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The tip I always preach is you need to think about how your customer potentially would come to search for you. Because most who search the web start off searching for one term and then continually refine their search. If you can figure out what people start off searching for, you increase your chances of reaching them.

Here is a sample for you to help illustrate my point.

Flower Store Inc: Just your typical small business. Has a brick-and-mortar business and an online site as well. In my experience, this customer might focus purely on keywords like - flowers, bouquets, florist, etc.

All very good keywords but look at these numbers as far as number of search results for each:

flowers - over 30 Million pages returned in a Google search

bouquets - over 13 Million pages returned in a Google search

florist - over 27 Million pages returned in a Google search

Probably a big source of revenue for flower shops are Weddings. How many brides and grooms go into their weddings blindly? Not many that I know. I think a common search might be:

wedding preparation - it has just over 400 thousand pages returned on Google

Another big contributor might be funerals, how about:

planning a funeral - it has just over 315 thousand pages returned in Google.

Do you see where I am going with this? The searcher likely is in need of flowers but is not directly searching for the traditional flower shop terms.

While I won’t get into as much detail with this example, think of a company selling mattresses. Will you reach more customers by focusing on keywords that include brand names or is it better to focus on something abstract like back pain? You know someone researching the web for back pain terms, is likely a good candidate for a new mattress as well.

Hopefully this makes sense to you and you can put this insight to use and see improved results in your monthly traffic and sales conversions.

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Let me know if any of you experience any problems with it.

Well maybe something like KeywordSpy is the tool for you. Enter a domain and it will give you the domain’s approximate search budget along with targeted key phrases.

It’s invaluable information when scoping out competitors.

Searching the web for more information I found that this company is a little shady in its marketing practices, resorting to spam-like practices. Whether or not that is the case, I cannot say for sure. Take a look at the tool and let me know what you think or what you have heard of them.

The first  thing you are likely to notice is that most solutions do as advertised and provide you with lots of data. The amount of data is likely overwhelming. What is important for you to look at? What’s not so important? You really need to have some understanding of this in order to effectively benchmark yourself.

For the purposes of this post I am going to share with you what I look at for my sites. I primarily use Awstats which is a common analytics program pre-installed by most hosting companies. Here are the key performance indicators I look at daily and what you should know about them:

Unique visitors: This will give you an idea as to how many individuals have been to your website during a given time frame. Note that if a single user visits multiple times, only one visit is tracked.
Tip: Your friends, relatives, and close associates are likely not the only people you planned on having visit your website. Keeps a close eye on this stat as it will be a good indicator, especially if it grows month to month, of new people discovering your website.

Number of visits: This will let you assess the total amount of traffic your website receives during a given period of time. Unlike the unique visitors report, this one will track each instance an individual user visits your site. A single user could account for multiple visits.
Tip: First thing you should note is that this statistic should be larger than your Unique Visitors statistics. You want those Unique Visitors to keep coming back for more. One word of caution though, especially as you may be getting started, your own visits  to your website do play a part in this number. You may think you are getting lots of visits when in reality it is tacking your own visits.

Pages: This statistic tells you how many pages have been viewed from your website during a given time frame.
Tip: You want this number to be many multiples higher than either of your visitor based statistics. This is a good indication as to whether or not people are clicking through to the various pages on your website.

Visit duration: This gives you a breakdown of how long people are spending on your website when they do visit.
Tip: This is a statistic that is very important but is often overlooked by people. This statistic gives you a good indication as to whether or not your website is compelling enough to keep a visitor long enough to have meaningful interaction. Ideally you want to work on getting the majority of your site visitors to spend as much time as possible on your site.

Keeping tabs on each of these four items will help you to work and re-work your website and its content in order to maximize its effectiveness and exposure. The key thing is to benchmark yourself month to month.

Did you notice? I omitted the Hits statistic from my list of the important stats. Hits are very misleading and can very easily give you a false impression of your site traffic. A Hit refers to the individual request for files from the server. The best way to explain this is with an example. If for instance if you had a single page that had 5 images on it and a user visited this page it would count as 6 hits because the one visit brought forth 6 server requests (the html page + each of the 5 images).

Traditional marketing in many ways was all about getting your message pushed onto to potential clients with the hope of converting them into active clients. Internet Marketing on the other hand is focused on getting the potential client to come to you to be presented your message on their own terms. There are several methods of accomplishing a successful Internet marketing campaign.  At the moment the key marketing strategies you should focus on are:

•    Organic Search
•    Paid Search
•    Blended Search
•    Social Marketing

With a well crafted and planned out campaign, you should see an incremental increase in your website traffic. Mix in a little luck and you could see exponential growth month to month. Keep in mind however that growth no matter how large, is a positive. Keep your expectations reasonable and remain patient.

What is Organic Search
Organic search refers to those listings in search engine results pages that appear by virtue of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being paid advertisements or paid results. Organic search results have long been considered the bench mark to measure a website’s Internet marketing performance. The fact of the matter is that more people are more likely to click on an organic search result rather than a paid search result.

Reports show that any given website should strive to at least be within the top 5 returned results for its targeted keywords. A search engine user will more often disregard other results or will refine and/or change their search term before reviewing the other pages of search results. So the key is to not only choose and target the correct keywords but also choose keywords that you are able to attain a top 5 result for.

What is Paid Search
Paid search is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or most typically search engines such as Google. Within Google the paid search results typically appear horizontally above the Organic Search results and vertically to the right of the Organic Search results.

While studies have shown lower click-through rates on Paid Search results as compared to the Organic Search results, the fact is this is still a very important aspect of an effective marketing campaign. The old marketing theory that the more times a user sees your message, the more likely they are to remember you, holds true in your Internet campaign. Also consider this; if during a user’s search the user sees your website listed on both the Organic results and the Paid Search results, it is very likely that the user will click on one of your listings. Even if the majority of the time it is the Organic Search result they click on, psychologically the Paid Search result has played a part in the click-through.

What is Blended Search
Blended search is the next evolution in search and is very much attributed to the Social Networking scene on the Internet where various forms of content are being created by all different demographics of people. Now when you search on a major search engine like Google, not only are you seeing Organic and Paid Search results, but you are also seeing blended into those results Video Search results, News Search results, Map search results, etc.

Because these are still relatively new and marketers are still catching on to trend, you have even more opportunity to compete on getting a top 5 listing for you keywords. If you do a search for your targeted keywords and you do not see any blended results returned, jump on the opportunity. Create a relevant video and submit to YouTube, you have a good chance of being picked up by Google and placed in the results.

Making a video not your thing? Well create a Press Release and submit to some Internet Press Release agencies. You could be blended as a News search result.

What is Social Marketing
Social Marketing is the process of promoting a website, business or brand through Internet based social media channels. This is done by engaging and interacting with existing consumers or potential consumers. Primary objectives of Social Marketing are to enable marketers to build links, attention and receive large amounts of traffic for their company or website.

There are new social media channels launched daily. Some of the more popular ones today include but are not limited to:
•    Twitter.com
•    Myspace.com
•    Facebook.com
•    Blogger.com
•    Wordpress.com
•    LinkedIn.com

There are a couple of directions you can go with Social Marketing. One is to do Paid Advertising campaigns; the other is to simply network and be-friend your existing and potential clients. The latter is a necessity; you need to have an open line of communication and interaction with your target audience.

Now that you have a baseline understanding of these commonly used Internet marketing tactics, start applying them to your business and its marketing strategies for 2009 and beyond. You will see return on your investment. How much you will see and how quickly you will see it, no one can say for sure. You just need to remain patient and be realistic in your goals.

Enjoy!

One of the features Google introduced in early 2006 in order to enhance its user experience, was the addition of sitelinks below the snippet for the number one natural result. The snippet is the 2-line summary that appears along with the link to the website. Sitelinks are additional links to deeper pages or directories within the main site that is listed at number one for the search term. The image below shows an example of the snippets visitors see when searching for ‘MSN’ in Google:

Criteria for Appearance of Google Search Result Snippets with Sitelinks

No one knows for sure how Google determines when to place snippets along with the number 1 listing. There are, however, numerous theories, all of which agree on following points:

• The Google snippets are directly related to site traffic
• Not all number 1 search listings are accompanied by snippets
• Sites with traffic levels above a certain level are usually listed with snippets. This minimum level is not yet known.

Sites with high traffic might not include snippets in the listing if the most relevant page being served is not the homepage. E.g. searching for ‘Ford Mondeo’ in Google UK brings up www.ford.co.uk/mondeo at number one, without snippets, whereas searching for ‘Ford’ in Google.co.uk brings up www.ford.co.uk with the snippets.

Courtesy of http://www.accuracast.com/seo-weekly/google-snippets.php

Synonyms Keyword Suggestion

Free Domain Backlink Checker. Webmaster (SEO) tool.