Sunday, December 30, 2007

HOW TO GRAB THE TOP SPOT IN SEARCH ENGINES

If your site is not getting indexed in the top 30 matches of the keyword targeted search, consider it be almost non-existent. It calls for some time to think over and look out for the solutions to get maximum out of your HTML code. Obviously, the main purpose of your site is not just to get indexed in the search engines. It ought to grab the top spot in terms of ranking and should have the dynamism of turning your visitors into buyers. The Real promotion of the site is a challenging task which requires strategic analysis and hence careful deliberation. The chances of boosting up your sales dramatically shoots up if your site is positioned well in the search engines. Website promotion mainly focuses on search engines whose Robots keeps a check on your well optimized page like perfect rendering of Meta Tags, keywords, carefully adjusted interlinking, light weight, lots of text and other features. Well created optimized pages for your website for optimal Search Engine positioning generate more traffic for your website appearing under many different keywords in Google, Yahoo, Altavista and other PPC and search engines. Apart from the perfect execution of tags and keywords, optimizing a website for search engines also involves listing of your site in the big search engines and directories, a proper link exchange program, blogging, e-mail discussion groups, forums, and chat rooms, generating reports etc. Though submitting the site to web directories is a tedious job as it keep the web pages under the best suited category, but the effort of submitting is worth it (sites submitted under irrelevant categories runs the risk of being considered as spam). A small nitty-gritty of the website promotion to grab a top spot is that whenever you advertise your website include your domain address. It is important to not to spend more on the pay per click advertising than what you are likely to get in return.

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

KEYWORD RESEARCH WITH LATERAL THINKING

For a layman “Keyword Research” would simply mean working hard at studying keywords. As keyword selection is the single most important aspect of search engine marketing, its supremacy can’t be ruled out. Apart from using services Overture’s inventory tool, word tracker, Google AdWords Keyword Tool or any other pay per click service some lateral thinking can be carried out to reach your target audience. For this it is necessary to comprehend what the online customers really want. When talking with people who are a part of target audience putting up questions like, "if you were searching for xyz product, what keyword or keyword phrase might you type into a search engine?" A little brainstorming can easily get you some interesting and constructive answers. Select two or three of your most important keywords related to your business and try using them diplomatically 3-7 times for every 100 words in your web copy.
By simply widening our accepted wisdom new avenues can be opened, which relate to a topic that directly relates to the target audience. Some creative thinking blended with brainstorming can enable the webmaster to know all kinds of site features, articles and content that will attract their specific audience. It sounds senseless to have a site that is not targeted to the right audience and expect high search engine rankings. If your site is already designed and is in the inventory of search engine but it is not yielding good results you may consider examining the keywords and make the necessary changes in your title, description meta tag, keyword meta tag, alt tags, comment tags, heading tags and main text of your web copy.


Saturday, December 22, 2007

UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL – SPAM

The significance and magnitude of electronic mail in e-mail marketing can’t be ignored even after witnessing the voluminous over-bloated inboxes filled with the spam. The spammers send a piece of e-mail to a distribution list in the millions, in the hope that if not all then certainly a tiny number of readers will answer to their offer. It is no wonder that the offers look very tempting, but it is always advisable to refrain from such marketers. On the contrary websites that offer specific email addresses that are segregated based on the target audience are worth visiting. Another effective and safe option is permission based email, where email addresses are collected through opt in options. It is an extremely useful advertising campaign with augmented security. Validating Unsolicited Commercial Email also known as bulk mail has gradually developed a set of best practices for email marketing by the organizations that focuses on creating e-mail distribution lists. Some countries follow the Code of Ethics and Standards of Practice to prevent the email abuse that more or less look like the important messages delivered to the inbox. Of lately, more and more Internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs) in their endeavor to stop junk e-mails have unintentionally blocked genuine email messages before they reach their recipients. Contemporarily the spam internet marketing is swelling and current email marketing figures have emphasized that the economy spend on e- mail marketing promotion will also led to an endorsement of spam. Spam represents almost 80% of total email traffic with an estimated impact of approximately US $25 billion dollars per year to the worldwide cost-cutting measure.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS WITH ONLINE MARKETING

How can you give your visitor any good reason to become your permanent client when you have only 10 seconds to attract him? 10 seconds is the tenure when you have to oblige him/her and have to assure that your business is his best choice. The plight of the short-sighted, entrepreneurs is that they simply throw up a Web site assuming that their business will automatically pep up overnight. And when nothing takes a positive turn, except for their own lack of marketing efforts, they blame the reliability of www. For 24/7 virtual marketing strategy, let the visitors of the search engine be acquainted with your Web name or your name and be aware of what you offer and how you may be having edge over others. Building traffic and jamming it to your Web site needs a proper management of content and sales messages synchronizing with online promotion methods such as submitting articles and creating a web-based periodic article (blog). When it comes to attract customers, and widen the range of clientele, following the taboos of the internet world is a worthy decision. Realizing that the spiders of the search engines comb sites, on day to day basis look for a good key word, free information, and power writing sales content, can to some extent ensure the success of the web site. Approximately 95 percent of search engine traffic comes from Google and Yahoo!, so it becomes all the more mandatory to realize that just getting a space in the inventory of search engines does not guarantee traffic. A popular concept known as digital back-scratching that helps the sites to include useful resources for the targeted customers also raises an opportunity to generate a strong clientele. Being honored as “Best of…..” can give you prestigious moments to always cherish for and above all a big publicity boost. Isn’t it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Saturday, December 15, 2007

DECIPHERING THE DYNAMISM OF WEB PROMOTION AND E-MARKETING

The online screening of the way in which the patrons have been interacting with the commercial websites has radically improved the response rates. The e-marketing tools that work in tandem fundamentally perform on the same platform where a proficient designer uses online architectural designing principles, carefully merging information delivery and insightful navigation. To capitalize on the launch effort, a professional web designer makes it sure that nothing is ignored, and most important Search Engine Optimization prospects (ranking, placement, submission, website architecture, web design, and other website marketing tasks) are properly acknowledged and decoded. Contemporarily every business wants to have the top search engine ranking and when internet marketing has cumulatively become hard, technical, detailed effort; simply showcasing an award winning website is not enough. The site ought to be at par with the expectations of potential visitors. The perfect combination of web design, development, and search engine marketing with focused Search Engine Optimization and placement tactics are imperative for the success of the site. To synergistically make the site succeed the website design, search engine optimization, submission, and placement should have a global approach. The appeal of these powerful tools, in their turn, roll the forceful targeted keyword information into a modified cross-sell and up-sell marketing program with special consideration to organic search engine listings that turns visitors into customers. Developing an Internet based entrepreneurship is a tricky endeavor, which can easily distract you from housing a steady stream of targeted traffic, but our thorough research will definitely put you on the unpretentious track from time to time.

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Web Answers: Another Cool New Feature on Ask Jeeves

In the last blog we talked about Ask Jeeves new "focus/Zoom" feature that will help refine searchers' queries by expanding the 'related topics' search suggestion category. As promised, in today's blog, I will introduce you to another cool new feature on Ask Jeeves that will make searchers' whole process of finding answers to questions less cumbersome and more interesting as well as fast.

This new feature is called Web Answers and it digs and excavates web pages in real-time looking for answers to queries formulated as questions. A somewhat similar facility was being offered earlier also by Ask Jeeves through their "Smart Answers" option, but the difference and improvement now is the extraction of answers directly from the content found on the open web instead of using structured infromation from other sources, like Wikipedia, etc.

A thing to note is that 'Web Answers' feature is functional or activated only if you enter your query as a question to trigger Web Answers. In other words, this feature will work well if you enter a question as a query and not a keyword or a phrase. For example,the query "location America" will not provide you the answer, but rephrasing the query as "Where is America" will give you instant answer with the help of the Web Answers feature.

It's not only Ask Jeeves that is providing direct answers to questions. Google has recently come out with its own question answering feature called Google Q&A that digs out open web content (including Wikipedia) for giving answers. Similarly, MSN search provides answers to searchers' queries from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia only when that information is relevant to a particular query labeled as "Answer" at the top of the search results. As far as yahoo is concerned, it does not have any specific feature that answers questions, but has some other search methods that provide answers to questions.

What makes Ask Jeeves feature stand out from others is the ability to analyze comprehensively the web content in real-time, as per the searchers' query. But as every new invention and discovery has it's ifs and buts, so does this new feature too. The one grey area in the feature's functionality is the fact that the answers provided may not be accurate or authentic or may even at times be totally wrong or satirical.

Sometimes the searcher might be confused when confronted with multiple answers to a question. Though this is a useful aspect of the feature as there may be questions that are debatable or have more than one alternatives, but this can also result in complications and problems for the searchers as they may not seriously rate the quality of the answers they get.

There is a solution to this problem too as all sources of information are listed for ensuring the accuracy and validity of the answers.The only thing required is awareness among the users to always view and consider the source to confirm the authenticity of a result.

http://www.segnant.com

Sunday, December 09, 2007

New Features On Ask Jeeves: Time to Cheer for Searchers

The latest news doing the rounds in search engine industry is that Ask Jeeves is coming out with two new features in order to facilitate searchers' process of focusing queries and getting direct answers to questions minus the hassle and complexity involved in search commands and search tools.

The two cool features added to Ask Jeeves are:

Focus or Zoom- This feature will help refine the searchers' queries by expanding the 'related topics' search suggestions that are shown in the right column of Ask Jeeves search results. Now the searchers will be presented with three categories of related topics search:Narrow your search, Expand Your Search, and Related Names

With the help of clustering technology, Ask Jeeves will identify "communities" on the net with information related to your query, and take out the meaningful concepts from those communities into the list of suggestions.

Narrow your Search Category will provide the searchers with suggestions that help them reach a particular topic or area instead of showing generalized suggestions.

Whereas Expand your search category and related names categories will broaden the search of the searchers by showing all related topics and subjects also.

The benefit of this feature is that the searchers don't have to waste time toying with different search terms and keywords for finding information. With single query, they will be able to get search results from the most narrow to the broadest of topics.

Web Answers- This feature will provide direct answers to the queries and questions put by the searchers as natural language questions. We will talk about this cool feature in detail in the next blog.

Till then Happy Reading!

http://www.segnant.com/

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

SEO Mistakes and Misconceptions

The net is full of seo related information. But more the information, worse are the misconceptions and mistakes floating about seo. It is important to keep in mind the following factors that are very critical to the success and popularity of a website.

1. Content that disregards the search engines
One of the major blunders that usually webmasters make is not to provide the search engines with good, fresh, relevant, and updated, keyword rich content. They stuff the pages with all sorts of flash, graphics and other embellishments forgeting that this is not what the search engines are looking for. They want keywords that explain and gel with your services and products.

2. Neglected link popularity
Another mistake committed by unexperienced webmasters is linking your site to thousands of other sites irrespective of the relevance and appropriateness of those sites that are linking to you. The incoming links should not only compliment it, but also be relevant to the site's content.

3. Inadequate keyword research
Many a times, webmasters do not realize the importance of keywords research while optimizing their pages. It is one of the most important features of seo. You need to discover a niche while searching for the right keywords-neither too popular nor too shadowy. It is important to do constant and regular research and update the content with changing times.

4. Not considering optimization while designing
Most of the webmasters don't see how closely designing of the site and planning its optimization strategy are connected. The SEO specialist should be consulted early on in the designing stage only. As they say, "prevention is better than cure". That stands true for seo also. The design of the website should be in tune with optimization strategies.

5. Too much dependence on paid advertising
Companies have a misconception that by buying search advertising, they need not indulge in organic search engine optimization. How wrong they are in their thinking! No doubt paid search advertising helps to a certain extent, but at the end of the day, it is the normal seo activities that brighten your chances of success online.

6. Ignoring the conversion process
For whom are you creating a site? For interested customers, of course. So how can you forget those very visitors who might turn into customers, if they find what they want on your site? Sadly this is happening so often. Many sites just do not pay attention to the conversion rate of the visitors into clients. The site has to be created keeping in mind the visitors and not your own self.

7. Overuse of graphics
If you want to end a business before starting only, put graphics to represent a link in a website. You may be having valid reasons for doing so,but this is not a great idea. Understand how the search engines find information on your webpages. They usually look for plain text links and when they encounter graphics for navigation, they are confused whether the graphic link is related to a specific webpage or not.

8. Too much use of Frames
Frames are just too difficult and cumbersome for the search engines to handle. It becomes really tough for them to index pages that are created in frames as the framed sites use several html files to display one page.

9. Submitting your site to innumerable search engines
Nothing could be as bad and time consuming as submitting your site to thousands of search engines in the hope of getting good and targeted trafic. Don't waste your time, energy and money doing this as the traffic generated through them is negligible unlike the popular misconception that it is good to submit to a lot of search engines.

10. Ambiguity regarding the Action plan
Sadly enough many website leave a question mark on the faces of the visitors simply because the visitors cannot understand what the website is all about or what it expects from the visitors. So if the people cannot make out what they are supposed to do on your site, they will not stay there for long.

http://www.segnant.com/

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Marketing Online the Right Way: Follow These Steps

Whether you are marketing offline or online, the principles of a sound marketing system remain the same. It doesn't matter where you are marketing, what matters is how you are marketing. The medium may be any, but the method has to be very strong and effective. The first fundamental that marketing teaches one is to achieve the four basic goals: attract, convert, influence, and retain. Some of the important things to keep in mind while marketing are:

Packaging Counts-How do you attract people to your products or services in today's world of stiff competition? Whatever you are selling or providing, thousands others are providing too. Here in comes the importance of packaging. A package is a combination of items creating an offer to suport the client in accomplishing their goal. So package your products or services well enough to make the clients achieve their purpose.

Make your uniqueness stand out-You don't want to be one of the hundreds of shops lying in one row offering almost the same things as others. What makes you stand out from the crowd? What is different in you from your competitor? Find out the differences and encash upon them.

Winning clients for life-Even if you succeeded in selling your services or products once, you haven't achieved much in terms of marketing. Try to turn one time buyers into regular buyers. Because that is your objective-to have multiple, lifelong, paying clients, and not short-term revenue generation through one time buying.


Building a strong client rapport-It does no harm remaining in touch with the previous clients and updating them time and again about your products, services and any new additions. This fosters trust that is a must for any sale. A strong rapport with the client will ensure better and more sales for you.

More than one way of buying- Providing the clients with more than one way or option of buying the products and services will help augment the revenue generation process. So you need to look and provide all the possibilities to the client to make the buying and selling process smooth sailing and fast.


Building a strong team-You need to build and maintain your networks and relationships with other team members. If you think that you are good enough alone and can sell without anybody's help, you are sadly mistaken. You may be able to reach your goal alone,but that would mean a long and arduous journey. So, it's important to have different teams and departments that help you in return of your help to them.

Be pleasant-Simple as that people need to like you before actually dealing with you. It is your pleasantness and likeability that builds confidence and trust of people in you, in order to get them excited enough to buy.

Think like a buyer-Don't have your own preconceived ideas and perceptions while selling. You need to get into the psyche of the buyers and see what they want. Perceive everything from the point of view of the employees and accordingly alter their job titles and responsibilities. Infact teach them too to perceive from the point of view of the clients.

Understand Clients' Emotions-Since Eighty-five percent buyers are guided more by emotions than logic while buying, so pay attention to the emotional factor, and then give them the logic to buy their products or services.

Communicate Well-The way you communicate your message makes a lot of difference to your sales and marketing system.This is one area that you cannot afford to miss or ignore. You must communicate so well that the visitor turns to a returning buyer.

http://www.segnant.com/