.

Traffic From a Specific Source is Particularly Inactive
If you look at your referrer statistics and note that one source of traffíc is sending a lot of inactive visitors to your site there may be one or more explanations. Review where the visitors are being directed to and ensure that this page is well optimized for conversions. Also do some digging on the referrer's end. A banner or link placed on an irrelevant page is unlikely to yield the positive results you are looking for.

These are just some of the ways that analytics can help you and your website. Experiment and look for trends. Question anything that you notice until you find the most reasonable answer, and then take action accordingly.

About The Author

Article by Matt Jackson. WebWiseWords, website content that sells.

Web Site Marketing Strategy Hints And Tips

by Eric Menzies

Your web site marketing strategy is the essential factor that determines the success or failure of a business web site. This is true whether your web site is an extension of an offline business, or you run an completely online business. Web site marketing is unlike any marketing you may have done using other media.

However, marketing your web site on the internet shares many common core marketing foundations that underlie your marketing efforts regardless of the media you use. I am a strong believer that for a small business, all marketing should be based on the old direct marketing mantra of attention, interest, desire, and action. In this article I am going to discuss those aspects in terms of how they are crucial in marketing your web site on the internet.

Regardless of the media you choose, nothing will ever happen if you don't attract the attention of prospective buyers. This is one of the very basic tenets of successful marketing. On the internet, this concept is evaluated by the traffic that you receive on your web site. But there are a lot of factors that affect how much traffic you get, and only part of it is the actual content of your web site. There are two ways you can get attention in any media: you can earn it or you can buy it.

All the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) show up two different types of results when a customer uses them.

The most relevant results based on the search algorithms used by the engine are called 'free' or 'organic' since they are the natural result of running a search.

The second type of result are actually paid advertisements, and they can be very difficult to distinguish from the results that are actually relevant to you query.

It is important to keep in mind that no matter how good the engine, the results are still hit or miss. It is a computer program sorting web pages based on mathematical formulae, not live people helping you select the best results, so as a person hoping to be indexed, you must be willing to put the time and effort into checking how you rank on the major engines and tuning your word choice to optimize that. If you can't make it onto the first (or second at the very least) page of results, your traffic will drop dramatically! Most people don't bother to wade through the hits on the pages after that. Even second-page ranking will hurt your ability to attract new users.

One of the most effective ways to increase internet traffic is buying some form of advertising. One of the most pervasive forms is banner advertising. Originally, these were very popular forms of advertising, but as they became more prevalent, their effectiveness waned. They can still be effective as long as you have a clear marketing strategy and are able to track your advertising statistics.

Text advertisements are probably the most common form of internet advertising today. Google has paved the way, and if done correctly, your internet traffic can multiply quickly by using Google ads. MSN and Yahoo also offer text advertisements on their sites. One downside to text advertising is that the cost can add up fairly quickly, depending on how many hits you receive for your ad. Each time a searcher clicks on your text ad, the provider charges you a set amount. Another way to increase traffic to your site is to buy traffic from someone who has an e-mail contact list or has a lot of traffic on their site already.

Any approach to publicizing your website or portal must begin with the aim of grabbing attention of the web surfers and internet addicts. To grab attention, you must deliver your message to surfers on websites they frequently visit. You can publicize your website by doing the hard work yourself or by availing expert help, or a mix of both.

Doing it yourself means you will have to commit your time, energy and money. It might sound daunting but ultimately proves to be cheaper as well. Availing expert help can get your results without eating your time. To set the cash registers ringing, it is suggested that you develop your own mix of both ways suited to your own needs and resources.

About the Author

You can get more information about Business Marketing at http://www.BizRave.com.Eric Menzies writes about Search Engine Marketing
Firms and other topics.

Why Most People Fail On The Internet

By Daniel Trainor

How many programs have you joined so far? How many websites have you built? It is amazing to me that 95% of all online businesses never make a profit. Many do not even make a sale and it usually comes down to one thing. In this article I am going to hit the nail on the head as to why most people fail online.

If you are to believe some of the really slick ads promoting the next great thing, then you will not fail. After all it guarantees your success so it must be true. Unfortunately slick advertising is what it takes to get suckers like us to fork over our money. Here is the inside tip none of the so called internet marketing gurus really ever teach. You need SKILLS to make money online. Think about that. You can have the best product in the world, but who really cares if they never see it.

And let' face it, there are over 1 billion websites and growing everyday. The competition dictates you must get better at doing internet marketing before you will be successful doing it. You need marketing skills to get traffic to any website or blog you have. Unless you pay for traffic and even then you need skills to do that right. Try and run a Google Adwords campaign when you do not have a clue what you are doing.

You need skills to hire the right people if you will not work to get the skills to do it yourself. It has been said that what you lack in time you can make up for in money and vice versa. You can always hire people to do things for you if you know where to find them and how choose the right ones. Not as easy as it sounds when you are trying to communicate with a website designer in India.

You need skills to develop the right self image to stick with it when the going gets tough. This is a personal thing. Many people will not succeed because they do not believe they deserve to be successful. Training your mind for success takes as much time and effort as building your internet business in many ways.

So now you see. Most people fail on the internet with their business because they are not skillful enough and they quit before they ever acquire any. Do not let that be you!


About The Author:

Dr. Daniel Trainor is an established internet marketer and mentor. To find out how Dr. Trainor can help you make money from home go to FriendsWin.com

Exclusive: All That You Need To Know About RSS

By Jo Han Mok

You probably have seen this three-letter acronym called RSS in the course of your internet surfing. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; syndicating means republishing an article that comes from another source such as a website.

An RSS is a means of publicizing updates about websites. It may or may not include a summary and photos of the latest posting. But those that provide summaries (thus Rich Site Summary) allow users to skim through the article so that they can decide later on if they want to access the website source. The RSS feed usually contains the title of the update originating from the website. It is also usually the link to the website source.

What are the benefits of RSS? RSS has benefits for both readers (users) and web publishers.

1. It gives you the latest updates.
Whether it is about the weather, new music, software upgrade, local news, or a new posting from a rarely-updated site you learn about the latest as soon as it comes out.

2. It saves on surfing time.
Since a RSS feed provides a summary of the related article, it saves the user's time by helping s/he decide on which items to prioritize when reading or browsing the net.

3. It gives the power of subscription to the user.
Users are given a free-hand on which websites to subscribe in their RSS aggregators which they can change at any time they decide differently.

4. It lessens the clutter in your inbox.
Although your email address will be required to enjoy the services of online RSS aggregators, RSS does not use your email address to send the updates.

5. It is sp@m free.
Unlike email subscriptions, RSS does not make use of your email address to send updates, thus your privacy is kept safe from sp@m mails.

6. Unsubscribing is hassle-free.
Unlike email subscriptions where the user is asked questíons on why s/he is unsubscribing and then the user is asked to confirm unsubscribing, all you have to do is to delete the RSS feed from your aggregator.

7. It can be used as an advertising or marketing tool.
Users who subscribe or syndicate product websites receive the latest news on products and services without the website sending sp@m mail. This is advantageous to both the web user and the website owner since advertising becomes targeted; those who are actually interested in their products are kept posted.

What are the drawbacks of RSS? The disadvantages of RSS use are brought about by its being a new technology and some user-preference concerns.

1. Some users prefer receiving email updates over an RSS feed.

2. Graphics and photos do not appear in all RSS feeds. For conciseness and ease of publication, RSS feeds do not display the photos from the original site in announcing the update except for some web-based aggregators.

3. The identity of the source website can be confusing. Since RSS feeds do not display the actual URL or name of the website, it can sometimes get confusing on what feed a user is actually reading.

4. Publishers cannot determine how many users are subscribed to their feed and the frequency of their visits. Moreover, they would not know the reasons why users unsubscribe which could be important in improving their advertising.

5. RSS feeds create higher traffíc and demands on a server. Most readers still prefer the whole update over a brief summary of the entry, thus they still access the site.

6. Since it is a new technology, many sites still do not support RSS.

How do I start using RSS?

There are two things needed: an RSS feed and an RSS aggregator or reader. The RSS feed comes from an RSS-supported website. There are also websites that provide a líst of RSS feeds of different websites. An RSS aggregator is used to read the RSS feed from the source website. It scans and collects data on the latest RSS feeds from the worldwide web.

An aggregator comes in two forms: a downloadable program also known as desktop aggregator and an online or web-based aggregator. Downloadable aggregators may require payment before they can be acquired, while internet-based aggregators are usually free of charge. All you need to do is to register an account then you are ready to use their services. Both versions allow you to customize or choose which RSS feeds to enter. Paid aggregators are usually chosen by more experienced users and they usually allow more freedom in customizing feeds.

1. Choose an RSS aggregator to use. For beginners, web-based aggregators are recommended since they are usually user-friendly.

Editor's Note: A good directory of both web-based and desktop aggregators for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms can be found at NewsOnFeeds.com .

2. Scan the homepage of your target website for the RSS or XML button. It contains the RSS code you need to enter in the aggregator. Copy this code. Syndic8 provides a directory of websites that support RSS.

3. Paste the code (which contains the URL of the website) in your aggregator. There is a space provided for pasting the code.

After you have done these three easy steps, you can start reading the RSS feeds coming from the website. New postings appear as they are published real time at the source website.

RSS and Internet Marketing

The original idea of RSS came from Netscape, where their intention was to provide a means for users to customize their personal homepage to contain links to websites that interest them, similar to bookmarking websites.

The application of RSS to internet marketing was an unforeseen development to RSS technology developers. Since users are given the freedom to add RSS feeds to their aggregators, those who are interested in particular products and services available on the internet can now be notified real time. Marketing becomes more specific to interested people and not a hit-and-miss operation.

Medium to big-scale companies who intend to use RSS for marketing their products and services should consider linking up with email account providers, (e.g. Yahoo, MSN, Google mail); networking websites (e.g. Friendster, Multiply, My Space, Hi5); and newspaper and television network websites (e.g. New York Times, CNN). Smaller businesses can also look at networking websites as well as personal blog websites (e.g. Blogspot) and websites of clubs and organizations that would probably make use of their products or services e.g. - a fishing supplies store could look for the website of their local fishing club for possible RSS marketing.

Clearly, RSS is an innovation in information management on the worldwide web as well as online marketing. We can expect better RSS technology in the not-so-distant future as its popularity increases among users and website owners alike.


About The Author

Jo Han Mok is the author of the Number 1 international business bestseller, The E-Code. He shares his amazing blueprint for creating million dollar internet businesses at: InternetMillionaireBlueprints

Signs It's Time To Redesign Your Website

By Erin Ferree

Designing your first website is a stressful undertaking. It requires you to dig deep into your business in order to write the copy for your site. You need to work with a designer and go through the process of creating a site that looks unique and works well. Plus you'll end up investing a lot of time, energy and money. And finally, after all that, you're finished and it's time for the site to go live. What a relief!
Many business owners go through this same process. By the time the process is finished, many entrepreneurs are very glad that it's over - and don't want to do it again anytime soon.

Unfortunately, websites don't last forever. Even if you plan your site to work for the current vision for your business, you can't accurately account for the entire future of your business.

Eventually you'll have to make some changes to your website. Some of these changes can be accomplished with simple maintenance, and by making updates to your site. But there's only so far that patching and revising your current site can go. If your site is particularly outdated, or if it's not working well for you, it's probably time to consider a full-scale site redesign.

Some signs that it's time to redesign your site include:

Your Business Has Changed or Grown

If your business is no longer the same as it was when you designed your site, chances are that you should redesign your website to reflect that. If you've only had a few small changes, you might be able to just update your current website. But, if you've changed your business direction, decided to provide new products or services, or if your company has grown significantly, it will pay off to redesign your site. Reconsider how the changes to your business should be reflected or addressed in the structure, design and strategy behind your website.

Your Site Looks Like It Was Designed in 1995

Some signs of an outdated web site include: chunky, slow-loading graphics, old-style "framed" coding, where the site is divided up into panes that load separately, little animated cartoon clip-art throughout the site, and text created as images instead of in HTML. Having any of these on your site could reflect poorly on your business, making you look 'behind the times'. It can also make you look like you don't care enough about your business or about technological advances to keep abreast of them. Keeping your company's website looking modern will improve its credibility.

The Information on Your Site Isn't User-Friendly

If you cringe when you read your site text, or if you regularly get questíons on your site text from visitors, re-structuring your copy or rewriting it can help to fix these problems. If you've been adding to your site over time and the navigation has become unwieldy or confusing, restructuring your navigation could be another pressing reason to redesign your site. You want visitors to be able to easily find their way around your site and to be able to access all the information you have within a few clicks. Laying out your site to make that possible can make your visitor's experience on your site a lot easier.

You Apologize for the Site When Referencing It or Handing Out Your Business Cards

Your site should be a source of pride. It should provide your clients and prospects an easy way to get a lot of information about your business. And, if you have to apologize for out-of-date information, broken images, poor design, difficult navigation or anything else on your site, it makes you look unprepared and unprofessional. Make sure your site is in top shape and looks impressive, so your clients believe your business is in good shape too.

You're Not Getting Good Results in the Search Engines

Poor rankings in the Search Engines can be a result of not optimizing your site well. Poor search engine ranking can also be a result of bad design choices or coding on your site. Make sure that your site isn't designed using frames and that the text is coded in HTML. Flash sites are also more difficult to optimize for Search Engines.

It's Not Bringing in inquiries and Helping You to Make Sales

If your site was designed long ago, then there's a good chance that it was designed as "brochureware". This means that the site was designed just to act as an online brochure. This was very common a few years ago, when websites were new. But recently businesses have realized that a website can do a lot more than just impersonate your brochure - it can help you close sales, bring in new prospects and make your business easier to run. To bring in more inquiries and make more sales include the following when you redesign your site:

Calls to action to encourage your visitors to take specific actions - like purchasing something, contacting you, or signing up for a newsletter.

Forms, scripts, or programs to make your business easier - like contact forms, project estimating tools, and an autoresponder email series that can help you keep in touch with your clients and prospects. Including a shopping cart or Paypal buttons on your site can also help you to make more sales without any additional work.

Downloadable information packets, articles, questionnaires and white papers can answer a prospect's questíons about your products or services and help them to move closer to buying. And, if you require the prospect to enter their email address or other contact information, it can help you to grow your prospect líst as well. These are just a few of the functions that your site can perform for your business. To get ideas for other ways that your site can help you improve your business, look at the other sites that you visit and note the functions they perform.

Your Site is Costing You a Fortune to Update

If you're racking up huge bills because of changes and still have a lot to go, it might be time to consider a whole site redesign. Make a líst of everything that you want to do on your site and consult a web designer about redesigning your site with those changes in mind. Often, if you have extensive changes to make to your site, it can be less expensive to just start over.

If your site is designed in Flash or coded in such a way that you can't maintain it yourself, redesigning and re-coding your site could allow you to do so. Having the ability to make changes and update your own text will let you make revisions quickly, at no expense. And you can play with your site and make revisions to see what will work best for your business and clients.

If your site has any of the problems mentioned here, it's time to redesign. The steps needed to update and revise will differ depending on the problems and issues that your site has - you may not have to start from scratch. But, do make sure that you address all of the problems that your site has so that you won't have to redesign again any time soon!


About The Author

Erin Ferree is a brand identity designer who creates big visibility for small businesses. Her workbook, "Design a Website That Works", will walk you through all of the questíons that you need to answer in order to create the best possible website. Elf-Design.com Web Workbook. hh

Cornerstones of an Effective Website

By Patrick Schwerdtfeger

Just about everyone has a website today. Certainly, if you're in business one way or another, you have a website. And people have different objectives behind their sites. Some are content-driven. Others provide an online service and have sophisticated user interfaces. Others still are designed to entertain and amuse their visitors. But regardless what your website is designed to do, there are a few primary objectives you should keep in mind before you start building.

Focus
This first website objective is FOCUS. Your site needs to have a narrow and specific focus. Why is this? Because there are literally millíons of websites out there and the visitors you're lucky enough to attract will only take a few seconds to decide whether they'll stick around or whether they'll simply click the back button and continue browsing elsewhere. Within those few seconds, your site needs to communicate exactly what it's designed to do so the visitor can decide if it meets his or her needs or not.

One of the best exercises to enhance the focus of your site is to establish a 15 to 25-word positioning statement that guides all your development activity going forward. Think about it like a mission statement. It should articulate exactly what your website does in just 15 to 25 words.

Another way to look at it is to do a Google search for a keyword in your field and see what comes up in the results page. Under each listing, there's a short description of what that site is all about. As it turns out, the search engines get that description from the meta tags on those websites but it's exactly the same thing. What do you want YOUR description to say?

Once you've established a positioning statement, you should display it prominently on your homepage. It should be one of the first things visitors see when they land on your website. And as I mentioned above, the same statement should be included in your meta tags as your site description. That way, the search engines know exactly what your site is about at the same time. And if your site shows up in a search results page, that description will show up as part of your listing.

Depth
The second objective is DEPTH. Again, this objective serves your visitors as well as the search engines. Build a massive amount of content all about your narrow business focus. That way, if a visitor lands on your website and decides in the first few seconds that they need what you're providing, they'll go on to find a ton of resources all about that topic, satisfying their need and establishing trust along the way.

Depth of content helps your website with the search engines as well. Google uses complicated algorithms to assess value to different websites and one of the biggest things they look for is content. If your website has a narrow focus and lots of content about that focus, it will get ranked higher within your area of expertise. Google will consider your site a good resource for people searching for your narrow focus.

Sticky
The third objective is to make your site STICKY. This is a relatively new term that describes a website's ability to keep a visitor on the site. A lot of sites do a fairly good job of attracting visitors but many of those visitors take one look at the site and leave within a second or two. As I mentioned earlier, the positioning statement can do a lot to help someone understand what your site is designed to do. But you need more than that to keep them browsing.

The visitor needs to see immediate value when they visit your site. They need to see something that will benefit them right away. They need to see something they can use to make their own lives better. This is the foundation behind today's value-first marketing moniker. People have been over-marketed and have become skeptical in clever marketing slogans. They want to see the value. They want proof that you can deliver. They want to sample your product or service before they buy anything.

You should spend some time and think about what you can provide your website visitors as soon as they land on your site. It could be information. It could be a tool or calculator of some kind. It could be a free subscription. It could be an entertaining video or an interactive game they can play. Whatever it is, you need to capture your visitor within seconds and guide them to something that will benefit them.

Once they've received one piece of value, give them a second and then a third. Guide them through a maze of value, encouraging them to continue browsing and discovering even more. This is the key to a sticky website and you can get a good idea of your progress by measuring your average time on the site through your analytics platform.

There are a million different websites out there and they're all designed to achieve different objectives. But each one of those websites can be a bit better by incorporating more focus, depth and stickiness. All three improve your website's effectiveness and all three provide benefits with the search engines as well.


About The Author

Tactical Execution with Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a strategic company focused on growth marketing and program implementation across business markets. Visit the website for actionable guidance for revenue generation.

How to Find Free Content for your Web Site

By Kalena Jordan

I see a lot of webmasters complain in forums and chat rooms that they don't have enough content on their web sites, but they don't have the means or the knowledge to find more.
There are actually many ways to obtain more web site content. You could hire someone to write it for you. You could purchase some ready made content about your site topic or you could spend some time and write content yourself. But did you know that there is a way you can get hundreds of pages worth of high quality, fresh content every day without paying a cent? There is. It's called article syndication.

Article Syndication

Articles relating to thousands of topics are freely available for syndication on web sites. Authors provide them for this purpose to gain a wider audience and achieve more back links. Generally, the only requirement for webmasters is that the author's by-line, resource box and link are included with the published article. In terms of copyright, you simply need to follow the author's publishing guidelines when republishing their article. This usually involves an "About the Author" paragraph at the bottom of each article with a sentence and link to the author's site. These syndication requirements are generally specified in the article itself.

How to do it:

1) Browse the Internet to find articles you can syndicate. I use the article announcement groups at Yahoo Groups, but you can also find them at sources such as Submit Your Articles.

2) View the articles being distributed by the group and review their freshness and quality.

3) Join the email líst or subscribe to the RSS feed of any article groups that seem to be distributing content relevant to your web site.

4) Go through your email or feed reader regularly to browse and select new articles.

5) Cut, paste and publish the articles into your web pages, giving credít to the author as requested in their syndication guidelines.

6) Voila! Fresh, daily content.


Articles for Blogs

If the article content is to be used on a blog, there is an even quicker way to publish it. Depending on what blog software you use, you can simply forward the email containing the article directly to your blog control panel using the publish via email option and then edit the post to correct any formatting issues. The other advantage of this method is that search engines LOVE blogs and tend to index them more often than regular web pages.

I use blog article syndication quite successfully for a couple of my clients. One is in the travel industry and the other has a large wedding portal. I simply subscribe to articles on travel and wedding related topics and publish them to the blogs belonging to each client. My clients supplement these with articles and blog posts written by their own staff or hired writers.

Advantages

There are a number of advantages to using article syndication:

Relevant, Timely Content - You can choose content that is closely geared to your existing content and of interest to your audience. For example, if you sell airline tickets, publish travel articles about exotic destinations. The idea there is that persons reading travel articles might be thinking about traveling themselves and need to be reminded to book their plane tickets.

Cross Promotion - You can choose content that gives you the opportuníty to up sell to your own products or affilíate products. For example, if you sell scented candles online, you could choose to publish articles about increasing the romance in your marriage and then include a link at the end of the article to your candle sales catalog (would you like fries with that?).

SEO Value - Apart from the obvious value of having fresh content regularly available for indexing, there are other SEO advantages to article syndication. Most articles are keyword-rich, meaning that they contain a lot of keywords and phrases that people might use in search queries. Publishing these articles means that your site has a better chance of being found for related search queries. One of my clients noticed their syndicated article pages ranking in the top 10 Google SERPs for target keywords within two days of publishing! You can also embed links within the articles or at the end of articles to related areas of your site using keyword-rich anchor text.

Increased Traffic & Sticky Content - It's not only search engines that love fresh content. You'll find that you'll attract more visitors when you publish relevant articles. Provided you find ways to interact with your new visitors such as allowing them to comment or sign up for your article feed, your site will become stickier and retain those visitors more easily.

Disadvantages

There are really only two disadvantages that I can think of about using article syndication. One is that the same article published on various web sites can sometimes be treated by search engines as duplicate content. So generally, a search engine will try to determine the original source of the article and index/rank that page while ignoring all other versions. If you publish a fresh article quickly enough, you can sometimes be lucky and have your version of the article picked up and treated as the *original*. The other disadvantage is that it can be time-consuming to trawl through the hundreds of new articles announced daily and choose the ones you want. You also have to scan them carefully to ensure accuracy of facts and to ascertain if the author has used correct spelling and grammar usage. But compared to the costs of paying somebody to write articles from scratch, I think this is a very minor inconvenience.

Want to get the jump on your competition and improve your traffíc? Use article syndication to publish fresh, relevant content on your site every day.

About The Author

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the
first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a dailySearch Engine Advice Column,Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

7 Marketing Mistakes to Avoid when Promoting your Business

by Sean McPheat

Many people rush into business thinking it will be easy to run, but very soon they realize that it is not as easy as it looks. A successful business is a finely tuned machine. In order to keep your business running smoothly it is important to avoid making mistakes.

Here are the 7 most common mistakes to avoid:

1. Not having clear objectives:
Many business people start a business without clear objectives. They fail to set realistic goals for their marketing and consequently set themselves up for failure. It is important to make a list of goals and objectives based on a quarterly time line. If you do not have company goals and objectives you are like a car driving without a road map. Make sure all employees are briefed on company objectives. When your employees are not properly prepared you will not be able to achieve company objectives.

2. Neglecting to analyse your potential customers
Neglecting to analyse your potential customers is a dangerous mistake. It can lead to many problems. When you do not analyse your customers wants and needs you do not know what products and services to develop for them. This will lead to targeting the wrong market and neglecting to understand your own niche market. It is important for any business to do their marketing analysis so that you can target your market and maximise your sales.

3. Not testing:
By not testing your sales copy and places you advertise with split testing your advertising, you will be losing sales. Split testing is simple to do but many businesses fail to do this. This results in a lot of wasted time and effort. If you do not test your ad copy and marketing promotions you will not have a proper idea of the ads and promotions that are pulling and what is not working. It is simple to do by placing 2 ads for the same product in a publication or website etc. You can then see which one is performing the best.

4. Not budgeting:
Budgeting is extremely important in business. Your business should never run out of money. This is especially true with your marketing and advertising ventures. It is important to have a monthly or quarterly budget for your marketing. Within that budget put aside money for each promotion you will be doing. Start small, test and then build on successes. This will allow you to always stay solvent and have enough for promotions.

5. Giving up too soon:
Companies go out of business at an alarming rate these days. One of the reasons is that the owners give up too soon. Just when success might be just around the corner they give up and decide to close the business down. In exactly the same fashion marketing promotions can fail. You need to give your promotions at least 3 months before you decide to scrap them. Some promotions will take longer than others to bring results. As always, test all marketing tactics before you launch a larger promotion. Patience is one of the hallmarks of business and you need to implement it.

6. Poor sales copy:
How often have you wanted a product but when you read the sales page you had serious doubts? Poor unprofessional ad copy will cost you sales. In fact without good sales copy you will not be able to sell effectively at all. It is critical to your business to get this right. If necessary get an experienced copywriter to do this. It is worth the investment, as you will see returns when you make sales.

7. Not screening your employees carefully:
To handle the extra load for the Christmas season you will need to hire new employees. It is very important not to rush into this. There is no dearth of people needing employment but you need to screen them carefully before hiring. One rude customer service agent can cost you customers. Do not take this type of risk. You want to preserve the integrity of your company at all times and screening employees is the way to achieve this. You will then be able to build a core of loyal professional employees that will be an asset to the company.

The golden rule is to diversify. You should always use multiple forms of marketing promotions in your business. Do not just do one or two promotions and then wait for results. This will slow company growth and your business will stagnate. The last thing you need is to slow your marketing in the Christmas season. So remember to diversify and enjoy the increase in sales.

By avoiding these mistakes you will take your company to the success you deserve. You will be able to have year round success for your business and really be able to cash in on the Christmas season. So plan ahead and be careful not to make these common mistakes.

About the Author

Sean McPheat is a leading authority marketing consultant and helps businesses across the UK, Europe, US and the Middle East. Sean's marketing services include direct mail, internet marketing, sales copy, sales training, telemarketing, PR and strategic alliance marketing.

New Website?It's Time To Think Links

By Matt Jackson

Link building has long been the staple dietary topic for SEO and Internet marketing experts, but with good reason. This is hardly ground breaking news but having a powerful link profile will help you to rank well in the search engines. Having an especially powerful link profile will also drive traffic directly to your website.

As the webmaster of a new site, there are several things you must do. First, you need to create a genuinely useful website filled with equally useful and informative content. You need to ready yourself to add fresh content on a frequent basis, in order to retain existing site visitors and to attract the search engine spiders. You also need to start building links – a good link profile takes time to develop so it is essential that you start as soon as possible. Below are some of the more and less effective methods of building quality inbound links to your new website.

Create Quality Content

OK, we've already mentioned this in passing, but it's important. Linkable content will get linked to (eventually). You may not have the traffic base to command links organically in this way yet, but you will do soon. Unique, informative, and even controversial content will ultimately see other sites willing to link to your own.

Video marketing has become especially popular because of its viral nature. You can create a good video clip, embed it into a page of your site and include "email to a friend" links. Also ensure that it is well branded so that everybody knows where the video first came from.

Free Directory Submissions

You should submit your site to a lot of web directories over time. If your domain is brand new then you should attempt to limit the amount of submissions you make in the first month. Google is believed to penalize sites that build too many links too quickly in this way. However, free directories can take days, weeks, or even months before they get round to accepting your submission so do start early.

As well as general category directories for your search engine link profile, you should research industry specific directories. These will also help your search engine ranking, but they can drive excellent levels of targeted traffíc to your site. Consider paying some of the bigger and more influential directories for an annual submission.

Paid Directory Submissions

Free directories typically only allow you to link to the main page of your website, but most also allow you to choose the title of your link. This gives you the opportunity to build your links according to your keywords, which is an essential component of link building for search engine rankings. Paid directories, on the other hand, also usually allow deep linking to individual pages of your website.

Consider paying for one or two annual subscriptions to the better directories. Yahoo is perhaps the most expensive at $299 per annum but it commands a lot of respect and a lot of traffic. Business.com isn't much cheaper ($199) but is almost on an equal footing. Less expensive directories include Best Of The Web and Uncover The Net.

Join Forums And Post Relevant Comments

Forums are, in reality, becoming less popular. The advent of the oft discussed web 2.0 means that the forum is seen as something of a dying trend. However, a lot of people do still use them and they do offer the opportunity to garner your website with some traffic and provide you with signature links.

Join forums that are relevant to your industry, create a signature link using your more important keywords and then browse. Find topics that genuinely interest you, or areas where you can offer assistance. Post comments, without linking to your site, and rely on your signature link to do the rest. If you provide genuine, helpful information then you may find that you pick up some very interested leads along the way.

Request Links

You don't get anything if you don't ask. Find relevant websites, though not in direct competition to your own site, and request a link. Point out a particularly useful section of your website content that is easily linkable and offer the HTML code to provide a link.

This isn't, in all honesty, the best way to spend your linking time. It can take many attempts with various websites before you get an acceptance and a link to your site. Webmasters will usually link to sites they have genuinely found themselves, or else sell their advertising spaces. Alternatively, they may only link to other sites within their own network.

Tagging And Social Bookmarking

So, you've read all about social bookmarking and tagging, but don't know how it can help your site? Well, the principle is fairly simple – join the social bookmarking sites, create a list of useful sites including one or two of your own, and then publish them. Some search engines are known to be particularly fond of using links found in this way. Also, if your list is genuinely useful then you should find some traffic diverts to your own site as a result.

Blog Commenting

Find blogs that are relevant to your industry and your site and sign up. Most blogs provide the opportunity to link to your site via your name so pick a name that includes relevant keywords. Like forums, only post relevant content and comments. Answers like "me too" do not count. If you don't have something valuable to add, then don't add anything, and move on to the next link building venture, please!

Article Syndication

Write articles, or have them written for you, and submit them to syndication websites. GoArticles and EzineArticles are among the more popular syndication sites and the article pages typically rank well. You have the opportunity to include two biographical links with most article directories, and these should point to the relevant pages on your site and include keywords as the anchor text.

Article syndication is a very good method of building links, but only if you can create article content that is appealing to visitors and to webmasters. However, one good article could generate many links and hundreds or even thousands of visitors to your website.

Offer Content To Other Sites

This is similar, although more specific, than article syndication. Contact webmasters of websites that operate in the same industry as you. Offer unique content in exchange for a link or links to your website. Again, if you can write well, then you shouldn't find it too difficult to find an avenue for publication of your work.

A lot of sites actively look for submissions in this way, so keep an eye out when you are next browsing the web.

Press Release Submissions

Press releases have been around a long time, and are still going fairly strong online. Again, press releases offer the opportunity to drive interested traffic to your website and some PR wires allow authors to include links to their website. PRLeap and PRWeb are among two of the more popular and beneficial sites to submit your PR to.

Reciprocal Links

I find myself sitting on the fence when it comes to reciprocal links. Once upon a time, a reciprocal link campaign was the most popular way of building links. You exchange links with another website and you both benefit. They do still have their place, if you can negotiate a well placed link on a relevant website with a lot of traffic. However, in terms of SEO, reciprocal links are known to have been devalued by the search engines. Consider every reciprocal link opportunity based on its own merit and, in most cases, ignoring the search engine optimization possibilities.

Don't Spam Blogs And Forums

Above, we have detailed a couple of link building methods that include posting on forums and blogs. Please, don't spam. Spam is the scourge of the online world and something that every site owner could do without. Spamming will make you unpopular, may get your site delisted, and it sure won't make you any friends.

Don't Use FFA Link Farms

A FFA (Free For All) website enables any website owner to place their link on a web page. Don't do it. Search engines despise this practice and you will not gain any benefit in any way from the use of this kind of site.

Avoid Any Dubious Link Building Practice

If you see a link building opportunity that looks dodgy, ignore it. At best you will waste your time, but at worst your site could be penalized and you may never be able to recover. If it looks too good to be true... you know the rest.


About The Author

WebWiseWords offers an article writing and submission service as well as various other forms of website content writing and creation.Visit us today for help in creating compelling content and marketing your website.