Is your Website Doomed for Failure Before youกve B

Is your Website Doomed for Failure Before youกve Built it?

by: Suzanne Morrison

One of the things that many people overlook when building a new website is keywords. I have to admit, I did exactly the same thing myself when I started out. You can build the flashiest, most professional looking website, with lots of great content, but if you don’t think about keywords first your website is most likely to be doomed for failure at least as far as search engines are concerned.

Visitors from search engines are the most targeted types of visitor that you could hope for. What you need to do is find out which keywords these people are using when they search in Google, Yahoo or MSN and ensure that your web page(s) are optimized for these keywords.

When researching your keywords you need to make sure that you

1. Choose keywords that people are actually searching for. Don’t optimize your site for keywords that people rarely search on.

2. Choose keywords that are not too highly competitive unless you’re an SEO whiz that is

If you keep these two goals in mind when choosing keywords you will have the best chance possible of rising to the lofty heights of the search engine results pages.

So, whatกs the best way to do keyword research? Iกve tried many different tools, but my favorite by is Wordtracker. You can sign up for a free trial of Wordtracker at http://www.homebizdirect.com/wordtracker.html but if you’re serious about your keyword research consider using the full version as it allows you to select unlimited keywords and includes results from 8 different search engines, 3 different directories and 4 different pay per click engines, compared to 1 search engine and 30 keywords in the trial version.

Once you’re logged into Wordtracker I recommend using the กKeyword Universeก to brainstorm for keywords. You just need to type in any keywords related to your area of interest and then use the built in thesaurus to find related keywords and synonyms. For example if I enter the keywords กinternet marketingก Wordtracker returns 300 related keywords including กweb site marketingก, กpromotionก and กonline marketingก.

Wordtracker then allows me to view a list of all the keyword searches that have included my keyword phrase. If I click on กweb site marketingก Wordtracker returns 118 rows of keywords that include that phrase, for example กweb site marketingก, กweb site marketing strategyก, กweb site online marketingก and more.

If I like the look of these keywords I can just add them to my basket and continue choosing keywords until I have 100s of keywords. For this example Iกll just add the 118 results to my basket and continue on to Wordtracker’s กCompetition Analysisก.

At the competition analysis phase I have a number of search engines, directories and pay per click engines to choose from. I can choose a maximum of two search engines, but for speed I normally tend to just go for Google, since it represents 35% of all searches. I can always go back later and look at other search engines if I have a good set of keywords.

Now the interesting part begins…

Wordtracker returns me a table with the first 100 keywords from my earlier keyword selection. The keywords are displayed in order of กKEIก, which means กKeyword Effectiveness Indexก. This is a measure to allow you to quickly identify which keywords are likely to give you the best results. Keywords with high KEIs are the best targets as these represent keywords with a combination of a high number of searches and a low amount of competing websites.

Other important statistics provided by Wordtracker are:

24 Hours – The predicted amount of traffic for a single day, for this search engine only (Google in this case)

Competing The number of competing websites for this keyword phrase.

Hereกs an example of two of the results returned from my กmarketing web siteก search:

Example 1

กmarketing web site designก

KEI 54.256

Count 46

24Hrs 17

Competing 39

Example 2

กweb site marketingก

KEI 0.256

Count 505

24Hrs 171

Competing 998000

You can see from these examples that the most popular keyword phrase here is กweb site marketingก, with approximately 171 searches in Google every 24 hours. However, this keyword phrase has almost a million competing websites, so if you decided to target this you would have a long hard slog to get on the first page of the search results.

In this example, my preference would be to choose the กMarketing web site designก phrase. Although there are 10 times less searches on Google per day for this keyword phrase, there are only 39 competing websites. So the chances are that I can get onto the first page of search results very quickly. I could also combine this keyword phrase with a few others from my research to build up the number of visitors to my site.

Once you have finished researching and have a good keyword list, ensure that add your keywords to

the page title

the h1 and h2 tags

the image alt tags

the keyword meta tags

the copy itself

Also make sure that you include the keywords in the anchor text when you are linking to your site from another site.

Going through this exercise of choosing keywords each time you set up a new website or create a new webpage will ensure that you have the best chance of getting targeted search engine visitors.

About The Author

Suzanne Morrison is the webmaster of http://www.homebizdirect.com. Visit her site to learn about more ways to promote your website.

This article was posted on August 27

by Suzanne Morrison

4 Steps to a Successful AdWords Campaign

4 Steps to a Successful AdWords Campaign

by: Michael McLaughlin

Not getting the satisfaction you want from your AdWords account? Want to make more money by spending less?

Google AdWords has made many businesses successful by providing them with a great deal of highly targeted traffic for as little as 5 cents! Yet many webmasters and advertisers are incompetent when it comes to using AdWords efficiently. After $100 in losses and having many failed campaigns, I have learned how to solve many of these setbacks, so I have put together a list of the 4 steps required to come out on top.

1. Design

Decide how the layout of your ad will present itself. Next consider what you want to be included in the title and what facts or catch phrases you want your visitor to know before they decide to spend your money by clicking on your advertisement. Don’t be a fool and get your ad disabled, please be sure to follow all of Googleกs rules and regulations on there editorial guidelines page.

Many computer owners are just learning how to purchase using the miracle of the internet and even more people do not understand that when they click on those Google ad’s they are spending someone’s money just by clicking on it. They also don’t understand that most of the pages that they are going to be clicking on are product pages trying to sell them something. Many aren’t even interested in spending any money no matter how convincing your sales pitch can be. Though, this depends on what they are searching for. To avoid this simply yet destructive problem merely put the price of your product directly into your ad.

2. Brainstorm

This is where my downfall began, I selected few keywords and in turn received little traffic, and the traffic I did receive was very expensive! To avoid this start off by taking the position of your possible customer. If you were searching for the product that you sell, what would you, as a customer search for? Do that now and make a list of as many search phrases and keywords you can think of. Don’t be afraid to use Google’s keyword tool, though I found that this isn’t too helpful.

After you squeezed out as many words you can, glance over them and determine what words and phrases can be combined to form a new one. Simply come up with as many words as possible, once you get started its easy and you should come out with around 250 keywords. Review this list and delete some of the keywords that are ขout thereข and wouldn’t produce targeted traffic.

3. Optimize

Never waste your money using Google’s suggested cost per click; it is 10 times higher than necessary. Many advertisers do not understand that there click through rate effects there position to the same degree with how much they pay per click. To make this easier to understand here is an example: if you pay 5 cents per click for the phrase ขshopping cartข and your competition pays 10 cents and has a click through rate of .5%, to surpass this person in position you need to double your click through rate to anything above 1% yet you are still paying half of what he is! For keywords that are less targeted to your product or purpose yet still effective I suggest pricing them to nearly half that of highly targeted keywords for a rule of thumb.

Now that all your keywords and pricing is in place, set your daily budget lower than you plan on spending per day for now, this way incase it’s a failure you don’t lose that much. Let your campaign run for a few days, but before you do make sure you set up conversion tracking. Watch what keywords perform well and convert to conversions, and delete the ones that cost you nothing but money. If at first you don’t succeed try try again.

4. Experiment

As you watch the performance of your keywords and Ad groups you should continue to try new things. Change one word in your ad and compare the results to previous, trust me one word can and will make the difference; whether positive or negative that is for you to discover! If you are having trouble finding an ad that gets enough clicks to avoid being disabled brainstorm again and create as many ads as possible, even if they are terrible they will give you new ideas. Pick your favorite three and create a new ad group while comparing the results to your other ad groups.

If you do not find success after following all of these steps, what you’re doing isn’t wrong it’s what you’re trying to sell. To determine if your product is assured to fail ask your self this question: is this product helping someone or is it just another great idea? Chances are if it’s a great idea people aren’t searching for it, or in desperate need of it.

Continue to track and modify your keywords and Ad groups while watching your sales and popularity excel!

About The Author

Written by: Michael McLaughlin at http://www.webmastershed.com – webmaster forum, for more articles by this author please visit: http://www.webmastershed.com/articles

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 17

by Michael McLaughlin

Finding The Cheap Clicks

Finding The Cheap Clicks

by: Henry EldridgeDoyle

As anyone who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in their marketing campaign knows, getting your ad copy on the front page of a search results listing is becoming more expensive by the day. It’s a new phenomenon known as ‘keyword fatigue’, and itกs down to the overwhelming success of programs like Googleกs AdWords. As more and more advertisers realise the benefits of this form of traffic generation, so the number of people bidding for the same keywords increases, and the bid prices climb accordingly. Great news if you are a publisher taking a cut of the revenue, but not so welcome for those doing the bidding.

So are the days of 5 cents a click now just a distant memory? Not at all, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of keyword phrases out there for minimum cost, all it takes is a little more effort to use them. To understand how this can be done, with Google AdWords in particular, it is first necessary to understand how ad positions are determined.

Googleกs PPC program, like their core search engine, places a great deal of emphasis on advertisment relevance. When a web surfer types keywords into the search box, Google wants the ad that most closely matches that phrase to be shown nearest the top of the list not just the ad bidding the highest amount of money. It mutiplies bid price by keyword relevance, and that means that by careful selection of your keywords, it is possible to be placed above competitors and pay only 1 cent more than they are (Google doesn’t necessarily charge the maxium amount you bid, only enough to put you ahead).

There are three simple ways you can trump your competitors with your keyword selection:

1. Longer phrases. There are huge numbers of people bidding on a loose term like กmortgage brokerก, but fewer people bidding on a tighter phrase like กmortgage broker in texasก. If a searcher types กmortgage broker in texasก into Google, and you have that phrase in your keyword list, your ad will be deemed more relevant than anyone just using กmortgage brokerก in their own list which means a cheaper click for you! Of course, there are fewer searches for mortgage brokers specifically in Texas than for mortgage brokers in general, so itกs necessary to build a large list of similar keyphrases targetting many locations.

2. Closer matching. Just because you might type กin car satellite radioก into Google, doesn’t mean every surfer will do the same. Somebody else searching for the same thing may well enter กsatellite radio in carก, or กradio in car satelliteก, and so on. If your ad contains every variation, it may trump a competing ad which lists only the first example. In other words, having just the keywords in your list isn’t necessarily enough having them in the same order a searcher enters them will give your ad a better relevance score.

3. The final (Google specific) method is to ensure that you wrap every keyword or keyphrase in both quotes and brackets. Again, this means that if someone enters an exact term you have listed, your ad will beat a competing ad that has the same term but without the brackets or quotes.

Clearly, building keyword lists in this way can be more time consuming than simply selecting a few generic words that describe your product or service, but free tools such as those at http://www.keywordlinker.com can make the process much quicker than doing it manually.

Cheap keyphrases are still there for the taking, the winners in PPC now will be those who put in the effort to catch them.

About The Author

Henry EldridgeDoyle is an internet marketeer, and site developer at http://www.keywordtoolkit.com.

This article was posted on September 29, 2004

by Henry EldridgeDoyle

Make Quality Content Your #1 Priority

Make Quality Content Your #1 Priority

by: John Tulus

It is by now a proven fact that content is the most important element for getting better pagerank and, consequently, more traffic.

Furthermore, the best ranking websites have content that is better written than most other sites.

A common mistake is to think that Google spiders just consider keywords and layout in order to establish pagerank.

If you look at the top ranking pages for the most searched for keywords, you will see that the quality of the content has been essential for getting them better pagerank, not to mention the enormous amount of traffic that Google sends them as a consequence.

Let’s look at some of the key areas that we have to keep in mind when producing content:

1. Updates

If you don’t update your content frequently, your visitors won’t have a reason to come back, and Google will not consider your site for better pagerank. You may get a good initial pagerank, but if Google doesn’t see that the site is updated frequently, pagerank will surely fall as a consequence. The best frequency is once a week, when possible.

2. Grammar and spelling

Sites that are well ranked in Google have little or no spelling and grammar errors. Before uploading content, make sure to check for spelling and grammar mistakes. Microsoft Word’s spellcheck may even be more than enough for this task.

3. Paragraph layout

Not only on websites, but in any type of message that implies text, lengthy paragraphs are difficult to read and readers loose focus on the content. Google is also aware of this fact and prioritizes short 1 to 4 sentence paragraphs.

The same applies to sentence length. Keep sentences brief and to the point with only relevant information. If there is an extensive idea that must be included, you can break it up into two or more sentences.

4. Keywords

On well ranked sites, references are made throughout a page to keywords and variations of the keywords. Always keep content relevant to the keywords that are referenced to your site.

5. Lists

Whenever presenting lists of items, it is better to show them bulleted or numbered and not in paragraph format. This is visually much better for your visitors and Google will also give it better pagerank. For example, see the difference with the text from this section in both formats:

Example 1 – Paragraph format:

When creating content, keep in mind updates, grammar and spelling, paragraph layout, keywords, and lists.

Example 2 – Numbered

When creating content, keep in mind:

Updates

Grammar and spelling

Paragraph layout

Keywords

Lists.

Some final thoughts:

Always make sure that you have quality content on your site.

If you write your own content, try to have an editor or a professional writer look at it before uploading, until you gradually develop your own writing skills.

Make sure you update your content frequently.

Distribute some of your content freely to other websites. This will generate more links to your site and improve your pagerank as well.

If you don’t have writing skills and aren’t willing to pay a professional writer to continuously create content for you, you can opt to acquire content databases that will provide you with extensive content that you can update regularly.

Once you have your site up and running, focus on content from then on. The design and layout of your site may be a one time only process, but content needs to be taken care of and nurtured to generate traffic and keep those visitors coming back for more.

About The Author

John Tulus is Marketing Director at Web Marketing Experts, developer of internet marketing solutions to help companies increase sales and profitability online. If you would like to learn more about Internet Marketing, visit Our Website at http://www.wmxp.com and http://www.webcontents.org or email John at [email protected].

This article was posted on September 08

by John Tulus

Making Informed Keyword Choices

Making Informed Keyword Choices

by: John Calder

Marketers stake much of their livelihood on keywords, whether for proper search engine optimization or targeted payperclick advertising. One challenge faced by inexperienced marketers involves knowing which phrases to target out of hundreds of combinations.

Often, one will find terms which look good, but later testing reveals the terms simply don’t convert visitors to sales. If you performed your due diligence by testing and tracking all elements of the sales page (copy, graphics, price, etc), this scenario may leave you baffled and wondering ขWhy didn’t this phrase produce sales? It really looked like a winner!ข

Every search term presents us with the challenge of reading intent. What was the visitor really looking for when they typed in the phrase? While it’s impossible to know this with certainty, you can improve your ability to read intent from keywords, and improve the accuracy of your targeting.

The First Guideline: Pay Attention to Qualifying Terms

Are multiterm (3 or more keyword) search phrases more targeted? Not always. A narrow search indicates only that searcher intends to find a specific piece of information. It does not necessarily indicate intent to purchase.

For example, the search phrase ขbig blue widgetข points to a narrowly defined interest, but does not reveal whether the searcher intends to research prices, look at photographs of big, blue widgets, or merely discovered a passing curiosity after hearing about them someplace else. The phrase appears promising at first, but still presents us with a high likelihood of nonconverting traffic. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t test such a phrase, only that you are more likely to see a good deal of untargeted spillover traffic.

What you really want to look for during your keyword research is qualification. Specificity is not enough. So, how do you spot the qualifying terms that indicate the searcher is in buying mode?

You spot them by applying a formula to your keyword list. If you have your list in front of you now, take a look at it and see if you can apply the following parameters to any of the phrases:

Contextual/Situational

Urgent

Preferential

Relevant terms for contextual/situational searching might include:

Bad credit/good credit

Student

Divorced

Retired

Self Employed

When you apply contextual/situational parameters to your keywords, you should think in terms of ขfilling in the blanksข of the situation: ขIf I have bad credit, where can I get a loan?ข ขWhile I’m a student, what deals can I get on travel?ข

Searches qualified in this way indicate an active interest in finding solutions. Visitors generated from these terms may view themselves as still in ขresearch modeข, but the fact is that they are as ripe as they’ll ever be for a convincing sales pitch.

What about urgency? The most obvious terms to look for include: fast, quick, speedy, immediate, and so on. However, you may also find terms which imply urgency, such as : easy (the easier it is, the faster it is), hasslefree, preapproved, automatic and instant, to name a few.

Lastly, preference can reveal much about where the visitor is in the buying process. Qualifying terms pertaining to the sales process, to delivery (e.g., ขinstant downloadข or ขfree shippingข) and customer service all indicate a proactive search for solutions.

The Second Guideline: Know Your Industry

Inexperienced marketers often miss out on keyword goldmines because they make the mistake of focusing only on the data their keyword tools give them for broad terms. The tools and tactics one picks up in his or her marketing education are valuable, but they’re no substitute for intimate knowledge of the market. When you ขdabbleข in an industry you often choose only the most obvious keywords, and this leaves you in competition with all the other dabblers scrounging for top placement on those terms.

A much better option (especially if your field is affiliate marketing) is to educate yourself deeply on the vocabulary of one market at a time. Learn everything you can about this one market, its sub or spinoff markets, and anything else that helps you live and breathe the mindset of your potential customer.

When you do this, you will find a wealth of new keywords – words with which only an ขinsiderข would be familiar. These terms are not only more targeted, but they invoke a measure of instant credibility as well. The customer knows you couldn’t reach him if you did not ขspeak his language’.

The Third Guideline: Choose Terms Which Hold Synergy with Your Sales Copy

In the fight to squeeze out as much traffic as possible, it is tempting to bid on as many keywords as possible and funnel them all to one or two sales pages. A better tactic is to slice down your keyword list into subsets which closely match the tone evoked by your sales copy. Next, separate out the terms which you feel are viable but ขdon’t quite fitข, and create new sales copy to support them.

Why do all of this extra work? Well, there’s a little secret you should know about. It comes from a surprising place: the world of personal ads. Personal ads provide the ultimate study in ขshort copyข. Have you ever placed an ad on a dating site and found that most of your respondents focused on only one or two words in your profile and then wrote to you despite their obvious incompatibility?

People are often lazy and they are often hurried. Your customer’s eyes zero in on only a few words – those most important to him at that very moment, and the rest of your copy gets filtered away.

This is why it’s crucial that your keywords hold synergy with your sales copy – and by synergy I mean that if you intend your prospect to zero in on, for example, ขeasy web site creationข, then your copy should speak only to ease, speed and instantaneous gratification of your product, and not make mention of any additional, complicated features. Save those features for your copy when you target people on terms like ขadvanced web site creationข. Even if your solution offers both ease of use and advanced results, split them off.

Making informed keyword choices boosts your bottom line. Remember that quality always trumps quantity. Even though you can’t read your customers mind, the guidelines presented here will get you one step closer to dissecting it!

Copyright 2004 John Calder

About The Author

John Calder is the owner/editor of The Ezine Dot Net. Visit today and read more of his articles held online at: http://www.TheEzine.Net. RSS feeds are available

This article was posted on September 06, 2004

by John Calder

Part 2 Do Not Ever Link to a Site Without Doing T

Part 2 Do Not Ever Link to a Site Without Doing This First!

by: John Krycek

Writing Links

In the first part of this article we learned some techniques to build a solid potential link partner list for your website. Those sites aren’t any good to you if you don’t use a strategy for writing the textual content of those links. Yes. I mean those few little words that are underlined in blue. In the right order they give the key to your website door to the world. In the wrong order, they don’t budge the cylinders in the lock.

Number of links takes second place to quality of links. The words you choose, varying them for each targeted link site, and incorporating some tried and true direct mail standard tactics will make your links more popular in the search engines, which is our ultimate goal. So lets get started!

As we said earlier, links are a crucial part of attaining high search rankings. The key to writing good กlink contentก uses the same tactics for writing all good web content. Namely, don’t write for the search engines. Write for your readers and target audience. After you do that, then go back and tweak the little details to optimize for the engines. Why? The search companies attempt to give results for human readers, and because a number one search engine position is worthless if the description of your site is the most boring thing anyone has ever read.

You have humans that are examining your site to see if they want to link to you. Even if you pay for links someone has to make the decision that you’re worthy of being on their site. And further, youกll never sell your product or service or attain any readership. Letกs take a simple stepbystep approach and make sure your links are lively, catchy, searchable and gushing to be clicked.

Pretend you’re the owner of a pumpkin company website. You sell all things made from pumpkins.

Step 1 Review Your Keyword List

Those are the words and phrases that you want to rank highly with in the search engines. They are the starting point for your link text. Note: กlink textก is the clickable part of the link, the underlined blue type. Letกs take some keywords and apply a few tactics to them to develop a good link.

A few keywords might be:

pumpkin retailer

pumpkin festival

pumpkin plant

pumpkin holiday

pumpkin festival

Step 2 Create variations on those keywords.

Think of phrases that someone might enter into a search engine. Using that thought as the core, build outward by elaborating and specifying. Ask yourself กwhat type of ____?ก to help you expand. For example, take the few keywords above and make them a bit more specific to:

pumpkin pie recipe

pumpkin bread recipe

cooking pumpkin seed

pumpkin patch

how to grow pumpkin

planting pumpkin seed

pumpkin carving design

carve Halloween pumpkin

pumpkin carving pattern

pumpkin costume

pumpkin centerpiece

Note: When coming up with additional keyword phrases (for use within your page elements and link) try this tool. www.inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ is part of Overture sponsored listings (now Yahoo) that will tell you how many times a phrase was searched in their engines on the web. Target the phrases with the most hits.

Step 3 Word Varieties

Your link should contain enough words so that when read out of context it still makes sense. Not so many words that it becomes blurred when a reader scans through a page.

Take the list you just made vary your keyword links using all of those keywords. Search engines raise an eyebrow at seeing กpumpkin recipeก on 50 sites with the exact same phrase all pointing back to you. It doesn’t see natural. Mixing up your link text with กpumpkin pie recipieก,กpumpkin bread recipeก, and กcooking pumpkin seedsก and the rest of your list keeps you well diversified without danger of spamming. And your keywords are more focused and targeted which gives you a better chance of being ranked higher.

Step 4 Incorporating Direct Mail Tactics

Now we have the words that will make up our link text. We’re almost finished. We need to give people some motivation to click.

The simplest of direct mail programs or incentive marketing campaigns all have a solid กcall to action.ก We need one here too. Why should a reader go to your site? Whatกs in it for them? Theyกve got better things to do.

So many websites use the phrases กClick here,ก กLearn more,ก or กMore infoก. Thereกs a definite boundary between keeping things simple and clean on a web page and just copping out. When I see those phrases on a link I think the writer didn’t have time to get me excited about their product so I don’t have time to go look.

It doesn’t take much to write a simple call to action. For example:

Instead of กpumpkin pie recipe,ก say กGrandmaกs pumpkin pie recipe and all things pumpkin at The Orange Pumpkin.ก Now your reader knows the name of your business (which will also be indexed), and thinks if itกs made by Grandma itกs probably good… I think Iกll have a look.

Step 5 Put it all together

Take your keyword phrase and surrounding text and create your link. The coded form looks like this.

Grandmaกs pumpkin pie recipe and all things pumpkin at The Orange Pumpkin.

Every single link doesn’t have to be different, but you should have quite a variety if you follow these steps for all your keywords.

Don’t forget to use those keywords within your page too!!

Step 6 Final Thoughts

Stay away from link farms and free for all link sites.

List in as many Directories as you can, especially ones that are of the same nature as your site.

Try to get oneway links. You might be able to buy some from someone fairly cheaply. If you have to get a reciprocal link, stick to sites that are similar in theme to yours. They don’t have to be identical, but in the case of The Orange Pumpkin Company, a link from a car dealer is a waste of time…unless that car dealer happens to have a collection of the worldกs greatest pumpkin recipes on their site. If thatกs the case, then try to get a link on the page with the recipes.

Even though you’re goal is to rank high in the searches, write for the end user. Then go back and finetune things for an optimized search engine friendly page.

Good luck and happy linking!

About The Author

John Krycek is the owner and creative director of theMouseworks.ca. Read more articles on the insights and secrets of website design and development and internet marketing in easy, nontechnical, up front English!

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 25

by John Krycek

Niche Marketing: Tactics to Use To Make Money With

Niche Marketing: Tactics to Use To Make Money With Niche Marketing

by: Karl Augustine

Niche marketing has always been a key any success in marketing but lately it has become quite a prominent force in the online marketing world. Many books, manuals, courses, and web sites have been developed that focus on niche marketing. It is easy to find solid resources on the Internet that can teach you how to make money with niche marketing.
Niche marketing online is a distinct segment of Internet marketing and is the quickest way to get maximum exposure if you know how to leverage the search engines to draw attention to your niche web site.
Thereกs many things to learn to be successful and profit from niche marketing and your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) will dictate exactly how to plan your attack to successfully market to customers in your niche.
If you plan to use niche marketing to draw visitors to your web site, hereกs a few tactics that you can use to make money:
Niche Marketing Tactic #1, ‘researchก
Fully utilize all of the research mechanisms that you can find in order to make sure that you truly understand your niche and all of its nuances.
This requires understanding what tools are best to use so you can understand what your target niche market does day to day, where they spend their time online, and what makes them tick from a personal and business perspective.
Niche Market Research (http://www.nichemarketresearch.com)offers free reports and articles to help you make the most of your research time.
Niche Marketing Tactic #2, กDefine your paying nicheก
Clearly define who will make up your niche market and make sure that the people in that niche market are willing to pay for the solution that you provide to their problems.
A niche is a clear subset of a larger category.
An example of what a niche market is not: กPeople who want to learn how to shoot better scores in golf.ก
In this example, there are far too many people within the main category (golf) to make this a true niche. Virtually everyone who plays golf will want to play better and shoot better scores so this wouldn’t qualify as a niche, much less a category worth pursuing.
An example of a niche market: กWomen who play golf who want to learn how to drive the ball longer and straighter.ก
This would be a niche because it clearly defines and segments who youกll cater to and why they would need your service.
After clearly defining your niche market, you should make sure that they are willing to pay for your services. The easiest way to determine this in the online world (other than using common sense) is to find web sites that may be close to, or even in your niche, and see if those web sites charge a fee for their services.
In addition, you should look to see if there is a reasonable level of competition between those web sites.
If you see more than a few sites listed on a SERP (Search Engine Result Page) that cater to female golfers for a fee, chances are the people who are your target customer will pay for your services for solving their problem women who can’t consistently hit long straight drives in golf.
Niche Marketing Strategy #3, กChoosing keywords and domain namesก
Research and choose your keywords carefully so you can acquire the best domain name for your site. Niche marketing most often includes maximizing the way search engines work to make sure that your web site gets listed n the first page of the SERPกs from your chosen keywords. Your domain name contributes to getting those first page results.
Go to Digitalpointกs keyword suggestion tool and type in keywords that you feel people would use to find the product or service that you offer within your niche. Look at the number of searches performed per day for those keywords and review the other keywords listed.
http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/
Type the keyword phrase that you think best suits your USPกs target customer into Google and assess whether or not you can reasonably compete with the sites that are listed on page 1 of the SERPs.
Can you get a page 1 ranking knowing that youกll have to compete with the sites already listed?
Repeat the process until you have decided what your main keywords will be for your product or service within your niche.
Those keywords should be in your domain name and preferably, they should be your entire domain name.
Example: if youกve concluded that กblue widgetsก best suits your USP and you feel that you can compete for page 1 listings on the SERPs with the sites that come up on page 1 for the keyword กblue widgetsก, then a good domain name for your niche marketing site would be กbluewidgets.comก.
Niche Marketing Tactic #4, กPosting keyword rich articles or reports throughout the webก
Niche marketing doesn’t differ from any other online search engine marketing, posting relevant content is the best way (bar none) to get the right type of traffic to your niche site.
Writing keyword rich articles or reports and posting them to high traffic web sites is a great way to make sure that you get maximum exposure within your niche market. People will use your keywords to search for information about the topic that they have interest in, and they will come across your web site on the search engines results.
Niche marketing caters to a distinct and select group of people who need what you have to offer. If you define your niche properly and make sure that your ability to solve their problem is something that they will pay for, you will have established a กmoney makerก.
Utilize the search engines to make it easy for your niche market to find your service or product. Niche marketing is the easiest way to be successful on the Internet if you do the proper research.

About The Author

Karl Augustine Publisher, กStarting Smart!ก

*Learn SEO Top 10 listings

http://www.9mistakesonline.com/nichemarketing.htm

This article was posted on July 08, 2004

by Karl Augustine

Making Google Adsense Work For You

Making Google Adsense Work For You

by: Erol Alici

If you have been online for quiet some time you might have noticed those tiny ads on many websites with the little กads by googleก notice beneath them.

These ads are called กAdsenseก, they are paid advertisements and can be a very lucrative income source for the person posting them on his/her website.

Whenever someone visits your website Google displays these ads wich are very targetted to your websites content. This is what its all about, since people come to your website with a specific interest Google will display ads reflecting that topic.

That means that any ad that is displayed fits the interest of the person viewing it. Since Google pays you for each clicktrough this can be very lucrative if done right. Here are just a couple of examples on how you can get the most from Adsense.

Focussing on one specific topic helps increase your clicktroughs because the ads Google displays will be extremely targetted to the topic the person is allready viewing.

For example you could make a website purely on growing flowers. People who visit your website are already interested in gardening and Google will likewise display ads on that topic.

A great tool to check wich keywords might be shown by Google on your website is http://www.aboutadsense.com/adsensewebtool.html

The more targeted Googleกs ads are the more clicktroughs you will get and the more you will earn.

Search for the keywords that have the highest bids and optimize your website to them.

When you setup an account at http://www.adwords.com you can use Googles keyword tool to view wich keywords pull the most visitors and how much the advertisers are paying for each click. Some keywords are as much as $100 a click, think of what you earn when you optimize your website to them.

Next you optimize your sites content to these keywords, you can do this by either creating content yourself or by using other peoples content like for example articles from third parties wich you can find at for example http://www.ezinearticles.com.

Remember its all about targeted content, the more targetted your content is the more target Googleกs ads will be and the more clicks you will generate.

Have fun!

Erol Alici

Copyright 2005 Erol Alici

About The Author

Erol Alici publishes กHome Based Business Successก an informative newsletter dedicated to supporting people build their online business. If you`re looking for the best opportunities, the latest tips and helpful support from an honest friend in the business then grab your FREE subscription today at: http://www.homebasedbusinesssuccess.com or send a blank email to mailto:[email protected] youกll be glad you did!

This article was posted on April 08

by Erol Alici

8 Essential SEO techniques

8 Essential SEO techniques

by: Matt Colyer

1) Title Tag The title tag is the most powerful onsite SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have itกs own title tag.
2) ALT Tags ALT tags were meant to be for text browsers because the images didn’t show in text browsers and the ATL tags would tell the visitor what itกs about. You should put your main keyword(s) in the ALT tags, but don’t over do it because you could get dropped in the results or even worse banned for life!
3) Link Popularity Link popularity is the most powerful SEO tool out of all them. Most search engines don’t even consider web sites if there is not at least one or two links pointing to the web site. Having another site(s) link to your web site is important when it comes to getting your site a good ranking. Your keywords should be in the links you get and keep the keywords short. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).
4) Keyword Density This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag, once in the heading tag, once in bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don’t over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.
5) Page Size Your web pageกs speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.
6) Rich Theme Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content thatกs related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.
7) Web Site Design This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of todayกs leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.
8) Insite Cross Linking This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

About The Author

Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network which includes www.linkexchangeit.com and is a parttime SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer. You can read more articles like this at www.marhen.com/articles/index.php.

This article was posted on July 29, 2004

by Matt Colyer

Understanding Google AdWords

Understanding Google AdWords

by: S. Housley

Google AdWords

Unlike many search engines Google, to its credit, clearly denotes search listings that are paid placement. In fact, Google AdWords appear in a separate section down the left side of the screen.

Google AdWords provide an inexpensive advertising venue for businesses to advertise products or services to a targeted audience. Advertisers have the ability to control their budget, target their advertising based on keywords. Advertisers are also free to determine the ad contents.

Google AdWords allow for nearly instant traffic, which can be turned on and off. Traffic results can be measured, providing information on what is successful, what isn’t and what needs to be changed. AdWords can be found that work by running a test campaign.

Benefits to AdWords

Advertisers bid on keywords, the more an advertiser is willing to pay the higher the likelihood the ad will appear higher in position in the list of ads served. Google, invariably wanting to make the most from advertisers, determines placement based on a combination of click through rate, bid amount and budget. Of course, in order to maximize revenue and please searchers Google does have guidelines for ads served and all ads must receive a minimum percentage click through or they are removed.

AdWord Guidelines

Clearly and accurately describe the website, this is to the advertiser and searchers benefit. Ultimately, the more qualified the visitor who clicks the ad, the higher the likelihood the clicker will convert into a sale. By providing clear and accurate information, searchers who click the ad are qualified leads, which tend to convert more consistently than unqualified leads. The most effective advertising communicates a clear message to a targeted audience.

Avoid excessive capitalization, superlatives and lavish exclamation marks in the ad. By doing this you are not only serving the visitor you are filtering unwanted clicks from nonbuyers. Due to space limitations your ad message will need to be concise. Select keywords that are relevant to your product, service or content. Call to action phrases are not allowed (i.e. you cannot use phrases like กclick hereก in your ad copy.) There are also no popups.

Steps for AdWord Campaign

1.) Open an account

2.) Target language and country This is very important because if your product or service can not be exported you do not want to pay to advertise in those countries for which your product or service can not be sold.

3.) Create Ad Group design an ad, select keywords, determine maximum cost per click that you are willing to spend and define bid amounts.

Title

The title tag is generally the most important part of the ad be sure to use a short phrase that gets the attention of your target audience. An underutilized feature at Google allows you to put a question mark in the title, the term searched on automatically replaces the question mark in the title of your ad.

Define max click Google will suggest a cost per click, but the recommendation does not need to be adhered to. Arguments have been heard that #1 position does not always mean increased sales; sometimes a second position will filter useless clicks and provide targeted traffic with a higher conversion ration. The rule of thumb is positions 13 garner the most traffic and best results. Increasing either your maximum costperclick or the ads click through rate will generally improve the adกs position.

Use keyword variations to reach more prospects. A variety or spellings and derivatives of keywords will increase the chances of your ads being served. Be sure to use common misspellings and plurals in your keyword list.

Broad match is targeting keywords in a loosely defined manner. Ads appear based on keywords that have been queried by search users. For instance, if the keywords you are planning on broad matching are กmountain bikesก and users search for the terms กbikes that can climb a mountainก, your ad will appear; as opposed to exact match, which requires that the keywords selections must exactly match the query.

Phrase match is indicated when quotations are used in the phrase. A keyword phrase set to phrase match will only appear when the exact phrase is searched on. For example กmountain bikesก will appear when searchers search for กbrand name mountain bikesก.

Exact match is when the keyword or phrase is entered with brackets. The phrase will only serve ads when the entered search phrase is identical to the keyword phrase. กMountain bikesก will only appear when searchers search for กmountain bikesก

Negative keyword is helpful in filtering unrelated phrases. A dash is entered before the filtering phrase. กMountain bike races will not appear if mountain bike races are searched on.

Landing Page is important because this not only helps with tracking, but also provides a focused and specific landing page for searchers. Information can be related to the actual search, while also increasing the conversion ratios for sales. A focused landing page with content related and using the same terminology as the actual search, will show the searcher that your solution is relevant to their needs.

3.) Define budget in order to maximize exposure Google recommends a daily budget for each campaign.

Googleกs suggested budget is helpful in receiving consistent traffic throughout the advertising campaign. Keep in mind this is only Googleกs recommendation; ultimately it is up to you to determine a budget that is affordable and suitable.

Google supplies tracking tools that assist webmasters in determining their return on investment based on keyword searches and phrases. While the technology is not perfect and cannot track phone and purchase orders, it should give advertisers a sense of what phrases and keywords are converting well in their advertising campaign.

While Google AdWords should not be your only advertising campaign, but should be a significant part of your campaign. Google AdWords can certainly help send those important targeted searchers to your website. Get started with Google AdWords at http://www.google.com/ads/

About The Author

Sharon Housley manages marketing for NotePage, Inc. http://www.notepage.net a company specializing in alphanumeric paging, SMS and wireless messaging software solutions. Other sites by Sharon can be found at http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com, and http://www.smallbusinesssoftware.net

This article was posted on August 19, 2004

by S. Housley

How to reach #1 in Yahoo! Part 2

How to reach #1 in Yahoo! Part 2

by: Michael Rock

KEI Keyword Effectiveness Index. The value of a keyword or keyword phrase that helps a web site reach the #1 position in search engines by comparing how often the keyword or keyword phrase is used and comparing it to how many web sites are using that keyword or keyword phrase to market their site.

In part one of this article I discussed how you can thoroughly research and pick the right keywords for your web site. You can read part one of this web design SEO advice here. (http://www.theinternetpresence.com/businessarticle26.htm) Part two of this article will show you how to take your list of keywords created from part one and narrow it down to the most effective keywords to use. Letกs start with the KEI rating of the keywords.

You can find many free KEI tools on the internet. I personally use one that was part of a $500 software package, but you can find many tools on the internet for free. My advice for this is to try a few of them out and stick with the tools that show generally the same results and toss the ones that don’t. Even with the software package I bought I still use wordtracker and overture to compare my results.

List your keywords in the first column of a table. (I use Microsoft Excel, but you can use anything that works.) In the second, third or more columns list the number of times that keyword was used per day or month. (I use one column for wordtracker, one column for overture, and one column for my software package.) Be suspicious of the keywords that don’t show the same results on all three and consider tossing them out. For example if one column says it searched 300 times per day, but the other two do not even show it being searched at all I would toss that keyword out. In the next column type in the KEI rating of that keyword. And in the next column, if you have a tool that allows it, enter how often the competition uses that keyword in a กcompetitionก column. Enter in the numbers for this data for all of the keywords listed in your table. Now we can start to narrow down the list.

Look at your keyword KEI ratings and compare them to each other. Toss out the keywords that have a low KEI rating. Next look over the list of keywords again and think to yourself, กWill someone that types that in want to visit my site?ก. If not, toss out the keywords. Ask yourself, กWill someone who types in that keyword be likely to be profitable for me?ก. If not, toss out those keywords as well. Look at how often your competition uses a keyword in your กcompetitionก column. If it has a good KEI rating and over 17,000,000 web sites are using it then it will be hard to get to #1. Consider tossing these keywords out also.

For example I concentrated on the search term, (web development contractor) which had a great KEI rating and was hardly used by competition. I tweaked my site for this keyword and now if you type in web development contractor into MSN youกll find out that I hold the number one position. And have held it for over a month now. In addition if you type in (business presence on the web), or (Internet Presence) youกll see me floating around the top 5 along with some other search terms. (Perhaps I should rename this article How I reached #1 in MSN) The search term (web design) had a good KEI rating, but the competition was over 17,000,000 web sites using that search term. Perhaps Iกll feel lucky and try for that one next.

I keep narrowing down my list until I have five of the best keywords to use for my web site. I take those 5 keywords and type them into the top 3 search engines and list the top 10 sites that show up with each keyword. So you will have a list of 50 sites per each search engine you used. To get a good general ranking in all of the search engines, I combine the 3 lists of 50 sites into one big list of 150 web sites for comparison. Alphabetize the list. Did you notice something? Some sites are listed three or more times! Toss out the sites that only show up once and this will narrow down your list of 150 considerably. Take the top five web sites that show up with the keyword you want and list them in another page. It is now time to pick apart there sites and discover why they are there!

Research the five sites using your keyword and compare them to each other. You have to research the siteกs page that landed on the search engine for these factors:

Is the keyword in the tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the description tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the keywords tag? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the content of the site? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the headings (H1H6) of the page? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the links of the page? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the alt image attributes? If so, where is it placed, and how often.

(alt image attributes are the words that pop up when you move a cursor over a picture)

If you want I can do this analysis for you. Just send me up to 3 keyword phrases and 2 web sites for comparison and for $25 youกll get a much more detailed report on both sites. This will save you a lot of time! Keyword research usually runs about $240 to $360 if you have me do it.

Examine the five sites next to each other and concentrate on building your site on things that they have in common and do one number better than them. Ignore building your site in the areas that are not consistent between the five. You then should be getting good results when your site is indexed next. There are other ways to help increase the ranking of your web site like linking. Linking plays a very important role with Google, but there are a number of rules for linking to make it effective. That is a whole new article in itself.

This may seem to be a lot of work, but is well worth it. Some companies charge $1000 to $1500 per month for doing this service and what I typed into these two articles is 75% of what they do. I have my system tweaked now so that it takes me roughly 8 hours to do the keyword research and 2 or 3 days to optimize my site for it. You can do this too!

Be looking for more articles soon!

Copyright © Michael Rock

Web development contractor (Web Design and Hosting)

Internet Presence

www.TheInternetPresence.com

About The Author

The owner of this registered company has over twenty years experience with DOS, windows business applications, numerous programming languages, artistic development, and web design. Other areas of interest include web marketing, web promoting, and business marketing and development. After the persuasion of those praising his work, he decided to go into business himself and highly suggests everyone else to do the same.

Internet Presence was founded in 2003 from a desire to become independent. Less than 1 year later Internet Presence has had accounts in three different states ranging from a locally owned auto collision repair shop to a glass packaging industry that sells its product worldwide.

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 10

by Michael Rock

Types of Keywords

Types of Keywords

by: Vikas Malhotra

Keyword can be classified into three categories :

Single word Keyword

Multiple word Keyword

Keywords based on Theme

Keyword(s) are basic raw material used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Keyword selection must be done using Keyword Research where we use special tools to find out a list of Keywords (search terms) searched by targeted audience, recently. Keyword can be single word, two or three words, multiple words and theme based.

Lets detail each of these one by one . Understanding these categories of keywords would also help one to decide as to their targeting on specific pages.

Keyword of Single word

Keyword of Single word is used to target a large traffic but leads to highly competition category of sites. Keyword of Single word are known as generic Keyword(s) where we target general audience. Keyword of Single word does not help to target a specific page for a specific audience.

Although, Keyword of Single word helps in bringing huge traffic but these terms are mostly not relevant these days, as, searchers mostly use two or three keyword to find out their required information.

Instead single word keywords are good theme keywords.

We can use these primary keyword 5 to 7 times in a web page for good theming according of a site. The inside pages of the site can qualify these themes into product or service categories by adding qualifiers to these theming keywords.

Example:

Keyword ขServicesข will produce result of all the web sites related to Services which can be United States Department of Health and Human Services, The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, direct Services, online Services, offline Services, Indian Services, American Services, food Services, agricultural Services, business Services, free Services, paid Services, etc.

Keyword of Multiple words

Keyword of Multiple words is used to target a specific traffic, which leads to high sale, top position in search result listing as well as improves page rank competition. Keyword of Multiple words are known as Specific Keyword(s) where we target a specific audience & not general searcher. Keyword of Multiple words helps to target a specific page for a specific audience.

Keyword of Multiple words, more often than not are location specific and related to geographic area of your intended services or products.

Keywords based on Theme

Keyword based on Theme are used to target a highly targeted audience, which leads to quick high sale, top position in search result listing as well as boosts page rank. Keywords based on Theme are known as Conceptual Keyword(s).

Keywords based on Theme consists all possible primary Keywords related to the web site therefore attracts high traffic of targeted audience. Keywords based on Theme add quality by providing Keyword Rich Text to search engines, which improve results and provide targeted search result listings.

Keywords based on Theme are used in each page of web site to focus on a specific topic correlated to a targeted topic or idea (theme). Keywords based on Theme effectively contribute in growth of informative pages for its site focusing on different related topics.

Keywords Targeting Strategy

Keywords Targeting Strategy is a tactic, which guides in placing primary keywords like Keyword of Single word, Keyword of Multiple words and Keyword based on Theme according to their importance for successful optimizations of the site.

Vikas Malhotra.

This article can be reprinted as long as the resource box stays intact.

About The Author

Vikas Malhotra

Iกm the owner of an SEO Company Mosaic Services and I regularly write and submit articles on various SE specific topics.

To know more about my company and its services and find more articles, please visit my website http://sem.mosaicservice.com

[email protected]

This article was posted on February 25

by Vikas Malhotra