Mistakes that most ebook authors make

The opportunities are abundant and vast for anyone who wants to become an online best-selling ebook author. The online best-selling ebook author with a capitalist impulse possesses the capability of making anywhere from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars per month by selling their ebooks online. But there are some authors who even possessing the same talent fail to hit the bull’s eye by committing some generic mistakes.

Mistakes that most ebook authors make are:

(1) They don’t write with a specific audience in mind
It is the thumbnail rule of the web is that whatever is written is written for the targeted audience with specific interests. The same applies while writing an ebook. Even the ebook authors need to clearly define, identify and visualize who they are selling their ebook to.

(2) Ebook authors usually overlook the importance of automating their business activities
Selling free online ebooks is highly cost-effective but it is not a big business where every downloading makes hundreds of dollars per sale. So it is important to automate everything be it your credit card processing, ebook delivery, technical support etc.

(3) Monotonous title
If you want to succeed in your ebook marketing, writing a strong and catchy title is one of the requisite. The title should grab the attention of your intended target audience instantaneously. The more appealing the title, the more your ebook is downloaded. Avoid using jargon. The language should be colloquial that convey the benefit as well as words that your audience is acquainted with.

(4) Ebook authors convey a lot of information but don’t make it comprehensive.
It is not rationale to provide the information without being specific and leaving rest to the audience to understand it on their own. If you are providing some concrete information try to show the audience the underlying principles and the benefits.

(5) Professionally down to business
If the marketing of your ebook simply happened on its own, it would make your life far easier and trouble-free. But unfortunately it is not like this. You ought to contact other Website owners and persuade them to be your affiliates. Don’t consider it to be a one-time action. This has to be done repeatedly if you want that your efforts should bear fruits.

(6) Fail to follow the boom
Most of the ebook authors become reluctant to differentiate their competition with their rivals. They in the air of being different choose such topics that don’t yield them any profit. Bt this should not be the attitude, even if there are a hundred other publications out there on same general subject, a wise ebook author should choose their angle as every topic has a very specific motive that sets it apart from the competition, and is aimed at a clearly identified target audience

(7) Ebook authors generally don’t write the words that sell
Most of the ebook authors deliver the information that is readily available anywhere and people are already aware of. This makes the people apathetic. Try to do a competitive analysis on the information that will immediately arouse the interest of the audience. Take out your quality time and examine whether your competitors are getting benefited in the same subject area.

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Designing effective Banners

Designing a web banner ad is an obscure task that usually doesn’t catch the visitors’ eye. Only few people give some sort of divided attention and that too when they happen to see 2-3 words that matches their interests. Only few banners will step forward and receive viewer attention. Design banner ad doesn’t simply mean designing and presenting an eye-pleasing layout. It involves a vast spectrum of creative concepts, designing techniques, quality content, and technical issues. An effective banner successfully demarcates the underlying difference between an unsuccessful and successful banner ad campaign.

To find the most effective banner design for your business you need to put some questions:
What does the banner need to achieve?
What are the main messages?
What types of users will observe the banner?
Who should be targeted?
What important elements ought to be included in the ad?

After answering these questions, find out the sites that will feature your banner ads. Also try to co-ordinate the color scheme of your banner site with the website that would be hosting it. Consider their color interpretation and how they are harmonized with text and graphics. Do not forget to see the pixel dimensions of your host site, its file size limitations and their file format. After carrying out the successful banner ad campaign, it is advisable to measure the CTRs and resulting sales over a period of time. The following banner design tips can increase CTRs (click through ratios) and resulting sales.

(1) File Size limitations
File size limitations are an important consideration while designing the banner ad. Make sure your file stays below 10K, 15K at the absolute most and you can have the best looking banner

(2) Strong punch line
Spend surplus time to create a catchy phrase that will immediately arouse the visitors’ curiosity to know more about you. The punch line should be short and snappy with a correct usage of verbs, colors and fonts.

(3) Use clichés - call to action words
Using clichés is one of the easiest ways to increase the CTR. Though today “Click here” is a trite phrase, but its power can’t be underestimated in the banner ads. Its very presence when displayed long enough for 2-3 seconds increases the click-thru rate of the banner ads by almost 20%. Other clichés that encourages the visitors are “Sale”, "Offer ends soon!", "Hurry!", "Special limited offer!"

(4) Animation
Use animation wisely. Don’t go overboard and fill a banner with lots of animation. At the first place it increases the file size and secondly frustrates the visitors. With the introduction of flash, a complete new area in web banner ad design has been opened. The animation should be subtle enough to attract attention with a quick-to-download time.

(5) Inviting Ad Copy
Generally fancy animations and pictures do not tempt the visitors. It is the magic created by words that sell. A successful banner has excellent copy. A thumbnail rule is to keep the ad copy short and snappy. Try to put emphasis on the benefits, not features of your product or service. Do not present fake information. If possibly try finishing your ad copy with a punch line phrase.

(6) Do not provide pornographic information if you really want your ad campaign to work out for your site. Let it be the domain of XXX sites only.

(7) Include BOTH the logo and the web site address in the banner.

(8) A typical web surfer spends less than 10 seconds looking at the top of a web page. Thus, try to display all its content in this time.

(9) Update or change your banners as often as it is the demand of your site.

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Learning how an ebook is an element of online success

If a person has a proficiency in a certain field and enjoys writing and believes in his power of words, for him it is very convenient to write an ebook. It’s not that writing people who lack writing skills and expertise don’t fall in the domain of selling ebooks. They can be an expert in some other marketing strategy and can sell popular ebooks as affiliates by customizing them and propagating them under their names. It takes quality time to compile the data for an ebook since every single issue to be included in an ebook has to be researched and compiled, written and enriched with pictures and graphics. The process can take as long as years and as short as few weeks. The greatest advantage of an ebook as compared to a conventional offline book is that anybody can publish it. Here, an author need not to rely on the wishes of editors to settle on the publication disputes. An ebook is not only money-spinning element for an author but also facilitates him to display advertisements or affiliate links.

The benefits of writing an ebook are vast. It can help you grow your business considerably. The fundamental secrets that make ebooks a great marketing tool are:


(1) Convenient and hassle-free to create
Creating an ebook don’t require any exceptional knowledge. You can publish your ebook in two different formats ie .exe or .pdf. .pdf formats need Adobe Acrobat Reader to get encoded. You can also use compilers for the formatting of an ebook. They are easily available in the market.

(2) Do not demand huge investment

(3) Developing the characteristics of your own paid product
Selling your own paid product becomes comparatively easy, if you know what to publish in your ebook. You just need to be focused. As a matter of fact there is a huge prospective for generating your own information products. You can also incorporate voice over narration that will talk about your niche topics.

(4) Spontaneous Delivery
Ebooks delivery is fast and instant. You need not to maintain accounts or administrative panels for orders and shipping. You can distribute an unlimited number of copies to your customers.

(5) Subscribing
Let your ebook be an incentive for your new subscribers. Offer your ebook full of quality information as a bonus or gift to make new subscribers to your newsletter.

(6) Good ebooks, your traffic machine
Good ebooks can bring you big exposure because of its viral marketing effect. It can propagate across the Internet if you allow others to distribute it freely to their own susbcribers to provide them quality information.

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How Content Management System (CMS) Can Help in SEO?

One of the important aspects of SEO is the provision of useful, unique content on your website that is easily understandable to the search engines. Here in lies the problem for a webmaster, i.e., always adding and managing content that is new, relevant, and fresh. Content Management System or CMS as it is popularly called, is an amazing alternative tool to using manual WYSIWYG HTML editors, website builders, etc. A tool completely devoted to managing and creating websites, CMS covers the complete lifecycle of your webpages from content creation and publishing to archiving.

Benefits of using CMS from SEO point of view:

1. Search engines are craving for fresh and relevant content all the time. CMS easily manages, adds, creates and publishes content. Not only this, CMS provides the owner of the website the freedom to outsource content remotely from willing contributers. Users also have the facility to register as authors in order to submit articles and news which are automatically sent to manager, editor and publisher to be automatically published on the front page as new content.

2. CMS makes the navigation of the websites a lot more easy and uncomplicated. Basically it helps give a website good navigation structure by creating meuns and navigation trees from categories set by you that can be immediateky published by you on all your pages with the click of a button. Isn't that cool?

3. The most important contribution and involvement of CMS in SEO is the fact that now CMS users can install modules to make it appealing to the search engines. These days you can create pages that are keyword rich, titles, meta tags, anchor text with the help of CMS. As a result the day is not far off when CMS appears as the new organic SEO tool that might make the very role of the SEO specialists and experts completely redundant.

Keeping in mind the valuable and beneficial features of CMS tool, it would be insanity not to utilize or use it for the purpose of getting your websites reach the height of higher rankings and improved targeted traffic generation.

http://www.segnant.com/

E-book Marketing

Ebook marketing is an important viral marketing tool for selling information via downloadable electronic books, normally on Adobe PDF format. It simply multiplies your marketing efforts and is among the leveraging properties on the internet. It is a group of files packed together which can be downloaded from any website or FTP site on the Internet. The Internet Users always crave for something new, helpful tips and easy to read & comprehend the articles. With just one quality ebook development you can benefit your potential customers in a pleasing and non-offensive way. Once your e-book gets publicized in your targeted community then people will rush to your site to know more about you, your offerings etc. You can pack almost anything in ebook that can be displayed or listened to on the Internet. Its unconstrained downloading can get you free exposure. The more of your website visitors download your free ebook the more free exposure and repeat visitors you get. The viral aspect of the ebook marketing is its free of charge downloading. People genuinely love the free aspect of everything, especially the information about a topic they're interested in, and never let any chance go by.

While promoting your site or affiliate program publishing and releasing an ebook can bring you lots of good fortune. Obviously you would be including links back to your website in your viral ebook and since once the user downloads it, s/he gets a permanent access to it. If your book is oriented with surplus knowledge and quality information your visitors will definitely update the ebook constantly by considering a link or banner that will directly switch them to your site. A thumbnail rule is that a successful ebook is always written for the potential customers and not to highlight your deep core competencies. To know precisely what your online customers want from you visit some online discussion groups that are complimentary to your services. The repeated questions will form the basis of the index of your ebook. Also you can visit forums, message boards, newsgroups or subscribe to email discussion lists. To make your presentation emphatic you can see the top selling books at Amazon.com.

As soon you finalize the chapter titles, provide your readers with all of the information required for each chapter in a simple language. Do keep in mind avoid asking for any protective material information from your customers in the chapters itself, since this tends to leave them in absurdity.
Writing text in a legible font would be appreciated such as Arial or Verdana. Do not even try to overwhelm your readers by making your pages gaudy. Be simple and be concise and leave a space between each paragraph maintaining the rule of black and white. Also make it easy for the users to navigate the pages and locate the information that specifically interests them. You can even jazz up the appearance by adding a colorful border, subject dividers and relevant images. Carefully select your color scheme for your ebook cover. Choose colors that are appropriate for your book's topic and compliment the color scheme of your website.

You can also allow other webmasters to sell away the free ebook on their sites. I bet, they won’t deny your offer as it will attract visitors and add considerable value to their sites. Allow them to customize your ebook with their company name and web address while maintaining its originality. The more it gets downloaded the more exposure you get. Also submit the ebook to every ebook directory you are aware of. Here it won’t be extraordinary if your ebook gets downloaded say 10, 000 of times.

Link Farm and FFA Submissions can get you banned

The concept started by Google, now followed by many search engines of gauging the prominence of site using link popularity has given a considerable boost to link farming and stuffing of sites with as many links as possible. But if you by joining link farms and stuffing your site with as many links as possible will make your site popular in search engines, then your thoughts have become obsolete. The more sites that link to yours, the higher your ranking in the search engine results will be because the more links indicate a higher level of popularity among users of the Internet. I agree, but your awful linking habits and skyrocketing strategies won’t land you up anywhere, only it will designate your site as a manipulative marketing effort and might get you even banned from the search engines. Google, which is considered as a giant online has been regularly executing complex algorithms to drive out the sites that participate in link farming. There are many service providers who promise to help you boost your link popularity without even bothering to check whether they are linking to relevant and related websites or not. Here you stand the chances of being eliminated. Even a page of links to other sites won’t save you from being penalized. These unscrupulous so call professionals simple reverse the intended efforts of your website. Even Google is afraid of irrelevant websites linked with others as this mismatch considerably decreases the site's value to visitors and spoil the image of the Website as source of useful content to the visitors.
Also FFA submissions don’t lag far behind in categorizing your site under spam. Like “Link farming” "Free-for-All" (FFA) sites are a collection of worthless links. It is more or less like a storehouse for webmasters to deposit their links to make their site appear more popular. But as soon Google realized "Link Farms" and “FFA” sites were messing up the web and making it hard for users to search valuable content, it immediately started rating the quality of the links. In the process "Link Farms" and FFA sites were segregated as spam.
Search Engines feel suffocated on the mere mentioning of link stuffing. So you should endeavor to submit your links to reliable directories and exchanging links with other significant sites. For instance if your site is related to music you should include links to the musicians, their fan sites and the sites that will serve your visitors with resourceful information.

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PDF Optimization: A Potential Threat to SEO?

Portable Document Format, commonly known as PDF in IT circles, is the defacto file format for presenting device-independent documents on and off the Web. The good news is that as a site owner you need not have sleepless nights over having your site optimized for search engines using the cumbersome and sometimes complicated SEO practices. Now you can have your entire site incorporated in the content of a PDF. Not only text, but also compressed video, dynamic content, and eye appealing visual stuff can be put into the web's only cross-compatible portable platform-PDF.

No more worries and delimmas related to either having or not having Flash in the website due to the fear of search engines not indexing your website. PDF has come up as your saviour as it can easily incorporate Flash player in its reading software. All the Media Player and Quick versions of videoclips will be in Flash. To top it all, you can also deliver the content anywhere to any device that has the facility to read PDF.
This will definitely be good news for the user. But for a professional SEO, it means putting a full stop to a paying business or job. No need of a database for storing information, now that you have all information in portable form.

If smart enough, the SEO's may be able to utilize this new revolution to suit their purpose, and get used to its huge benefits.

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Search Engine Cloaking

Contemporarily every web master has some commercial goal and setting up that strategy online requires manipulations in the sites to retain there chances of staying. Though Search engine cloaking isn't as effective as it used to be but its careful interpretation can still benefit your search engine rankings. Also known as Smart Page, these cloaked pages have their own distinctiveness and stands separate from the rest of a site. Designed primarily for the search engines, a Smart Page is a very small HTML web page with a Java Script re-directs that tricks the search engines making them think that these are actually relevant pages of content. But by now the technique has stigmatized the search engine domain so much that that the search engines have become increasingly aware of the different used by the webmasters to make fool of them.
Since hundreds of thousands of sites compete for the same customers, it is not easy to maintain the goodwill. At this point Search Engines emerge as yellow pages and play an important role in getting a visitor. Webmasters are very well aware of the potential of the Search Engines and hence competition for search engine traffic is appalling. Moreover the toughness of the Search Engines makes it impossible to correspond with the fluctuations of the search engine rankings. That means one day your site could lead the SERP and the next day possibly you can be permanently out of the competition. The drastic fall indeed raises many questions and particularly pinpoint towards the unethical methods of optimizing the webpage. One specific method that comes into notice is the search engine cloaking. Though it is a smart way of increasing incoming traffic, but at the same time it also ensures temporary profit and long term tribulations for the online businesses, because such products/services don’t offer any genuine value to the search engine or web surfer. It heavily relies on the notion of making a 'fake' page profusely scattered with key words visible to the search engines to attract the attention of search engines indexing system while the real page is delivered to real human visitors. The same thing happened with the BMW’s German site. It heavily relied on javascript code that was unsearchable by Google’s spider and used text-heavy pages liberally sprinkled with key words. A picture of what a search engine spider visiting the home page of the German BMW website saw, and what a user’s browser saw were very different.
Despite of the unethical character of the Smart Pages they are used as part of a search engine optimization policy with unique optimized text.

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Using Robots.txt and Info.txt

Robots.txt
SEO is a stealthy marketing strategy that is manipulated by the SEO tools. Ever tool has its specific function but are oriented towards same goal; high listing, quality traffic and sales. But have you ever pondered over why some web pages rank well on one engine for a particular keyphrase and the same keyphrase may actually plummet your ranking in other search engine?
Some webmasters optimize their web pages for each particular search engine. Though the change is not apparent, but these small changes make considerable changes when it comes to ranking. However, here you stand the risk of getting penalized or banned because search engines don’t like duping or somebody making fool of them by showing what appeals to them the most. Now you might be thinking how you can stop Google from indexing pages that are exclusively optimized for Altavista or some other search engine?
The solution to both these questions lies in incorporating robots.txt file to stop major search engines indexing the pages for other search engines. The robots.txt protocol is a text file that has specific set of instructions for search engine robots about specific content that they are strictly not permitted to index. For Example:

This example allows all robots to visit all files because all robots have been specified by "*"
User-agent: *
Disallow:

If you want to block certain engines from certain files that are not in your root directory you can keep robots out by
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

The following code disallows the crawlers to not to enter into four directories of a website:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/

The robots.txt patterns are coordinated by substring comparisons so before appending matching directories have the final '/' character.


Info.txt
Contemporarily some major Search Engines are encouraging webmasters to create info.txt files in order to find the web page if you trust the source. If you really want them listing just submit them.
Now you might be mulling over where to insert the text of info.txt?
Do not insert the text of info.txt into your index.html page. Upload it the same way you upload any of your files, like index.html or robots.txt as a completely separate file in the same folder where your main index.html page is kept in.
To submit in alexa.com follow the url:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/contact_info?url=www.mbsautoparts.com/
Enter the info.txt that you can generate on the site on your root and after every change you make to your site, go and apply for re-caching your site by Alexa.


http://www.segnant.com/info.txt
# Contact info submission

url: www.segnant.com/
site_owner: Segnant Inc.
address1: 1431 Greenway Drive
address2: Suite 230
city: Irving
state: TX
country: USA
postal_code: 75038
phone_number: 214-441-1309
display_email: info@segnant.com
site_name: www.segnant.com
site_description: Segnant Technologies provides innovative e-commerce web-sites to companies to sell products directly to consumers and accept payments online. Get custom website specifically built to your business

www.segnant.com

How Google Adsense is important for content sites

Google Adsense delivers relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content. Basically, a webmaster place Google AdWords ads on your site(s). For every ad clicked, you receive a commission, which is a share of what Google receives from the advertiser. Google puts appropriate CPC (cost-per-click) and CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ads, and let them compete against one another. The auction is an instant process, and, as soon it terminates, AdSense automatically showcases the text or image ad(s) that produce the maximum revenue for a page. The webmasters who can afford to spend extra penny can get relevant text and image ads that are precisely targeted to their site and their site content. If per chance an ad appeals to the visitor and he/she clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster serving the ad earns a fraction of the money that the advertiser pays to the search engine.
The search engines undisputedly screens and handles the cookies and the transactions, which makes it easier for the webmaster to showcase the content-sensitive and targeted ads without having requesting the advertisers. They are also saved from the tedious task of screening, the clicks, maintaining the web-metrics, and collecting the funds. It is also an opportunity for the webmasters to completely focus on their dues that they timely receive from the search engines.
Adsense has covered a long way in understanding the requirements of publishers and webmasters. Its gradual progress that is still continuing and its flexibility permits full ad customization. To make the websites more interactive, webmasters can choose from varied types of text ad formats to suit the layout of their web page. The easy formatting makes the chances of click through bright thus increasing the curiosity of people and encouraging them to go in the depth and know more about the ad. It will serve the dual purpose thus making profit in the process.
The streamlining of Google’s algorithm has made it easier for the webmasters to keep a track of the progress of their sites and their profits, page impressions, clicks and click-through rates. This gives the accurate insight on which pages, ads are performing best and generating them revenue. The advertisers have realized the profits of having their ads placed on targeted websites. They have hit the bull’s eye by already assuming that a prospective web surfer will have an interest in their product and services. This has become possible because of the relevant content and it’s regular up gradation. Even all those who haven’t explored the multitude profits of Adsense in their sites, they are getting their content generated from the professional Content Writersb so that they may not lag behind in the race of having successful and money-generating web sites. This program is a huge boon for small content publishers... AND encourages higher quality content.

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Writing content for the Web that sells

Writing everything from web portal content to writing a title, link, and intranet content is altogether different from writing for print since each medium has its own requisites. Web-surfers are usually finicky so you have to take hold of their attention with graphics and straight-forward content. If you know how to "persuade" in your daily life you just need to fine-tune this proficiency while writing for the Net. By now you might have come to know that people on the internet search for quality content and new information. It is only the quality information and credible content that generates traffic and yields you more revenue. In other words, creative better interweaved in a careful way sell more.
While writing for the web the three important considerations are that more than half of the users just scan the page if the content doesn’t appeal them, reading from computer screens takes almost 25% extra time, web promotional content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent including the keywords. Your writing should be cumulative of the right words with the right process to build targeted traffic and convert visitors into customers. It is the words that sell and not the flashy graphics or moving pictures. Some of the vital categories of text that help guide the user are page titles, headlines and subheads, “in-page” indexes, navigation bar links, bold text, alt text, and captions. While writing any of these try to summarize in a crisp, organic, precise way since people don’t read they just give a floating look. Most Web documents follow a specific style that is normally not used in your colloquial writing. So, in order to make the concept more descriptive, the task of the content writer becomes more binding.
Obviously, for a copy writer in wanting to put his/her "best foot forward" and make that ever-important first impression with a prospective client it is important to have someone (with English as a first language) proof the web promotional content especially when we sell ourselves as copy writers, designers, creative gurus, etc. In case of any error the web reader will either skip over it or not even bother to go through your copy.
Some of the tactics that will ensure that Web readers will find your information worth are:

1. Using inverted pyramid style ((Conclusions- Details- Background Info)
2. Careful interpretation of the information, using words and categories that make sense to the audience
3. Meaningful Sub-headings
4. Highlighting the most important points in your document using headings, lists, and typographical emphasis
5. For more credibility, link quotes from magazine reviews and other articles to the source
6. Limit the use of puns, jargons, metaphors, complicated writing and complex words
7. Bulleted and numbered lists to a great extent help the scanning eye to become analytical and can draw attention of the users to important points
8. Avoid self-referential terms that call out your supremacy.

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Add A Discussion Board Or Chat Room To Your Web Site for more traffic

Building an online community is the fast, easy, and free way to draw repeat visits to your site. By adding forums, message boards or chat rooms to your Web site personalized to go with the look of your site you can provide hosted discussion boards or user-initiated, always available chat rooms for your visitors/customers to interact with each other by posting and reading messages and replying to the posts from where you can assemble unprejudiced opinions and feedback from visitors to your site. Following and entering into the conversation with your visitors will help you to know your visitors on a personal level and lay the foundation of trust. The content that you will provide on a personal level will give your users plenty of good reasons to take advantage of what you're offering and purchase products from somebody they believe in. Though there are many ways to campaign for your services/products but putting up content that demonstrably heighten user value, a populated chat room can solve your purpose.
You can invite your active members to share openly and freely to participate in the discussions. But before incorporating think over the facts that an empty chat room doesn’t leave a good impression, enough traffic in mandatory to put people into a chat room on a regular basis. To avoid this notoriety, particularly for the small sites you can provide your Yahoo! or MSN or any other ID where users can shoot questions if you are available to them. It can save you from the mock that comes with offering an unpopulated chat room.
The chat can only be as safe as you allow it to be. If you are cautious you should be safe, if you provide your contact information your safety may be become vulnerable so it is up to your comfort what level you want to present. It would be advisable not to post any other personal contact information such as phone number, address, etc.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ADDING A DISCUSSION BOARD OR CHAT ROOM

1. Helps you make money when you market own products and services on your discussion board or chat room. Not only this; by joining the affiliated programs of your counterparts you can earn commission from them.
2. By owning a discussion board or a chat room, you get an opportunity to get advertised freely by listing other web sites in online community directories.
3. Also you can allow small websites who don own a discussion board or chat room to use yours. It is an easy way to earn free advertising by permitting them to link to your online group of people.
4. You can create a set of connections with other online businesses by exchanging business ideas, leads, advertising, etc. This is based on mutual give and take.
5. You can earn more profit by selling an advertising space on them.
6. You can increase you proficiency by using your chat room as an online teaching room. This will give an impression that you are an expert in your domain and in return will increase your web traffic.
7. Your website will attain more credibility when you answer the questions your visitors ask on regular basis.
8. By knowing the mindset of your visitors and their response to your product/service you can easily learn the nitty-gritty of how to market your products more effectively.
9. Visitors with same interest will definitely revisit your site considering it to be a space where they can interact with their fellowmen of same concern.
10. Finally the more you will interact with your visitors, the more they will get to know you on a personal level. And it is a proven fact that people usually buy the products from somebody they already believe in.

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Making your online testimonials believable

A testimonial is a documented proof commending the virtue of some product and serves as a strong promoter in the advertising and marketing campaign of your product, and thus establishes the credibility of your website. This endorsement is a written or spoken statement applied to the sales pitches certified by the ordinary citizens. Most inexperienced marketers have admitted that if a strong headline separates a good sales letter from the lousy one, a well-documented testimonial helps in making the deal definite. If a first-time visitor is cynical about your product that interests him/her, your testimonials just might hit the bulls eye and motivates your visitors to place an order on your website.
Do’s and Do Not’s to make your testimonial believable:

Do Not’s

1. General, non-specific, misleading testimonials never bring any good, and on the contrary belittle your long-established standing.
2. Do not under any state of affairs, try to write your own testimonials or to hire someone to write fake testimonials for you. It is not wise to dupe your visitors.
3. Do not include the testimonials from individuals who identify themselves with just names and nonspecific titles such as "businesswoman" and "professional."

Do’s

1. Include short and snappy, authentic testimonials from genuine people. This can considerably boost your conversion rate. You can simply request them to commend on the virtue of your services and products.
2. For each testimonial included, also provide the customer's particulars. If your customers represent some organization include the business name. Enhance their authority by citing their designation and including a link of their website. You can also request your customers to provide their pictures along with testimonials to lend more credibility to your web site.
3. Always ask for permission before publishing someone's comments on your website. If possible get their approval in writing. But always include the testimonials of those customers who are not finicky about providing the personal detail you intend to provide.
4. Include comments which will aptly appeal to the five senses of your potential customers. The generic ones are neutral. If they don’t harm you, they do not even yield you any benefit.
5. To increase the level of impact of your testimonials, try embedding them in the content on your main pages. It is a powerful technique to improve your sales conversions.
6. Try keeping the quotes not more than five lines because nobody has that much time to go through the long copy unless it is highly effective. But if in case including the entire testimonial is the demand of your web page try splitting it up into several segments to scatter throughout your site.
7. To lend a more official look to the testimonial include scanned signatures of your customers.
8. Convert the recorded commendation into an online audio file. Uploading it to your web site to give a feeling of intrapersonal communication.
9. Have people mail you their testimonial on a postcard. It will be a big proof that your testimonial is not fake.
10. Include scanned hand-written letter for a more realistic look.
11. Including the e-mail messages the way they come at you. It’ll be more convincing because it will show the date, time, subject, who it's from and who it's to.
12. Convert the camcorded commendation into an online video file. Uploading it to your web site to give a feeling of intrapersonal communication.

How to find commanding Google AdWords

Attaining proficiency in finding out the Google Adwords will help you cross the most difficult aspect of marketing – targeting potential customers to your web site and start making sales without any delay. When your product generate a lot of clicks, this may mean you have a winning product, and when you have a winning product you can easily generate sales leads to build a relationship with your visitor. Also this can yield you large benefits. The Google Adwords allow you to identify the demand of product/service, but identifying the keywords is an art in itself.
To find commanding Google Adwords you need to:

1. Do a wide-ranging keyword research with an analytical eye. You may use overture or wordtracker to find the best keywords that complements the selling of your product. It would be good enough to categorize the keywords and create 2 different ads based on your most targeted keywords. This will help you recognize which keyword/phrase is best suited for your campaign.
2. Constantly preview the click through rate (CTR). It is the ratio of the number of times a person clicks on your ad based on the number of times it is viewed.
3. Don’t over-burden your ad groups with too many keywords.
4. Be precise with a clear headline, solid body, the features of your product/service and then your contact information. Let your each word say the story of its own.
5. Avoid feather language in Ad copy, but yes incorporate strong action verbs that directly appeal to the five senses of the customer. By using strong verbs in your ads your visitor will certainly be stimulated to take some action.
6. Write ads that have nice flow to them effect people in a better way.
7. Since Google sets a specific amount to spend for each click. Don’t get overwhelmed and start with your own interest with a comparatively smaller daily amount. Keep an eagle eye on your CTR since ads displayed at the top don’t necessarily produce the highest CTR.
8. Keep a statistical record of your ad, checking it frequently for the first few days.
9. Continuous slicing and splicing up the ad groups help you to create a refined ad.
10. Keep a track of ads that produce the most clicks.
    

Tip- SEO professionals understand your needs and help you create an effective Ad copy.

www.segnant.com

SEO against PPC

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) aims at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings whether “organic” or “inorganic,” and pay per click advertising is solely “inorganic” in which every time when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged per click. For an aggressive, high-volume search terms, the cost of pay per click advertising can be significant. But that doesn’t mean organic search results are any less then inorganic search results. They generate same targeted traffic and that too potentially at a lower cost. It may be noted that PPC is a part of the SEO making them the two most important practices in the domain of Search Engine Marketing. Of lately the recent manipulations have brought out the efficiency of SEO over PPC by declaring that SEO earns substantially better ROI than PPC. Most search engine position are NOT for auction. About 60% of the top search engines' amount of space available on a display is “non-paid” or "organic" making it apparent that 60% of the search engine visibility is because of the SEO. Relatively PPC campaigns are laborious, in addition to the click charges that the advertiser has to pay after set up is complete. PPC requires constant supervision because the PPC can be banned if they don’t qualify the stipulated terms of search engines perpetually. On the other hand SEO, when carried out ethically is done once and performs fantastically in continuance. Moreover, the labor charges of setting up and managing a PPC campaign are more or less the same than the labor charges of SEO, but then there are the continuous click charges you pay after set-up.
Another loophole that PPC poses is the ever-increasing prices, usually that are beyond positive ROI for your most important phrases, and the least of all PPC is increasingly beleaguered by array of "click fraud." These factors make PPC the second most cost-effective form internet marketing. So it is important to make a standing for yourself in organic listing of the leading Search Engines and after that to aim for a winning PPC campaign. To guarantee the success of the campaign, it is important that a reasonable price is paid for each visitor. It won’t be a wise decision to start off with a major investment.
Obviously, the leading search engines won’t try to dupe their user by only displaying the “non-organic” listing. Search Engines are smart enough to create a win-win situation by earning their trust, traffic, and revenues. Depending on the supremacy of the search engines, the prices per click is decided. Otherwise the minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 and goes up to US$0.50. Another factor that makes rudimentary is its instability, since PPC positions change perpetually according to the bidding tactics.

www.segnant.com

Hitting your competitor on Google AdWords

Google AdWords is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes for driving traffic to their site. Google AdWords program can give you advertising revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources. You place Google AdWords ads on your site and for every ad clicked, you receive money (a share of what Google receives from the advertiser). Though it is an easiest way to build a positioning for your website, but it requires some strategies; strategies to beat your rivals in the chase of Google Adwords. If you are among those who spend large amount of money bidding on super-influential keywords, sooner or later those ads stand the risk of getting disabled for their unsatisfactory performance. This is the time when your competitors get the top spot. But that doesn’t mean an end of road; you can surpass your competitors by being more strategic in your approach.

• Don’t fall short of bidding as many significant keywords as possible. It is probable that your competitors would have same interests, and you end up paying a heavy price per visitor. You can get an edge if can think of incorporating interesting new combinations of keywords that none of your rivals could even think of. This way you can get high up the results and that too at a very nominal price. Undoubtedly, your unique less common keywords will get searched for less often, but the outcome will be profitable since you will have to pay less for potentially wealthy visitors.
• If possible categorize your keyword/phrases into groups of similar words and campaign for each group separately. This will enhance your CTR rate considerably. If a visitor types the exact word, it makes you stand apart in the listing increasing your chances to be clicked on.
• Remember more the CTR, the higher you ad will appear. It is applicable even if your competitors have bidden more money and your ad gets a higher CTR, Google will give you preference and will show you higher. But it has a loophole, if your ad does not get at least 0.5% CTR, google will render your site inoperative.
• Google gives preference to those ads that are closely snowed under to what people have searched for. So it is advisable that for every keyword or phrase you bid on, you should also bid on “segnant” and [segnant]. The concept behind putting the keyword or phrase into “inverted commas” is to let you ad appear any time someone searches for that word/phrase as part of a search with other terms included. Square brackets allow your ad to when someone searches for that phrase and NOTHING else.
• If possible manage at least two different ads with different copy for each campaign. By default google will display both adverts alternatively. This way you can easily identify which ad is more close to the mindset of the people. Tracking the CTR’s of both the ads will help you to create a super-effective ad with improved words and incorporating what appealed most to your visitors.
• Before choosing the keywords always indicate the negative keywords to the search engine that can impose heavy debt on you by attracting leisure visitors to your site. For example no body can escape the fancy of word “free” and if your product requires payment, include -free as a negative keyword. This way you will be saved from paying for the web-traffic who have no intention of spending any penny.

www.segnant.com

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Nothing can be compared to the superiority of PPC Advertising campaigns because it is still one of the quickest and effective ways of promoting your business online. These are those “sponsored links” that Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL and other search engines list on the top or on the sides of the search result. Also addressed as keyword auctioning where webmasters bid high prices to get on the major search engines; the higher the paid listing on the search engine result pages, the higher the site will appear in the outcome for the keywords that have been auctioned. Though it is difficult to convert clicks to sales, but is worth to get a smart customer at the cost of 5 cents. While here the relevancy of organic search engine rankings can’t be altogether ignored.

• Why Use Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
  The organic search engine rankings may not be achievable for some time even with the help of an SEO company. PPC ads can be live in a matter of minutes. Contemporarily Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) is ruling the pay per click search engines, due to its well organized system. Yahoo! Search Marketing facilitates the advertiser to bid for rankings and choose the description and title they want, which in turns generates the traffic for a website.
• What’s the thumbnail rule of Pay-Per-Click Advertising?
  The highest bidder for a phrase gets top spot. That means you have to target the right type of searcher or consumer with the right keywords. Your ad must get clicked on regularly enough or it will be abandoned. Both Googles AdWords and Yahoo’s! Overture have keyword rules and they may not auction the keywords that aren't used very frequently, even if they are highly productive in terms of revenue.
• 2 essential points to consider in a Pay-Per-Click Campaign:
  a) Keeping a track of keywords/phrases that produce the best results.
  b) Consider to whom you are transacting with to stay away from being duped because hackers have developed a certain program to robotically click on that banner which increases the amount that you will have to pay to the search engine.
  c) Find lesser-used, two or three-word phrases, many of which aren't suggested in the keyword suggestion tool.
• How to find the phrase that will maximize your ROI?
  For selecting the phrase that will produce the highest ROI, depends on the sales you expect per day based on the keyword phrase you have chosen to target. If a promotion produces a surplus sale, your targeted keyword/phrase is a success. The sales you will get per day will directly depend on precisely what position you attain on the natural engines.
• How to decide Which Phrases to Use?
  Learn how much people are keen to bid on the different keywords that you are concerned with. You may use it in your own campaign after analyzing these bidding patterns.
• How to increase your conversion rates?
  PPC gives you an opportunity to conduct a thorough research on a wide range of keywords. Good use of keywords incorporated in your copy and content will help you to attract the right kind of potential audience.
• Writing Effective Pay-Per-Click Ads
  Writing precise, crisp and persuasive, ad copy requires a good judgment If you aptly attract the prospect by the magic of weaving words and keywords/phrase and offer them a flawless solution, you'll be rewarded with a good sales rate. Use you customer’s jargon and their colloquial language to attract them.

A note of caution: Hiring an SEO professional to customize your PPC copy the best way to increase your listing and ROI.

SEO Myths

Search engine optimization techniques though start out well with a great focus on ethics, but human mind always ask for more and eventually becomes highly manipulative and rips off the possibilities provided by the search engines. Webmasters harness them again and again without evaluating even once what they are doing. It is always advised to be fair when it comes to optimization of a website because when you do right the engines treat you right. At the cost of trust and credibility the search engines only expects quality and relevancy of your web site. Unprofessional people, who scam unsuspecting persons make different hypothesis about Web sites that achieve top search engine visibility. The SEO industry is flourishing and will definitely keep on blooming in the coming years. The cut-throat competition within the websites to attain free rankings will also considerably increase. But the strategies for ranking well in "natural," or "organic," search engine listings does not always call for being unethical and going out of your way to make your site a success. The market is full of surplus SE optimizers who just in the want of your money write knockout referrals and client references to impress you and win your trust. Since there are so many myths associated to SEO, you better become smart and question your SEO to exact specifications detailed, including contract or written agreement details.
It would be partial on your part to think of SEO as a fraud. Almost every responsible marketing professional is aware of the fact that SEO is the most lucrative marketing technique for gaining new customers. Not many of would know that SEM is a multi-billion dollar industry and is still growing at a very fast pace. It has been already acknowledged that both SEO and PPC earn surprising ROI. SEO is smart enough and understands the value of your time. Once a site has been optimized, it usually requires little or no further adjustment to retain its search engine placement. But as mentioned above it desires quality and relevance, playing with its modus operandi and cheating its algorithms can cost you your long-established standing.
It won’t be fair to say that success of SEO can’t be predicted. If carried out ethically you van maintain a web metric of your site which can help you analyze the searches for key phrases in the top search engines and the number of competing web sites that contain those phrases. Also you can reckon your ROI by multiplying predicted SEO traffic by your conversion rates. After reading this much, if you are feeling that SEO is an easy process, then you are totally wrong. To be highly effective it calls for meticulousness and preciseness in a wide array of technical as well as verbal skills. It is a cumulative outcome of various aspects that form the tools of SEO. So it would be advisable to deal with an organization that follows the ethical codes of SEO, because it is the only way to ensure the execution first-rate professional work on your website and hence its longevity.

Optimizing Tags and Attributes for SEO

There are some fundamental tags that considerably enhance the search engine rankings. They are embedded in the web page so that the search engines list the particular site in their catalog with more accuracy. The Meta Tags are rooted to the page by adding:
· The Title Tag
· Meta Keyword Tags
· Meta Description
· Heading Tags
· ALT Attribute
The tags serve their best when they are not overtly stuffed with keywords important to the Search Engines. Normally while optimizing a site Meta Keywords Tag and Meta Description tags are streamlined. The Meta description tag allows Webmasters to explain what the web page is about and the Meta keyword tag allows them to insert keywords that are important to the site to get listed in the Search Engine Rankings. Meta keywords on a page have no significance of their own unless they follow the keywords that are used in the content of that page. To make it simpler for you to understand, I present you an example:

“Keywords” and “description” Meta tags are heeded by both Google and Yahoo. You may embed up to 255 characters in the description tag including spaces and no more than 1020 characters in the keyword tag. Image Alt Attribute is the seldom considered tag for optimization and is never optimized in a correct way. As a matter of fact any images on your page can help your listings to. Each image on your page can include a keyword phrase or two that describes the image. Although all search engines do not heed to this tag but there is no harm in streamlining it.
Though the Meta Tags lost their prominence partially because of their over-exploitation by the webmasters, but its contribution can’t be altogether ignored. Even though they do not form the basis for deciding the Page Ranking, but they certainly influence the results people get when they do a search. Every page on a site has its own individuality and different content. For that reason, a different Meta Keyword Tag for each page of the site should be used.

Internet Marketing Terminologies – III

A Unique Visitor: A count of how many different people access a Web site. Unique visitors are determined by the number of unique IP addresses on incoming requests that a site receives.
URL: (Universal Resource Locator) It is the global address of documents and other resources on the World Wide Web. For example: www.segnant.com
USP: (Unique Selling Proposition) The unique product benefit that the competition can not claim. It conforms to certain advertising concepts.

Some miscellaneous Web site terms and abbreviations that are commonly used are:
API: (Application Programming Interface) The specific method prescribed by a computer operating system or by an application program by which a programmer writing an application program can make requests of the operating system or another application
ASCII: (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.
ALT text: The text that appears when you move your mouse over the top of an image or a picture on a web page.
Anchor Text: Also known as Linking Text, the clickable text of a hyperlink.
Below the fold - The content of a web page that is not seen by the consumer unless the consumer scrolls down.
CSS: (Cascading Style Sheets) It defines a simple mechanism for customizing the formatting of Web pages, by defining fonts, colors of titles, paragraph spacing, etc.
Html: (Hypertext Markup Language) the coding language used to create hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web. It is the most common form of coding used to build web pages.
DHTML: (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) A mixture of standards, including HTML, Cascading Stylesheets, scripting.
DNS: (Domain Name System or Server) an Internet service that translates domain names into IP addresses. If one DNS server doesn't know how to translate a particular domain name, it asks another one, and so on, until the correct IP address is returned.
File: Common Internet File types include .zip .pdf .gif .jpg .png .swf
FTP: (File Transfer Protocol) A protocol used to transmit files between computers on the Internet.
GUI: (Graphical User Interface) A program interface that takes advantage of the computer's graphics capabilities to make the program easier to use.
http: (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. It defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.
ISP: (Internet Service Provider) A company that provides access to the Internet.
JS: (Java Script) Programming which can add interactivity and function to a web site. Some examples include drop down menus navigation button effects, interactive forms, slide shows, and pop open windows.
Meta Tags: Meta Description Content, Keywords and Title are used in the head section of websites. It typically passes information to search engine crawlers, browser software and some other applications. They are very important when it comes to listing your site in Search engines.
Ram: (Random Access Memory) The place in a computer where the operating system, application programs, and data in current use are kept so that they can be quickly reached by the computer's processor.

Website Blunders that ensure to drive your target audience elsewhere

To sell your products/services online, your website becomes your harbinger that represents your aims, goals and standings in the web world. In order to be effective you need to carry out the presentation of your web page meticulously steered by efficient coding and manipulative use of flash, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, of Coldfusion's, .Net etc. Most of the times it happens that you tend to overlook an unorganized feature of your website unintentionally that simply leaves you perplexed that where what went wrong. In other words a small forbidden mistake can bring blunders that ensure to drive your target audience elsewhere. Don’t suck at this internet stuff re-tune your efforts after understanding the blunders that can cause havoc. To be effective in your online marketing approach the thumbnail rule is to remember that your website visitor did not design the page and needs proper direction.

• Burdening the web page with animations that need downloading of additional plugins: your curiosity to view the animation will redirect your browser to site for automatic installation of the plugin. Most of the times the downloading process kills the curiosity of the customer.
• Going out of focus in your presentation: Identify what you are best at and position yourself as an expert in that field. There is nothing wrong in being the jack of all trades but at least be focused on what you are proficient at. Don’t ever leave your visitors in a chaos thinking over what you are really good at. Visitors that become your potential customers like to deal with experts.
• Availing free hosting services: Using popular free web hosting services gives an opportunity to your host to place banners ads on your site which have nothing to do with your services. The only aim of free web hosting services is to generate revenue. This way you stand the risk of losing your visitors regardless of how professional you are. Also the customers normally don’t trust the vendor who can’t afford to spend $5 a month on their marketing efforts.
• The fourth blunder that is often committed by the webmaster is that they create an amateur looking website for selling a professional product or service. Shabby pictures, chaotic navigation, distracting color interpretation can easily direct your target audience elsewhere.
• To create an impression, the explicit use of jargon: Words speak. Your copy should be self-indulging. Often the technical words are far beyond the understanding of an average visitor. Don’t expect your visitor to always be a technical superhuman.
• Your company name serving as a caption for your web site: never ever forget that people often arrive at your site never having heard of you, but branding your organization’s name this way can easily designate you as narcissistic. Rather the leading should convey what you do and not who you are. You may give suggestions about products, and provide backgrounds and uses for different products.
• Boasting navigation labels: On the web, there is no space for perplexing navigatory labels. Clear, ordinary navigation labels attract more traffic than weird, mysterious ones.
• Emphasizing on the superiority and command of “we”: frequent use of “our,” “we” implies that you are more interested in selling your product by hook or crook and your product/service is not efficient enough. When you spend most of your time beating your own trumpets, you force your potential customer to think over what the site offers to them. Convincing them lies in the superiority and command of “you.”
• Ignoring to add the contact information: You need to provide your contact information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and physical address if mandatory. Clearly lay out who and where you are. Don’t completely rely on the web forms.
• An error in typeset material, careless formatting, and grammatical mistakes: Proofread your content before including it in your webpage, else the errors when noticed by the visitor will reveal your negligence. Your standing and honesty depend on the minutiae information being legible and correct.
• Complexity of forms: If you are asking for memberships, checkouts, or anything that requires information, do not use a lot of forms.
• Hiding obvious information that your visitors desrve to know.
• Irrelevant interrogation: Don’t try to pull out ever small information about your visitor. This can easily irritate him/her. But if it is the need of your site, simply explain it under your terms and conditions.

Peeping into The Future of Search:Time To be Happy for the Search Engine Marketers

At a recently held conference (March 2004) on search engine strategies in New York, a lot of enlightening facts ragarding the future of search popped up. The eminent panelists in the conference came up with their ideas as to how they perceive the future of search, and let me tell you, the news is good for the search engine marketers.

According to these panelists (seasoned and experienced professionals from Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, AOL search), in the coming years, search engines are going to act like people's personal assistants, guides, mentors, furnishing them with the answers for the most abstract of questions too. And search engine marketers will be more dependent upon an intelligent combination of relevant results and ability to pay for traffic. Search engines will go much deeper into our lives, thus becoming more:

All-encompassing-This means that people will be able to access information in much more areas than now. Basically, the "access points" for searching for something would increase, right from inside-the-car Google search to kitchen, travel, repair service etc. In fact, the mobile communications device maufacturers will have voice controlled web searching features in their phones and PDAs. So the users will get an all pervasive search experience where they will be able to search for any thing under the sun.

Personalized and Localized-It would not be a long time before search becomes more inference based by learning from users' habits and location and using this information to provide relevant results. Gerry Cambell, General Manager, AOL Search and Navigation, gave an example in the conference, of inference based seach in the near future saying, "If one of our subscribers searches on ‘pizza,’ our search results will return a list of stores in their ZIP code. In the near future, search results on 'Eagles' will be different for a user who visits sports sites and one who goes to classic rock sites."

Looking at the above mentioned predictions and forecasts, one wonders whether paid advertising will overtake natural search and web site optimization for generating natural traffic. Though paid placements and sponsored listings are going to increase in the future, but it would be difficult for the search engines to depend completely on paid programs for relevance if they claim to interpret users' infrences and emotions in the future.

In conclusion one can say that search is largely dominated by the user behavior and user needs. It is the users that the search engines have to pamper and keep happy to remain in action and business. As far as paid search is concerned, it may in the future be dominated by the highest bidders. This would again be good news for small or medium players or companies in the market who may not be in the position to bid high. That means such companies will revert back to the natural search engine optimization strategies. This will make the natural search engine results more useful to the user. Thus the search engine providing the most relevant search results will reign supreme in the future search kingdom.

http://www.segnant.com/

Internet Marketing Terminologies – II

Doorway or Gateway Page: Pages setup specifically for search engines. Once the visitor reaches the page, they are then redirected to another website. These are designed to increase a web sites ranking in a search engine by replicating the key words and description of web sites.
EPV: Earnings Per Visitor. Calculated as an average. For example, if a page shows three ads, that's three impressions. Advertisers use impressions to measure the number of views their ads receive, and publishers often sell ad space according to impressions.
Filter Words: Words that search engines consider insignificant as keywords for indexing purposes such as; is, am, an, for, do, was and the.
Hit: One single request (visitor) made to your Web site server. For example, when a visitor calls up a Web page with four graphics, that's five hits, one for the page and four for the graphics.
IBL: Inbound Link. A hypertext link from another page that links to your page. These links increase traffic and increase your site popularity according to search engines.
Keyword Research: The search for keywords to optimize your Web site, and their analysis. If done properly it yields the highest return on investment (ROI). Wordtracker.com and Oveture.com provide useful keyword tools.
Keyword Density: The ratio of the number of occurrences of a specific keyword or phrase to the total number of words in a page. More often the keyword or phrase, the higher its search engine ranking; if repeated too often though, it could lead to the page being penalized for spamming.
ODP: (The Open Directory Project) (dmoz.org) The largest human edited directory. It is run by thousands of volunteer editors and is used by Google and other directory for many of their Directory listings.
OSEO: (Organic Search Engine Optimization): the core of all the things that can be done to optimize a website. It increases "link popularity" to make it appear higher in search engine results.
Outbound Link: An outgoing link from your web page to another site.
Page Views: The number of times users request a page. It also includes requests for images contained on your pages. Also known as page impression or simply an impression. Home pages generally get more page views than other pages in the site, which is why more advertisers place their banners on home pages
PPC: Pay Per Click. Advertising structure in which advertisers pay for click-throughs to their website. Ads that serve are based on keywords or themes One visitor equates to one click. Overture was the first great pay-per-click advertising sales channel for the search engines
PR: (Page Rank) It measures not only how many links point to a website, but the "quality" of the sites providing the links. PageRank measures the quality of a website on a scale of 0 to10.
ROI: (Return on Investment) The percentage of profit that results in a marketing or advertising campaign. Online ad campaign ROI is a metric that determine what the advertiser receives in return for the cost of the advertising, usually in terms of new sales.

The Importance of Clean Coding

The site coding allows search engines to index and analyze a website correctly. When the search engine arrives to crawl the website, at first it finds the root (main) folder of the site for a file called robots.txt. In the robots.txt file it confirms what directories and files it is permitted to index. Although, there are some search engine spiders overlook these instructions. Once the spider gets the permission it checks the tags between the and tags of the web page for:

• The title of the page
• The keyword and description meta tags
• The robots meta tag
• Web Page Content between the body tags

The web page content is of utmost importance. Here the search engine spider (robot, web crawler) looks for the embedded keywords and phrases that are uniformly spread in the page's keywords and description Meta tags. The search engine spider reads the content from the top down and follows links inserted in the web page content.
The clean coding allows a search engine spider to weed through your content successfully. Like a web browser, the search engine is also fastidious and easily stumbles if it encounters problems with the HTML coding. It highly considers low of the websites with broken tags, improper coding and excessive java script redirects. In that case the spider prefers to abandon the site.
It has become very common that web programmers and designer in an allurement of achieving highly dynamic pages incorporate Flash, JavaScript, ASP, PHP, of Coldfusion's, .Net etc. Undoubtedly these tools make the visual appearance exuberant, but this exuberance is never so lucky to yield good results since they hinder the optimization value of a page. Also there complexity is not decipherable by the search engines. Search engine's spiders and robots are simple and read only actual HTML markup code, and the ASCII text that appears on the page itself. Still, if you plan to employ Flash or Java applet in navigation menu, make sure to replicate it somewhere and integrate HTML links as well.
Search engines highly disapproves of the coding done with

• Too little Text
• keyword density ratio
• Heavy JavaScript
• Large File Sizes
• Small Text Sizes
• Frames

Different search engine puts a different amount of weight on above mentioned factors.

www.segnant.com

Make your visitors your potential customers

So you have finally built an amazing site, but it is not attracting traffic because customers still feel fatigued of purchasing products and availing your services. In order to mark the existence of your website, you need to become visible to them with your definite set of goals. The webmaster cum retailer who works meticulously to build trust only prospers in today’s internet marketing realm. No matter what you are selling, be critical of your site. Plan out each and every aspect of your website to avoid negligence of making mistakes and presenting an overall unorganized and not a well thought out page. While you might know the navigation of your website, but considering that even the customer would know everything will kill your existence. Remember that your website visitor did not design the page and needs a little more direction.

Some incredible ways to convert your visitors into potential customers are:

• Put your web address on all outgoing envelopes, business cards, print ads etc. to enhance your chances of being noticed by your online visitors.
• Leaving your URL address in the answering machine or voice-mail messages.
• Requesting the sites associated to your field of proficiency to add links to your site. Your endeavors will be rewarded particularly if you add a section including links to the related businesses before putting up a request for links.
• Forwarding an email newsletter on a regular basis with every week's or month's updates, sales, discounts, launches, and schedules to your subscribed visitors. The new promises can make your customers re-visit your site.
• Requesting people to bookmark your site also encourages them to visit your website over and over again.
• Online competitions and offering free give-away gifts can also attract people to your site.
• Create a survey for your site and conduct several small tests in interest of your customers. Survey as many customers as you can. Then act on the results and make the changes.
• Use your real voice while demonstrating your product/service online.
• Be earnest and provide straight facts.
• Viral Marketing also encourages links to your site. it also encourages individuals to pass on your word-of-mouth marketing message in an informal, person-to-person manner.
• Use testimonials to build credibility.
• Issue timely news releases. News Releases are not only loved by people but also by the search engines.
• Built an alternate domain that redirects the customers to the same site.
• Post ads in free online classified ads to commercialize your products or services.
• Participate in discussion forums.
• Affiliate Marketing: A system of sharing revenue between one site featuring an ad or content designed to drive traffic to another site. The affiliate site receives a fee based on the amount of traffic generated.
• Publish blogs that serves as a publicly available personal journal for an individual.
• Once your visitors become your potential customers, don’t keep them waiting. Answer to their queries immediately. Provide them their due services and ship the order ASAP.

www.segnant.com

Internet Marketing Terminologies – I

Blind Traffic: Low quality visitors generated by misleading banners or spam which rarely convert to a sale
Blog: A journal or information sheet that is often updated and intended for general public utilization.
Clustering: The process of listing a single page from a web site within a search engine or directory's search results. This is done in order to provide a wider variety of relevant results to keep one company from occupying all of the top positions.
CPA: The Cost Per Action. The cost the advertiser pays to the site publisher each time a specific, visitor-initiated action occurs.
CPC: The Cost Per Click. The agreed amount the advertiser pays for each click someone makes on a link leading to their web site.
CPM: Cost per 1,000 impressions. Sending 1,000 visitors to your site via Banner or advert views.
CTR: Click Through Ratio. Ratio of the number of times an ad is clicked divided by the number of times an ad is viewed.
SEO: A set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.
SEO Firm: An industry of consultants carrying out optimization projects on behalf of clients' sites
White hat SEO: An ethical practice of SEO methodologies
Black hat SEO: An unethical SEO in which questionable or prohibited techniques are employed to increase SERP’s. It affects the users experience on the site for the worse.
Grey hat SEO: Followed by most of the SEO Firms that cloak and take on some calculated risks in order to get ahead.
Search Engine Algorithm: Set of rules according to which search engines rank web pages. If you comprehend how they gauge relevance, you can make specific pages on your site super relevant for specific search terms.
SEP: (Search Engine Placement) The internet marketing term used to explain the process of ensuring that a website appears in the top results list of a search engine or directory once a relevant search has been implemented.
SERP: (Search Engine Results Page) The Web page that a search engine returns with the results of its search.

SEM: (Search engine marketing) A strategic approach to driving/attracting users to a website. It includes things such as search engine optimization, paid listings and other search-engine related services.
SPAM: Technique that increases the potential positioning of a site at the expense of the quality of the search engine's database.

Search Friendly Copy Writing

The words of your content on your Web pages should never be an obligation or and added burden of representing something. It is a major asset in your search engine optimization campaign. A well organized, consistent, keyword-rich and properly presented article is the subsequent step after carrying out keyword research. Once the hidden potential of SEO writing is explored by you or your copywriter it can bring you High Rankings without any special coding and Meta tagging. With a bit of more observance and increased knowledge, you can easily develop a new written, keyword-rich marketing copy, ensuring that you have harnessed all possible keyword opportunities. Check your paraphrase against the original text to make certain that you have incorporated all the keyword/phrases without losing its readability and selling proposition. Though it is an intimidating task, but for the sake of achieving your goal you will have to cross this bridge. Search-friendly copy to some extent poses a level of redundancy that is actually a part and parcel of ad copy content writers. To produce good copy that is a real delight not only for the customers but also for the search engines and prompts the desired response at a high rate, the following guidelines can certify this acid test.

1. Understanding what search terms could potential customers type to find your site and the number of competing sites that are part of the search results.
2. Maintaining equilibrium of phrases used for optimizing your web site. Advisable is to target one or two keyword phrases per page.
3. To reduce keyword clutter, combine your potential search phrases. Using this phrase with consistency will build relevance.
4. There are not many search terms to target.
5. The search terms are on the low to middle end of competitiveness.

Matching Phrases to Your Content
Try to compose your article from the readers’ point of view. The pages you create should provide ample information with reference to specific terms and concepts that are unique to your website. Not many of you would know that Search Engines index the first 500 words from each page they successfully crawl. So the text within that extent of words helps to determine the relevance for a particular search term. If you are a wizard at crafting your keywords into a forceful copy you are more expected to be relevant for keyword searches.

Create Keyword Rich Page Copy
To create Keyword Rich Pages supply good content repeating a particular keyword manipulatively a number of times without disturbing the flow of the copy. Ensure you have a working knowledge of the different HTML tags like the Title tag, the Meta Description tag, the Meta Keywords tag, the Heading tags, the Alt Tag etc.

Understanding Keyword Density
Keyword density is a measurement of knowing how significant a given keyword is to a page of material. It is calculated by counting the total number of words on the page, then calculating how many of them are "keywords/phrases.”

Understanding How Keywords Fit into Copy
Successful website copywriting convert web site visitors into qualified leads and generate sales and revenue. It should be crafted in such a way that convince the search engines that is creditable of a top ranking for keyword searches related to its theme and simultaneously should provide customers an insight into your products and services.

http://www.segnant.com/

How to handle competitive words and phrases

The new organization in the process of flourishing on the internet look out for comprehensive ways to increase their traffic, their presence, and their business magnitude in a market with many competitors who are mature established businesses. As the search engines have become more sophisticated in how they rank results, you need to exploit your investment in your site development by bringing you more visitors. There is an extensive misapprehension that a site in order to generate the traffic need highly competitive keyword phrases that have often become the clichés. Typically people still rely on non-specific keyword phrases, courtesy Overture’s keyword finder tool that tells them that particular keyword phrase gets the most searches. However, it has a major downside to it. Handling competitive keywords and phrases calls for something more and it is feasible to generate first-page rankings in the free listing part of the major search engines for competitive keyword phrases.
What you really aim is to generate more qualified leads or sales. Simply trying to get top search engine placement based upon those keyword phrases being searched on most may delude you from your ultimate goal: more sales. Take a moment and introspect what SEO is really all about and then again ponder over your own search habits. It is not always that your chosen keyword or phrase will decide your target audience or internet leads, because if demographically seen you can get leads from people all over the globe whom you can’t provide your services. A wise step of action here would be handling your keyword or phrase in such a manner that pre-qualifies your prospects. Let a keyword phrase accurately describe your product/service and bring you targeted website traffic. But be cautious while embedding them into your Meta tags. If you have been given the liberties don’t try to overemphasize your expectations and assemble your keywords into one. Instead of using unethical SEO methods shortlist 20 to 30 keyword phrases, choose 10 highly relevant and competitive keyword/phrases. It will yield you search engine placement skyrocketing your quality and quantity of leads.
Finding the right keyword phrase needs an analytical eye. You ought to have a clear vision before you start to look for your targeted keyword phrases. Be focused & get in touch with your real market and think like your customers. Decide your categories and sub categories and incorporate them as your keywords. The websites that are high on the lists for these keywords will have a good chance of getting visitors and converting these visitors you’re your regular customers.

http://www.segnant.com/

Building links based on what your competitors are doing

Link Popularity is vital for any website to get listed in Search Engine Rankings and building them particularly based on what your competitors are doing requires a thorough research and development, analysis, experience, motivation, a lot of interaction and plenty of hard work. Of all the finest strategy you could possibly have for generating quality of incoming traffic and your search engine rankings is to hunt for solid, permanent links on related pages.

Building links based on what your competitors are doing involves

• An efficient web metrics model for finding potential link partners
• A strong analysis of existing link data
• A strong analytical study of your competitors marketing efforts

Strategizing link building endeavors for your site at the first place involves ethical SEO methods. It helps to obtain related links to your site. Ethical SEO goes hand in hand when your website meets your target audiences’ expectations. Building your site to meet industry expectations simply means knowing your audience and what they expect. If you feel your competitors are following some trend then don’t overlook the fact. Maybe there’s something to that. Be sure to follow your own approach because your focus is your product and your audience. As you incorporate all the design elements, think about the credibility and usability of the site. To make it more user-friendly incorporate have textual links as a feature within the body content as part of your navigation scheme and let your active document speak. Contextual linking only imposes cognitive burden on the audience forcing the visitor to rely on the main site navigation to decide their flipping to next link. Integrating effective color essentials can create a more appealing website that can easily lead your visitors to take the desired actions. The visual calls should be stimulating enough to create an aura of impulsive yet intellectual buying. For a sure-fire way to grow a strong, steady, and permanent link base over time, find your link partners manually and contact each one individually.
Another way to analyze your competitors command on search listings is to view their META KEYWORDS tag within the HTML source code. Here you can get some high-quality ideas for augmenting your own list of keywords.

http://www.segnant.com/