The Three Key Ways to Make Your Website a Success

Your company website can stand out and attract visitors in three simple ways. It must draw visitors in, keep visitors on the website long enough to understand what you can offer and keep visitors coming back for more.

If you feel that your current website is under-performing and the subject of online marketing brings you out in a cold sweat then check out our simple guide below to help you understand what you need to do…

1) Entice visitors

Your website has around three seconds to catch your visitors' attention or they're likely to click away. In order to keep your visitors interested you need a website which has an original design and layout and an enticing headline on every page.

Take a look at your website - are you happy with your design? Do you feel your headlines will compel your visitors to keep reading? If the answer to either of these questions is a no then it's time to make sure your website is reaching its potential.

Be honest about what your strengths are, if you have a great business brain but writing isn't your forte then contact a website copywriter to help you with the content on your website. Website copywriters are paid to write headlines that draw visitors in and make sales.

Also, contact a selection of web designers who have a good knowledge of marketing and communicating your message to your visitors. Ask them for ideas and a quote to see what they would do differently in terms of the overall look and feel of your site. It's never too late for a re-brand; if your site has been up for some time and isn't attracting visitors then you need to start to make changes.

2) Hold your visitors' attention

You should constantly be monitoring how long your visitors stay on your website for. If the average visitor sticks around for thirty seconds or less then it probably means that they've taken a look your website and then clicked away.

You need to be aiming to keep the visitor on your website for at least a few minutes so that they can read three or four of your main website pages otherwise they won't have a true understanding of what you can offer them.

Informative and enticing website copy is one way to hold your visitors' attention. Your website copy needs to be written to appeal to your target audience. It needs to be interesting, compelling and persuasive and you need strong calls to action on your website pages so that your visitors can easily contact you or buy from you.

If you don't have a dedicated marketing department or someone who specialises in online marketing then consider contacting a website copywriter. Website copywriters specialise in writing persuasive and targeted content for the web to help businesses generate enquiries and make sales.

3) Keep visitors coming back

Not all of your visitors will buy your products or contact you to make an enquiry the first time they visit your website. The majority of online customers will either compare your service and products to your competitors or take some time to consider their purchase before making an investment.

You need to make sure that your website has enough compelling, informative and interesting content to make visitors return. Weekly updates to your website via blogs and articles can provide a human element to the business and they are also a great way to share company news and advertise promotions.

It can take time to write the content for these so if you don't have someone in house who can provide the copy for blog posts and articles then consider contacting a website copywriter. Experienced website copywriters can produce compelling blog posts and articles for a variety of businesses in different industries, some even offer discounts for multiple articles or blog posts.

About the Author: Pure Ink Creative are experienced website copywriters who can transform your website into a profitable success. These three simple steps can completely alter the performance of your website and turn it into a money-making resource.

Search Engine Optimization And Search Engine Crawlers

There is a lot to learn when it comes to online or internet marketing and search engine optimization. That is why a lot of people hire SEO consultants to worry about their internet marketing for them.

However, if you do not want to have to pay SEO experts to help you with the marketing of your website, then you may want to think about doing it yourself! It's not that hard, it just takes some reading on the internet from trusted sources. Really, most of the SEO services that are provided online are built around one thing, and that is search engine crawlers.

Today we are going to talk more about search engine crawlers, and what they do. Soon you will find out that pretty much everything that you do, as far as search engine optimization goes, is to make these little crawlers happy. It is no longer as easy as a quick search engine submission and your website becomes popular.

As you may be able to guess by the name, these search engine crawlers are little bots that roam around the internet looking for new websites and ranking them based on an algorithm. When they come across a new website, they rank it in different ways, taking many things in to consideration. These ranks help to determine where the site is going to end up in a search done on a search engine.

The first thing that you have to do for these crawlers is to get noticed by them, and that is the hardest part of SEO, or at least that is what SEO consultants want you to think! The truth of the matter is, you can get your website noticed by simply visiting different popular search engines and adding your URL to their submission forms.

You also must get links from other web sites pointing to your web site to obtain link popularity and credibility with the search engines. This way the crawlers will know where your site is at, and find it a lot quicker. They will also consider it a relevant source of information if other sites link to you.

After that, it's all about marketing your web site on the internet through search engine optimization techniques. These little crawlers are programmed to look for certain things on your web site, these are things that SEO experts study and have an understanding for.

Using the services of SEO Consultants to help in your marketing, however they can be very costly, so you should hire a service provider that is talented and can provide a portfolio to ensure you get quality work.

Before hiring someone to work on your web site you should make sure they use ethical search optimization and marketing tactics and also make sure that they can provide results.

The first thing that crawlers look for is, of course, keywords.

Keywords in your web sites content and keywords in the links pointing to your site. When it comes to search engine optimization, use keywords wisely. Don't over-saturate your web site with keywords because you can get docked as a spammer. These keywords have to be worked into the web page and not just listed there. You should integrate them in to your content, page titles, meta tags and URL. Also, it will help the marketing of your web site if you work them into the titles of your web page as well.

Also make sure that your main page headings are bigger than that of your normal font so the crawlers can easily pick out what the main focus of your page is.

SEO consultants also worry about how many links there are out there that point back to your website. The more links, the better. However they must also be quality links from popular sites that are credible with the search engines. That is why SEO experts are always looking for different places where they can post links to your website. While crawlers are looking around, if they come across links to your website, then that helps to boost your ranking online.

As you can see, SEO services are very helpful, but if you can learn how to do online marketing by yourself, you don't need to hire anyone.

About the Author
Joel McLaughlin - DataFlurry offers Affordable Search Engine Optimization & Marketing. We are a talented Phoenix Internet Marketing, Search Advertising Online Agency.

What Corporates should know about Online Marketing

The most important function of a website is to help a company to sell their services/products to new clients.

When potential new clients/tourists need to choose between two companies with whom they aren't familiar, they are most likely to compare the websites. This is because a website is almost the only method for a person to actually see beforehand what he/she pays for. In general, more than 90% of these potential new client's decisions are decided upon the impression that is reflected from the website, regardless of the competence of these companies. The general truth is that most potential clients do not know how to technically compare companies, and therefore trust that the website's professionalism will reflect the expertise.

Therefore large amounts are invested in corporate website development.

Unfortunately most companies tend to overlook the importance of building a trusted web presence. Without having a web presence with authority almost no new visitors will end up at your website. And since every company wants to expand, they need to focus on improving their web presence in order to increase the chance of getting new customers.

The best and most effective long term solution to increase your web presence is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is a highly specialized field that focus on improving the amount of trust the rest of the world will have in your website. The more trust you have, the more potential new clients will visit your website daily.

The amount of trust your website has, is most of the time determined by search engines (for example Google, Yahoo, etc.). This is because the search engines have the most advanced mathematical algorithms available today, hence the acronym, SEO. Of all these search engines, the world's most accepted benchmark of website trust is known as the Google rank (or page rank) of your website. Therefore, if you could increase your Google rank, your number of new visitors to your website will most certainly increase.

Google Rank of well known organisations' home page:

4/10: Pick n Pay, Steers, KWV, News 24
5/10: Anglo Gold, Checkers, Spur, Shoprite, Nedbank, Old Mutual
6/10: Anglo American, Absa, Stellenbosch University, Telkom, MTN, Vodacom, Mobil, Virgin, Standard Bank, Die Burger, Sasol
7/10: McDonald's, Ford, General Electric, Nike, Coke
8/10: General Motors
9/10: Microsoft, eBay, Amazon
10/10: Google, Facebook

Another reason why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is so important is because of the quality of the traffic (website visitors) you receive on your website. If somebody visits your website due to a search engine query, as opposed to other reasons (such as typing in the web address/clicking on a link from another website, etc), the new visitor will most likely already be looking for your services. For example, if someone types in the word "wine" in Google, they are probably looking for wine. So if your site comes up first on Google you can probably sell a bottle of wine if your offering is satisfactory. The contrary is that the person accidentally lands on your website, but has no immediate desire for the product or services.

Please note that it is possible to buy quality traffic, but this is expensive (depending on the product value and competition) and only effective in the immediate short term i.e. while it is active. SEO has a long term cumulative effect and is relatively inexpensive to maintain once a certain level of optimisation is reached.

Tips when hiring SEO experts:

- Whenever using a company in order to improve your SEO, always check out the Google Rank of their website. Since SEO is not that well known in management circles, there is a lot of companies that will try to sell SEO skills while there own SEO are terrible.

- Also try to get some form of guarantee. It is very rare that marketing companies ever give guarantees about the effects of their efforts, but if they actually do, you know they are serious about their skills.

- Try to get clear benchmarks to calculate the results of the SEO campaign. For example monitor the number of visitors that your website receives that came from natural search engine queries during and after the time of your campaign. (If your marketing team don't know how to get these figures, don't use them!)

- Make sure your SEO team have a clean record. Sometimes SEO companies may get desperate in order to get results and might step over the moral line by trying to fool search engines with unnatural 'black hat' methods. When caught out, these websites are usually banned from search engines and will not show in any search result. To look into any company's track record simply Google them. Disgruntles clients tend to write their bad experience in public forums that will normally be listed in Google's search results just below the company's own website.

Good luck with your marketing campaign!

About the Author
Wim Conradie is a majority shareholder in Matogen Corporate Web Development (www.matogen.com). He studied electronic engineering, computer sciences & industrial engineering at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and started first web development business in November 2003. He has a 'passion for business and adding value to other busnesses'.

SEO - Be Direct, Be Clear

If you are like most people, it is probably safe to say that you are often annoyed when sales people become... pushy. And it doesn't matter if it's a car salesperson or someone blocking your way past a kiosk in the mall, these sales people have something in common, and that is persistence and the belief that they can persuade you to buy anything and/or everything.

If they talk fast enough, or maybe if they fill your head with so many claims, they feel that you can be convinced.

Unfortunately, there are many sites on the Internet who feel the same way, that if they inundate the friendly neighborhood visitor with claims and boasts and incomprehensible numbers and figures, they'll persuade you that what they are offering is exactly what you need. And surely you'd agree with them... once you've waded through all the claims.

Or, there is the other situation, the one in which you wander into the wrong store, either because the name was misleading or you just weren't paying enough attention. The same thing happens online. SEO practices can get certain websites to the top of the ranking for a given keyword, even if the searcher's intent doesn't quite match up with the content of the site. The visitors who click on your site need to know they found the right place before they have the chance to beat a hasty retreat.

Given these experiences, it should be obvious that being direct and being clear is at least as important a part of SEO as keyword rich content writing or link recruitment. Well, to rephrase, it is important if you want to increase your conversion rate and not just the number of visitors.

Often SEO developers are focused on creating keyword relevant content, and advertisers are focused on finding that great turn-of-phrase or magical call to action that will persuade a visitor to make a purchase. But the truth of the matter is that often it is the simple act of making your site clear that will do the most good for your business.

By clear and direct, this means that a potential customer will need to know immediately where they are, what they can do/buy there, and why they should choose you over the competition.

For example, an old SEO tactic (a bad tactic, it should be added) was to redirect visitors to a different page. But it doesn't have to be that dramatic, either. If a visitor clicked on a PPC ad that claimed there was a free download/membership/whatever at the other end, yet when they get to the site there is no clear path to the freebie, this can lead a consumer to believe that they found the wrong place and they will try somewhere else.

Helping them understand what they can do on your site should happen next, and it should happen very quickly. Don't make them wade through lines of text before giving them an option to do something. That option should be available to them from the beginning, and they should know exactly what that option entails.

Finally, they need to see why you are the right choice instead of your competition. This does not mean bragging and talking yourself up. When you do that you've just reverted to the care salesman mentality again. And no one likes dealing with these personalties unless they absolutely have to. Clear comparisons and honest testimonials will go a lot further than hollow promises and claims.

Many times content writers feel like they need to answer the "why" before the "what" and the "where". This only leads to cumbersome dialogue and weary customers. Proper content needs to quickly confirm where they are and what they can do. Do not try to present the solution before the problem. When you address these issues you can start to create a site that will interest your customers and help them choose to do business with you.

About the Author
Andy Eliason is a writer at Main10, Inc, a Utah SEO firm. If you'd like to learn more about strong Internet marketing methods then visit their site today.

Eliminating Failure in the Online Marketing World

Guaranteed Recipe for Failure.

Failure is all but guaranteed in the highly competitive online market. Advertising costs are though the roof and keyword competition is out of control. The average online marketer can barely keep up with the "Big Boys". Creating enough back links through blogging and article writing can be a daunting task for someone working alone. After several frustrating months, many will simply give up and join the 90%.

Network Marketing is going to explode in 2008 and 2009.

Lets face it, people are desperate for options. Layoffs are up! Bankruptcies are up! Gas prices are up! Corporate loyalty is down! More and more people will be looking online for help. Those people will be looking for opportunities. What are you going to do to position yourself to reap the rewards of this market explosion?

The Solution.

The solution to eliminating failure is simple. Teamwork! A group of individuals is much stronger than one. When you have a group working together, you don't have to worry about that Sponsor who suddenly disappears as soon as you join their opportunity. A group supports each others marketing efforts.

How it works.

Think about this. You decide to write an article and you want it to be on Digg's front page. Everyone in your team will go and digg your article. Soon you are on the front page! That is very powerful and will help you attract new recruits. Some groups even pool their resources and everyone shares the traffic generated for a particular opportunity. The power of this is everyone can concentrate on his or her strengths and tap into every possible marketing technique.

The future of online marketing is in the Team Concept, not the individual. Remember to pick your team first, not your opportunity. The right team will be successful in any opportunity.

About the Author
Tim Benefiel. A Founding Member of Infinite Potential. A free forum of like minded marketers working together for success. http://www.internetsuccesshome.com

Internet Marketing, Tracking Your Results

One of the biggest mistakes that newbies make when taking their first steps into Google AdWords is not tracking the results. But this doesn't only happen with Google AdWords but with all new types of marketing. The majority of people and companies do not track their results or do not track properly.

When people start tracking their marketing it is all too common that the wrong results are being monitored. For example if you start a new marketing campaign and notice that your website traffic increases by 50% this must be a positive result... Not quite. Just because your website gets more visitors doesn't mean that you get more money.

When monitoring your marketing it is vital that you monitor your profit, not your turnover or the number of visitors to your website. The only true representation of how successful your marketing has been is how much profit you have made.

There are many ways you can start tracking your marketing, if your customers phone you up to place an order or enquire about your products. You can simply ask them, how did you find us? Which search engine did you use? What search term did you use?

Using this method you can generate good results although you allways get some customers who was handed your info by someone else and some people just don't seem to remember how they found you.

If you are selling your products online using a e-commerce shopping cart or even a service like Paypal you can track every step a visitor makes all the way through to purchase. Google has their own monitoring tool called Google Analytics. This tool allows you to monitor every visitor into your website, you can see what traffic sources provide your visitors, how many pages they visit, which page do the leave on.

Google Analytics has a powerful tool called Conversions, you can define what you class as a conversion for example this maybe the thank you page after someone has purchased one of your products, it may be the thank you page after someone has joined your mailing list or subscribed to your newsletter.

You can then take this a step further and create a sequence of conversions, this is often called a sales funnel. You may for example set up a conversion for when someone enters their name and email into your squeeze page. A second conversion may then exist on the page containing how to buy your product and finally and conversion at the end of a shopping cart.

Using this method you can see how many people get to your squeeze page, who then goes on to find out more and finally the percentage of visitors who go on to purchase one of your products.

When you are successfully tracking your marketing campaigns you will always know which keywords from which traffic sources are generating you the most profit. You can identify what does not work, ignore it and then concentrate on your marketing that gives you the best results.

I wish you all the best.

About the Author
Mark Voce - I hope you found this article helpful. Check out my blog to get more advice, tips, secrets and the latest news on Google AdWords and Internet Marketing.