On Page SEO Tips

It requires a lot of effort in designing and building a site, but it can be all in vain if you can't attract enough traffic towards it. You put all your efforts in an attractive design of your website and the next step you do is to put it in front of the online world.

You can't get success only by uploading your website on the www; the target is to attract well-qualified visitors towards your website, which can't be done unless you put your site in the eyes of the search engines.

Today, all of the internet users use search engines to find the site relevant to their interest. For example, if a person is interested in finding information about on-going and up-coming cricket events, he/she can easily do so by typing in the keywords in Google, Yahoo or any other search engine. The search engine, as a result, will present a list of most relevant websites on the basis of their keyword. So, in short, to get more traffic towards your website, make it more optimized and put all efforts into keeping your website in the eye of the search engine. This traffic is, without any doubt, the life of a business. No e-business can run without adequate traffic.

How to optimize your website for search engines?

There are two ways of doing it.

* Off Page Search Engine Optimization

* On Page Search Engine Optimization.

This article will focus on the tips useful for On Page Search Engine Optimization.

All search engine optimization techniques are usually classified into On Page Optimization Techniques and Off Page Optimization Techniques. Both help in achieving one common goal; to get higher ranks in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).

Useful On Page SEO Tips

Following are some of the most common tips for better On Page Search Engine Optimization:

The most important word; The Keyword: it is always suggested that before you upload your website, put all your efforts into the keywords since users will be using keywords to find websites of their interest. Each page of your website should be treated as a separate entity having its own title and targeted keywords.

Always try to name your webpage files starting with your targeted keyword like crickethome.htm etc. For instance, if your website is about Telescopes then the title of each of your webpage should always start with the word Telescope and name each webpage file starting with word Telescope like Telescopereview.htm because the search engine robots look at filenames.

Always remember that you have to make your website attractive for the human visitors as well as for search engine robots. Attractiveness for both of them can be achieved through better keyword optimization.

You should keep in mind the keyword density and never over-optimize your web page. It is not necessary that the greater the optimization level of your web page the better it will be.

Title Tags are considered to be one of the most important factors of On Page Optimization. You can say in other words that it is mandatory for you to include the main keyword as part of your title.

You should always use Header tags with lots of care. Most of the SEO experts recommend having a single H1 header tag that should contain the main Keyword in order to attract human visitors as well as the search engine robots. Other H2 tags can contain secondary keywords.

Putting the main keyword in the URL is always beneficial in the eyes of the search engines. Most of the users are usually not bothered with that but it will help in better SEO. If it is not possible to include the complete keywords or a phrase in the URL then try at least to include the most important keyword in the URL.

There are many more On Page SEO tips but the above mentioned tips are the most common and recommended by experts. You can add additional features on your website to make it more Search Engine Optimized, for instance, adding blog sections, feedback areas, guestbooks etc.

About the Author
Colm Byrne has been working in the SEO arena for 4 years now and runs a blog to give tips on Internet Marketing and how to do Ethical Link building. His numerous articles provide a wonderfully researched resource.

Online Marketing to Prospects: 6 Secrets to Ensure Your Prospect Well Never Runs Dry

Many service business owners, once they become busy working with current clients, no longer make the time to market their businesses. It's only when business has dropped off (and the well is starting to run dry) that they frantically begin marketing their businesses again, anxious to fill in the gaps. When they speak to prospective clients, the prospects can hear the desperation in their voice and are thus unlikely to hire them. Frustrated by rejection, the business owner is off again, desperately seeking more clients. Does this describe your marketing pattern? If so, you're not alone.

More than 50% of service business owners experience this feast or famine scenario. What if you could create an environment so that the well never ran dry and would permit you to continuously market and promote your business? There is another way to keep yourself supplied with an eagerly waiting list of prospects with whom you can work when you have the time and space in your business. Often referred to as "drip marketing," this strategy is defined by a deliberate, planned and sequenced system of deploying marketing messages over a period of time. In many cases, drip marketing is conducted through direct mail, but the Internet entrepreneur can create her own drip marketing campaign as well.

Here are 6 secrets you can use to create your online drip marketing campaign and keep prospects in your pipeline:

1. Client attraction device. The best way to get prospects into your marketing funnel is to give away something that would compel them to part with their name and email address and join your list. Often called an "ethical bribe", your client attraction device must answer a pressing problem experienced by your target market. You can format this information into an ebook, special report, ecourse, audio recording, video, or some combination of all of these.

2. Newsletter: Whether you choose to publish a hard copy newsletter that's directly mailed to your prospects or an email newsletter that is emailed on a regular schedule to your list, your newsletter is the best "stay in touch" device that you have. Regular publication of an email newsletter (weekly is most effective) will enable your prospects to get to know, like and trust you and have you be top of mind when they are ready to solve the pressing problems that fall within your line of expertise.

3. Blog. Business blogging has become more popular than ever. Blogs use RSS feed technology to immediate get new posts and updates out to your blog subscribers through a feed reader, Unlike ezines or traditional websites, search engines index blog posts almost immediately, which help you generate traffic to your website. You need to post 2-3 times per week to keep your readers interested and coming back.

4. Article marketing. One of the best ways to generate traffic to your site or to your blog is to regular write and publish high quality articles that demonstrate your expertise. In addition to placing these articles on your website and blog, you'll want to get them distributed throughout the Internet on high traffic article directories. Ezine publishers, reporters, print media editors, and bloggers all frequent article directories in search of quality content to present to their readers.

5. Social networking. If you don't yet have accounts on the two most popular social networking platforms, Facebook and Twitter, today is the day to hop on board. Business owners are getting prospects on their lists and making sales every day to people they met exclusively through social networking. Best of all, these strategies are free of charge!

6. Public speaking/teleclasses. What better way to wow prospects than for them to hear you speak at an organizational meeting or on a teleclass? Speaking locally to groups comprised of your target market or holding teleclasses are very effective ways to build your list and increase the number of prospective clients. Design a signature speech or teleseminar that demonstrates your knowledge and expertise without giving away the store (focus on the what and the why but not the how) that compels your listeners to visit your website or request your client attraction device and get on your list.

Don't become overwhelmed and try all of these strategies at once. Pick one that you find appealing and work at it for 3 months. If you discover that you don't enjoy it or that it's not working for you, try another one. Continue to slowly add more drip marketing strategies until the process is firmly ingrained in your day-to-day business practices. Ultimately, you'll create a list of prospects who are ready, waiting, and eager to hire you. Copyright (c) 2008 OnlineBizU.com


About this author
Online Business Manager and Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals learn how to automate their businesses, leverage their expertise on the Internet, and get more clients online. To claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at http://www.OnlineBizU.com . Ask Donna an Internet Marketing question at http://www.AskDonnaGunter.com

Build Customer Confidence with Testimonials

Every person in America has bought something that either broke or stopped working after a few days. Because of this, today's customers want to feel reassured that you are selling quality products and services. Customers do not want to lose money or feel like they've made a bad decision. The best way to do assure customers is to have good, strong testimonials.

If a business has happy customers and a lot of return clients, it should have testimonials. You wouldn't hire a contractor to remodel your house without checking references. Therefore be proud of the work you do and get some testimonials. Customer testimonials will help increase sales as well as boost the confidence of potential customers.

The Difference Between Good and Better

In order to have testimonials work for you and increase clientele, you must be careful how you phrase them. Testimonials are a marketing effort, which means that they need to be geared toward making your company look spectacular. For example, instead of writing "I love their vitamins", write "Taking these vitamins everyday gives me lots of energy and keeps me feeling great all day long." The latter testimonial is a lot more eye-catching and will be more effective in gaining a customer's confidence than the former. Ask customers who are willing to write testimonials to be specific.

Cherry Pick Your Testimonials

If you don't have any testimonials, check your company's email inbox for customers who sent compliments. If you can't find any ones you like, look at your client list and find out who is buying your products and at what frequency. Call or email a handful of your best customers and ask them to write a specific testimonial. Have them send a picture as well. This will give potential customers further reassurance of the validity of the testimonial.

Testimonials will not only improve your business, but will also improve your company's image as one that values customer satisfaction. So make the effort to get some strong testimonials.

Four Tips for Effective and Eye-Catching Locations

1. Once you have the testimonials, you need to figure out where to put them on your site. Placement is key, particularly when using flash. You want your testimonials to give maximum impact. The most common place on a website is for them to have their own navigation button titled either "Testimonials" or "Rave Reviews". This way more testimonials can be viewed on their own page.

2. Another option is to use flash testimonials on a sidebar on the homepage along with the customer's name, job title and company or logo. If you are using the testimonials in the masthead, they should rotate every 7-10 seconds then stop after all testimonials are shown. You don't want a testimonial to be so distracting that it takes the emphasis off of the content and what you are selling or offering. By having the flash cycle stop, you are allowing viewers to see the testimonials and then freely look at the content without the excess flash.

3. An alternative way to present testimonials is to sprinkle them throughout the site, highlighting them within the content using graphics, such as a color block background, upper and lower bar, etc. These visual stops are equally effective in reinforcing your credibility and can act as an additional selling point for specific products or services.

4. If you have the option for audio or video testimonials, this can be very effective in boosting your company's credibility. Audio is easy to record using Audio Acrobat. Video, on the other hand, requires more thought to positioning and angles. If you are at a trade show or with a client, you may want to pre-plan these testimonials for more impact.

Remember that in order for a testimonial to be effective, it needs to be specific, believable and placed in a credible location. With these three tips in mind, your testimonials will build customer confidence and web success.

About the Author
Converting visitors to buyers is the ultimate objective of most websites. The Web Success Team has an arsenal of online direct response marketing techniques to entice visitors to take action while on your website. Contact the Team today and we'll show you how to beef up your online marketing efforts make your website capture more buyers and generate more income for your products and services. http://www.websuccessteam.com

SEO Changes - Are Your Sales Dropping as Your SEO Rankings Soar

Let's look back at a bit of history with search:

Traditionally, SEO was all about gaining higher rankings for the most important keyword phrases. That was early in the game and back then, some people believed that was ALL you needed. After all if you show up number one for the best keywords then you must become a winner. But then as search engine marketing evolved, people learned that it was not enough just to have top rankings for the right key phrases, but we learned the importance of being able to provide content that compelled the visitor to take action. No one benefits if they click on your number 1 page and just leave again by clicking the back button.

More and more search engines began to reward Webmasters who created in depth, high quality content that served a useful purpose and actually satisfied the reason why the searchers initiated the search in the first place. It still amazes me when I hear people trying to decipher some kind of secret coding when Matt Cutts talks. "Hmmm, I wonder what Matt really means when he talks about quality content," they puzzle. He is simply telling you the truth. Google can recognize the context of a message through Artificial Intelligence. Write content that is written well for a human reader and you will be rewarded with some relevancy.

Let's not forget the advent of the Pay Per Click process which was a pretty big trend when it was first introduced at the time too. I remember some people saying that they would never do Pay Per Click, but it evolved into what it has become today. A well accepted form of paid advertising.

Your job as an SEO professional is to keep up to date in an ever changing environment and keep yourself apprised of current and future trends. You want to keep yourself aware of what is coming next because that way, you'll always be able to assist your customers with up to date skills and advantages regardless of the changing search landscapes.

This time around, we examine a few of the challenges that SEOs will face in the future with the growing popularity of personalization of search. Personalization is the option that people can toggle on to improve their search results based on their personal interests. With personalization turned on, the search engine can gather information about the history of your searches and as the time you use it increases, it can actually become accustomed to your searching habits so as to present information that is more important or more interesting to you personally, than to someone else.

So where does the challenge come in with SEO you ask?

The challenge is that as the popularity of personalization grows so will there likely be a diminishing effect on your ranking reports. In simple, it means that 4 people in the same household could all be taking turns using the very same computer and doing searches for the very same keyword phrase, and yet each person would typically see completely different results because of their personal use of the Internet and a growing history of different interests.

What this means is that you no longer can tell exactly what your ranking reports mean because where you rank for one person will not be the same as where you rank for the next person or the next. Thus ranking reports could very well become meaningless in time.

It should be understood that with personalization turned on, the search engine is not using a different algorithm. Instead, the algorithm is the same, but there is a shuffling of results based on the particular individuals history of usage. The search engines attempt to serve up even more relevant content to that individual based on their personal interests.

This in turn means that it could become very difficult to determine where your ideal buying audience is finding you because you will no longer be able to simply do a search and see who is ranking number 1. Obviously if you are interested in your own products and you own industry, you site may come up in the top results when you search. But what is the rest of the world seeing? With personalization growing in popularity, there is no way you can use the traditional methods to know.

Personalization of Search may bring a new dimension of satisfaction by providing the user with much more personalized results. After all, everyone wants the best search results. However, it is bound to pose a few challenges for those who have never thought out what is really happening and the far reaching impact that it will have with posing certain challenges with respect to traditional search engine marketing. As I mentioned in part 1, there are solutions. But we feel that it's important to help SEO students grasp the implications of how much things could possibly be affected.

So what are others saying about how big this change will be?

Michael Marshall is a respected SEO associate educator and advanced mathematician who has taught with Robin Nobles and I over the last several years. Michael is a technical expert who often teaches at our Ultra Advanced Symposiums.

Here is a recent quote from an article that Michael published he states that:

"Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO loses its foundations for optimization decisions. They can't tell who the leaders are. They've lost sight of the bellwethers. A bellwether is any entity in a given arena that serves to create or influence trends or to presage future happenings. Without a bellwether, for example, sheep might be left to wander aimlessly. Without a reliable means of rank checking, traditional SEO also loses its metrics for determining its success or failure regarding changes made for the sake of optimization. Traditional SEO is a process the methodology of which is predominantly trial and error."

To read Michael's full article, please see "Personalization of Search and its implications for SEO." http://www.evancarmichael.com/SEO/1279/Personalization-of-Search-and-its-implications-for-SEO.html

In his article, Michael Marshall does far more justice to the topic than I can, on a technical level but also see full quotes he has from an IBM Distinguished Engineer Mike Moran and how large he estimates Personalization will affect the future.

The solution to the challenges of the effect of personalization is being able to grasp the big picture. Gone are the days of counting characters in a Title tag or Description tag. Trying to measure SEO influences separately one at a time will be obsolete.

Advanced competitive intelligence is not just a new "buzz" word.

The type of solutions to these challenges will actually have a variety of excellent benefits other than just gaining genuine visibility.

Try and imagine being able to do search marketing and optimization in only the minimum of moves, making only the minimum of changes for your exact search landscape and making maximum impact.

Will these techniques really be possible in the future you ask?

No, actually they are available right now so you can begin to stabilize your results and prepare for the changes. No one can say for sure the rate at which personalization will make it's impact. The sad thing for some who are unawares is that with only slow and subtle changes over a given period, they may never even realize what is happening other than their traffic is dead and sales have stopped. So we start by making our students and readers aware.

About the Author
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at http://www.SearchEngineWorkshops.com offering live, SEO Workshops with his partner SEO educator Robin Nobles, author of the very first comprehensive online search engine marketing courses http://www.onlinewebtraining.com. John has taught SEO skills to people from 87 different countries world wide. John is also Director of Search Engine Academy, http://www.searchengineacademy.com.

Smart Search Engine Marketing - Some Guidelines

Search Engine Marketing, whether it's paid or organic, is a science.

While it is true that you can put together an ad on Google or Yahoo!, pick a few keywords that describe your business, then bid on them and be up and running with a Pay Per Click campaign in a few minutes, the actual process requires considerably more thought. Here are a few key points to consider:

What is the goal of your ad? If you are an e-commerce merchant selling mainline products, you probably want to generate a sale. If you are operating a decorating business, your goal more likely is to generate a lead for follow-up. That goal will shape how you structure your campaign.

What kind of landing page do you want the user to click through to? Is it a specific product page with all the information necessary to complete the order or do you want your customer to land on your home page in order to get more information about your company? You may want your ad to be product specific or have a more general message.

Is there a special "deal" that you can offer in your ad? Phrases like "free shipping", "save 10% now" or "sale ends tomorrow" create a sense of immediacy that can increase the likelihood someone will click on your ad.

You don't have to have the top ad listing in order to be successful. While being #1 likely will bring you more clicks, you don't want to overpay for them. Typically, as long as your ad appears in the first five positions, and has a compelling offer, you will get your share of clicks.

The keywords you select for your ad are critical. In fact, the difference between a cost-effective campaign and one that just costs you money often are the keywords you select.

Try to avoid buying general terms, unless your site has a very, very broad selection of product. The keyword "cars" might bring anyone who is looking for anything having to do with a car - that probably doesn't do you much good if you are selling radiator hoses.

Stick to words and phrases that relate as specifically as possible to what you are selling. A good rule of thumb is that the more general a keyword is, the more expensive it is.

The page customers land on when they click on your ad should contain similar words to those used in the ad. Reinforcing the ad message is important for two reasons: first, it tells people they are "at the right place" and second it will help your Quality Score on Google and Quality Index on Yahoo!.

Google in particular attaches great importance to the relevance of your landing page and you may be able to secure a higher ad position with a lower bid than other advertisers.

Monitor your campaign regularly. This is particularly important at the outset when you are establishing what works and what doesn't. Pay per click advertising isn't day trading - you don't have to be glued to the monitor but you don't want hours to go by without seeing if your clicks are converting into your desired result of sales or leads.

A large search agency might suggest that you need 1,000 or more clicks to determine if your campaign is working. As a start-up or small business, you (or your agency) should be able to draw conclusion with far less clicks than that.

About the Author
Richard Teich is the owner of eMarketSmart.com, a Search Engine Marketing Agency based in Los Angeles, CA. He has worked with business in different e-commerce verticals, as well as in the health information and business to business sectors.