SearchMar Marketing Blog

Marketing Managers:Take Your Business Viral, 5 Video Marketing Strategies That Work

2011-03-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

If you are considering entering the world of YouTube video marketing, now is the time to make your move. Business video marketing will help you take your business advertising to the next level. Due to their extensive experience, it is wise to set up a consultation with a professional video marketing specialist to design and produce a presentation that is cutting-edge and will also showcase your company, product or service to its best advantage.

Why Video Marketing?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video could be worth a million dollars. Never has there been a better time to take advantage of the benefits of video marketing on the internet. The explosion in YouTube viewing has made this the perfect vehicle for b2b video marketing and the presentation of business videos. YouTube is the third most visited website on the Internet, but it has been underutilized by businesses from a standpoint of YouTube video marketing. This means the time is ripe for you to be on the leading edge of this opportunity.

Video is a dynamic and effective way to grab the attention of the public and hold it. Studies have shown that few people will stay on a website long enough to read all of its contents, but will usually view a video to its conclusion. Consider what this can mean to your business in terms of reaching the maximum amount of potential clients and getting your presentation seen and heard. Think of commercials or movies that have moved you. A well-crafted video, utilizing the right images and music, can accomplish the same thing. Using YouTube for business video marketing is the most effective – and least competitive – means of attracting business.

Tips To Market Your Business Videos
Due to its wide viewership, YouTube is an invaluable tool for b2b video marketing. However, marketing is only as effective as the choices you make. There are several factors to take into consideration when creating a video marketing campaign. Utilizing these tips will help you generate interest by potential clients and ensure that this interest generates concrete and measurable results in terms of business revenue. Here are some tips on business video marketing to help you maximize the potential of this medium:

1. Have a clear goal in mind. Know what it is you want to say and focus your message on that. Knowing where you want to go with your business video is half the battle in getting there. A ship cannot steer without a rudder.

2. Be genuine and authentic. People can spot a phony; what they respond to is honesty. People prefer to do business with you if you earn their trust. Smile, be natural and friendly. If you met someone in real life who doesn't make eye contact or seems uncomfortable talking to you, do you give them your business?

3. Keep it short, simple and direct. Don't start with a flashy graphic or animation just because it is cute or sexy. If it has no relevance to your message, leave it out. Also, be careful not to ramble aimlessly before making your point.

4. Seek to establish a rapport. Customers like to do business with a company that understands their needs and cares about them. People respond best when you can offer up a problem or a situation that they can relate to. Then offer them a solution.

5. Establish your brand at the outset. Make sure your video is appropriate and relevant to the messages you want to convey.

By following these simple guidelines and working with a professional video marketing company, you will be able to create a valuable sales and marketing tool which will bring results. A well-crafted, interesting business marketing video has been a proven method of increasing both web traffic and sales volume.

Google Patent: Determining Quality Of Backlinks

2010-09-02T11:00:00.000-07:00

On 24th August 2010, Google was granted a new patent by the name of- determining quality of backlinks. As the name suggests, this patent gives out detailed information on how Google judges the value of backlinks.

The number of links pointing to a website helps the site in ranking well in the search engine results pages. Google judges a site based on the quality and quantity of its backlinks. A site having few quality backlinks will rank better than the site having a lot of low quality backlinks.

It is very important to understand how Google evaluates backlinks. This will help you in building quality backlinks to your site.

An abstract from the patent: A ranking component ranks documents, such as web pages or web sites, to obtain a ranking score that defines a quality judgment of the document. The ranking score of a particular document is based on the ranking score of the documents which link to it and based on affiliation among the documents.

What Can We Deduce From The Patent?

1. Google allocates a lot of importance to the backlinks coming from affiliated pages.

2. Backlinks coming from independent pages are assigned individual values.

Google’s Patent Confirms Our Belief in the Current Link Building Practices in the SEO Market:

1. The quality of a backlink is more critical than the quantity of backlinks to a site.

2. You need to build a considerable number of backlinks for your site to rank well in the SERP’s.

3. Try to build backlinks from niche websites. Backlinks from a closely related website might be considered to be affiliated by Google.

4. Avoid purchasing links from third party link sellers.

What are your views on Google’s latest patent? Does it change the way you build backlinks? Share your link building techniques in the comments section and we will publish the best ones.

Bing Powers Yahoo Search Results

2010-08-31T11:00:00.000-07:00

Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products recently announced the transition of Yahoo search results from Microsoft’s search platform. Microsoft now officially powers Yahoo web, images and video results on both desktop and mobile devices.

As of August 2010, Yahoo still powers its own search marketing. The integration of Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo search marketing is expected to actualize by October 2010. After the merger, Microsoft Adcenter is going to be the sole advertising interface for Yahoo and Bing paid search advertising. The advertisers will be able to bid on both Yahoo and Bing at the same time.

A search marketing model like this will attract more advertisers and in turn more bids. This is likely to cause the prices of PPC campaigns to increase by a high margin.

The Alliance Between Yahoo and Microsoft is going to Benefit Webmasters and Advertisers in the following ways.

1. Webmasters will have one less (major) search engine to optimize their websites for.

2. Websites which were not ranking well in Yahoo but ranking well in Bing will come up in the former search engines rankings.

3. Search advertisers will be able to target two major search engines with one search marketing interface- Microsoft Adcenter.

4. Advertisers will find it easy to reach out to the combined audience of Yahoo and Bing.

5. Managing and analyzing campaigns for both Yahoo and Bing will become a simple task.

Shashi Seth stated the following in the Yahoo search blog, "Yahoo! will continue to drive technology innovation in the search experience to bring more value to users and advertisers alike. We are focused on creating rich, immersive experiences that foster serendipitous discovery for people across the Yahoo! network... we are also working hard on finalizing our revenue model for the Yahoo! Search BOSS program going forward, and will be offering other search-related tools for publishers in the months to come."

What do you think about Bing powering Yahoo results? Have you noticed any change in your websites ranking in Yahoo?

Optimization Techniques to Consider While Doing SEO

2010-08-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

Images infuse life into your website. You need to keep the visitors interested in your site, which is not an easy task with an all text site. Images add a new dimension to the website and help in explaining the content easily.

Searchbots cannot read or find images. If you own an e-commerce or a photo gallery site, image optimization will form an integral part of your SEO strategy. You need to make your graphics search engine friendly to rank well in the SERP’s.

Listed below are the Image optimization techniques to use while performing SEO on your website:

1. Include Keywords In The Filename: Use keywords in your image name. This is one of the best practices for image optimization. Do not include space and special characters in your image name as they will be encoded. Use hyphens to separate the keywords in the image name.

2. Add Alt Tags: Search engines cannot read an image, but they can read the alt attribute included in the image tag. Make sure that you include keywords in the alt tag of every image. Do not use the same keyword for all the images on the web page.

3. Use Relevant Anchor Text: If you are linking to another page on your site using an image, add an appropriate anchor text. Include keywords in your anchor text.

4. Reduce The Image Size: Make sure that the images are not heavy and load quickly on the site. A slow loading image does not give a right impression about the site. You need to keep your site loading time to a bare minimum as it affects the ranking in Google to some extent.

5. Surround The Image With Text: It is not a good practice to congest a web page with images. Always add a little text along with your images, if only a few lines. This will give the search engines more information to crawl and index.

6. Name the Image Folder Appropriately: Wordpress has a default folder called uploads, for saving all the uploaded images. You can change the name of the folder and make it keyword rich. Henceforth, every time you add an image to your Wordpress blog, your image file name will be searchbot friendly.

7. Include the Title Tag: Title tag helps you add meaningful information to the image. This is helpful particularly for a site containing a lot of images.

8. Add Images To Sitemaps: Google indexes billions of images every day. Help Google find the images in your site by adding them to the sitemap. You don’t need to create a new Sitemap; you can just add information on images to the Sitemap you already use.

Use these image optimization techniques to rank better on all the engines and drive more traffic to your site.

Google Tweak’s its Ranking Algorithm- A Change for Better or Worse?

2010-08-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Over the years Google has reassessed and tweaked its algorithm numerous times to provide us the best search results on the web. Google’s rise in popularity can be attributed to its diverse and quality results in the top search result pages.

Earlier this week Google made an addition to its ranking algorithm. The current ranking algorithm helps us find more results from within a site. Any user searching for a specific domain will be presented with multiple relevant search results from that site. However, not all results on the page will be from the searched domain; Google has further announced that it will maintain the search diversity by including results from other sites.

There are a number of issues that have come into light since Google’s latest addition to the ranking algorithm.

1. Multiple results from the same domain weakly simulate the navigation structure of the site. Many users might prefer using the primary navigation of the site to the multiple search results from the same site.

2. Many results from a single domain are likely to appear when the user shows interest in a particular domain. This will push down the relevant search results from the social media sites. As visitor interests differ greatly, these results might end up pushing the relevant search results away from the users.

3. Multiple search results from the authority sites, like Wikipedia can easily overshadow other relevant results. This will cause the visitor to dig deeper into the search result pages or change the search query term.

4. Google sitelinks provide similar functionality as that of the multiple search results from a single domain.

Google’s latest addition to the ranking algorithm enhances the search results to a degree, but it also has its share of cons.

Link Research Tools – SEO Tools Review

2010-08-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

Link research tools are a collection of tools build specially for link builders. Link research tools help you in optimizing your existing set of backlinks as well as building new ones.

Link Research Tools Comprises Of The Following Tools:

1. Backlinks and Anchor Text Tool: The backlinks and anchor text tool lists all the backlinks to your website. These backlinks are categorized as do follow, no follow, offline etc. You can download your backlinks report into a CSV file even after your subscription has expired.

2. Common Outbound Links Tool: The common outbound links tool gives you a list of sites you can get backlinks from. Most of these sites are linked to by your competitor or authority pages.

3. Strongest Subpages Tool: The strongest subpages tool lists all the important subpages of a domain from where you can get a backlinks. A lot of authority sites have high quality inner pages that link out to other websites. You can use this tool to build a lot of high quality backlinks.

4. Missing Links Tool: The missing link tool checks all the backlinks of your competitor[s and compares them with your backlinks. It then lists all the missing backlinks. This is a good way of catching up with your competitors in terms of backlinks.

5. Juice Tool: The juice tool helps you analyze a variety of parameters for any given URL. The reports are available in the form of charts and graphs, making it easier for you to analyze the URL’s with the maximum link juice.

6. Common Backlinks Tool: The Common Back Links Tool helps you in unearthing sites that are commonly linking to at least two domains or pages you enter. This tool analyzes your Input and compares the list of backlinks it finds for each URL against the others. This will tell you where your competitors get their backlinks from.

7. Link Juice Recovery: The link juice recovery tool helps you find out the outbound links from your domain, that doesn’t exist anymore. You can fix this issue with an htaccess redirect or replacing the dead link with your content.

You can visit link research tools or take a tour of their services. Have you used link research tools to discover more backlinks? What are your favorite backlinks checker tools on the web?

How to Search Engine Optimize a Video You Want to Go Viral

2010-08-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

The appearance of videos in the SERP’s has made the search optimizers stand up and give video optimization a second look. Till date, videos were the most neglected lot of the web page elements. Now with viral marketing hitting the scene, videos are the being churned out one after another.

Another term for viral marketing is “Word of mouth”. Viral marketing coupled with a great video can help create a positive buzz around your brand. It increases the exposure and influence of your business / brand in the online market.

As it is with content, there are a lot of irrelevant and uninformative videos on the internet. You need to optimize your videos to get an upper hand on the already existing and high ranking videos.

Video Search Engine Optimization Best Practices:

1. Create Relevant And Informative Videos: If you want your video to go viral, you need to capture and hold the visitors attention. Include relevant and useful information in the video. The visitor should not have second thoughts about sharing and promoting your video.

2.Add A Catchy Title To The Video: The title of your video should be keyword rich and catchy. Remember that a visitor will click on the SERP link after reading the title. The title should not exceed 65 characters.

3.Include Important Key Phrases: Tag your video with important keywords. Find keywords with a fine balance of popularity and competitiveness. You can also include key phrases in your filename and video name.

4.Avoid a Lengthy Video: The length of your video should not exceed 5 minutes. Visitors do not spend much time on a search result. Your video content should immediately engage the visitors and hold their attention. If your video is very lengthy, break it down into smaller videos of 5 minutes each and tag them accordingly.

5.Brand Your Video: You can brand your video in two ways. You can add a watermark or your business logo in the video. This will help when a visitor embeds your video on their site. Your video will contain your brand name on it and the origin of the video will be always visible to the visitors.

6. Optimize The Meta Description: Your Meta description should be highly relevant to the video content. Include keywords in the video description.

7.Include A Video Rating Option: Add an option for the visitors to rate your video content. A good rating by visitors will influence others to view the video. This is a very popular technique for making your videos go viral.

8.Allow Others To Embed Your Videos: Allow and encourage the visitors to embed your video on their site. This will increase the number of do-follow backlinks to your video content. Remember to add your logo or watermark to the video.

9.Create Video Sitemaps: Google has recently announced that it will crawl and index individual videos in the sitemaps. Include all the important video tags in the sitemap. This will make it easier for the googlebot to find and index your video content.

Before creating a video, understand your target audience and their requirements. Videos that connect with the audience have a high success rate in viral marketing.

Important Tags for Building an Effective Video Sitemap

2010-08-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Videos are the most popular rich media formats in the world. Google has made a provision to make the video content on your website searchable. The search results contain the thumbnail image of your video along with the other information mentioned in the sitemap.

You need to specify all the minute details of your video content in the sitemap. This will help the searchbots to index your videos easily.

5 Important Tags for Building an Effective Video Sitemap

1. The Location Tag: The <loc> tag contains the location of the landing page for your video. The landing page URL must be unique for every video.

2. Video Content Location: The <video:content_loc> tag contains an flv URL. This URL has the actual raw video bytes containing the video content.

3. Video Player Location: The <video:player_loc> tag contains information present in the src element of an tag. The video player content should not be the same as the content of the location tag. A sitemap can contain either the content location tag or the player location tag.

4. Video Thumbnail Location: The <video:thumbnail_loc> tag contains the URL pointing to the video thumbnail image file. The recommended thumbnail size is 120*90 pixels.

5. Title and Description Tag: Google displays the content of the title tag <video:title> in the SERP’s. The title of the video content should not exceed 100 characters. Google displays only 2048 characters of the entire description tag in the SERP’s.

After you finish creating your sitemap, you can submit it to Google using the webmasters tool. There are a number of tags that you can include in the video sitemap. The tags mentioned above will help Google to crawl and index your videos quickly and easily.

5 Things Every Landing Page Needs

2010-08-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

The landing page is the heart of any pay per click campaign. The sole aim of selecting the right keywords and creating ads is to get the visitor to click on them. These ads then direct the visitors to the landing page of your website.

You need to make the most of your landing page in order to get a conversion. The first look of your landing page must generate a positive reaction from the visitor.

1. A Great Headline. The headline of your landing page must be highly relevant to the PPC ad; otherwise the visitor will hit the back button on the browser and leave your landing page. Place the headline on top of the landing page where the visitor is bound to see it first.

2. A Clean and Visually Appealing Design. Keep your landing page design clean, simple and free of clutter. Use visually appealing colors that relate to your services and product. Do not stuff your landing page with ads and images. You have only a few seconds to grab the visitor’s attention with your page.

3. A Conversion Form. Keep your conversion form simple and devoid of unnecessary data fields. Ask all the important details of the visitor, e.g. their name, contact number, email id and the service they are interested in. Specify the required and optional fields clearly. Place the contact form on the right side of the page to get maximum views.

4. Relevant Content. The content of your landing page must pick up from where the PPC ad finishes. Keep your content specific to the service, product or discount mentioned in the ad; otherwise the visitors will feel tricked into visiting your website.

5. A High Quality Score. Include targeted keywords into the headline or content of your website. This will improve the PPC quality score of your selected keywords and landing page. Avoid using heavy elements on your landing page. Your landing page needs to be able to load as quickly as possible.

You can use the Google website optimizer tool to understand which landing page format works the best for your ads. The most optimal landing page will increase your conversion rate and result in a high ROI.

Tips for Boosting the Alexa Ranking

2010-08-16T11:00:00.000-07:00

Alexa traffic rank is more than just the traffic statistics of your website. It is about your website data relative to all the other websites. Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users.

Data is obtained from various diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted and computed and the result is shown in the Alexa service.

Why is Alexa Ranking Important?

Webmasters and advertising networks determine the importance of your website by its Alexa ranking. Banner and text link advertisers are always keen on advertising on websites with low Alexa ranking.

For Alexa, a website with a rank of 500 is more important than a website with a traffic rank of 1,000,000. The concept of Alexa traffic rank is very different from that of Google page rank.

Definition of Alexa Traffic Ranking:

The Alexa traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated traffic data from millions of Alexa toolbar users and other sources. It is a combined measure of page views and users. The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time.

The rank of a site reflects two things; the number of users who visit that site and the number of pages on the site viewed by those users. In order to boost the Alexa traffic ranking of your website, you need to increase the number visitors and page views.

Tips for Boosting the Alexa Rankings:

1. Install Alexa Toolbar: This is the most basic step for increasing your Alexa ranking. You need to download the Alexa toolbar on your browser. Alexa Toolbars are easily available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox. These toolbars help send your website traffic details to Alexa.

2. Add Alexa Rank Widget To Your Website: This is a tried and tested formula for increasing the Alexa traffic ranking. Many webmasters and bloggers have installed the Alexa rank widget and observed their Alexa ranking improve.

3. Write Unique Content Very Frequently: Alexa toolbar is installed by webmasters in the field of SEO and internet marketing. Write high quality articles which will appeal to the webmasters. Once your website content catches their eye, they will visit your site frequently for updates. This in turn will increase your website visits and page views.

4. Optimize Your Website: Search engine optimization is an assured way of increasing your website traffic. Optimize your website for the niche keywords and build high quality backlinks. SEO results are slow to appear in the SERP’s, but the wait is worth it. Your Alexa ranking will improve by heaps and bounds when the SEO results start reflecting in the SERP’s.

5. Start Guest Blogging: Guest blogging is one of the quickest means of driving traffic to your site. Guest blogging has a lot of benefits. You get to reach out to a wider set of audience. Most of the blogs permit you to enter one do-follow link at the end of the article. This will increase the number of do-follow backlinks to your website which in turn boosts SEO.

At the end, it boils down to having a well maintained and frequently updated website. Have you used any other methods for improving your Alexa traffic rank? If yes, please share them with us.

How to Get and Keep Twitter Followers

2010-08-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a great way to keep up with the latest news and updates from your niche. Twitter helps you in reaching out to millions of people with just 140 characters.

The concept of Twitter is based on two things, the number of people you follow and your followers.

Here are a few tips on gaining new followers and more importantly, retaining them.

1. Complete Your Profile. Add an image and fill up your Bio and location. Include your personal or professional website link in the Web section. Your profile is your identity on Twitter. Others can relate better to you with all your details filled.

2. Interact With Your Followers. You should interact frequently with your followers. Your Tweets should have a personal touch to them. Reply to their each query personally and acknowledge their retweets.

3. Avoid Spammers. Twitter is full of spammers and a new twitter account is their main target. Keep a check on who is following your Twitter account. Personally visit the twitter account of all the followers and delete the ones which raise suspicion.

4. Tweet Your Favorite Links. You can tweet the latest posts from your favorite websites. You can use Twitterfeed for this purpose. Add the RSS feed of your favorite site and connect Twitterfeed to your Twitter account. Twitterfeed will do the rest.

5. Schedule Your Tweets. If you are busy and don’t have time to tweet, you can schedule your articles with Sprout Social. This is a great way to save time and avoid the need to be on Twitter all the time.

Twitter can help you build your business into a brand. The trick is to analyze the user behavior and provide information that appeals to them. You can use Twitter Analytics tools like klout, twitalyzer and graph edge for this purpose.You can follow us on Twitter @searchmar

How to Construct SEO Friendly URL Structure for Wordpress Blog

2010-08-10T11:00:00.000-07:00

By default, the URL of any blog post in Wordpress contains parameters. These URL’s are called dynamic URL. Search bots are programmed to understand static URL structure.

If the URL structure of your blog post is dynamic in nature, it reduces the chance of the web page ranking well. There are a number of options to make the URL structure of Wordpress SEO friendly.

1. Use Permalinks: Go to the “settings” option in the left side menu in the Wordpress dashboard. Permalinks is one of the submenus of settings. Permalinks help in improving the aesthetics and usability of the website. You can choose from the number of options available.

2. Include Keywords: Always include keywords in the URL. Your chances of ranking well increase if you include the targeted keywords in the URL. You can include the exact keyword phrase in the URL provided it is highly relevant to the web page content. Never include grammatically incorrect keyword phrases in the URL.

3. Avoid Nested Web Pages: Deeply nested web pages are considered far moved from the main web page. Search engines give very less importance to such web pages. Always keep your web pages at the first level of hierarchy.

E.g. www.example.com/services/seo.htm is considered less important than www.example.com/seo-services.htm.

4. Add Hyphens to the URL: Hyphens (-) and underscores (_) are considered separators by Google. You can separate each word in the URL with a hyphen or underscore. It promotes readability and searchbots can easily differentiate between each word. Use of hyphens is preferred in a URL because the visitors find it easier type the URL.

SEO is all about being found in the search engines. A well constructed URL goes a long way in pushing the ranking of the blog post.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep You Ahead

2010-08-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

A typical Ecommerce website contains a few hundred pages. An Ecommerce giant like Amazon contains thousands of products and millions of web pages. Optimizing a website like Amazon is not tough; it just requires a smart SEO strategy.

Optimizing an Ecommerce site is slightly different from optimizing a static website. You need to plan and construct your optimization strategy well in advance. This will help you save you a lot of time and effort in the future.

16 Ecommerce SEO Tips to Keep Your Website Ahead in Rankings and Traffic

1. Maintain a Uniform and Clean Website Structure: The home page of your website should reflect the product categories; while all the inner pages should follow a common webpage structure.

2. Use Unique Title Tag: Every product page should have a unique title. An Ecommerce site can contain any number of web pages. You can ask the programmer to code the title from the page content and product name. This makes your SEO more dynamic.

3. Select Appropriate Keywords: The keywords must be unique for every webpage. They must reflect the important phrases within the webpage content. For an Ecommerce site, you can ask the programmer to select keywords from the content and product name.

4. Create Relevant Description Per Web Page: The description of a web page is the snippet which appears in the SERPS. Every visitor reads the snippet and then clicks on the search result. It is very important to include a description relevant to the product.

5. Include Breadcrumbs For All Inner Pages: A breadcrumb is like a secondary navigation structure. It helps the visitor to navigate back to the main product category page. A breadcrumb also helps in the internal linking of the website. Overall, including a breadcrumb makes the website SEO friendly.

6. Use Heading Tag: Searchbots give a lot of importance to the heading tag. The heading tag is SEO friendly and can be used to format the title of the web page content.

7. Avoid Usage of Flash: Avoid using flash on every web page of your Ecommerce website. This will increase the site loading time. If the use of flash is inevitable, include textual content in the flash. Search engines are capable of reading the text in the flash file.

8. Optimize The Images: Add the alt tag to all the product images on your website. Search engines cannot read images. The Alt tag is a means of ensuring that the search engines read the alternate text for images.

9. Optimize The Anchor Text: Anchor text appears between the anchor opening and closing tag. It is a good practice to use keywords as the anchor text.

10. Create An SEO Friendly URL Structure: The default URL structure of a dynamic website contains parameters. Search engines are not capable of understanding these parameters. A good URL structure must contain words separated by hyphens.

11. Generate An XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap contains all the URL’s present in the website. Searchbots find it easy to find and index all the web pages in a site. If the number of web pages in a site is high, you can create a number of xml sitemaps. You can then submit these sitemaps to Google via the webmaster tool. E.g. sitemap1.xml, sitemap2.xml.

12. Limit The Number of Outbound Links: Always link to a safe and secure website. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking out to, use the no follow attribute.

13. Submit To Search Directories: Submit your website URL to good quality search directories. Most of the search directories take a few weeks to link back to a site. Fill-in the details of the submission form carefully, so that the administrator accepts the submission.

14. Submit to Article Directories and Social Bookmarking Sites: Article submission is the quickest way of obtaining high quality backlinks. You need to select the "do follow" bookmarking sites and submit the URL to them. An increase in traffic is a benefit when submitting to social bookmarking sites.

15. Integrate A Secure Payment Gateway: A secure payment gateway is the heart of an Ecommerce website. Get a trust seal from Verisign, TrustE etc. The visitors will trust your site enough to make an online payment.

16. Track User Behavior with the Good Analytics Tool: You can track and analyze the visitor’s behavior with a good analytics tool. You need to select an analytics tool based on your requirement. If your Ecommerce website operates on a large scale, you can opt for a paid analytics tool. Otherwise you can use a mix of a variety of free tools to obtain the best results.

It is very easy to rank well and get quality traffic with these tips. The trick is to maintain the balance of your site so it is SEO optimized and user friendly. What steps do you take to optimize your Ecommerce website?

Forum Link Building Revisited

2010-08-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

Need more back links? It's time to revisit the good old sources of links. It costs little on your part, since these sources are already a part of your long-term organic SEO strategies. We're talking about forums, in particular.

Your online marketing campaign no doubt already includes the organic SEO strategy to promote your site in common-interest forums and groups. Forums are places where people who share the same interests hang out. This is where they discuss everything under the sun. There are forums for all niches and interests. For example, if you run a jewelry web site, there are jewelry forums for people interested in all jewelry-related topics. These forums allow people to talk about jewelry constantly –jewelry making, material sourcing, repairs, the jewelry industry as a whole, that sort of thing.

As an online marketer, here are the benefits of niche forums to your organic SEO link building strategies:

1. Forums are a perfect place to attract target customers. Forum members are already interested about your specific product niche. They have been talking about it, so the interest is already there. As you know, customer engagement is easier when the customer is already in any way engaged.

2. Forums are moderated. Forum moderators are on the lookout for spamming, prohibiting any members who engage in this practice. The result is that forums are often high-quality sites themselves, which is perfect for generating reputably-sourced links.

3. Participation equals links. Genuine involvement in forums is all it takes to get back links to your own site. When you post useful information and provide helpful answers to other forum members, sooner or later you rise in popularity in the community. Including your web site links on your posts will be easily accepted from then on.

Here's a tip: to find forums in your niche, use Google to search for your niche. When Google returns the search results based on your niche keyword, it will also list some options in the left hand side of the page, such as news, images, maps, etc. Click on the "more" link to expand the list. It will then show more search options. Click on the "discussions" link. This returns the list of forum sites related to your niche.

Email and Social Media: A Potent Combination

2010-08-03T11:00:00.000-07:00

Most of your customers’ tweets, wall posts, blog comments and YouTube shares maybe about their personal interests, but ever so often their topic preferences may wander off to realms familiar to you -- such as your product, business, niche or industry. Don't you just wish you were on hand to join every social media conversation that your customers are engaging in right now?

Doing so might have potentially expanded your business reach. At the very least, you might have been given the opportunity to increase your email marketing list and send regular information to social media audiences through your newsletter email campaign.

Social media and email marketing can be a potent combination. Despite their differences, there are interesting points at which they intersect and complement each other. The end result is a wider audience coverage that's good for your business.

How are social media and email marketing different? Here are their points of differences:

1. Social media is all about near real-time conversations. Email is scheduled conversations.

Social media platforms are sophisticated versions of the good old chat room or forum. Content is shared in a fast and interactive manner. With email, conversations happen in a slower pace.

2. Social media users have short attention spans, but they receive it all. Email recipients give their undivided attention, or not at all.

Email offers the recipient the leisure of time to open and read the email message. It also gives them the freedom to delete your email if they consider your message spam. With social media, users receive the full stream of tweets and all wall notifications quickly. The sharing is dynamic and so is fleeting.

3. Email offers more permanence than social media.

Emails can be printed or archived for posterity or retrieval. While social media content is of less permanent nature.

Knowing these differences, it is now pretty apparent that a successful marketing campaign needs to take the strongest points of the two and mix them together. Social media builds the initial relationships with customers, while email takes this relationship into a higher level and solidifies it.

How to Create a Search Engine Friendly Website

2010-07-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

Many webmasters complain about their website not ranking well in the SERPs. What they fail to realize is that their website is not search engine friendly. A SEO friendly website contains more than keyword filled Meta tags and content.

A website must be created and designed keeping the visitors in mind. Search engines can get your website in the top ranking; but a well crafted website ensures that the visitor gets converted into a customer. You need to ensure that your website is both search engine and visitor friendly.

Tips for Creating a Search Engine Friendly Website:

1.    Fill the Meta tags: Search engines come across the Meta tags well before the content. A major part of the search result is picked up from the Meta tags. The title tag helps the search engines and visitors in understanding what the webpage is about. The Meta description gets listed as the snippet in the search result. Well formatted Meta tags play a major role in making the website SEO friendly.

2.    Include Breadcrumbs in the website: Breadcrumbs are navigational links present in the inner pages of the website. They link a web page to its respective category and sub category. Breadcrumbs help in the even distribution of the page rank to the connected web pages. You must include keywords as the anchor text of the breadcrumbs. Remember to place the breadcrumbs before the main heading of the web page.

3.    Perform the On Page Optimization Activities: SEO of a website mainly consists of on page optimization activities. To make a website search engine friendly, you should:

a.    Add a heading tag to the web page.
b.    As search engines cannot read images, add an alt tag to the images.
c.    Name the image according to the selected keywords. Use hyphens to separate long keywords.
d.    Place a keyword as the anchor text of a link.
e.    Optimize the content of your web page. Make sure that the keyword density doesn’t exceed 2%.

4.    Interlink all the important web pages: Interlinking web pages helps the search engine spiders to navigate the website. Web pages can be linked based on their category. E.g. an online book store can link their web pages based on the authors. It has been observed that a well linked website will always rank better than the non-linked websites. You can link to the important pages of your website from the homepage by using appropriate anchor text.

5.    Use SEO Friendly URL Structure: Search engines do not understand the URL’s which contain the PHP / ASP code in them. A SEO friendly URL structure contains words separated by hyphens. You can rewrite your URL’s manually via the .htaccess file. Wordpress gives you an option to change your URL structure with one click.

6.    Generate XML Sitemaps: Sitemaps help the search engines discover all the pages in your website. There are a lot of free XML sitemap generator tools available online. You can include the “priority” and “change frequency” tags in your sitemap. The priority tag indicates the importance of the web page to the search engines. The Change frequency tag tells the search engines how frequently the page is likely to change.

Having a search engine friendly website increases your chances of ranking well in the SERPs. Once in the top SERPs, your website has a good chance of converting its visitors into customers.

6 Really Cool Ideas for Email List Building

2010-07-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

Have you really exhausted all possible ways to increase your email marketing list? Do you often feel you can do more and make the list bigger? Fret not. The ideas below are sure to make you think -- why not?

1. Trade shows. Visit show booths in trade fairs. Circulate, ask questions, and learn new stuff. Don't forget to get business brochures, calling cards and informational items where there may be email addresses written. If you hosted a show or exhibit, collect email addresses from your booth visitors as well.

2. Conferences. Again, circulate, mingle, and interact. Get business cards, or give out small flyers telling participants that you are encouraging email sign-ups on your website.

3. Trendy giveaways. Apple's newest iPhone may have antenna problems, but you get the idea when you give away currently hot products like these as a monthly promo, winnable only by your email subscribers. Guess what non-subscribers will do when they got wind of your promo? Subscribe, of course! The temptation is just too great.

4. Co-registration. Have you ever subscribed to newsletters wherein when you sign-up you are asked if you wish to receive email newsletters from this and that site as well? If you answer yes, your email address is registered to those sites, too. Leverage your partners. Ask them to place your subscription form in theirs, in exchange for adding them in yours.

5. Retail store checkout. Whenever customers ring up their orders at your store, encourage them to leave their business cards to avail of freebies or enter a raffle promo.

6. Employee communications. Make it a part of your organization's culture. Encourage your employees to communicate your email subscription campaign to their customer communications -- be it by phone, or by email.

Building email marketing lists can be a fun exercise, if you follow the strategies above. The good part of the email marketing list building enterprise is that it is only limited by your imagination.

What about you? Do you have other cool ideas for email marketing list building?

Surviving the Google Ban

2010-07-28T11:00:00.000-07:00

Unwittingly or not, you may have irked Google's search engine algorithms with your organic SEO methods. Enough to earn the dreaded Google ban. In dealing with the ban, you need to have a two-fold strategy.

Strategy 1. Get Back into Google's Good Graces

Being dropped from your previous perch at Google's top page to the top 100th is bad enough, but searching for your very own domain name returns no result at all means that Google has deleted you from its index database, to your suddenly imminent disaster.

Allow yourself a brief time to despair, then get down to the business of wooing Google to bring your site back again.

1. Clean up every organic SEO violation in your site. Keep in mind that a human will review your site, not the search engine. You need to pass every rule laid out at Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

2. Send a nice (read: begging) email to Google to re-instate your site. Send it to help@google.com.

3. Wait two weeks, then a month or two. The former if you are innocent. The latter if you really practiced shady organic SEO.

Strategy 2. Go on with Life without Google

Google may be a major force in your traffic generation strategies, and the only search engine you had in mind when you designed your organic SEO campaign, but there is life beyond the Google ban. Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines also exist. Your potential visitors are still out there surfing and looking for the services or products you provide.

So to continue your site operations without Google's aid, here are the organic SEO and marketing strategies that you can still implement:

1. Article marketing
2. Email and newsletter campaign
3. Community forums
4. Blogging
5. Social networks
6. Social media sites

The above strategies will still work despite Google's ban, because they all reach out directly to people. Google's search engine crawlers may bring you your potential customers efficiently, but you can bring them to your site yourself, albeit manually and more tediously. Old-fashioned marketing principles still work -- communication, customer service, relationship building, to name a few. And these are what will bring customers in.

Better Local Search Performance Thanks to Your Customers

2010-07-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

In searching for ways to improve your local search performance, getting your business and address listed in local business directories is one effective method. As you repeatedly submit your address to local directories, you make it easier for search engines to treat each mention of your address as relevant content associated with your site. In time, whenever users conduct a local search near or around your address, yours will be one of the businesses suggested by search engine results.

Try searching for "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington" and Google will list the White House in the top first pages.

But do you know that you can do more to improve your local search performance after you had your site listed to reputable business directories? Yes, by encouraging customers to review your business listing.

Here are the step-by-step of it:

1. Submit your business name and address to high-ranking local business directories. You have to wait for a certain period before your listing is approved.

2. Once your business listing has been approved, candidly appeal to your customers to help you out by posting a review about your site in the said business directories.

3. You can integrate your appeal into your email marketing or newsletter campaigns, or utilize Facebook, Twitter and your other social media sites to reach out to customers about your local search optimization goal.

4. Suggest to your customers to use your targeted keywords when they review your company, products or services.

Google treats every customer review as fresh content and an endorsement of your site. You have to be careful, however, not to offend your customers with repeated requests for reviews. As with all marketing strategies, you need to exhibit a high level of tact and diplomacy to pull this off.

4 Tips to Speed Up Your Website Loading Time

2010-07-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

Website loading time and quick browsing speed is one of the best online experiences you can give your visitors. Consider a very common scenario. Imagine that you visit a top ranking website through the SERPs. The snippet of that website promises you the perfect solution to your search query. But when the site opens, it takes more than 10 seconds to load. You will leave the site and go straight to other search results.

16% of the visitors leave a webpage if it takes more than 10 seconds to load. A research shows that only every second visitor waits for more than 15 seconds for the website to load. You will lose half your visitors if your website has a high loading time.

Google’s decision to incorporate site loading time as a ranking factor has affected less than 1% of all the websites. Very few number of search results have been affected so far. But, the announcement has made an impact. Webmasters around the world are working on their website to decrease page load time.

4 Tips to Speed up Your Website Loading Time

1.    Reduce the number of Images: The loading time of a webpage is directly proportional to the number of images in it. Instead of using full length images, crop them into thumbnails. Wherever possible, use background colors instead of plain images. You will notice a significant improvement in your page load time.

2.    Avoid Heavy Flash Components: Flash can convert your website into a visual treat. It can also cause your page to load very slowly. Google has started crawling flash sites, but Flash is best avoided for sites looking to rank well in search engines. If use of flash is inevitable, ask your flash developer to reduce the size of the flash file.

3.    Use External CSS and JavaScript Files: Inline coding causes the size of the file to increase by a large number. Create external style sheets and JavaScript files and attach it to the web page. If there are a lot of external style sheets, merge them all into one style sheet. This way the web page will call only one file instead of many, reducing page load time. Avoid creating external files more than 50kb as this too can affect the site loading time.

4.    Utilize Web Page Load Tools: Google webmasters tool – Labs – Site performance gives you good insights on your web page performance. There are a lot of free tools available online to evaluate your website speed and load time. E.g. Page Speed & YSlow – which are Firefox, add on. Use these tools to make necessary changes to your web pages.

There has been a lot of debate among webmasters over the website load time. You must remember that “website load time” is just one among many factors affecting the ranking. Other important factors include site relevancy, reputation, on page optimization etc.

Discover How Google Generates Snippets from Your Site

2010-07-23T11:00:00.000-07:00

Google defines a snippet as “a description of or an excerpt from the webpage”. It is a popular belief that the snippet consists of the webpage title and URL along with description. The term “snippet” applies solely to the webpage description.

A snippet can vary every time for the same brand or product. It depends exclusively on the term you are searching for. You must have noticed that some terms in the snippet are bold, these are again the keywords searched by you. They are highlighted by Google to enhance user experience.

The Content Of The Snippet Depends On Various Factors. These are:

1.    Webpage Content: If your Meta description does not contain any data, search engines pick up the snippet from your webpage. Relevant content including the search query is displayed in the snippet.

2.    Meta Description Tag: By default, the search engines pull the content from the Meta description tag. For large websites, like an e-commerce website, writing Meta description manually is impractical. For such sites, the Meta description can be auto generated by including the keywords and product description.

3.    A Mix of both Content and Meta Description: In some cases, it has been observed that the snippet contains data from both the web page content and Meta Description. Few words from a sentence are pulled up followed by dots to show continuity.

4.    Open Directory Description: In some cases, the open directory description overrides the webpage content and Meta description. Google sometimes includes the open directory description in the snippet. If you don’t want this to occur, you can use NOODP in the Meta robots tag.

A search result contains more than the description. A visitor sees a lot of data on the search engine results page.

The Other Components of a Search Result are:

1.    Title
2.    Cached / Similar Pages
3.    Sitelinks
4.    Breadcrumbs
5.    A expandable button (plus sign)
6.    More results option
7.    Description under link
8.    Bold keywords
9.    A search option

In its bid to improve the visitor experience, Google has included the “search website” option in its SERPS. Currently, this option is available for websites like Wikipedia and yelp.

Rich Snippets

The rich snippets feature of Google SERPS is useful for webmasters with structured content. As the information in the snippets increase, it becomes easier for the visitor to decide the usefulness of that webpage.

Google currently supports the following information types in the rich snippets: reviews, people profiles, business listings, and events. These features can be observed for websites like yelp, i.e. review sites and social networking/people profile sites.

After setting up your website, ensure that the Meta description is in place. The webpage content should always be relevant to the title. Observe your website’s snippet in the SERPS. Over a period of time, you will learn to manipulate the snippets to some extent; in turn providing better data to the visitors.

Email List Building Right off Your Website

2010-07-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Looking for ideas on how to add more subscribers to your email marketing list? Look no further than your own web site. Here are a few tips on how to build you email marketing list just by fishing it off your website:

1. Offer attractive benefits

Your visitors may be enticed into signing up to be included in your email marketing list if you offer them an incentive. A white paper on your niche, product or technology is often useful to users. The same goes for promotional e-books.

2. Place the sign-up form in strategic places

If it's possible to place the sign-up form in all of your pages, by all means do so. Determine the pages where the form may be appropriate. For example, a summarized content page. Visitors only get the full non-summarized version of the same content in e-book form if they sign up.

3. Landing page placement

The chances are higher that visitors add themselves to your email marketing list when they see the sign-up form prominently displayed on top of your home or landing page. Graphics are expected in the home page, so the inclusion of eye-catching sign-up forms in this page is recommended.

4. Offer a reason for the subscription

People value their email reading time highly these days. You have to give them a compelling reason to add you to the tons of email they receive at their inbox. You have to commit to provide them quality and useful content.

5. Forward to friends

Provide your visitors with a facility to forward, share or refer your content to their friends. When they click on the forward/refer link, they will be asked for the email recipients that they wish to send the content to.

Building your email marketing list by using the sign-up form in your website can yield good results. After all, the visitors arrived at your web site voluntarily and because they looked for you in their targeted search. The motivation is already there. A call to action such as a sign-up form is a logical next step that they may be willing to take.

That Dreaded Google Ban

2010-07-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

Google is notorious for penalizing web sites that do not play by search engine rules. Google considers certain SEO techniques as "cheating.” Google either drops the rankings of these erring sites or exile them to search engine North Pole (a.k.a. 100th page of search results). Worse, Google can impose a ban on the site.

What are these practices that are Google ban-bait? Here are a few of them:

1. Cloaking

If you've programmed your web server to return a different version of your web pages when search spiders come crawling, Google imposes a permanent ban on your site. Your altered web pages may be packed with your desired keywords, but the actual web pages that visitors see is different.

2. Hidden text or links

Sneaky won't do with Google. Hiding keywords and links in a white on white background may not be visible to visitors, but search engines can spot these invisible content a mile away.

3. Doorway and redirect pages

Doorways are pages that attack search engine spiders with targeted keywords but real visitors are brought to a different site once they click on it. The doorways are often similar except for the differences in keywords. Redirection automatically brings visitors to other pages.

4. Duplicate content

It doesn't matter who’s the original and who’s the duplicator. As long as Google finds duplication in most of your web pages and another website, you're both in trouble.

5. Keyword stuffing

Overdoing the mention of your targeted keywords in everything from your page content to your HTML code is offensive to Google.

6. Bad links

Linking to banned sites, known spam sites, or even low-ranked sites can get your site banned or dropped in ranking. Adult sites and link farms are examples of these sites.

When you get over-zealous in your desire to be at the first page of Google, douse yourself with the proverbial cold water, which in this case is the question: what happens to your entire online business when Google bans you? Thinking of the ramifications of the Google ban is enough to sober you up.

Strategic Addressing for Effective Local Search

2010-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

One of the sure-fire ways to optimize your website for local search results is to make strategic use of your business address. A good place to start your local search optimization is right at your web pages. Here are some ways to do this:

1. List your address at the "About Us" page. Commonly, this page is all about your business and includes your history, services or products. But you can seize this opportunity to mention the location of your business as part of what you are about.

2. Place your address at the "Contact Us" page. This is often the right place for your address, lumped together with your telephone numbers and email addresses.

3. Place your address at the footer or blog side bar. This method makes sure that your address is visible at every page that users visit or every time search bots index your pages.

4. Incorporate a Google Map widget. Type in your address at Google Maps, make the necessary adjustments to get your location decently visible on the map, and click on the link button to get the HTML code that you can embed in your website.

5. Avoid keyword stuffing. Don't place the address as actual content to your blog posts or pages. Search engines may penalize you with keyword stuffing when they see the word combination being repeated several times.

6. Use microformatting code. Microformatting your address means placing code snippets to let search engines know that this group of words is an address. The snippet often appears similar to below:

<div class=”address”>
<span class=”street-address”>870 Market Street</span>,
<span class=”city-address”>California</span>
</div>

7. Use consistent and clear addressing. Once you begin with "Avenue", use it everywhere. If you prefer abbreviations, use it consistently as well. For ambiguous abbreviations like “CA” that can stand for either California or Canada, always resolve the ambiguity.

Including your address at every page of your website, without violating search engine rules will help bring your address into prominence -- both in the eyes of users and search engine spiders. This increases the effectiveness of local search for your business.

How to Get Your Tweets Ranked in Google

2010-07-19T11:00:00.000-07:00

Last year Google reached an agreement with Twitter to include tweets in its results. Tweets are 140 character long microblog posts. Google’s aim of using Twitter was to provide us with real time data in search results. This up to date information is beneficial for many regular internet users.

Let us consider a real life scenario. You are searching for the address of a newly opened restaurant on Google. After you locate the restaurant, you happen to glance upon the tweets ranking below. These tweets are reviews from other users who have been to the same restaurant recently. These reviews can either encourage you to try the restaurant or dissuade you.

Real time search results like these have the ability to influence your decision in real life. Including tweets in search results can lead to a great user experience.

Google has kept its tweet ranking algorithm under wrap. A large amount of data passes through Twitter at any given time. Google needs to be able to capture the relevant tweets in real time. Then these tweets need to be prioritized and presented in the search results in an orderly and relevant manner.

3 Important Facts about the Twitter Snippets in Google:

1.    The title of the search result snippet reads as- Twitter Result for “the searched keyword”.
2.    At any time, there are 2 or more tweets listed under the Twitter result snippet.
3.    A Twitter result contains the Twitter id of the person, their respective tweet and the time the tweet was posted.

5 Tips to ensure that you’re Tweets Get Ranked in Google:

1.    Follow selective and authoritative figures in your niche.
2.    The count of your followers must be greater than the number of people you follow.
3.    Keep tweeting about the latest news and events of your niche. Google uses tweets which are less than a few hours old.
4.    Give useful information to your followers. Never spam your Twitter account with content and unnecessary hash tags.
5.    Use Twitter analytics tools to measure your influence. If you are an influential figure in your niche, Google is bound to give your tweets a lot of importance.
6.    There are a lot of free tools available online that post tweets at regular intervals. This can save you a lot of time and effort in managing your twitter account.

It is very tough to find the same Twitter snippets twice in a day. As the tweets get older, they get discarded from the search results. With more than 27 million tweets posted a day, it is indeed very tough to get your tweets ranked in Google; but not impossible.