Web Marketing

Building a site’s popularity organically

2008-09-30T07:24:00.001-05:00

Very often it is seen that the webmasters are either perplexed or always showcase their rejection about how to achieve site’s popularity. Most of the times remain fidgety always wanting to be in the top 5, 10, top page for organic listings. But may I please tell them once again building a great website optimized to score high popularity in the SERPs is only half the battle won. To lead in the organic results or the free listings, there are some organic methods which can help you promote your site. Partly a web site's search engine rankings are determined by the popularity of your site. Promoting doesn’t always necessarily mean advertising; it is more compound and call foe finding ways to get your visitors involved. As such there is not any shortcut to achieve the status of influential site. The unethical SEO which requires money will only raise the status of your site ephemerally, but tomorrow it will ensure the crash down in the rankings as the result of being declared spam. As a matter of fact organic growth is a slow process and generally takes a year or more to display real results.

You have created a web site that has premium content that is relevant to your targeted visitors, it is ranking high on the search engine results pages (SERPs), you have totally avoided spamming and other unethical SEO tactics that are liable to get you banned. But…. Do you think you are done?

For a rational explanation, you need to deeply understand the exclusivity of the search engines because the other half of the battle depends on the time to time manipulations of the search engine algorithms. To set off a good start, simply overlook the mirage created by the link spamming. An organic link building process includes the links that search engines love to index and crawl. An organic approach towards link building will attract more visitors not only from the search engines but also from other sources. Web surfers find their way to popular sites via bookmarks, links to the site from articles or blogs, and directly typing in the URL at the address bar.

How to generate buzz and get web surfers interested in what your site has to offer them

2008-09-22T07:21:00.001-05:00

Building a community online is easier said than done. Yes it goes against the age old click, “It is always easy said than done.” Looking at your Web marketing plan as a long term effort, a wise first step of consideration would be thinking of your website not as a commercial information sales sheet, but as a prospect for you to interact with your customers. Although at the niche you work for organic listings, at the front simultaneously you ought to offer anything unique and of quality or value; or should I say viral marketing is the best way!!!!!!!!!

To build a strong community try to evaluate, why your site exists. Keep in mind: what benefit do users get from participating in your community? What are you offering them that they won’t find on your competitive site or anywhere else? Once your goals are apparent, adhere to them, but at the same time be flexible. In any case you have to meet the needs of the community.

Have a proper strategic planning for your actions to be carried out. And if you display incapability somewhere, your users or potential buyers might start a hunt for their own programs that probably won’t fit in well with yours.

Just set up a blog, forum, wiki, or other interactive system to receive feedback from multiple users. Provide authentic testimonials to the people so that they may be able to make up their mind judiciously. You can also attract interested web surfers through search engines, and submitting links to other sites. If you’ve ever been a participant in other online communities, your experience will help you know your objectives better. Luckily if your list of visitors is healthy and sociable the trick is getting the good ones to stay will take care of itself.

An errant but intellectual behavior of your visitor does not necessarily mean that they uphold any negative stance for your site. For instance, your blog, wiki or whatever has attracted the comments from the participants only for the sake of comments, on the contrary the voice brought into play may take an excited interest in discussing ideas you never thought were important or didn’t even know existed.

When a reliable community is set up, some community members act as moderators for your web site. They may make the discussions smooth, and even act as peacemakers between other community members engaged in serious disagreements with each other. At the same time you need to pay attention to honest criticisms, because might is not always right. One of the best things you can do to ensure no disparagement is to post a code of conduct to the community members. Once a healthy community is established its members will link to it from their own blogs or websites. Maintaining cordial Public Relations via press releases is news equivalent of search engine optimization. If your press release is well written and newsworthy, it stands the chances of being picked and linked up by the mainstream press. Press releases are a sure shot gun method to gain popularity overnight. But be sure to present the factual information. There is no place for gossip or feathery promises in PR.

Website credibility and SEO

2008-09-15T06:46:00.002-05:00

Web credibility is its usability, the quest for designs that are easy to corporate, makes our lives easier and simultaneously becomes important to Search Engines. The credibility of the website depends on the functionality and simplicity of navigation, how the interpretation of colors, font size and design rally to enhance a user experience without distracting the user. But navigation has an unswerving effect on how search engines crawl a website, and index it consequently.

Navigation is often overlooked but it plays a crucial role in getting site visitors to view more than just the home page from the moment the visitor enters the site to the moment they leave. If navigation choices are ambiguous, visitors may prefer to hit the "Back" button. Maintaining an easy navigation for a web site is not an easy task. Once the visitor enters, the real challenge begins, as it an uphill chore to let first-time visitors to get take maximum advantage of a site. Navigation is such a tedious task make functional for everybody who will use your web site. The best navigation system is one that contains text links, anchor text, breadcrumb trail (derived from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel and offers shortcut links for users without using “Back” button). Text links and Anchor text should not be cloaked using JavaScript or other undecipherable code because cloaking won’t allow a search engine to follow your navigation system. From the SEO standpoint they provide another opportunity for you to include your keywords. The titles also help a search engine to determine the credibility of a site and hence they should not be misled either a search engine or a visitor.

Web metrics has made it apparent that web users like to visit sites that are easy to access and are not far away from the home page. Also the search engine are not liberated enough to crawl more than a couple directory levels deep. Here not even a great navigation structure and breadcrumbs would help you out.

The legibility of text, its size and color is another aspect of maintaining the site’s credibility. Also search engines give weight to text that is bigger. For both structural, navigational, and organization purposes, both for the site visitor and the search engines organizing web pages into sections is a good idea. Clean, sophisticated and uncluttered design web sites are usually visited and crawled the most.

Website Usability and SEO also relies on content positioning, site maps, and stats. A search engine scans the text left to right, top to bottom. Hence, the content at the top and left of the page is more imperative than the content positioned to the right and at the bottom of the page. A properly structured sitemap allows users find what they are looking for and it helps the search engines better index your entire site. If your website is having more than 50 links on a single page, it would be wise to break your sitemap into several pages, grouped under their specific category. Web metrics is an innovative way to identify where your visitors are going, or tend to go, and then you can streamline your site accordingly. You can get to know the preferences of your visitors and alter your navigation of those pages to make it easy for your visitors to get back to where they want to be.

Fine tune your marketing efforts with web metrics

2008-09-04T02:16:00.001-05:00

In this era of perpetually changing technology, marketing strategies, consumer demographics and industry trends; keeping a track of who is coming to your website, which direction are they following, how long they stayed there, from where they got redirected to your website, whether they are interested in buying your products/services have become incredibly essential. In the face of this, still large numbers of website owners are leaving everything to conjecture, with no curiosity to learn what parts of their website halts the target audience, and which don't. The webmasters are just concerned to focus on increasing their traffic and sales, marketing their sites, improving their content, attracting a community of loyal visitors, and other subjective goals. In the rush to be online, they often overlook scrutinizing where their businesses are statistically. They are not even concerned how users are targeted towards their site and what those users do once they get there. Not knowing where a business is heading towards could be perilous, particularly on the World Wide Web where things change without giving any prior intimation.

It is very important for a webmaster to understand the statistical positioning of a site everyday. Every other site promotional technique depends on the statistical approach, because it provides the vital dimensions of site’s performance and its market competitiveness. Evaluating the daily progress could provide the owner a direction to review audience activity and the related revenue-generating potential. A proper appraisal will provide a wealth of information that will directly attract and serve the customers.

For improving your site traffic and conversion:

Screening a site’s escalation on the whole: Traffic & sales are the two measures to analyze the overall intensification of site and hits and page views are the long-established methods to assess site's growth and its demographic reach. A rise in page view is a consequence of the cordiality among the increase in traffic, increase in the number of the site's pages or a blend of both.
Screening site’s marketing campaigns: Maintaining proper statistics of the visitors coming from banners placed in other sites help to determine the effectiveness of a site's marketing campaigns. Considering from where your visitors are coming can easily capitulate answers to your marketing efforts.
Gauging the interests of visitors: A webmaster can determine the interests of its visitors in a number of ways. Statistics to measure the popularity of page include the consideration of the most requested pages, track of time spent on pages, time spent on site, depth of visit etc. Knowing the pages that people frequently visit will help a webmaster identify the sort of information that his or her visitors want.
A site's metrics can help locate where the desired visitors are coming from and the quality of traffic.
Site metrics can provide a deep look of how a site is experienced by a user. An all-purpose site facilitated for use by different versions of browsers has a possibility of reaching a wider spectrum of audience.
Assembling a picture of site's traffic and improving customer service and technical support will provide surplus information and an idea of how the site is doing and how it can be further improved.

Traffic is money online

2008-09-01T05:42:00.000-05:00

It can’t be denied that traffic is the lifeline of any website. If a site fails to generate traffic, it is impossible to reach the summit of turnovers. Due to the new algorithms introduced by Google, of lately many sites have suffered in desperation the loss of traffic. Even though these sites have tried to generate traffic to some extent, but still they are finding it difficult to understand what's holding them back. The situation is whole-heartedly getting availed by the unscrupulous individuals who have decided to take full undue, unethical advantage of these desperate webmasters. You've probably come across their modest offers stating, “pay $200 and get back 10,000 guaranteed visitors to your web site” or “spend $50 and get 2,000 visitors overnight." These unprincipled, crooked promoters change their pitch with each new offer made, but always end up showing the same result. They deceitfully steal the traffic of other sites and divert it to yours, and as expected the targeted visitors won’t ever buy anything from your site. These visitors will visit your site without putting up any query. They won’t subscribe to free email offers. They will visit your site giving you some goose bumps and nightmares. Here their mission gets accomplished, but what about the bucks that you have spent…..?
To avoid getting cheated upon try to follow other SEO tactics that will work for your site including

ezine advertising
pay-per-click search engines
article submissions
publicity
affiliate programs
networking
viral marketing
buying other web sites

These tactics are worth spending your money and time to drive traffic to your web site.

Poor Configuration of Firewall Kills Search Engine Rankings

2008-08-30T06:02:00.002-05:00

Many of you might have gone through the horrifying experience of finding your websites being removed from the search engines one fine morning. This must have left you with a question mark on your faces as to why it happened when you had done nothing to offend or displease the search engine spiders. This is exactly what happened with some webmasters whose websites were hosted by a compay that used SonicWALL Inc.'s special firewall software.

As a result of using this software, search engine spiders couldn't access their websites because the Firewall software didn't allow them to do so. The standard security settings of this software state that:

"An attacker could retrieve robots.txt from the server, then use the contents of this file to discover the path of an unprotected administration interface for the server. The attacker may gain control of the webserver using this interface.The information gathered from robots.txt could be used for system compromise and control of the web server." (reference)

In simple and un-technical terms, it means that the search engines will not spider your website if this software is used without customizing it. In case the firewall has these settings, the connection to anyone asking for the robots.txt file will not be given so that it appears as if the site is offline.

The bad news is that this is not good from SEO point of view because the robots.txt file is the one which all search engines request and ask for before they index your website. So, the bottom line is that if you too are finding your site being removed from the search engines, regardless of good incoming links and well optimized web pages , you need to talk to your web host whether their firewall is the culprit, blocking search engines to request for robots.txt file. Chances are that your web host is not aware of this problem.

How to ensure your press release drives traffic to your website

2008-08-22T02:33:00.001-05:00

Press Release is the most advantageous way to increase your sales, expose your business and increase traffic to your website particularly when your business is running short of enough money. A well-written press release has the potential to get picked up on various sites and channels and increases the traffic to a site providing enhanced rankings overall. Publishing a Press Release in several News Search Engines attracts hundreds of back links from high-ranking web sites, as News Channels tend to be highly ranked sites. The main objective in writing an effective press release is to write something noteworthy of your products/services and get it published. So they must be written in a crisp, clear and colloquial style. Since the main characteristic of the press releases is to present an updated fresh content, it regularly earns your webpage the editor’s attention. Properly optimized keyword rich press release drive traffic to your site and helps building/retaining market exposure for the services/products offered by you. But you might be mulling over how to ensure that this condensed journalistic articles provide the kind of publicity and traffic you look for.

For substantial SERP, you need to consider following points:

The relevance of your information: consider if your recent release of press release is informative or not. It should strictly adhere to the ‘5 Ws’ of your organization, your agendas, product/services and providing suitable answers to who, what, where, when and why.

A strong appealing introduction: The heading of the press release should be such that it immediately captures the interest of media, journalist or editor. The title of the press release should be short and emphatic.

Remember your aim is to reach your target audience: Your press release must target a specific audience. Emphasize or highlight the information that is projected for them and tell them why they should follow it enquiringly. Your press release will be more effective if you attract focused and targeted audience.

Be honest: There is no fun of making castles in the air and providing the facts that are not true to the best of your knowledge. Provide only the facts about your information. Avoid exaggeration and feathery language.

Careful interpretation of words: Avoid using superfluous adjectives, adverb, flowery language, or unnecessary expressions that simply makes you narcissistic of your products/services. Let each powerful used convey your agenda.

Provide some real life examples: Providing some real life examples or testimonials always works out for an organization. It is a wonderful way to increase the credibility of your services.

Select the opportune time to release your Press Release: It is more than important to publish your press release timely, and recount it to a news-worthy event. It would be advisable to link your news to current events or social issues, to make sure that your release has an informative element.

Press releases are not meant to narrate all the elements of your business. They are meant to convey the cores of what's going in your business.

Do not ever forget to provide your contact information with your contact name, address, web site address and e-mail address.

Before releasing, fix on where and how to send your press release.

Make a chronological list of the media in the range you want to cover.

Easy methods than SEO to promote a website

2008-08-15T06:18:00.001-05:00

Webmasters have always endeavored to direct traffic to their websites. Now when Internet is cluttered with all sorts of SEO techniques to increase traffic to your website and are touted as reliable ones, you can increase the "organic" or "frëe" traffic by following some simple ways that are equally reliable. After building a good content-rich site the following methods will definitely yield profitable results

Buy Other Web Sites: Every day thousands domains are forfeited by their owners who fall short of funds to renew or pay for the registration fees on their expired domains. These sites are eventually deleted and are sent back to the "pool" of unregistered names. Cashing in on high profile domain names already rank high on your keywords. These expired domains beseech a lot of marketers’ attention. Ensure Google page rank, Alexa rank and the number of back links for any expired domain before taking the ownership of any site.

Affiliate Marketing: hire affiliates and offer commission to them for selling your product. Each affiliate's link to your salës letter conversion page will bring you traffïc and a better search engine rank too.
Know your visitor value and have a tested and proven sales page that converts your visitor into an enduring customer.
E-marketing Strategy: E-marketing strategy helps the companies to build a solid customer acquisition. The strategy involves a thorough identification of the best target market segments and developing the right online marketing programs to attract and retain profitable customers.
Present your Testimonials in other sites: Let other sites publish your testimonials on their web site. This can provide you a one-way link from a site that would probably otherwise not give it to you.
Develop a powerful link strategy: buy links from other sites from text link brokers. Make sure you get links from pages with a Google Page Rank higher than "0". A webpage can get a “0” PR because it might have violated the rules of ethical Search Engine Optimization. If you link to it you can also get “0” PR.
Blogs with RSS feed: The blogs are often updated several times a day with each voice-over conveying a story of its own. It is an effective strategy that increases the exposure of weblogs on the Internet and generates targeted traffic to your blog for free. To strengthen the effects distribute your news, views and reviews through RSS feed. Once the RSS text file is set up and registered at the various aggregators, it will generate plenty of traffic.
Press Release is another market exposure that generates traffic. An electronic press release is the most cost-effective marketing tool that not only brings credibility but also drive targeted web site traffic. If properly optimized it adds significant profits to your new product/services. Every Press Release published should be around 300-500 words including a link back to your site. this way you can get hundreds of links back to your site.
Also market your product/service in Ezi
Place ads in someone else's email newsletters that reach your target market. Make your article free for other sites as long as they keep the link back to you at the end of each article.
Nothing can be compared to pay per click advertising because you pay only when someone actually visits your site. You can bid for rankings and choose the description and title you want, which in turns generates the traffic for a website. It is also an easy way to be in the #1 rankings, and that too after paying the minimum amount per click-thru.

Buy other web sites: An easy way than SEO to get Web Site Traffic

2008-08-04T01:29:00.000-05:00

Every day hundreds of thousands domains are forfeited by their owners who fall short of funds to renew or pay for the registration fees on their expired domains. These sites are eventually deleted and are sent back to the "pool" of unregistered names. Expired domains implore a lot of marketers’ attention because these domains form a new supply of domain names returning to the market. Cashing in on high profile domain names can considerably boost any business on the internet. It initially started as a way to own a good domain name but contemporarily has turned out to be among the most recent ways to propel website's traffic. Every day more than 30,000 domains are registered and 2000 domains expire. Once a domain name expires and is send back to the inventory of unregistered names, it becomes available to be re-registered by anyone. It is more or less like a cat and dog race; the moment it is discarded the battle begins for its monopoly. Contrary to the belief, the domains do not terminate with a great ease. After its stipulated period of expiration, it goes into “expired” status for at least 40 days where its services are called off, but the domain owner may still renew the domain after paying the renewal fee, which is free of any penalty. But if in case the owner does not turns up to claim his domain it is shifted to “redemption period,” where the site is deprived of all Who Is information. Here the renewal charges are subjective to penalty. Subsequent to the redemption period the domain’s status is “locked” and enters the deletion phase. The tenure of the deletion phase is 5 days long, and on the last day the name is officially drop from the ICANN database and is made available for registration by anybody. Whether you want a domain name for your new website, find web sites that already rank high on your keywords and verify the traffic to them to better market your existing site. While new unregistered domain names are tedious to search, the expired domain lists are a better option. You can visit http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jhtml to get registration information on millions of domain names with many different extensions, irrespective of where they are registered

RSS: A Boon for Ezine Publishers

2008-08-01T06:02:00.001-05:00

Online publishing is on a rise these days. Every other publisher seems to be on the bus to online publishing destination. With the coming of RSS (Rich Site Syndication), the publisher's task has become all too easy and efficient. Now the publishers can syndicate or distribute their content to the interested subscribers through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks. Besides the syndication of content, there are numerous other benefits of RSS that need to be highlighted to the users.

First of all, RSS helps your site to rank better as search engines have a weakness for themed and subject related websites. In other words, when sites are optimized around some niches, or specific subjects, they rank much better in the search engines. RSS feeds also correspond to a particular topic or niche or theme. So by using the highly targeted RSS feeds from the blogs or news feeds, you can improve and update your site's content without writing a single word.

Search engines crave for theme based content that they get from the RSS feeds. So when you subscribe to an RSS feed related to your products or services, you also stand a chance of adding several keywords to your pages that are contained in that RSS feed and that you want to rank for.

Not only this, you also get highly updated and relevant content without having to write anything on your own. Simply because the RSS feeds are regularly updated by the publishers. These changes can be seen on your pages also, thus giving you an added benefit of having an updated site every few hours of the day without your doing anything.

Using RSS feeds also gets your site indexed and spidered more frequently and regularly than otherwise. Yes this is true because the search engines consider the sites with RSS feeds to be as good as having new, fresh, and updated content everyday. So they don't mind visiting theses sites even on a daily basis.

Now, think like a savvy marketer. With an RSS feed, you stand to have a win win situation only as your web pages will be indexed regularly and frequently as compared to your competitors who does not have an RSS feed subscription and hence no spidering or indexing by the spiders as frequently as that of your site.

So adding RSS feeds should be a very important part of your online marketing strategy and you should take it seriously if you dream to rank topmost in the search engines.

Shades of SEO spam

2008-07-30T23:04:00.000-05:00

Spamming intends to mislead search engines indexing programs and generate an artificially high ranking of web pages. This BMW case has become high profile for a major offense and is likely to gain attention for another couple of months. They exploited the supremacy of search engine with a view that promoting the business using unethical SEO techniques is an online business imperative. They used "borderline" techniques to gain rankings, and their traffic dropped like a rock. They took care of every impossible situation, buried keywords “gebrauchtwagen” (used car) and “neuwagen” (new car) many tens of times, relied on javascript code and CSS spamming to trick Google. They fed the search engine spider with a page full of their important keywords mentioned above without even realizing once that Google is smart enough and is strictly against the black hat SEO tactics.
BMW created a doorway page that featured “gebrauchtwagen” 42 times. In addition, a user’s browser immediately generated a JavaScript redirect to a completely different URL to the one seen by Google’s spider. This ‘cloaking’ technique broke one of Google’s fundamental rules. Search engine spiders ignored javascript totally in the past, probably because of this reason BMW endeavored to cover the real pages as best they can. The javascript they followed more or less looked like:

Because JavaScript is interpreted, loosely-typed, and has varying implementations Google immediately recognized the loopholes and demoted bmw.com.de for artificially enhancing its popularity. Though BMW Germany promptly removed the offending pages from their site, 2 hours after realizing what has happened, but it was obviously too late. It will be a minimum of 30 days that the BMW site will not appear in the Google results for any search. Rest depends on Google’s terms and conditions how long it keeps the site on probation.

The code for their CSS spamming was:

Google’s bullying campaign

2008-07-22T06:46:00.001-05:00

The lure of getting top listings in the search engines, besides setting the stage for SEO spamming is giving rise to unethical SEO techniques. Though it can’t be overlooked that search engine rankings are extremely competitive and Website owners are under constant pressure to do all they can to gain visibility in search results, but that doesn’t mean that it should be done at the cost of irking or exploiting the search engines. The webmasters have done their part and now it’s time for Google to bully them and freeze their sites. BMW’s recent death penalty verdict by Google has already started a landslide of news and commentary on search engine spam and the black-hat tactics. It seems Google has become adamant to give the weightage to the sites which have incorporated legitimate techniques ensuring ranking improvements that was earlier given to the bad guys. Some of the black-hat tactics that can toss an artificially inflated site to the bottom of the ranking pile are:

Hidden text or hidden links
Cloaking or tricky redirects
Link farming
Programmed queries to Google
Irrelevant keywords buried in HTML Pages.
Use of unrelated keywords
Multiple pages, sub domains, or domains with duplicate content
Mirror sites hosted on different domains/website address
"Doorway" pages created with an intention to trick the search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or duplicate content
Results manipulated by deceptive practices

Now when Google and the other search engines have decided to act, the black hat methodology will definitely be axed. Google simply blacklists the penalized site and drops it PR to 0. Sometimes the entire site is banned from the search engines and once you are banned you may have to resubmit your site for re-inclusion in search engine directories which takes a couple of months before you see your site listed again in the search engines. Search Engines give credibility to content rich sites and that is the only key to earn high ranking. The much needed resources for good Search Engine optimizations are developers, content writers and SEO specialists. It’s better to follow the fundamentals to have a better user experience and enjoy better ranking.

Give your site visitors something worth

2008-07-15T06:44:00.001-05:00

The usability and design of your site, strongly affect those factors that enhances the visitor’s experience. It is not a difficult task to create an attractive website and still be optimized for search engines. It is not obligatory to engulf a website with graphics when they can be overlooked. The heavy graphics only cause the page to download slower. The aesthetics of a site should be such that it serves the purpose of a webmaster, a user and most importantly do not exploit the search engine. Primarily due to a lack of knowledge the webmasters overload their web pages with graphics. Many of you might not know that Flash only websites, while attractive are not appropriate for search engine optimization.

On the contrary you can consider keeping 90% regular text HTML and can insert Flash elements to endow only the interactive attractiveness. Though we can’t restrict any web designer to limit the creativity but yes we can think about embedding code wherever possible over graphic elements. Equally, important are the complexity of the graphics as the web sites structure, layout and functionality of a site. There are also some advanced techniques that can endow your site an appealing look and increase its functionality. CSS, PHP scripts, JavaScript have become more prevalent, but these shouldn’t be used overwhelmingly because they run the risk of spamming also.

Search engines are for people who are searching for something, and your site should cater to those people as well. Writing well optimized web pages are still the number one method of finding information on the web. High quality content being the second to get high ranking in the SERP’s. So, to get a higher ranking you need to mull over what your visitors want and need. Think about the kind of content that your competitors are providing on their sites, and what you can provide that would better serve your visitors.

How to get your website listed without spending in bulk

2008-07-04T01:33:00.000-05:00

By know everybody is aware of the fact that a site can get hundreds of thousands hits & visitors in a single day from just one properly ranked page, which can mean big, big profits. The internet that tools that promises you to get your site listed and improve rankings are Search Engine Submission, Keyword Research, Doorway Pages, Rank Checking, Link Popularity, Meta Tag creation, Top Keywords, and overall presentation. Search Engine Optimization is the most efficient and powerful way to optimize and promote your website in Search Engines, directories, classified sites etc. Most search traffic is likely to come from Yahoo and Google, and increasingly MSN. Now the thing that amazes most of the webmasters is that when everybody in the internet marketing industry is endeavoring to do well then why only 10% of marketers actually succeed. There are lots of strategies that are hyped-up and are a mere wastage of time and money. Moreover, most of the tricks you've probably never heard of work wonders for getting website visitors and sales. One such way is growing targeted opt-in lists. As we all know marketing is a major factor in the process of "creating" your Web site, growing targeted opt-in lists is among the best proven online marketing method. Here the best way is to grow targeted opt-in email lists and use tools that automatically email the people on the list -- personally, and on a regular basis. The technique works out in a simple way you simply give away something of value (a unique and free product or service) in exchange for some contact information
Many people think they'll put up a website and people will just start coming. You might have the best Web site ever created, but if people don't know of its existence, what would you do with this best site ever created. Just getting a site optimized, doesn’t completely solve our purpose. It calls for something more productive. As you might have guessed, search engine submission is definitely the most effective way to start marketing your Web site. The strategy of getting listed high in the search engines is not as simple as you might have guessed. First, you must figure out what keywords and Meta Tags to use. Keywords are the words that are used by visitors to find your Web site on search engines and they have to be specific to your product and location on the Internet. The hierarchy of getting listed in Search Engine involves:
Write a Page Title.
Write a Description META Tag.
Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3
Make Sure Your Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text.
Use Keywords in Hyperlinks.
Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly.
Develop Several Pages Focused on Particular Keywords.
Submit Your Webpage URL to Search Engines.
Submit Your Site to Key Directories
Submit Your Site to Industry Sites and Specialized Directories.
Request Reciprocal Links.
Write Articles for Others to Use in their Newsletters.
Issue News Releases.
Begin a Business Blog.
Participate in forum discussions.
Miscellaneous Strategies
Include Your URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature
Viral Marketing
Email Strategies
Install a "Signature" in your E-Mail Program
Publish an E-Mail Newsletter

Google’s death penalty

2008-07-01T07:01:00.001-05:00

Recently Google blacklisted BMW’s German website for violating its guidelines. According to the verdict termed as the "Google death penalty", "BMW" or "BMW Germany" will not return a direct link to the car company's German website, bmw.com.de for artificially enhancing its popularity on Google. Furthermore, bmw.com.de's PageRank has been reset to zero. Initially the site was removed for three day, but it really gave goose bumps the SEO Community because the bmw.com.de notoriously became the highest profile companies till date to suffer the “Google death penalty. It heavily relied on java script code that was unsearchable by Google’s spider and used text-heavy pages profusely scattered with key words to attract the attention of Google's indexing system.

What actually happened was that the cloaking was tactfully embedded in the webpage. 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. The spider was fed a page full of text containing words “gebrauchtwagen” (used car) and “neuwagen” (new car) many tens of times and not much else, and for the surfer there was a more standard-looking web page with smart pictures of automobiles and use of each of those words maybe twice.

It came as a surprise for everybody that how such a high-profile website got engaged in black hat SEO tactics and how such a global site that is geared to other countries, could abide with the disappearance of one of its national sites. It could have happened probably due to the company’s carelessness. They might not have checked the credibility of the SEO Company before hiring them. But the SEO professionals can’t be foolish enough to know that those JavaScript redirects could lead to the site being removed. Every second company uses this black-hat SEO tactic and that ways BMW is not any exception. This has left so many webmasters perplexed, because still it is not known to them that what raged Google.

BMW has already suffered the wrath because the search term "BMW" still direct web surfers to the main worldwide site, but for the lesser companies such a penalty could be catastrophic because in that case their visitors/customers might end up being directed elsewhere.

Now you might be wondering what Google requires to re-include the site in its catalog. Fundamentally Google wants that the site should get rid of all those JavaScript redirects then submit a re inclusion request. As such Google also has the right to know the SEO Company who optimizes the web pages and tell them what they exactly did. But in case of BMW Google wants the company to include details on who created the doorway pages, and an assurance that such pages won’t appear again before the re-inclusion of the domains.

Significance of Page Rank

2008-06-30T05:10:00.000-05:00

One of the most significant factors that have been put into practice within the search engine algorithms is the emergence of the Google Page Rank parameter to gauge the significance of the indexed web pages. The PR of a webpage is the web page’s overall internet popularity where the search engine algorithm count the number of websites that link to a page and assign it a score on a scale of 1-10. Search engine optimization involves careful deliberate incorporation of keywords and phrases in a web page to boost its ranking and making it important from the search engine’s perspective. The search engines index these Web pages in its database and rank them according to the keyword frequency, density, placement and its "Internet popularity." In clear cut terms it is a bullying factor that is not easy to break down. One of the reasons that make it hard to put PR in plain words is because of its analogous aspect. It is something webmasters work for all the time without thinking about it. With the emergence of PR tool, ranking has increased for lower ranked sites while it has decreased for previously higher ranked sites, which has made it a debatable issue. There is something to PageRank that even the SEO industry aficionados don’t always agree on. This has resulted in the conclusion that PageRank doesn’t hold much of importance for your site, as it holds for other sites linking to your site. In more clear terms, it means if a highly ranked and reliable site links to yours, you get more credibility. PageRank is judged primarily on a website's link volume, link age, and link value.

Google uses link popularity to gauge the PR of a web page because many webmasters cloak their web pages to showcase one version of a page to one visitor and another version to others. This sneaky process is simply against the Google guidelines. PageRank depends on the number and quality of inbound links. Though the quantity of inbound links alone does not give an authentic estimation of the page' significance because it ignores link importance. However, it gives an estimate of page popularity. At one time the boom of PR caught such an interpretation that the webmasters to promote their services/products readily agreed to buy the popular links to increase their website’s internet popularity. But of lately, the craze of buying the links has plummeted because of the emergence of other SEO marketing tools such as forums and blogs. These tools have enormously impact the listing and ranking of websites. Due to the google’s ever-changing algorithms many higher-ranked websites are seeing a drop in PageRank, particularly those which are on importance score of PR5-PR8. PR8's and PR9's have become the untouchable score, as even the number of PR7’s has also declined overall. The fluctuations are seen because Google wants to put a damper on the acquisition of links based strictly on the Toolbar PR value. For us, the green little line in the PR tool is a good pointer of a website's online value, but the need of the time is to stay updated and taking good consultation in the area of traditional best SEO practices.

With the recent launch of Google's Bigdaddy datacenter no data center will make 100% of people happy. For every URL that moves into the top 10, another URL moves out. Googler Matt expects that Bigdaddy’s results, which are still experimental at this stage, will become the default for Google later on (possibly in a few months). It’s no wonder that PageRank fluctuation would also be on rise.

Building PR the right way

2008-06-22T05:42:00.001-05:00

Page Rank is a score that Google assigns to each web page on every site that is within the Google database. The PR of a page is based on external and internal linking of a site, as well as on-page standard of the web page which is being linked to as well as the web page being linked from. Not only Google but also other search engines like Yahoo, MSN etc. place a weighting factor on each link. Some search engines won't even crawl into the websites that do not have links directing to them. And to enhance the PR, it should be ensured that big majority of links you exchange are relevant to the content of your website. To build the right PR there should not be any kind of discrepancy between the subject-matter and the link pointed to it. The concept is link popularity is highly regarded because it is a kind of recommendation or guarantee for search engines that a site is worth.

Building the links for a particular website is a complex process because there are plenty of sites that can go to any extent to obstruct there outgoing links from the search engines. The page ranking raises with number of links, but if the links are directed from the websites with relevant content that page rank goes up higher. Building PR the right way requires some deliberate course of actions.

Writing a great testimonial for a site whose services you have availed and including your sites link. This can give your site some credibility.
Posting your articles in forums that are ranked well in the search engines and are industry specific. Make sure the forums you have chosen use a mod-rewrite so that your postings could be read in the search engines.
Creating a web blog with well written keyword-rich content about your industry and posts. It is important to have well written content and include at least 3 links on each blog pointing back to your site. But please at any cost do not spam others blogs with your sites links, your blog link will be added automatically.
Submit your web pages in web directories. The content should be keyword rich.
Sign up for the link exchange directories. Make sure that the category names are specified so that you don't dwell on tiresome repetition of the content.
If you are a webmaster to sites then try triangular or 3 way linking. Ask someone to link to your main site and in return you will link to their site from your other site.

How to prevent the loss of traffic caused due to spelling variants

2008-06-15T06:12:00.001-05:00

Misspellings are a great way to gain search traffic that is less competitive. Since the evolution of English language plenty of variations could be seen in English language in terms of its usage, vocabulary and spellings, none of these ways could be termed as wrong. This linguist habit of people can also be seen while searching for a particular stuff in search engines. As already presumed most of the people never accept the correction suggested by Google or Yahoo! taking an awfsome lot of searches somewhere. Some of the Most Commonly Misspelled Words are:

definately --> definitely

"There" for "their" or "they're",
"advise" for "advice"
"than" against "then"
"It's" for "its"
loose against lose
accommodation, accommodation, accommodation, acomodation affect and effect

In the common misspellings of the domain some sites appear to exist solely from the profit derived from the already established site. For example gogle.com, googel.com and goolge.com are all redirected to the Google's home page, but few of the variations that are missed out by Google are redirect to the sites that totally proliferate due to the profit from the Google brand. Most of the times the web sites that contain the right spellings do not get listed in the search engines instead the web sites containing the misspelled variation come on the search pages. This way the authentic sites, suffer the ironic fault of being right. Misspellings can also be incorporated into the content of pages because it is it is fairly easy to come up in search rankings with misspellings for your target keywords. From an intellectual web user's perspective misspellings in the body of content is embarrassing, but from an SEO perspective it is a way of generating traffic. But it is also having its flaw, if your web site does not contain the variant of the term the user typed in for getting information in the search engines; you stand the chance of losing your potential traffic. One can’t always predict the ignorance of visitor to spell certain word or words in the right manner.

To curb the loss of traffic that these spelling variants causes, the proper incorporation of Meta Tags is compulsory, although Google doesn’t consider indexing Meta Tags, but they are detrimental for other search engines. Camouflaging the keywords in the web pages capitalizing on the visual effect of color also came into existence, but the profits derived by it were short-lived because search engines are smart enough to cognize the tactics that try to befool them. In that case, it is wise to use the misspelled words but only in moderation. Using all variant spellings and misspelling on the page can work wonders for your site only if incorporated with a sense of judgment and priority. For that after determining the crucial keywords on a specific page use the possible variants of the keywords. Using faulty spellings in image ALT tags is also an alternative option but only after objectively assessing its advantages against its very disadvantages. Using the spelling variations in the image ALT tags has the advantage of being getting indexed in Google.

How to discover keywords that nobody else is bidding on

2008-06-04T06:09:00.001-05:00

The webmasters look for the highest paying keywords in the market so that they can build the most profitable content to feed the Search Engines. When a site is optimized, it is mainly optimized for some specific keywords that are often targeted. Selecting effective keywords is imperative to any search engine optimization campaign. Discovering those not yet so explored effective keywords could be an easy process but executing them in a site is calls for some diplomacy. The PPC advertisers often bid for cheap keywords to generate inexpensive traffic. They try to search ignored, yet significant keywords using Overture (Yahoo! Search Marketing) and Google AdWords tool. The phrases that most exactly describe definite aspects of a website capitulate the highest gain. The keyword analysis and their subsequent search yield the highest return on investment. The most general keywords incorporated from a users insight are the most widely searched.

After compiling a list of a thousand or so keyword suggestions and analyzing their competitiveness in the web market, the most relative keywords that can define your site can be integrated. Now you might be thinking how to analyze the competitiveness of a keyword. By following the simple steps you can discover the keywords that nobody else is bidding on:

Select keyword that search engine looks
Right selection of keywords
Making a separate list of key phrases that describe your site
Keywords should be modern
Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) Analysis is an important step
Spelling mistake should be avoided. In the hope of piggy-backing off other people's SEO efforts there should no deliberate attempt to change the formation of a word since Search Engine Optimization is all about tricking the search engines and not deteriorating the flow of English language.

Domain name: The center of your Internet Identity

2008-06-01T02:19:00.000-05:00

If you are running your online business with a vague domain name, probably you would be losing thousands of dollars on daily basis. Your domain name is your identity and your identity builds up your credibility. An authentic identity is likely to have more traffic because more people will return as they can remember your address. Another advantage of having a proper domain name for your site is that you can employ custom error pages to prevent your visitors from overlooking your site because of broken links and other miscellaneous errors.
Some pointers that will help you in choosing your identity on the web are:
1. Keep it short and easy to remember: Try to register the shortest name that your customers and visitors will associate with your Website. The thumb rule is, keep it under seven characters if possible excluding the suffix.
2. Choosing brand name rather then generic: A domain name that matches the brand name yield more traffic. This way all your off-line branding will pay off online as Internet users should be able to guess your domain name from your business name.
3. Trademarked names never sell: Tardemarked names never sell but they get you involved in lawsuits.
4. Register Your Domain as soon as possible: Just get out there and register before you loose the opportunity to get the name you really want
5. Choosing an extension: .com suffix is the first extension that most people try when searching for a Website. .com also shows that your business has been around for a while and that you have a well-established presence on the Web.
6. Domain names can only use letters, numbers, and dashes. The static symbols leave unfathomable possibilities for the spiders.
7. Don’t spend large amounts: There are companies that sell domain names, which has lowered the costs of buying a domain name dramatically.

http://www.segnant.com/

SEO for Blogs

2008-05-30T05:44:00.001-05:00

Blogs are the search engines daily small part of records that are updated on a frequent basis and get a lot of preference in the search results. Blogs and blog posts are search engine friendly because they are text-rich, keyword-rich, link-rich, are frequently-updated and have very little irrelevant HTML. The two main uses that have made blogging indispensable are to trick Google Adsense, and to also to gain better search engine rankings. The two major blogging sites that are ruling the internet are WordPress and Blogger. Blogging in blogger yields better results because it is owned by Google, which means quick indexing of your site. The major search directories and search engines such as Yahoo!, Google, Alta-Vista and most of the others sought for fresh and new information that is updated as frequently as possible.

The more search engines find updated content, the more often their search spiders will visit the blog, resulting in high search engine rankings. The supremacy of blog depends on the frequency of blog posting. For that very reason 3 postings per day can make your web blog very active and spiders will quickly index that site. Optimizing a blog is synonymous to optimizing a website, and optimizing a blog post is synonymous to optimizing a web page. A well optimized blog can rule the search engine results.

The benefits of optimizing a blog are:

Fresh information keeps on appearing on search engines in days and not weeks, which means more traffic and higher ranking.
Higher search rankings of your website on Google.
Free marketing has unlimited ROI.
Create visibility and credibility.
You can share timely information with your readers/visitors/customers.

Few rules to be set up for the optimization of Blogs are:

To be effective, set up a blog with RSS
URL should include the primary keyword that you want to optimize your blog for
Blog header tags and the title of the posts should contain your main keyword phrase. Keeping the title related to the topic will endow relevancy to the blog. Stylize your blog title in the H1 tags
The secondary keyword should be included in the body of the post but should not be overdone
Use of keywords in anchor text of links
Archive of posts should be accessible from all the pages
Create a link for comments
Link to other related blogs
Submit the blog to blog directories and search engines
Update your blog with fresh content frequently
Avoid changing domain or blog host because this can cost you your traffic and a fall in page rank
The blogs should not convey sales pitches, but should be informative

How to add reliability to your website

2008-05-22T05:50:00.001-05:00

Trust and credibility are the biggest subversion to Internet sales so they need to be properly addressed on your web site. Most of the webmasters are suckers and try using visual tricks and other exaggerated tactics to trick the search engines. Incorporating unethical optimization techniques for only to trick search engines will only yield you any profit, contrary playing games with them will get your site banned. Credibility is crucial to the success of your business and the key factor in influencing the potential customers. Conveying credibility has always been a challenge, be it any medium. That makes conveying credibility through a web site more of a challenge. The credibility of your site should be such that your visitors immediately convert to sales, otherwise there is no fun in pursuing PR and generate traffic for your website. In all likelihood, the webmasters and the visitors won’t ever come face to face, so it becomes all the more very important to win the trust of your visitors. Convincing people of your reliability from a distance is definitely a difficult task, but it can be overcome by providing the site visitors the facts!

Guidelines to prove your credibility:

Design your site so it looks professional. It's optimization should be handled by a professional only
Appropriate online presentation of your skills, experience, and professionalism
A descriptive and authentic presentation of your experience
A biography of your company’s progress
Highlighting the proficiency in your organization and in the content and services you provide
Wrong content on your site may sink it. It should be directed towards target audience
Share your goals and sound authentic
Update your site's content often
Mention some of your achievements
Describe any awards or special acknowledgment you've received.
Add quotes from satisfied clients
Make your site easy to navigate
When you're sure that your web pages generate sales, optimize them for high search engine rankings
Evaluate your competitors content, back links, keywords
Absolute no cloaking, no invisible or tiny text and no keyword stuffing

An overview of Google’s freshness factor

2008-05-15T02:49:00.000-05:00

Google evaluates the relevance of web pages by considering more than hundred factors. To achieve considerable PR have significantly affected the websites that are dependent on Google to generate traffic. This dependence has resulted in increased emphasis on factors such as Google's "value / quality score", its "freshness" factor, and its requirements for site maps. Google seems to be conducting experiments with its algorithms giving its users different search engine results and also the goose bumps. One of the chaoses involved in deciding the freshness of a document indexed in a search engine is that the “last-modified-since” trait isn’t always accurate. At times the date on which Google crawls a page appears just after the size of the page, which tells you the freshness of Google's copy of the page. It is a discriminating fact that old web pages that haven’t been updated in a long time and haven’t fetched any new inbound links not be looked upon as favorable because what Google looks for is actual bespoken magic of words. But of lately, Google has showcased a poor performance in deciding the relevancy of a web site in relation to its content.
By now, I can understand what you all might be thinking. How does the freshness factor help in deciding the relevancy when there are some websites that are not updated but still are ranked higher? It doesn’t matter how fresh a document is to Google, particularly if that document has many inbound links pointing to it. If a stale page continues to fetch incoming links, it will still be considered fresh. The ranking of web page will be still influenced by the frequency of page or site updates. But again one more issue has rose up, use of duplicate content that attacks the freshness of a particular document. Google particularly is not very finicky in cutting out the duplicate content.
Google’s criterion in determining the freshness factor:

The frequency with which all web pages are modified
The actual amount of modification
Keyword distribution
Exact number of new web pages that link to a web page
Changes made to the anchor text
Limitations put on the affiliate links on new web pages

http://www.segnant.com/

How to turn your visitors into customers

2008-05-04T06:08:00.001-05:00

Most of the times it happens that your site generates traffic, but you might not be making as many sales as you would. Turning your reluctant website visitors into enthusiastic customers needs a bit of diplomacy and careful implementation of the strategies. To leverage the sales list out the benefits on your order page or put a small red box just above the order link and highlight two or three of important benefits of your product.

You can take the help of SEO professionals who will not help you in conceptualizing and designing your site but also will help you in marketing your products/services on the internet. Nothing builds reliance with customers and prospects the way good words about you from your patrons does. You can include testimonials from your customers and suppliers. Testimonials not only say you can do the job, but they say how well you can do the job. If possible include testimonials throughout your Web site It is responsibility to explain the unique features of your product and how your product is having an edge over others. The visitors are particularly fond of the demonstration of your product. For that Viral marketing is the easy-to-use web-based element that helps you build a loyal customer base through live demo, free downloads, trial downloads, catalogs, email newsletters and printed postcards. Let your web designer and technical designer help you out in this.

The navigation on a Web site should be easy. Use simple, descriptive headings and subheadings to direct visitors throughout your Web site. Put keywords in the headings and subheadings so that the Search Engines have an accessibility to index your web pages. Try keeping your information organized. The easier you make it for your customers to find information, the more likely you will be able to attract the visitor. And, the longer they stay, the more probable you will gain a customer. Provide your clients Help files, Help desk, Frequently asked questions, Support email, Community forums; and as to their emails as early as possible. Include phone, fax, and your regular mailing address. Your street address adds credibility to your website and offers.

Search engines are the number one way of getting visitors to your site. Let your SEO professional handle all the processing. But to retain you ranking, make sure that your site is updated often. Also include links to other sites like yours and try to get those sites to add your link as well.

Spams that should be avoided

2008-05-01T07:14:00.003-05:00

Spams are the unwanted mails that can considerably break the monopoly of a site. These are those tons of mails that you usually see in your bulk folder. Here it should be noted that the email newsletters that have been subscribed to are wanted and would not be considered as spam. In fact the email newsletters to remain updated of what is going on in the website development and what are there recently launched products/services. As we all know Google changes its algorithm give the relevant sites their due credit, but that doesn’t mean that all practices banned are actually spasm. In fact the webmasters try to make fool of Google by using spams in their site to earn higher search engine rankings.

You have full right to advertise your product but not by unauthorized means. Some of the spams that should be avoided are:

Cloaking: In Search Engine terms “cloaking" is a stealth setting when a website returns modified webpages to search engines, crawling the site in order to alter search engine rankings. To preserve the accuracy of search results, Google can permanently ban any site that is engaged in cloaking to mislead the users. .

IP Delivery: It is a simple form of cloaking where search false content is presented to search engine spiders to gain ranking points.

Leader Pages: It is one of the oldest tricking methods where a sequence of similar documents is designed to meet the requirements of different search engine algorithms.

Mini-Site networks: These are more or less like leader pages, but the only difference is that they are bigger. Each mini-site contains its own keyword enriched URL and is designed to meet specific requirements of each major search engine. Here Google is given an impression that the site has link-density and deserves to be credited in the search engine.

Link Farms: Link farms emerged as free-for-all link depositories when webmasters learned how heavily incoming links influenced Google. As a result, Google without any delay plummets the ranking of a site.

Blog and/or Forum Spam: Since blogs and forums have established high PR values due to the freshness of their content, many unethical SEOs targets them for high-PR links back to their websites or those of their clients.

Keyword Stuffing: Webmasters try to stuff keywords everywhere they possibly could to get higher listing. The most common example of keyword stuffing can be seen in the sites that rank near or at the bottom.

Hidden Text: it is another deceptive form of tricking the search engines and a common component of spam messages. Spammers incorporate hidden text in their HTML emails in order to try to trick spam filters. It can effectively reduce the overall "count" of these spam indicators, so that the message can creep through the filter. There are two types of hidden text. The first is, text that is coloured the same shade as the background and the second is, text that is hidden behind images or under document layers.

Incorporation of Useless Meta Tags: Although the Meta Tags will help improve your position in the search engines, but Keyword stuffing in meta tags is a form of Spam

Misuse of Directories: Search engines traditionally give links from directories a bit of extra weight by considering them links from trusted authorities. A practice of spamming directories emerged as some SEOs and webmasters started hunting for valuable links to improve their PR.

Email Spam: Email spam has actually increased. It involves sending nearly identical messages to thousands (or millions) of recipients. Its reliability is doubted because here the spammers often use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers.

Redirect Spam: In other terms it means hijacking of traffic generated for other site, but what may be the process the end result is spam.

Brand your web site, business and yourself by submitting articles for SEO

2008-04-30T02:46:00.000-05:00

Search Engine Optimization is the only way to brand your website and business on the internet. SEO amenable articles unavoidably hit the right keywords/phrases that are likely to be used by the people in search of corresponding services. A keyword-rich article raises the ranking of sites in various search engines by hitting as many keywords as possible. Higher the ranking more is the accessibility to the site. The articles need to be optimized because seldom, people check out web sites in the latter pages of search results.
Do You Know The significance Of Article Submission? The distribution of content brings your site new visitors and increases your popularity. Each article submitted gives you a golden chance to publicize your site in the about the author section. You can also submit your articles to top Web sites that promote your products/ services. Submitting your articles to directories is certainly a good course of action if you are interested in increasing the number of back links to your web page. Directories provide web visitors a one- stop zone to find the information, which increases the visibility of your website. One of the greatest benefits of submitting to directories is that the more links you have the higher search engines will rank your web page. It should be noted that it is not rare to get thousands of backlinks for each article submitted, with the increasing popularity of your article. It is normally perceived by the webmasters that their website derives traffic from the search engines. To some extent it is true, but every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of traffic. To be successfully listed in any web directory, the terms and conditions of the directory should be confirmed. To improve the chances of your listing being accepted a relevant category that is as close to your theme should be chosen.
The articles can also be branded submitting articles to e-zines where you can include your name, business name, your credentials, web site address and e-mail address. The uniqueness of your article might get extra exposure if the e-zine publisher archives their e-zine on their site. Your profits can get multiplied; your publicity can get enhanced, you can gain the trust of your visitors if you allow e-zine publishers to publish your articles in their free e-books. Either ways it is a win-win situation without any halt. If you look for more exposure, an inexpensive option, or for a higher level of professionalism, online directories and e-zines can become a valuable part of web promotional program.

Paying Attention to Forms in Website Designing

2008-04-22T05:49:00.000-05:00

Forms form a very important part of your website as they are used for buying products, contacting you, and signing up a newsletter.In other words, forms activate users to take action, do something, achieve something. Forms must be created keeping in mind all kinds of users-whether it is the normal human beings or visually challenged ones.

One of the most important things to remember in form creation is to provide prompt text for each form item and field. The purpose of each form item has to be clear to the users with an appropriate lable for the fields. Not only this, the position and placing of the text has to be correct. It is advisable to place the appropriate text immediately before input boxes, drop down boxes and after the check boxes and radioboxes.

A form has to be accessible to the readers by breaking it down into manageable chunks, like one chunk constituting of personal details, the other dealing with contact information, etc.and so on. So, in case your form is a long one, it is better to use "fieldset" and "legend" tags for both sighted and visually impaired readers.

Another very crucial factor in form accessibility is the reliance of drop down menus on JavaScript. If the drop down menus rely on JavaScript, thet will not be very accessible to the users. They have to be created in such a way that in order to activate them, theuser has to click on a separate button instructing "Go" which allows the form to be activated on the server side. These kind of drop down menus are easily accessible.

In a nutshell, one can say that a thing like forms that might appear to be a very easy and unsignificant area of web designing , but actually is a very important and essential component. Therefore, it needs to be created very carefully keeping in mind the users who are going to act upon the form presented to them.

http://www.segnant.com/

Google’s infamous “Sandbox Effect”

2008-04-15T02:48:00.000-05:00

Google's sandbox is a new filter that affects almost all new websites by placing them on a preliminary "probation" status. Thus the term "Sandbox Effect" applies to the idea that all new websites after becoming search-engine friendly and being indexed may perform well for a couple of weeks, but when the filter is applied to the new website (called sandboxing) the site will still appear in the result pages, but it will not rank well despite of how much unique, well optimized content and how many quality inbound links the site may have. Not only this, this notorious process can even send the established sites to Google Sandbox which all at once obtains hundreds or even thousands of links from other sites. As a matter of fact, this theory can make the webmasters go nuts if they are willing to optimize their site themselves as an amateur. Although a webmaster may succeed in encoding, but he can’t overlook the fact that Google Sandbox can restrain his website/s from having immediate success in the search engine result pages. Sandboxed sites experience a hard time ranking for keyword phrases, no matter how competitive they are. Three to four months is a normal probationary period of any site that has been sandboxed, but it can extend up to six months also. High-competitive searches often spend six months in the Box.
The Sandbox Effect was noticed in March 2004, when the new websites failed to rank well for the couple of months from the date of their launch. Although these sites had good PR’s, well executed optimization and strong incoming links, the result was frustrating. It’s not that only newly built sites can be sandboxed, but also the established sites are also vulnerable to sandboxing. Most of the times, these sites are abandoned because they seek rankings in highly competitive searches and are in for a much longer duration. Sites targeting non-competitive keywords and phrases are usually left out of the Sandbox.
It may be noted that it is not any kind of punishment for the webmasters, but it is google’s own way to discourage spam sites from rising quickly for their keywords; banning the sites that use various tactics to rise to the top of the search results, and gain heavy sales; and repeating the process. As a result google has made probation mandatory for the new sites.
The Sandbox often targets:

Top-level domains, directories or sub-domains.
The sites registered after March 2004.
The site that is full of tactical SEO methods, particular on-page optimization of text, titles, meta data, etc.
Websites mainly in the English language.
Rankings of all levels.
Penalized sites that rank in top results of other search engines will nowhere be ranked in the 100's or even worse at Google.
Low quality, spam sites and sites carrying AdSense more often.
Commercial and private segment sites only.

Building links to your site the RIGHT way

2008-04-04T07:12:00.000-05:00

Link building is one of the most important elements in gaining high search engine rankings because it is via links from other websites only that majority of the people find new sites. Link building requires a bit of competitive intellectuality to surpass or the competitor’s site. Apart from the traffic there is one more side to link building, ranking. Rankings in search engines are greatly commanded by the number of links directing to that site. Setting-up appropriate quality links to a website can increase the rankings in the major search engines. A simple link from an established site will get the search engines to visit the new site and spider its contents. The more the number of the quality incoming links, the more important your site becomes to link to. The process of getting number of quality links is obscure to the search engines, because the engines seldom consider "artificially created" (or useless) links. Rather they look out for the links coming from the commanding sites, or the sites that share the same subject-matter as your site. Otherwise also, getting a reliable site to link to you endows your site an additional visibility.
For building links e-mailing or contacting the Webmaster is considered to be a wise step of action. Though it is not complimentary but for the sake of courtesy you request them to link to your site while outlining the advantages to them and to their visitors. If the popularity of the link is important to your site, call them personally or write them a letter with a personalized touch. Obviously not everyone will be generous enough to offer you their link; however, there will be non-competitive well-ranked sites that will readily agree to trade link with you-- particularly if you offer to link back.

For legitimate link building it would be wise to consider the following points

Exchange links with the sites with specific keywords in their anchor text
Exchange links with the sites with specified PR
Exchange links with the industry relevant pages
Watch out for redirected links. Search engines don’t like the redirected links
Avoid the Sites with Java Script feed because they don’t allow the search engines to read the text embedded in them. The webmasters of these sites can easily trick you.
Avoid getting links from framed sites as it won’t yield your site any benefit.
Avoid exchanging links with Robots.txt file because it is an indication for the search engines that the content is not for indexing.
Getting a link from a PR4 page with 20 outgoing links is better than a PR4 page with 60 outgoing links
Your spread of links from many relevant domains
Avoid getting links from the sites with bad coding, image map links and CSS because Googlebot is not a hard-worker.
Check the link popularity of your competitors, and find out the sites that link to all or most of your competitors
Have the search engines find or "spider" your link partners
Think what made your competitor rule the market.

This "off page" factor have become so crucial for the marketing of a site that it can literally make or break a site with the search engines.

Want more traffic? Create an RSS Feed

2008-04-01T05:34:00.000-05:00

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a set-up for organizing news and the content of news-like sites and weblogs. But it is essentially not just for news. Anything that can be broken down haphazardly into separate items can be syndicated via RSS. Once the modified information is encoded in RSS format, RSS-enabled program can check the feed for the changes made and respond to the changes in an appropriate way. RSS is a web feed XML-based document that is most popular in the weblogging community and includes summaries of stories or weblog posts with web links to their full version. Many weblogs and news websites make content available in RSS to help you access all your favorite weblogs or favorite news content by checking their RSS feeds. RSS delivers this information as an XML file and allows its regular visitor to track updates on the site using an aggregator. It is to be noted that all RSS files must be in accordance to the XML 1.0 specification, as set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This specification makes it an accessible text file and can create your feed to automatically regenerate from time to time.
RSS streams traffic steadily, generates a list of links and costs next to nothing. Since the search engine crawlers can’t decode the JavaScript feeds the text embedded in them also runs the chance of not being noted by the search engines. But the SEO guidelines emphasize that to make newsfeeds visible to search engines; their text has to be embedded into your page. So, here the best option is to use RSS feed. Anytime you update your website, add a new page, add a blog post or podcast, you are able to organize your post, page or podcast to the search engines, data aggregators and indexes. It can increase the traffic to your website considerably as your message and link is exposed to thousands of viewers. Because a large portion of content is available through the RSS feed – one is not always obligated to create the content himself/herself. Importing feeds from other sites or from the parts of your own site and publishing them on your webpages can also enhance the search engine rankings. Also, without any interference you can automatically keep your website full of fresh, relevant information.
Contemporarily RSS feeds are the hottest marketing tool for web marketing. It allows the webmaster to forward email without ever being detected by a spam filter.

Keyword Optimization

2008-03-30T02:04:00.000-05:00

Keyword Optimization is another important element of Search Engine Optimization. Adding finely tuned keywords and phrases to your pages helps the sites to get higher search engine ranking. The keyword optimization is done keeping in view the user’s interface because it is of utmost importance to determine the most probable keywords and phrases used to search for the site. Extensive keyword research process is mandatory to make it certain that all variables used for keyword optimization process are followed by multiple keyword(s) and keyword phrases to achieve maximum exposure on the World Wide Web. The basis of SEO marketing strategy depends on:

Popularity of keyword phrase
Competition for the keyword phrase
Marketing significance
Support of content

And SEO with optimized keyword performance gets

Long Term Search Engine Popularity
Long Term Search Engine Placement
Highest Web Site Traffic & Conversion rate
Multiple First Page Listings
Maximum ROI

To Integrate Keywords into Your Web Site Copy is not any lay man’s work. It requires careful analysis and perfect interpretation in title, description, keyword, heading, link url, link text, image alt, comment and body in order to put the site in the most appropriate spot to score high in search engine matches for those words and phrases. Creating a body of refined text doesn’t mean that you can sit back and relax and wait for the search engines to crawl into your site. For that your site need to get targeted since search engines won’t ever rank your web site highly if your body copy conveys the reliability of your product/service in general. You need to get precise. If you want to be found for the targeted keyword/phrases then mention them all. In fact a better would be sorting your web pages into categories based on your products and services. The big picture behind this is to allow you to aim at functional keywords and place them strategically within your pages that match the relevancy guidelines for logical search queries. Here the “functional keywords” are the “optimum keywords” that should compliment the overall subject matter of your site and yield appropriate search results that can help you achieve competitive rankings.
To identify the keyword phrases that are most likely to succeed, WordTracker's Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) and Overture’s Search Term Suggestion tool can help you research keywords and keyphrases beforehand.

The value of forums to the internet marketing

2008-03-22T07:25:00.000-05:00

There are plenty of ways to make your product or service of interest to large audience to generate traffic and encourage sales. SEO Forum is one of these ways to attract interested visitors to your websites. These SEO forums are for free and open discussion of all search engine optimization techniques and methods and essentially the easiest way for the webmasters to attract the visitors who share common interest. The big SEO advantages from forums often aren't targeted keywords; rather they bring lots of traffic from unexpected searches. Here the internet marketers attract potential customers who eventually become the serious buyers of their product/services. Forum discussions falls under the network marketing where forum forms the small part of a site but the input and topics on the forum significantly dictate the structure and features of the main site.
Posting messages on online discussion forums is a great way to get free advertising where the marketers not only connect with people who are acquainted about their business but also gratify the same audience. Per chance if the businesses of both the webmasters compliment one another, they might end up in a highly profitable partnership or joint venture. By participating in forum discussion you can get access to mental power where you open yourself up to a great education, discover new developments and opportunities. The most productive thing about these forums is the personal touch where the members with the span of time become great friends, which means no nasty remark and no spamming. Another wise step of action would be adding a "Recommend this site" feature to your forums so that your forums easily direct the visitors to your site.
To get a more lucrative result, some online forums permit the visitors to leave text and graphic links at the end of the comment or message. It is to be noted that click-through rate with these links are more advantageous than just a normal signature file. But it should be ensured that you know every detail of the communities advertising rules, else the board can disqualify your membership and your site for deliberately spamming the forum.

Best Way to Increase Traffic to Your Web Site

2008-03-15T05:41:00.000-05:00

To generate traffic for your website on a continuous basis is one of the most difficult and at times frustrating tasks in this ebiz competition. There has been never a set of specific rules or guidelines to skyrocket the traffic counter, but a careful analysis and a manipulative marketing strategy yields more traffic to your website and let the existing traffic work for you. One of the easiest, most successful and reliable ways to increase the flow of traffic to your website is to showcase a more quality and promising content. A well composed keyword-rich article has the potential of bringing thousands of targeted visitors to your website. Hence, writing articles for targeted traffic enhances your Search Engine Rankings and helps to build credibility. Writing & submitting just 2 articles a week in a site can attract hundreds of targeted visitors to your sites and if your article is exclusive it might be replicated in several other sites. The chances for your site to get exposure becomes more brilliant if the interested reader to know more about you out of curiosity click on your url. Anyways, Writing and submitting quality content is only one phase of internet marketing, and quality Online Traffic is the cumulative outcome of several others factors also including participation in discussion forums, Online Advertisement / PPC Programs, qualitative search engine results page, Offline Advertisement, ensured Targeted Hits, Hits Exchange Network etc. The listing in the search engines depend on the careful use of keywords. Search engines look at the frequency of keywords. Coding your site yourself may not yield you profitable results. To achieve and maintain top search engine positions you ought to take the help of the SEO professionals who may charge anything depending on how demanding your site is.
Viral marketing also generates thousands of visitors and money unlimited levels deep. By providing free Value added Services, Pass on Free Software with Ads, Free Graphics, Viral Brandable eBooks, Distribution Rights to Your eBook, you will encourage the existing traffic generate more traffic for your website. This is one of the greatest website promotion strategies online that allows people to use and distribute your products/services to instantaneously burgeon your marketing on the internet.

PPC Advertising

2008-03-04T02:34:00.000-05:00

The value of online businesses has dynamically increased due to the credibility of Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) that has given them a chance to get their ads or search listing indexed at the top of the pack, right up front, perfectly matched to the searcher's query. With PPC advertising various search engines has enabled small online businesses to burgeon. Contemporarily, in the internet marketing the biggest and most powerful PPC system is that of Google AdWords. Positioned down the right hand side of Google’s search results, they are a remarkably commanding method of advertising in the genre of World Wide Web. This branded text-based pay-per-click (PPC) advertising service is 100% keyword targeted aimed at the target audience. This means, if properly carried out, the AdWords advertiser triggers at the right audience that is willing to buy his products/services. The only obligation in the process is that advertisers specify the words that should prompt the flow of traffic to their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers' bids against the value of their chosen keywords. The more popular keyword is, the more will be the bidding prices. Every time a search is conducted the keyword or keywords call up these paid ads under sponsored links ensuring the visibility. If the advertisers are ready to pay more for the bidding, their site could also become a feature of other associated search engines. For example Google’s interested top selections are AskJeeves, AOL Search and Netscape. Keeping in view the bidding made by an advertiser, the chosen keyword/s determines the content network that shall feature your ad.
Where Google’s AdWords has become the king of internet marketing, Yahoo’s overture has derived a substantial profit for portals like Yahoo, though it is not a great success. But the core of both services is to get a good ratio of traffic to buying customers by closely targeting the traffic. For that it is essential that the right keywords are used. The performance of PPC campaigns is the cumulative outcome of; the impression rate, the position of ad, Click thru rate (CTR), and Conversion rate. Precise information on the cost of each click on your site can be regarded as potential customers and therefore a proper knowledge should be kept about the site visitor to control the advertising expenditure.
The Pay Per Click ads should be build in accordance with:

· The credibility of the Destination Page Overview. Just having the adword or PPC land on the product page is not enough. You have to sell your/service.
· Content Management
· Construction of the destination page (Each destination page should have a single, specialized and obvious goal)
· Unique Selling Proposition (benefits of the product/services, individuality and superiority of the product/service, influential approach)
· Analytical approach

Google’s AdWords follow up program AdSense is equally lucrative. As an extension of AdWords program AdSense allows webmasters to place text and image advertisements on their sites.

Relevance of Sitemaps

2008-03-01T01:48:00.000-05:00

Sitemaps are very useful to help the search engines to crawl into your site to understand the web structure of a site. It makes it easy for the crawlers to know the listing of all the links with in a website, the priority of the web pages, exact information about the date the webpages were last modified, and the with how much regularity the webpages are modified. In other words the site map is the center of the spider-web. While applying the SEO techniques, it should be ensured that your keyword phrases from the page you are linking to should be in your anchor text on the site map. Being able to inform the Search Engines quickly and simply that your website has changed is of utmost value, because every modification made need to be informed to the Search Engines. Webmasters follow this rule to retain their re-indexing in the popular Search Engines. XML formatted sitemap for your entire collection enables spiders’ capabilities to locate documents with alternative file types among your website files
Most of the search engines index a couple pages with each visit, usually taking weeks or months to become acquainted with your site. But a proper structure of your site via Site maps can speed up that process by making every page easily accessible to the search spider. Sitemap serves as the food of a spider food.
Of lately, Google introduced a feature called Google Sitemaps, allowing webmasters to screen how google analyses the web pages of their site within the Google search engine network and quickly informing the webmasters about the modifications made to the website structure. But still the Google sitemaps is in its infancy and has to go a long way. Once everything will get organized, the Webmasters will be able to monitor: keyword searches that return results from your site, keywords that users click through to access your site, crawl stats for pages which have been crawled successfully, crawl stats for pages which have errors, page rank for each of your website pages, pages which have been indexed, pages which are linking to your site and checking that your robot.txt file is functioning properly.

Press Release: Another market exposure that drives traffic

2008-02-22T01:44:00.000-05:00

A powerful press release of newsworthy information is the most cost-effective marketing tool that not only brings credibility but also drive targeted web site traffic. If properly optimized it adds significant profits to a new product/services you have started to commercialize via internet marketing. In general terms also Press Release is the most advantageous way to promote any business, particularly when a business runs short of enough economy. Because it has the potential to get picked up on various sites and channels, it increases the traffic to a site and provide enhanced rankings overall. It also increases the chances of additional press and may even create hundreds of back links for your site. Publishing a Press Release in several News Search Engines attracts links from high-ranking web sites, as News Channels tend to be highly ranked sites. In addition, press releases will also be preferred by other sites that have the similar subject-matter that means more links pointing to your site.
The relevance of Press Release is that since it is updated with fresh, new releases; the target audience finds it easy to access the relevant release. Even the editors always look out for some fresh content. A properly optimized keyword rich press release can earn you the editor’s attention. The powerful keywords drive traffic to your site and helps building/retaining market exposure for the services/products offered by you. As mentioned above optimized press release also calls for the attention of the target audience and effective press release target new ones and help to build your brand equity. Submitting the links to PR Web pointing towards the website increases its PR automatically. The rise in PR, the higher the site will be ranked in the search engines generating more traffic for the website. Regular press releases distribution about the website on the net increases the perception of a Search Engine that the web site is proficient in its place.
For substantial SERP, the keyphrase should be a part of
· the "subject" heading
· uniform distribution in the body
· should be included in the first 25 words, and again at the very end of the Press Release.

To draft Press Release
· Solid beginning with an effective expression of the impression
· Repetitive name of the product
· Drafted with the interface of Journalists/Media agencies
· Targeting audience
· Practical approach
· Use of active voice
· Avoid usage of exaggerated expressions and jargons
· No exclamations, Please
· Company’s permission and detailed information

How changing one single On Page optimization factor boost your rankings

2008-02-15T06:37:00.000-05:00

In the chase of increased search engine ranking and gain a competitive advantage, it has become very important to implement and execute well designed search engine optimization strategies. However, there is as such no easy method to get a good ranking, but optimization makes it far more probable for a site to get ranked far higher than they would be without any optimization. Many Websites fail because they are designed inadequately and get a listing in late hundreds or thousands.
The On Page SEO tactics are in observance with current Search Engine methods of ranking. The Search Engines have spiders that crawl into the website and figure out what your pages are about. Search Engines analyze more than 100 On-Page Factors when analyzing a web page. For achieving the best ranking possible, you will want to have all your pages optimized. Over optimized pages runs the risk of being considered as spam. For a lay man, On-Page optimization means an effort to feed the engine with the things that help a website to get indexed in a search engine with a good ranking for specific keyword/phrase/s that is being targeted.
On-Page Search Engine Optimization Factors include

Proper selection of keyword
Proper embedment of Meta-tags
In depth analysis of the Page Title. Combining Keywords to cut down on the total number of words in the title strengthens the individuality of each keyword
Placement of most important keyword in header tags
Uniform distribution of keywords throughout the Keyword Density
Image tags
Bolding, italicizing or underlining some of the keywords, 1 time each
On-Page Link Analysis
HTML Validation
Directory Listings
Link Structure

http://www.segnant.com/

Did Google cache your homepage and your other pages are still waiting to get indexed?

2008-02-04T07:22:00.000-05:00

Googlebot is a smart spider that revisits the site depending upon how quickly the content changes. If it finds the same old stuff, it ignores the site and revisits it after one month. Everytime on visiting if it comes across the new stuff, its visits become frequent, probably several times a day. In other words if the content on the pages not getting spidered has not changed, then the duration between spiders get greater. Googlebot according to the specified softwares decides which of your pages will be indexed in Google index and which won’t.
Coming to the main issue, did Google cache your homepage and the remaining pages are still waiting to get indexed? The root cause probably could be the change in the algorithm of Google. Google updates and changes a lot of things and of lately is often taking the snapshot of older cached pages.
But for that it should be ensured that your site does not contain any technical error and has a clear hierarchy of text-based links. And a proper execution of HTML Codes and no broken links, please! Moreover every page should have an access from at least one static link. In case of a huge site, site-maps should break the confusion. Well described information-rich content is certainly an added advantage. Descriptive and accurate TITLE and ALT tags makes the accessibility more vivid. A “?” character in URL is a threatening element because most of the search engines normally ignore to take the snapshot of the dynamic pages. And obviously you won’t ever prefer to cut down the parameters of being getting indexed!

http://www.segnant.com/

EMARKETING STRATEGY

2008-02-01T00:55:00.000-05:00

Emarketing strategy helps the companies to build a solid customer acquisition. The strategy involves a thorough identification of the best target market segments and developing the right online marketing programs to attract and retain profitable customers. These days the direct marketers are trying to sell their products or services like hot pancakes in business-to-business marketing. For this they are in a regular pursuit of developing new techniques, setting up new tools, and emphasizing the sales and marketing variety. In email marketing to extend your influence beyond your current reach with insightful impact, email etiquette is must as it is amongst the most powerful elements for keeping in touch with customers and prospects.
To follow the emarketing strategy, first of all it would be advisable to analyze the purpose of the site. A legitimate business site is often confused with a communication site. The difference between the two lies in their relevance. A widely distributed sales team should be marketed differently than an internet-only business. But it is important for both evaluate the changeable needs of its distributor community, and tailor the content accordingly. Most of the times a valid business email is often confused with spam by the search engine spiders.
Undoubtedly, we all put a lot of effort to make our internet business success. In the hopes after spending hundreds of dollars in opt-in email, the webmasters most of the times forget sending emails daily and sometimes an additional sales letter can set off a wave of cancellations, declaring your emails as spam or unauthorized.
It should not be ignored that e-marketing when promoted alone, does not show emphatic result. It comes out to be more successful when incorporated with other marketing channels such as telemarketing, direct-mail, personal selling, advertising, publicity, sales promotion, and other promotional techniques that maintain the whole selling-buying process starting from its prelim stage of pre-sale to sale to post-sale.

THE G(GOOGLE) FACTOR!

2008-01-30T06:54:00.000-05:00

Google's novelties have always continued to restyle not only the world of search, but also the advertising marketplace and the area of publishing. Google set its standards then only when it was put on the web for the first time in 1999. With an index of just 25 million pages, and handling 10,000 search queries every day, Google search engine made a loyal following along with the growing number of Internet users. Contemporarily, Google’s outstanding coverage of web searches has over 50% share of the total search market, making it the giant of internet marketing.
But this G factor has also caused a lot of anxiety in the SEO community. Google in order to make its search results contain relevant, important sites; invests millions of dollars to create algorithms that identify the sites which tries to fool them and adjust their ranking accordingly. It has already rocked the World Wide Web by its algorithm changes such as Florida, Jagger, Gilligan and Bourbon. These minor jerks to large-scale changes drops the ranking of the websites to 30 to 40 to 50 places in the Google Search Engine results giving the webmasters a real nightmare.
With the latest algorithm update called Jagger, Google has once again outsmarted huge numbers of SEOs. Considered to be the most difficult algorithm update in the history of the Internet, Jagger implemented CSS Spam filtering to disable CSS to hide text, which was tricking Google for a long time. In the front stage when the SEOs were busy swapping links, buying cheap links, and placing links on free directories to trick Google; Google in the backstage moved towards favoring sites with more natural incoming links, as well as sites with quality content. At that time, the hundreds of thousands of websites that enjoyed strong listings and powerful ranking were sent beyond the second page of results. You might be wondering, what made it so necessary to introduce the Jagger update. Google did it with the intention to curb the concept of reciprocal links as a measure of popularity and sites produced with tattered content; to allow the addition of a greater number of spiderable file types; to allow new methods of site acquisition.
It can’t be denied that Google believes in executing the constructive ideas. By integrating Google Analytics (another platform to know about how your visitors found you and how they cooperate with your site giving you an opportunity to judge your ROI) and link popularity, Google will enjoy the monopoly of being the only major search engine to give you an insight how your site is looked upon as by the other websites and what are the reactions of your visitors towards your website. And on the optimization front niche directory submission, article submission sites, the quality of article PR and web site content will continue to rule to generate the traffic.
Google has always superseded its rivals to become the world’s most renowned search engine with the biggest database. Its PR element for the website is the cumulative outcome of popularity, traffic, quality of links, Word proximity and their amount in results.

THE NEED OF SEO

2008-01-22T06:53:00.000-05:00

Most of the webmasters who are overconfident enough of their site and under-estimate the importance of SEO hold the notion that the majority of web traffic their sites get is generated by the major commercial search engines like Yahoo!, MSN, Google, and AskJeeves. Probably what the overconfident webmasters may claim could be true on their part. They would have certainly managed to get their website high in the search engine results pages, but the chances are very high that their sales won’t match the traffic their site might have generated. Precisely, the webmasters at times become too finicky regarding the codes, programming, etc that they often overlook the importance of selling their product or services online.
To have an effective website you must have more, and that "more" is the perfect optimization of the site, its content, product, salesmanship, etc. SEO is simply a form of marketing, which like other advertising campaigns run print ads, get links, promote public relations in the blogosphere and social networking online, competitive analysis etc. SEO in fact comes down to 4 things: a) Onpage Factors, b) Content, c) Offpage Factors, and d) Strategy. A professional SEO can make your users actually see you – and that the ones that see you really are looking for what you have to offer turning them into your permanent customers.
Proper optimization of web pages make them “search engine friendly” and can greatly increase your search engine rankings, traffic levels, and most important of all the potential earnings. Search engine optimization can produce sales, both online and offline. Its effective strategies can attract and convince the search engine users to do what all you expected from your website. Doing all this, will greatly reflect on your website’s prominent position, branding and name recognition. And I need to emphasize that the targeted visitors to a website can provide publicity, revenue, and exposure like no other form of marketing. This is the power and potential of SEO.

http://www.segnant.com/

USE OF WELL TURNED-OUT WEBSITE FILE-NAMES FOR HIGH SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS

2008-01-15T06:51:00.000-05:00

The file names have important implication for operating system usability, compatibility and Web site promotion, particularly if keywords appear in the filename; it helps the website in search engine rankings. Since it has become apparent that main aim of SEO is to embed targeted keyword phrases into a website to reach a high rank on a search engine results page (SERP) under those keyword phrases, targeting right keyword phrase in the file-name will emphasize the effect of the search engine ranking.
For instance once you know which your prime keywords are, it would be wise calling your webpage with name
“segnant.html”

Search engines crawls through both the text that is displayed on a page as a link, called anchor text, and the file name that it is linked to. It would be more advantageous to include targeted phrases in both. Google pays high importance to file names of the site and in return gives the site a lead in the search engine ranking. It would also be advisable to keep the optimized pages static in their approach with .html format. Indexing a dynamic page is a difficult task for the search engine spiders.
Use of hyphens or underscores to separate keywords while naming file is a good option. The filename in which a homepage that links to all of its following pages but still retain its keyword focus also gets a boost in the search engine ranking. Even though file names are only a small part of the SEO process and if only file names are optimized and not the on-page copy, the file name design will affect the incoming links, internal site structure etc.
Beware of using over board file names and domain names. Obviously you would not love to get discouraged by your visitors and not rewarded by the search engines.

DIRECTORY VS. SEARCH ENGINES

2008-01-04T07:10:00.000-05:00

A web directory is heavily optimized with an access to a categorized listing of other websites for reading. It supports search and browsing in addition to simple lookups. For the web surfers looking out for more dependable results means a search conducted in well-known, commercially-backed search engines. On the other hand, directories also allow searches for web sites, but being listed in more directories means getting your site crawled more frequently for keywords in the search engines. Without understanding the difference between the "crawler-based results" and "human-powered results” it would be difficult to understand the pull between the two.
Submitting site to the directories involves a lot more than simply submitting a URL in search engines. Unlike the search engines, the directories use a hierarchical structure to classify their database, where the web pages before being submitted are reviewed, selected and categorized by human editors. Being listed in these human-based search engines is by far the most effective way to drive traffic to your site. The directories attract the visitors interested in the specific topic and seek for exact service or product. Here the interest of the visitors becomes the prescreened element for ranking a website on the top spot in the search engine. The chances of good ranking of a website become brighter if the directory to which it is submitted is close to the top of the keyword targeted search in the search engine. Directories normally charge a fee for submission to cover the costs of the directory expenses and guarantee a review by the editor or a webmaster for a specific period of time to retain the top spot of your web site. Open Directory offers free submission.
The search engines are an excellent choice to search or any kind of information. Their “crawler-based results” provides inclusive coverage of the web along with great relevancy. One even need not to submit a site to a search engine to find a site and place it in the catalog for searching.
To make it easier for you to decide whether directory submission yields you qualitative result or the search engine, let’s take a glance;
Directories require considerable human effort to organize and maintain it, eg. Yahoo and Librarians Index. Though it limits the peer review but it is probable that you may come across any unexpected discovery while browsing through categories. On the other hand search engines like Google, AltaVista, and AllTheWeb let automated programs, called robots, spiders, worms, etc. search and catalog web sites. The "spiders" of each search engine have their own modus operandi and during the keyword targeted search it may target the directory too. I won’t sound wrong if I say that the search engines are the giants of internet.
Still confused! The tug is getting too far. Well I may not confuse you more. It all depends on what kind of information you are looking for. If you want spontaneous result then looking in a search engine might be helpful. But if you want organized and exact information, searching in a directory could be of great help. Being in the directories lends credibility to a website in the search engines. If your site is good enough to list in the directory, it enhances the overall search engine link popularity.

PPC CLICK FRAUD

2008-01-01T07:04:00.000-05:00

As pay per click has saturated in the search field, more and more people are trying to abuse this program to fraud competitors and get ahead. Like a bug, each day it is hogging away the profits and advertising budget. It has occupied the ads and has made them unavailable for the potential buyers. Particularly the small business entrepreneurs are the victims of the click fraud. The fraudulent accomplish this mission in a number of ways. Either they manually click on the same ad link repetitively or set up automated bots. That means, whatever the technique is used, the affected advertisers pay prime CPC rate for fraudulent traffic.
Other aspect of the same issue is that if the PPC fraud keeps on bugging the advertising programs of the search engines like this, it will ultimately to loss of advertisers and revenue. If you are also among those whose PPC campaign is getting abused by fraudsters, and your 10%, 20%--even 40% of your budget is getting depleted because of these wasted clicks, it’s the time to take measures.

Ensure that trustworthy PPC search engines and your investment is receiving good returns.
Avoid working with those publishers who partner with sites that offer incentives for clicks or searches.
Keep the knowledge about your site visitor. Your effort to improve your business and save the investments won’t go empty if you will keep yourself updated, if need be on hourly basis. Your knowledge about your visitor will provide you the solid proof to data to combat click fraud and provide proof to Google that you are being defrauded. In this case the search engines become obligated to pay you the refund checks for up to 30% or even more subjected to the money wasted on the fraudulent. It makes no sense to pay for the traffic that has no intention of purchasing anything from your site.
The search engines on their part can limit this fraud activity by cutting rate click from the traffic coming from countries where English is not the standard language.

HOW TO GRAB THE TOP SPOT IN SEARCH ENGINES

2007-12-30T07:12:00.000-05:00

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.

KEYWORD RESEARCH WITH LATERAL THINKING

2007-12-25T02:56:00.000-05:00

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.

http://www.segnant.com/

UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL E-MAIL – SPAM

2007-12-22T07:27:00.000-05:00

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.

ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS WITH ONLINE MARKETING

2007-12-19T04:12:00.000-05:00

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DECIPHERING THE DYNAMISM OF WEB PROMOTION AND E-MARKETING

2007-12-15T03:43:00.000-05:00

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.

Web Answers: Another Cool New Feature on Ask Jeeves

2007-12-12T03:19:00.000-05:00

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

New Features On Ask Jeeves: Time to Cheer for Searchers

2007-12-09T05:30:00.000-05:00

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/

SEO Mistakes and Misconceptions

2007-12-04T06:15:00.000-05:00

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/

Marketing Online the Right Way: Follow These Steps

2007-12-01T03:26:00.000-05:00

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/

Optimizing Your website for Different Search Engines: Using Robots.txt File

2007-11-25T07:24:00.000-05:00

If you think that you are ranking well on one search engine for some keyword or phrase and by default will rank well on other search engines too, then you are highly mistaken. All search engines have their own different methods, ways and algorithms to rank the sites. Now you want to optimize your site for different search engines, how do you do that? It is not so simple as just creating very similar pages with slight differences here and there. If you do this, Google's spiders will consider it as spamming and may ban your site forever or give you very low rankings. So what's the solution? How do you optimize your pages in order to satisfy and impress different search engines? Well, the answer is Robots.txt file.

It is a text file created by using a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad so that your site does not get banned or punished by the search engines for designing different pages for different search engines. This file stays in the root directory and in order to stop some search engines to not view or index certain web pages of your site that don't stay in your root directory, you need to point towards the right directory and then list the file as normal.

The code to insert in the file is:

User-Agent:(Spider Name)
Disallow: (File Name)

The words before the colon never change and are mandatory, but the words after the colon will change according to the file and search engine that you want to ignore or avoid. User-Agent defines the name of the search engine that you want to disallow visiting the files that are mentioned in Disallow category. In case you want to list more than one disallow files, they can be listed one under the other. For example, if you wish to disallow Inktomi to view or spider two pages optimized for Yahoo and three pages optimized for Google, you can do so by placing these files one under the other.

Robots.txt files can be your saviour, if you are optimizing your web pages for more than one search engine, but you need to be very careful while listing the names of those files as a small error on your part can turn into a blunder. So, go ahead and optimize your pages for different search engines without the fear of getting banned or punished for spamming by simply creating robots.txt files.

http://www.segnant.com/

Some Less Tried Web Marketing Techniques

2007-11-19T07:29:00.000-05:00

No doubt ranking in the first 10 or 20 slot on major search engines is a dream come true for webmasters. But is it the 'be all and end all' of web marketing. I say no. After all, why do we want higher rankings? Because we think higher rankings means more targeted traffic and better business prospects for us. Well, dear readers, that is not the whole truth. Only ranking higher in the search engines doesn't guarantee a higher profit or targeted traffic always. You may fetch more traffic and people for some time initially, but in the longer run, you will find your site vanish from the search engines as fast as it arrived. Why? Because probably your site didn't have the power or conviction to hold the attention and getting links from other sites within its niche.
So just concentrating on higher rankings is not enough. It is posible to get your marketing message listed in Google's top ten results for your targeted keywords, and still get good traffic for your site. What you do is advertise on a site that gets spidered by the search engines. This leads to higher rankings for your targeted keywords, others read your advertisement and click on the actual website. This is something that not many people have tried. Try it because it works well.

Similarly, there's another not much explored and tried out way of increasing traffic to your site. If you have heard of a service called Google Answers, then you must be aware that users submit specific questions to Google Answers with the specific amount they are ready to pay for each answer. Google loves to list questions and answers from Google Answers within their top 10 search results. So all you need to do is post a comment to a query listing your company and even the URL in the comment. That's it.You will find your marketing message listed in a very high position for that comment. So all you did was add some information about your site and got ranked. No hassles, no payments, all done. So from now on keep a watchful eye on the queries to post comments to, in a way, referring people back to your site.

http://www.segnant.com/

New To E-Commerce Business?

2007-11-15T06:37:00.000-05:00

Opening up an e-commerce business is no longer the exclusive right of some now. With more and more information getting accessible to people, thanks to the internet revolution, every business minded person can not only think of, but actually open up his/her e-commerce business. But there are many if and buts involved in the whole thing. And if you are new to the e-commerce business, avoid the following things to get the most out of your online business:

Do Proper Research

Never start anything that you have not researched on adequately. Your target market and the product you aim to sell must not be already saturated to a point in the market. You must identify your niche market very carefully after extensive research.

Be Realistic

It's good to dreams and have big expectations but remain firmly grounded on earth. Don't expect to make a gold mine in first go only. Be practical and keep working on your marketing strategies to get agood result. No doubt you can make money on the net, that's why e-commerce is booming, but there is no guarantee or surety too. So dream about good profits, but don't day dream.

There are no free lunches in this world

Those mortals who think that they can make money and run a busines online without spending anything, are living in a fool's paradise. Every thing in this world costs something and you should be prepared to invest some money in advertising and marketing of your products to remain above the competition. It helps and pays in the long run.

Too much PPC

Excess of everything is bad. How True. Pay Per Click is an amazing way of advertising online, but depending too much upon it can be dangerous too. Instead indulge in natural, organic, ethical SEO to get higher rankings in search engines along with PPC. But don't over indulge in PPC advertising.

The crux of the whole story is that you need to be really brushed up as to what's happening out there. Do your research very well and get, set, go. Your first experience will tell you where your business is heading. If it is doing well, fine, otherwise leave it and move on.

http://www.segnant.com/

Relevance of E-Zines and Blogs

2007-11-12T06:29:00.000-05:00

E-zines or email newsletters comprise of detailed, comprehensive, and much researched articles meant for that audience which is little less serious or passionate about your products and services as compared to the blog loving audience. On the other hand, blogs consist of short and sweet, focused pieces of writing meant for an audience that comes to you for updated information on a regular basis.

Both these can be combined together to cater to different target audiences. For an audience that looking for frequent ideas as well as answers to their questions and want to remain abreast with the latest that is happening in the industry, blogs is the solution. But the audience who are not much into blogging you can very well send a monthly or bi-weekly newsletter that consists of all the important and meatiest of your blog articles along with urls of all other important entries in your blog.

It is like understanding and respecting different people's needs and giving them what they want. Blogs and e-zines fulfil different needs of different people, so gauge the mood of your target audience and give them what they want- a blog or a newsletter.

http://www.segnant.com/

Have You Checked the Popularity of Your Keywords?

2007-11-04T01:39:00.000-05:00

The keywords that you use for your website play a significant role in improving the ranking of your site in search engines. So it becomes all the more important to check the popularity of the keywords that you plan to use in your website. It is this popularity count of the keywords that will help you determine the list of chosen keywords, with the most unused but relevant keywords coming on the top of your list. And these should form your target keywords that will be further optimized according to your website requirement.

Once you have a list of 25-30 keywords with you, you need to expand the list by experimenting and playing with these keywords using singular/plural word combinations, synonyms, or interspersing same keywords in different combinations, and so on. The idea is to come up with ample number of keyword combinations that might possibly be looked or searched by people on the search engines for your website.

To check for the competing pages on google, you should put the keywords in quotes in the search box, and this will give you the clear picture for the keyword that we plan to optimize for. Also keeping a tab on the ranking of the subpages on the SERPS page helps. In case the subpage shows a high occurance, the key-phrase is less competitive.

The keyword density on your page should be in between 5-20% while optimizing. Remember that 20% of your search traffic reaches you through primary keywords and another 20% through the secondary keywords and other different combinations. the rest 60% is fractional.

Some important keyword tools:

Overture
Google Adwords
Alta Vista "PRISMA"

http://www.segnant.com/

How To Generate Sales Leads?

2007-10-25T05:21:00.000-05:00

If you plan to establish your business online, you have to generate sales leads in order to make sales yourself on the net. So in other words, when you try to generate sales leads online,you are basically marketing on the internet. A good number of relevant leads is quite essential for building your business online.

The first thing to do in generation of sales leads is building a solid mailing list. A list of customers who are responsive and buy from you always helps. Email marketing is a free and effective method of reaching your audience and all it costs is time to you. You can always mention a free gift/product or some incentive in the email to allure or arouse the interest of the prospective customers in your products/services.

Leads can be generated through emails by exploring options like email signatures, joint ventures, and safe lists. Always provide the option of an un-subscribe link in the marketing mails to aviod spam. Basically in email marketing you put a signature in all your emails and that signature contains a link to your main product/service. In case you want a quick increase in your list you need to enter into a joint venture where you provide the product and a fellow marketer provides the leads and you both share the profits. This might also help you get your fellow marketer's customers to whom you can then mail further.

You also have the option of safe lists that consists of names of those people who have allowed you to send them emails provided you also allow them to send their emails to you. Though not a very good strategy it might help in a small way. Then there is the pay per click method like Overture or Google adwords to get interested leads.

You cannot do away with the value of forums related to your area of business. You can always post in these forums and include a link to your site in your signature. Whoever is interested in your area will often click your forum posting if it is interesting. Submitting articles to ezine publishers and article directories, press releases, testimonials in your target market, all help in generating leads.

Capturing the leads email address is very important and for this you have different options available, like, using a pop up with some incentive so that people sign up. You can also use "name squeeze page" that is a kind of web page for capturing an email address. This webpage generally has some short information about your product/service, a sign up form and a message that directs people to know more about your product/service.

Remember always to convey the right marketing message to the right audience at the right time. Your emails should not only be timely but also directed towards the right people, in other words, your targeted audience.

http://www.segnant.com/

Learn Marketing From Your Own Life

2007-10-19T02:34:00.000-05:00

Your life can be your best teacher. And in marketing too, you can apply the same rules that you apply to your life.

First Impression is The Last Impression

Just like the first impression is the last impression in real life, similarly in marketing also your first impression is everything. If you don't make a favorable first impression, your prospects will never see you in a positive light. Customers like to buy from business houses that project a very professional, organized, and uncluttered side of theirs. Don't neglect your brand's image. The people who know you must be having a particular image in mind while thinking of you. They must be categorizing you as either professional, or clumsy, or high headed, or non serious, all based upon what they think about you. Exactly the same way, your brand, business also projects an image in front of the customers/prospects. In business too, image is everything. Do not project a poor or a weak image in front of your target audience.

Be consistent in Your marketing efforts

If you are seeking instant satisfaction, marketing is not for you. Just as in life, you have to make continual and continued efforts to remain on top, so is the case in marketing. You have to market on a regular and consistent basis and remain patient to reap long term profits. Get into the mindset of a marketer and have a committed approach towards your work.

Don't give up in between

You have to keep trying hard to reach your goal. This is what you do in life also. If you fail once, you stand up again to face the world. So in marketing too there may be some strategies that work and others that don't work. Failures teach you to succeed in life. Note your failures so that you can learn from them. This will also give you an accurate picture of what works and what does not work in marketing.

Engage others in your efforts

Don't make the mistake of doing everything on your own. You must involve others in your efforts as it is not possible to handle everything on your own. If you do, you will be tired soon. Be practical and realize the importance of hiring professionals to help you out. Think of the long run and invest some money in experienced and seasoned manpower to get results. In life too, you take help of others to do so many things, so the same applies in marketing.

You have to spend money to get money

Don't expect everything to happen without paying a penny. As they say there are no free lunches,similarly don't think that everything will be done without spending money. Marketing requires you to spend money for the strategies that you wish to incorporate or execute as a part of your marketing efforts. And this investment of money today will show you its results in the future for sure. Don't you pay for everything in life-be it electricity, water, or food. And you get the results when you pay-a sumptuous meal, good quality water, and uninteruppted electricity for a comfortable life.

Keep these things in mind while marketing. These are things that we indulge in and incorporate in our lives daily and can be a great help in our professional lives also if we learn from them. Marketing can be a manageable and comfortable thing if we approach it in the right vein.

http://www.segnant.com/

The Right Choice of Colours Can Make All The Difference To Your Website's Popularity

2007-10-15T02:10:00.000-05:00

Yes it's true. The choice of right colors can make or break the reputation of your products and services and your website. First impression indeed is the last impression in the business world too. No doubt good and relevant content and links play the most important roles in making your website popular and profitable, but the look and appearance of your website also leaves an impression on the audience. The right choice of colors can make the visitors feel relaxed, at home and comfortable with your website because human emotions are triggered by color and you should know which color offsets which emotion.

Everything that exists on this earth has a color, whether it is food, clothes, places, or buildings. These colours feed our psychological and emotional hunger and also reflect our personalities. Color being a powerful tool, can really help us if used properly because we never forget the colors that we see once. As far as your website is concerned, it is important to work out which colors would best reflect your products or services. Listed below are some colors that have different emotions attached with them and that can be used depending upon what image you want to project about your company, products or services to the visitors.

White- This color reflects purity, peace, perfection. Keeping your content on a white background is easier on the visitors' eyes, and also lends a professional look to the site.

Red- This color is symbol of excitement, hunger, warmth, and love. So if you are an agressive business person and want to trigger off the excitement and hunger buds of the audience, this is the color for you. The people in food industry can use it to their best.

Green and Blue- Both are cool colors and trigger off calm and content feelings. Green color may also stand for money, greed and Blue is the color of the corporate world, much loved by the Corporate America.

Grays and Browns- These colors suggest depression and sombereness, but they also mean weight and heavyness. If used properly with other colors they help provide the visitors with a feeling of stableness and strength. This will further help build the solidarity and confidence of visitors in your products and services.

People who are in marketing world know how effective the colors can be in making a brand image for you and your company. People come to associate your company and logo with the color you choose. Visitors identify you with the color of your company. We are in the color T.V and Internet age now and color does help you get attention in the millions of other websites existing alongside you.

http://www.segnant.com/

Do You Know What SEO Copywriting Means?

2007-10-12T01:23:00.000-05:00

SEO copywriting is completely different from print copywriting and we must understand this if we want to optimize our website fully. SEO copywriting is the art of describing the process of developing the visible text that you see on the web page. As a webmaster you would want your website to be equally attractive to the search engines as well as the human visitors so that your website gets high ranking in search engines for the keywords/phrases targeted by you to best describe your products and services.

One major difference between normal print copywriting and SEO copywriting is that in SEO copywriting, you have to attract the attention of the search engine spiders so that they come and index your site. Keeping this in mind, not only the usage of right and relevant keywords but also the placing of those keywords in the webpage plays a very important role. You must be able to identify the right places and positions where to put the keywords/phrases.

You can make or break the popularity of your website and products/ services if you convey the right message to the right people. SEO copywriting is a highly creative, yet demanding job that expects you to think and act like a savvy marketer who knows his/her audience well and uses the exact language that best translates benefits of products and services to the targeted audience.

Some Good Linking Strategies

2007-10-04T02:13:00.000-05:00

A good link strategy is one that offers content, products, and services that will help and interest your visitors.

Do not divert from the theme-What is your site’s main topic or theme? Stick to it while linking with other sites. A well articulated theme increases your search engine rank and helps visitors find the information they need, thus bringing more targeted traffic to your site.

Are your links popular?-The more popular the inbound and outbound links, better will be your site’s ranking in the search engines because search engines don't consider the number of links; they appraise the relative importance of inbound and outbound links. So instead of stuffing 500 irrelevant and unrelated links in to your site, it is advisable to have 100 related and relevant ones.

Beware of automated link generators-Automated programs sending emails to other webmasters offering to trade links are a big no no. Personalize your linking strategy by sending a personalized email that explains to the other webmaster why you want to link to his/her site and what you particularly like about his/her site.

Use contextual links-Always include links in the page content containing the page’s keywords as against links sent to a site's "Related Links" page. Content links help search engines rank the importance of a link and put it in the proper context. It would be really helpful if you try to identify a particular page that perfectly fits with your links as far as page’s content is concerned. Also keep a note of the exact location of the page concerned when you ask for a link. This will show the other webmaster that you have taken out time to check out his/her website.

So the fact is that a good linking strategy can do wonders for your website. It not only makes you an authority in a particular area but also inspires more and more people to come to your website for information. Search engines spiders will love you and you will no longer need to run mindlessly after links.

http://www.segnant.com/

Beware of Link Farms

2007-09-25T02:05:00.000-05:00

If you think by joining link farms and stuffing your site with as many links as possible will make your site popular in search engines, then you are highly mistaken. Your bad linking habits and strategies might get you even banned from the search engines.

Link farming or link stuffing is the phenomenon where sites start linking to other websites for the only reason of increasing their website’s link popularity without even bothering to check whether they are linking to relevant and related websites or not. Google has come to understand this dirty trick of some unethical webmasters and hates link farms. And anyone who indulges in link farming is branded spam by Google and may even get removed from Google’s index. The reason being that Google does not want irrelevant websites to be linked with others as it decreases the site's value to visitors and damages the image of the Web as provider of useful content to the visitors. Just imagine a clothes’ site linking to a music site does not make sense at all and costs precious time to the surfers.

The search engines are taking a very serious stand against all link farmers and Google’s spam policy states clearly to disregard link stuffing when building the index and computing static rank and to reduce the static rank of documents containing it.

So all I can do is to warn you and make you aware of the heavy price that you may have to pay if you displease the search engines with unethical link farming. Linking is good, but only with related and relevant websites, otherwise you are just calling trouble for your website.

http://www.segnant.com/

Seniors/Aged Form a Valuable Chunk Of Online Buyers: Don't Neglect Them

2007-09-19T07:00:00.000-05:00

A website plays a very important role in marketing your business online to the senior citizens. According to a recent survey, there has been 47% increase in the number of online senior surfers between 2000 and 2004 alone. This increase has been due to many reasons, like, a desire to stay in touch with news and events, checking up for medical/health related information, researching for products/ services to purchase offline, make online shopping purchases, researching for stocks, etc.

If the target audience for your business is the older people, you need to keep the following things in mind in order to modify your website accordingly:

Since the older population has visibility problems, it is better to use less content and in a larger font. Also provide the users with an option to enlarge the font or text size, if need be.

Use a font type that is easily read by the older surfers, like sans-serif font as that is not condensed and double space body text.

It is better to design with high contrast and avoid reversed type and patterned backgrounds. Also use dark text on light backgrounds.

Avoid web jargon and the language that the younger generation is used to. Use terminology that is simple and easily understood by the older people. The older people may not be aware of terms like emoticon, IM, message board etc. So keep this in mind while writing for the seniors.

Be very clear and precise in explaining what the users are expected to do after clicking on a button. The reason being that the senior citizens tend to be more cautious while surfing on the internet, so explain things thoroughly yet concisely.

Your linking strategy should be straightforward where you use clear ways of showing links as blue or underlined.

Don't design a very hi-fi or difficult website. Your site design has to be simple, and stable with the navigation being easy and hassle-free. It is important to foster confidence and loyalty in the surfers if you want to win them over.

Last but not the least important is the testing of your website by some senior surfers before you actually launch it.

So if you want to make profits and earn good money from the senior online buyers, make sure you cater to their needs and give them what they want in an easy, comfortable and time saving way.

http://www.segnant.com/

Understand the Difference Between a Marketing Plan and a Communication Plan

2007-09-15T04:57:00.000-05:00

Generally people confuse between a marketing plan and a communication plan, thinking both of them to be the same. But they are highly mistaken because both plans are different and have their own importance in web marketing.

A marketing plan is a broad term that includes a lot within itself, whereas a communication plan is a small part of the marketing plan. A communication plan concentrates specifically on developing strategies to spread the word about your business, products or services. Public Relations, advertising, seminars, speaking presentations, etc., all form a part of the communication plan.

On the other hand, a marketing plan begins with the creation of a strong, strategic marketing foundation for the communications plan. Basically, a marketing plan is concerned about the goals and objectives of your business,and not just the communication activities. It also pays attention to the packaging, pricing, and selling strategies of you products or services, keeping in mind your competitors and their strategies also. The main concern of the marketing plan is to come up with a uinque selling point for your product or service so that it is uniquely placed in the minds of your prospects and customers.

A communication plan comes after a marketing plan when you need to send a message out to the world about your products or services. Once a strong, and innovative marketing plan is in place,your communication plan comes into picture. You may do without a communication plan, but not without a marketing plan. It is most essential for the success of your business.

http://www.segnant.com/

Contribution of Pay-per-click in Increased Blog Traffic

2007-09-12T07:08:00.000-05:00

Any new invention, discovery, and technology takes time to become popular and beneficial for people. At the same time, not every new thing is completely fool-proof. It can have both positive and negative effects. But, if you use it judiciously and and have thorough knowledge about its working, applicability, and usage, it can turn out to be 'a million dollar baby' for you.Take the case of Pay-per-click advertising. If you know how to tap the potential of this unique and great online advertising strategy, you may be able to increase your blog traffic tremendously. But the key to success here is knowledge, research, and constant monitoring, involved in the execution of PPC.

Are you paying the right amount for the right keywords?

Money is a big player in the PPC game. You must know how to pick up the right keywords at the right prices, so that you getyour money's worth. Your profits must outweigh your investment.

Is your advertisement worth the effort and money spent on it?

The PPC advertisements are like the trailer of a movie. If the trailer doesn't excite the audience, why would they see the movie?So be sure that in limited words, you convince, attract, and make the visitors click on your paid advertisement.

Where does your advertisement take the visitors?

You advertised about a blog on latest fashion trends, and the excited, interested, innocent visitor clicks on your ad. Poor guy! what he finds on your landing page is a long monotonous piece on history of fashion. Give the visitors what they want, and give them to the point, relevant information that they are hungry for.

Ultimately, everything boils down to one thing- EDUCATION. Immerse yourself in gathering as much knowledge as possible aboutPPC, test that knowledge by investing in learning the do's and dont's from a PPC pro, someone who has been using thisstrategy successfully to run his business. This investment of money would help you in the long run than wasting your hard earnedcash in hit and trial method.
http://www.segnant.com/

Understand SEO Algorithms for Better Optimization

2007-09-04T07:05:00.000-05:00

Being a searcher or search engine optimization expert, it is always beneficial to understand the algorithms and technologies powering the search engines. You need not pass an exam to prove your expertise, but it would do no harm if you delved a little deeper into the SEO mechanics and how it works. We know SEO is all about calculations, analysis and deductions on the basis of the websites' purpose, target audience and overall construction. We need to work out the statistics and logic involved in using some specific techniques, strategies and tools as against the others. And if we are not well versed with the dynamics of the whole concept of SEO, the algorithms and technologies being used, applied or being tested every now and then, I'm sorry to say, we are not keeping pace with the changing times and ever faster changing technological aspects of the Webworld. Also a technically sound and updated SEO will always have an extra edge over a novice or a person who though knows about SEO, but is not in touch with what's happening out there in the search engines and their changing algorithms. Take the example of a doctor who is pretty good in his job, but is not abreast with the latest and most updated changes and developments in the medical world. In other words, he is not research saavy or well tuned with the changes as well as workings of newest developments in his field of expertise. Do you think, such a doctor will be able to do justice to the needs and requirements of the patients? I don't think so. Similarly, understanding the changes taking place in the SEO world and their repercursions on the way you optimize the web site can make a hell lot of difference to the way you view the web pages or optimize them in the future.

http://www.segnant.com/

Search Engine Components That You Should Know About

2007-08-25T04:07:00.000-05:00

Understanding the search engine components and how they work is very important part of SEO. And those who think that SEO is all about learning some tricks and techniques to make your site rank well, are highly mistaken. Search Engines are always in the state of change as they have to keep up to the promise of providing relevant and updated content to users and also to keep a vigil eye on SEO experts who try to break the rules to rank high. So understanding the logic behind a search engine's working becomes all the more important for SEOs if they want to remain in touch with the changing rules of search engines.

Things would be much more easier to understand if we treat the search engines as living entities having an anatomy of their own just like a human body. They too have different parts or components that serve different functions to store, index, and then display websites to searchers. The datacenters where these search engines are placed are one of their important components.

The links from the engine itself are another important component as they take us wherever we want to go in the engine and also help us retrieve information. Then comes the spiders/crawlers or the 0s and 1s sent out by search engines to the internet to fetch documents, scanning and retrieving information in the form of fiber optic connections, thus visiting all the paths and directions.

The core function of the search engines is to crawl and index the sites. They know a number of different methods for storing, presenting, prioritizing data. When the search engine spiders are crawling the web, they are collecting the stores of existing data and sending it back to the datacenters where the information is processed through existing algorithms and spam filters. It is there that the website will get a ranking on the basis of the search engine's understanding of the way the Internet and the information contained in it works.

The search engine learns from it's own workings and the workings of the Internet functions in order to ensure that the new document types and technologies are able to be read and the algorithms are changed according to the new understandings of the functionality of the Internet. Not only this, detecting and penalizing spam is also one of the components of search engines.

Understanding how the search engines work, what are their components and what are their long term goals can help you optimize your website in the best possible way without employing tricks and techniques that do not gel with the long-term goals of SEOs. In other words, understand the fact that search engines are ever evolving and dynamic entities that keep updating themselves and their rules. And because they have the capability to "learn", in case you use any unethical means and tactics, eventually they will learn of them.

http://www.segnant.com/

All About Google Sandbox

2007-08-19T02:23:00.000-05:00

To understand the Sandbox Theory, let's take an example. When a new employee joins a company, he/she is kept on probation for a certain period of time to see whether he is the right person for the company and has the capability to work effectively and efficiently. Similarly, when a new website is created and requests the search engines to index it, the Google Sandbox acts as a filter or probation for the new sites so that no spam sites rise and then get banned. During the sandbox effect, these websites do not get good rankings even if they have good content, lots of incoming links, and high PageRank.

Whether anyone believes it or not, the Sandbox Effect is no myth or illusion but solid reality. And the idea behind it is to stop the addition of purchased links to spam sites that indulge in illegal practices to get high rankings. The first appearance of something like a sandbox effect existing was felt by website owners and SEO professionals in March, 2004 when the websites launched after that period stopped ranking well in search engines despite a good PageRank,strong incoming links, and good optimization techniques being used.

There is no way to escape the Sandbox Effect except those sites that were launched before March,2004. Also those sites that target non-competitive keywords and phrases are left out often from Sandbox, and if they are in the Sandbox, the stay is pretty short. The general time frame of stay in the Sandbox generally is three to six months depending upon the competitive level of the keywords/phrases.

So while your site is in the sandbox, the best thing to do is wait patiently and keep adding more relevant content, keyword rich pages, and off page as well as on page optimization of your website. The end result will be that when the sandbox filter is lifted from your site, it will rapidly rise in the search engine rankings. The sandbox is also the most appropriate time to add links to your site with strong keyword rich anchor text added to the links.

The only way to prevent your site from getting sandboxed is by purchasing and sending live a website, before it gets completely ready for the prime time. Though the site will have low rankings, it will set a timer on its Sandbox duration time. Keep adding incoming links to get past the alleged new links filter. Keep adding content to your site. Anything that can be done to speed up your site’s appearance on the internet, including the purchase of an already existing domain, must be done. If you manage your time properly, your site can avoid the Sandbox completely.

http://www.segnant.com/

Some Important Marketing Terms You Should Know

2007-08-15T07:15:00.000-05:00

You may be aware of these marketing terms already, but it is essential to understand them and the difference between each of them fully in order to run a successful online marketing campaign:

Unique Selling Point (USP)-It refers to that particular feature or benefit of your company/service/product that is unique to you alone. It has to have value for the customers and something unique about it for your clients in order to attract them to buy. If you don't already have a USP, you can create one and build your business around it.It can be any idea or concept around which you center your messages.

Single Message-This is basically the one most important idea or message that you say about your business when you market. It may be closely related to your USP but not be exactly the same as the USP. So once your USP is decided, you can create a single key message also, something that you tell your prospect clients so that they start looking at your products/services in a new light.In other words, it is used to change the mindset of people and make them think what you want them to think about your products/services .

Tagline-This is the actual line of marketing copy written to sum up all that you do and want your prospects to know about your products or services or benefits if they purchase from you. Your USP and single message will help you chalk out an effective tagline. The tagline has to be very customer-centric to actually make it work.While drafting it, keep asking yourself, "What's so amazing about it?".

http://www.segnant.com/

How Can You Improve Your Marketing Results

2007-08-12T06:19:00.000-05:00

Marketing forms an integral part of any business venture. Without proper marketing, you cannot achieve the desired profits in lesser time. Executing the following steps can make a big difference to your online marketing results:

Learn from Your Previous Marketing Experiences-This should be your thumb rule always that you review your previous marketing activities in order to understand the ones that worked well and brought more sales, customers, clients, and growth for you. This will also help you eliminate the strategies that failed or didn't work at all.

Broaden Your Definition of Marketing-Marketing is more than just giving ads or sending a mail to clients. Everything and anything you do to improve your business prospects by interacting, and talking with the clients about your products, services and brand is marketing only. Even if you send a thank you card or email from your business, you are marketing. Always remember to include your business card when you mail a letter to a client and don't forget an email signature that has your business name, phone number, email address, website address, etc. This makes it easy for people to remember and contact you.

Monitor the Marketing activities that lead to a sale-You conducted a seminar on behalf of the company on benefits of your products and services, and someone contacted you and made a sale after that seminar. This is called tracking your sales to your marketing, directly or indirectly. If a considerable amount of customers bought from you after certain marketing strategies of yours, then find out the exact number of sales, customers that were generated by your marketing plan.

Do away with those Strategies that didn't work at all-Seperate all those marketing activites and strategies that you tried but didn't help you in increasing sales, customers, or clients. Otherwise you would be spending money on things that have not proved fruitful for you and hence there is no sense continuing them.

Make use of the information gathered for future plans-It would really benefit you if you spend some time, effort and energy on all those activities that brought you more business and proved effective for you. This will help you focus more on them in the future and maybe improve upon them, instead of wasting time on experimentation with different new strategies.

Always Track your future marketing plans and activites- and one of the simplest ways of doing this is to ask your new customers where and how they found about you. You must make a note of every marketing activity you do so that you can keep track of all events. This kind of tracking will help you immensely to zero-in on those marketing activites that have been effective and beneficial for you.

http://www.segnant.com/

The Key Qusetion To ask Yourself For Successful Marketing

2007-08-04T06:34:00.000-05:00

Do You Know Your Customer?

Well, if you don't ask yourself this question, and better still figure out the answer for it, you may be off the mark as far as online marketing is concerned. You must find out why the people are coming to your site and what are you doing for them to make their visit as comfortable and enjoyable as possible. It is very important to find out the "why" of clients coming to your site and it is very simple also. All you need to do is ask them. When the information comes from the horse's mouth, it is always genuine and true. Only your visitors can give you true feedback and insight into the benefits they get from your products/services and what they dislike about them.

You can ask them the following questions to know where you stand in the market:

Why they purchased from you?
Have they got what they wanted in the time frame promised by you?
What is that one thing that they don't like about your products/services ?
What suggestions can they make to improve your products/services?
What would they want to see added to your products and services?
Why they didn't buy a particular product?
How much they generally spend on your products/services ?
What is their age, gender, location, profession?
How would they want you to help them in the future?

It is a known fact that the more you know about your prospective clients, visitors,and buyers, the better you will be able to serve their needs. In fact this information can help you figure out or modify your Unique Selling Point (USP) for better marketing. Gathering information from your prospects is not at all cumbersome process as you have options of emailing them, or calling them up, or sending a questionnaire to fill, etc. The rule basically is to send a formal survey if the number of people are large and call them up, if they are just a handful of them. Always end your queries on a polite and curteous "Thank You" note.

You can also offer some incentive to encourage your prospects and clients to participate or repond to your queries. After all it is very important to make them feel special and show your appreciation to them for taking out time to answer your questions.

http://www.segnant.com/

Yahoo's Next Major Take on Blog Sites

2007-07-25T04:32:00.000-05:00

Testing of Ads on Blog Sites by Yahoo

The latest news doing the rounds of Internet Marketing is that Yahoo is testing a system that will allow it to place ads on websites of bloggers and other small to medium sized publishers in competiton with Google . Around 2,000 sites will be invited by Yahoo to take part in the test and the system will be officially launched for the blogs and other publishers by the end of the year.

Though Yahoo and Google have been entertaining advertisers to bid and associate their small text ads with particular keywords on Internet searches. But it was only in 2003 that Google associated with the publishers and bloggers with a system that selects related ads by analyzing the content on a given page.

Yahoo's system is much smaller than Google's and would be working with just a few hundred sites as compared to Google's hundreds of thousands of sites. With this service of Yahoo, a website will be able to specify what categories of advertising it wishes to see or not see on a page. Additionally a contact number will also be provided so that even small publishers can call for help. This is something that Google does not provide to everyone. Yahoo seems to be taking advantage of two complaints that people make about Google: one that Google is a black box and second that you cannot get anyone on the phone to help you.

http://www.segnant.com/

Advanced Search Features For Faster Results

2007-07-19T06:24:00.000-05:00

You may not always be sure of what you are looking for on the web. But there is nothing to worry as you can take the help of advanced search features of the search engines to find whatever you are specifically looking for.

The "+" search sign used in front of a search word helps if the word is commonly left out of the search query. The + sign basically includes that word in the search that you had initially not included in the search.

The "-" sign narrows down your search results by excluding the sites or domains that you don't want in your search results.

The "~" sign shows synonyms and the search engine bolds all the words related to the word entered in the search query along with the "~" sign throughout the results.

The use of "" double quotes with a search phrase will search for this exact word or phrase in the websites. But if the double quotes are not used, the number of sites dispalyed will double or triple as compared to the narrowed number of search results when a word or phrase is used with double quotes.

The "OR" search helps find pages that include either of two search terms, for e.g., if you want to find out about web maintenance services OR web designing services , putting an "OR" in uppercase between the two terms will help you search for either of these two terms.

The "Define" feature helps you find out the definition of any word when used in front of the word concerned.

The "domain restrict" feature helps you search a particular website further when you know which site will have the information you are looking for. For example you know already that for information on designing ecommerce sites services , you will find the relevant content in www.segnant.com. When you write web designing services:www.segnant.com, this will search for the words web designing services in the above mentioned site.

http://www.segnant.com/

Avoid These Search Engine Spam Techniques

2007-07-15T06:17:00.000-05:00

When you try to show two totally different versions of your website to the search engines and the visitors respectively, you are spamming. Ethically speaking, your audience should see exactly the same content and pages as being delivered to the search engines.Listed below are some spam techniques that you should avoid at any cost, because deception of any sort will get noticed by the search engines sooner or later. And when you are caught, the consequences can be pretty bad.

Hidden Text or Partially Visible Text- Your text should be clearly visible to the visitors as well as the search engines and the font should not be very small.

Stuffing of Meta Tags and Alt Tags- Repeating content or words in the title tag is a big no no.This is called unneccessary stuffing just to attract the attention of search engines. But this is taken as a serius offence by search engines that can really prove harmful for you and your site.

Bait and Switch trick- This is when you replace the original page that was used to achieve rankings and replace it with another.

Misleading Text-The title and meta tags text should accurately relate to the page itself and should not have any unrelated or misleading keywords.

Hindering back button use-Do not create a page that doesn't allow the user from using the browser's back button to return to the search engine results.

Doorway Pages-Always shun doorway pages like plague. They have different names, but are generally the same thing.

Layering-Do not use layers to hide the content from the viewers.

Multiple Domains-Do not have multiple domains with same content and focus your resources, money and efforts on one url.Also stay away from Link Farms & Free For All type sites.

Hidden links- Just like hidden text or content, hidden links (the 1x1 transparent pixels for hiding links to doorway pages) are no longer popular or liked by search engines.

Cloaking- Cloaking is used to serve different content for the search engine spiders by serving different content based on IP addresses.

Remember that by employing spam techniques, you increase the risk of getting your website caught by the search engines. And that would mean cleaning up the whole site again and appealing to the search engines for reinclusion.

http://www.segnant.com/

Easy, Effective and Free Ways of Promoting Your Business Online

2007-07-12T06:13:00.000-05:00

There are some really amazing and totally cost free ways of advertising your online business without spending a large amount on marketing.

Free Publicity-You can also give some products of yours for free to generate publicity. Interviews can be given for free publicity or even free publicity for speaking. Free memberships can be provided, contests can be set up, articles can be submitted, in exchange for free publicity.

E-books-Create an informative and relevant to your business ebook and offer it to people for free and also get your site listed in someone else's ebook. You can also brand a series of Ebooks to give away. Or better still write a book in collaboration with someone else.

Exchange programs-You can exchange reciprocal links or exchange a free seminar with discounted products for registrants. There is no harm trading reprint rights with information products. You can trade and exchange articles, content for content, a product for an ezine ad, an ad space for an ezine ad, exchange autoresponder ads, trade signature files, trade banner ads, trade a product for another product, etc.

Offers-You can also offer free consultations in the promotions, or offer your articles in an Ebook for distribution, or offer email links to distribute your articles, or offer webpages as an Ebook. Offering a discount to subscribers for an Ezine ad also helps. Equally beneficial is offering free or low cost resell rights for information products.

http://www.segnant.com/

Hot Blog Exchange and Promotion Sites:Amazing Places for Viral Advertising

2007-07-04T05:56:00.000-05:00

Blogging is hot and happening. And now it is being used more and more for marketing and promoting one's business, products and services. Promoting your blog for free can bring lot's of traffic to your blog(s). And once a devoted string of visitors is established, you can generate revenue from your Google Adsense ads and other ads displayed on your site that are of interest to the visitors. So by using free services like:
Blog Advertising
Blog Exchange
Blog Pop Unders
Blog Polls
you can unleash the power of viral advertising and make your revenue as well as traffic soar to new heights.

Some of the really cool and profitable blog sites are as follows:
BlogBanner.com is a free service that helps blogs trade advertising with each other. It offers a 2:1 ratio for impression to your blog. Every time you place a banner above the fold in your blog, and the banner receives an impression on your blog, your text ad will be shown in two other blogs from the network.
BlogClicker.com is a free blog traffic exchange community where for every 2 member blogs you view, you get one visitor to your blog.
BlogCrowd.com is a free blog traffic exchange program which helps you earn credits for visiting other blogs during 20 seconds. So for every two blogs you visit, you get one out of the members of BlogCrowd to get to your blog.
BlogExplosion.com is not only a free blog traffic exchange community having a facility to add unlimited blogs, banners, giving full statistics, monthly bonus credits, etc, but also allows blog script providers, blog hostings, blog templates, and blog products and services.
BlogLinker.com is an automatic link swapping service when you join and place code into your pages. Once you link to any BlogLinker member, they automatically link back to you.
BlogPopUnder.com is a free pop-under traffic exchange system for bloggers where for every two pop-unders you show on your blog, you get one pop-under showing your blog on any other blog of their system.
BlogVisitors.com is for buying advertising targeting blog readers to get traffic for your blog.
EmoBlog.com is blog link exchange that looks forward to getting blog links from other bloggers in order to grow their link exchange community. All you have to do is link to them and provide your own blog link with details of the place where you have placed their reciprocal link on your blog. But your blog has to provide good quality information to visitors and not just advertising.
Link2Blogs.com is free text link exchange program to cross promote your blog with other bloggers in the Link2Blogs network.
TextAds.com is a free advertising network for microads or small text ads without the use of JavaScript. All you have to do is add a text ad to your site that will appear in other people's web sites that are part of the network.

http://www.segnant.com/

How To Get Your Website Indexed Fast

2007-06-25T01:50:00.000-05:00

Every web owner who has come up with a new website wants to get his/her website indexed as soon as possible. And there are some ways of doing so like:

Building natural links over a period of time and not launching a new site with lots of back links. It is a big myth that buying links from high-ranking sites can guarantee faster indexing by search engines. Your incoming links should not exceed 100 as the search engines know it pretty well that it takes time to get link popularity. The best advice is to build a strong set of natural back-links with other similar site in the period of 30-45 days when Google is deep indexing the new sites(also called Sandbox time).

It is important to get your domain name registered at least four months before launching the site. It is well known that Search engines take older urls much more seriously than the new ones.

By writing blogs and by pinging intelligently(letting blog services know that your blog has been updated),you can get your blog indexed in the search engines pretty fast. But beware of the red flags that are given by search engines if you over-ping.

Keep your bulk directory/portal sites in 200-300 page range. Divide the meta-keyword lists, group your sub-lists, and build smaller sites. It is always better to experiment with building smaller sites having more targeted niches than building huge websites and then keep waiting for months to get indexed.

http://www.segnant.com/

Write Your Website Content for the Visitor, Not for the Search Engine

2007-06-19T01:47:00.000-05:00

Many webmasters still remain under the impression that the more content (keywords and phrases) they write specifically for the search engines, better will be their chances of getting higher rankings. How wrong and clouded they are in their estimation and analysis. You can't just write something for impressing the search engines alone and disregard the one most important factor in online business success-relevant content for the visitors. Get your facts clear. Writing unique, good, fresh, new, exciting, and relevant content for the web site visitors is what matters and counts. Wasting unneccessary time, energy, thinking of keywords or phrases just to attract the attention of the search engines alone won't help at all. Take it the other way round. If you have really worked hard in writing good content for your web site keeeping in mind your targeted visitors, there is no reason why people will not come and visit your site. Instead of concentrating on feeding wrong, exaggerated, or twisted information to the search engines in order to get spidered, it is much beneficial to write for your audience. You will find this is going to generate maximum web traffic automatically without your having to write seperately or specifically for the search engines. Understand what your target audience wants or is searching for in your products and services. Give them that in simple,clear, and understandable language and VOILA! You will find your site jammed with people, all clamoring for more information about your company, products, and services. When you write quality content for your audience, you are using the smartest and safest online business method. Because after all, in the end, if people don't get or like what they are reading, no matter what, they will not do business with you.

http://www.segnant.com/

A Cheaper Alternative to PPC Advertising: Independent Search Engine & Directory Network (ISEDN)

2007-06-12T05:17:00.000-05:00

Now it will not be difficult for the smaller search engines and directories to make use of the PPC (pay per click) campaign that was earlier monopolized by the biggies like Google, MSN, and Yahoo alone in web marketing. They will now get together and deliver paid ad placements on a mass community scale for a minimal amount to the advertisers or website owners.

This is really good news for the advertisers as they would want to advertise through ISEDN because of the unlimited exposure they will get from all these dirctories and search engines joined together. Founded in June 2006, the ISEDN network comprises of 47 members with new members getting added at the rate of 3-5 per week.

One major advantage of ISEDN over Google or Yahoo is its low cost as it offers targeted keywords for as less as $5 a month, giving 10 exposures for your site listings across 45+ search engines and directories. Also the chances of click fraud in ISEDN are as good as nil as you pay a one time fee for your selected keyword(s). So even if your competitors or others click repeatedly on your ad, you don't pay anything extra.

How does ISEDN work?

An XML feed is provided to each member to implement within their search results or directory listings. The members can modify this feed so that the pay-for-inclusion listings are displayed matching their site's look and feel. But regardless of how the listings are displayed, the advertisers are guaranteed top 10 exposures across the entire ISEDN network. This is so because the number of times any keyword term can be bought is limited and all paid listings are rotated in the search engine result pages (SERPs) on each individual engine and directory.

Every advertising venture is looking forward to a good Return on Investment (ROI) and advertising in smaller ventures online brings better results as the competition is less, more targeted audience is there, more local opportunites are there, and you get more exposure for your money. And ISEDN has made it easier to advertise in loads of smaller directories and other programs through their own network.

ISEDN is a kind of counter to the gradual monopolization of search on the Web by engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. It might in the future also contribute in other areas related to search such as search relevance and possibly the support of open source search software.

http://www.segnant.com/

Do You Know These Pay Per Click Terms?

2007-06-05T06:07:00.000-05:00

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is one of the important and popular ways of advertising on the web. These advertisements are displayed along with the highest paying bidder ads appearing in the top position. Explained below are some terms that are very much a part of PPC marketing campaign and that an internet marketer must be well versed with:

Bid-The amount of money an advertiser agrees to pay to the search engines for a click on a specific keyword.

Budget-The amount of money that is set aside by an advertiser for an advertising campaign depending upon whether he decides to have an advertising budget on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Clickthrough Rate(CTR)-This is the percentage of clicks on a link that is calculated as the total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions received by an advertisement.

Conversion Rate-This refers to the percentage of people whose clicks have brought about a sale or resulted in desired action in relation to the total number of clicks on an advertisement.

Cost Per click(CPC)-The amount paid for every click through an advertiser's website.

Cost Per Thousand-The amount paid by an advertiser for every one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of whether a consumer bought anything or not after clicking.

Delisting-When a listing is removed due to inaction or bad performance, it is called delisting.

Geotargetting-Targeting an advertisement at a specific geographical area or location is geotargetting.

Impressions-Every time a web surfer views an advertisement, it is called an impression.

Keywords-The relevant search words or phrases that are related to an advertisement are called the keywords.

Landing Page-Is the web page that a visitor comes to after clicking on an advertisement.Usually this page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase.

Linking Text-Is the text included within a link.

Rank-This is the rank or position of a web site in the search engines or advertising results.

Return on Investment-This refers to the profits generated through marketing or advertising campaign. Every advertiser wants the money spent on the campaign to be exceeded by money earned through it.

http://www.segnant.com/

What's in a Blog?

2007-06-04T06:13:00.000-05:00

Well, if you ask me this question, I will say "a lot". Something that started as a personal diary or journal on the web, has today transcended beyond just being the personal thoughts and feelings of people online. Today blogging has become highly influential in allowing millions of people to publish their ideas online and others to comment and react on the blogs already published. In fact businesses are using blogs to attract customers.

The best part about a blog is that it broadens a blogger's horizon by widening the audience and providing a personal, more direct, and interactive contact with the readers. And the same holds true for the business enterprises also. They have realized the power and wide reach of the blog and want to tap its benefits to get wider audience as well as customers for their business. With the help of a blog, the companies get a chance to interact with their clients on a regular basis.

But one thing that companies using blogs must realize and understand is that blogs are not the place to promote your products, services, or brand. It is a great platform for promoting your ideas, expressing yourself, and providing tips to the audience in order to build their trust in you keeping in mind the fact that this audience might turn into customers.

Some things to be kept in mind while launching a blogging program are:

1. Providing quality, and relevant content
2. Blogging on a regular basis
3. Writing the blog with specific audience in mind so that you cater to the unique needs, issues and demands of the audience and remain focused
4. Updating the blogs on a regular basis

Blogging can make all the difference to your business prospects if you practice it properly. So, pull up your blogging socks and start right away.

http://www.segnant.com/

Learn About Advanced Google Operators

2007-05-25T05:30:00.000-05:00

There are many helpful advanced search engine operators that can be of great value and importance to the webmasters if they are used properly. Read below about them and how they can be useful:

Cache Command Operator- This operator tells you about whether your site has been indexed and when it was indexed.All you have to do is type the url of your website after the word "cache:" (for e.g "cache:www.segnant.com)into the Google search engine and you will know when your site was last indexed. This operator also displays the web page that was indexed last time so that you get the latest version of the page that was indexed. The cache operator can be really helpful in case you have lost your website and backup data due to some major computer failure. With this operator, you can get all lost data back in the form that Google last indexed it. The only problem may be the amount of time it will take to retrieve the web pages depending upon how big or small the website is. Not only to the webmasters, the cache command can be and has been a great help to the forensic experts also in retrieving incriminating evidence against criminals. And those webmasters who think that by using a "no cache" tag they can block Google from caching their sites should better know that doing this does not affect web rankings.

Link Command Operator-This operator, used along with the domain name informs you about the number of links pointing to your site. By using the syntax "“link:http://www.segnant.com/", with your website's url mentioned, you get to see the total number of links indexed by Google that are linking to you.

Inurl Operator-This operator restricts your search to one site only. Like if I type the url of my company "inurl:www.segnant.com guaranteed SEO", it will show you the guaranteed SEO webpage only. This can be especially helpful in case when you are looking for a specific phrase on one site.

Intitle Operator-This operator helps you find out websites that have a particular keyword in their title tag. So by typing "intitle:web design" or any other search term you are looking for, you can find the website having that keyword in it's title tag.

Allinurl and Allintitle Operators-These operators help in finding out for a string of keywords in either a title or site. So starting a query with allinurl operator command will restrict your results to those pages that have all the query words in the url. For e.g by typing "allinurl:www.segnant.com segnant" will give you only documents that have segnant word in them.

http://www.segnant.com/

Don't Forget The Cs of Web Marketing

2007-05-19T06:19:00.000-05:00

In order to have a powerful web presence and while optimizing your website, it is important to keep in mind the following "Cs" to ensure that you are not missing out anything in your web marketing campaign:

1. Control- It means to ensure that all systems to monitor current activity and to make any consequent changes are put in their right places. This will help you to measure the effects of intervention and whether you are moving in the right direction.

2. Compatibility-This means to ensure that your website is compatible with what the search engines are looking for so that your website is crawled and indexed easily and quickly and you are able to achieve high rankings in the search engines.

3. Content-This refers to the content used in the webpages of your site. The content in the website should represent the products or services sold by the company. The keywords used have to be relevant and customer specific.

4. Culture-This means targeting the webpages to the intended audience and not wasting time and energy on the whole of the world. Your website must target the right people, geographically as well as demographically.

5. Connectivity-Your website has to be connected to related websites in order to improve its ranking in the search engines.

6. Conversion-You have created a website to make profits and get return on investment. So conversion refers to targeting the right visitors so that you can convert them into customers by making your site easily navigable.

7. Cost per Click-In order to make your website visible to prospective clients and ensure visibility in lesser time, cost per click is a good option where the webmasters pay some amount to have their websites appear on search result pages (SERPS).

http://www.segnant.com/

Changes In Google's AdWords Program

2007-05-12T05:39:00.000-05:00

In order to become more advertiser friendly, Google is making changes to its AdWords program which will also improve relevance for users along with giving more control to advertisers. Till now, it was the maximum bid by the advertiser and the relevance of the advertisement (measured by the number of clicks by users) that was the determining factor for the position and frequency of the ads. So ads appeared or disappeared on the basis of this calculation on the search result pages (SERPs). The ads performing well used to come on top of the ones having a higher bid but not being very relevant. As a result the ads that didn't perform well were either penalized or accounts were slowed if they didn't meet the search engine's requirements. And bringing them back on the SERPs meant improvement in the quality of the ads by the advertisers.

But there is good news for the advertisers now. Google has simplified the whole process by making the ads as active or inactive. The advertisers need not worry about their ads being on hold, in trial, disabled, etc. They just have to think in terms of two states-active or inactive. This will help them considerably to manage their campaigns. Along with this, Google has also introduced a quality based minimum bidding system with the help of which the advertisers can show the ads to the visitors if they meet the minimum bid requirements of the system without the fear of being penalized as used to happen earlier for not meeting adequate quality levels based on Google's automated predictive modeling system.

Minimum bids are now determined by a Quality Score that predicts the relevance of an ad for a specific keyword. Minimum bids to a quality score wipes out completely the previous de facto minimum bids. Now, an ad with a high quality score can have as minimum a bid as a penny and for low quality score ads, the minimum bid can be as high as the previous minimum of 10 cents.

Thus the minimum bids could change over time as the Quality Score gets updated time and again. Ads doing well will find the minimum bid decreasing and the ones that are not performing well will find an increase in minimum bids.

According to Salar Kamangar, director of product management, Google, this change might benefit the advertisers and users both.

http://www.segnant.com/

Understanding Search Engine Marketing

2007-05-05T04:33:00.000-05:00

Many people confuse search engine marketing (SEM) with search engine optimization (SEO), whereas both are totally different concepts. SEM is not optimization of the site for getting higher rankings in search engines as happens in SEO. SEM is the ability of the advertisers, ad agencies, marketing firms, web owners, to pay for sponsored listings on a cost per click (cpc) or pay per click (ppc) basis, provided they have a budget for search engine marketing. It is one of the fastest as well most expensive method of getting targeted traffic to your website. It is a costly affair because you have to pay for every visitor that comes to your site from the search engines. Overture and Google AdWords are examples of the SEM programs.

In fact, SEM started with the launch of Overture (the first ppc search engine) in 2001. It took shape out of the imagination of internet and search engine savvy professionals who realized that there could be a quicker and easier way of getting the websites listed. This gave birth to PPC. In PPC campaign, different interested parties bid for a particular keyword or phrase for the top position in search engines. The highest bidder gets the top position. Though an expensive proposition, this was happily taken up by advertisers as a quick and easy alternative to natural search engine optimization.

Advantages of Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

1.The Search engine marketing listings are as good as immediate, hence making it possible for bidders to determine their most profitable keywords in days, not months.
2.The control of the copy that appears in the listing is in the bidder's hands.
3.All you need is resources and money in order to remain always the first listing for a keyword.
4.You don't have to worry about the On page factors associated with search engine optimization.
5.Keeping track of the search engine marketing campaigns is pretty simple and straight.
6.You can keep track of conversion ratios on each keyword phrase easily.
7.Which landing page the visitor goes to after clicking on your sponsored link is also in your control.
8.With SEM you don't need to submit your web site to the search engines.

All good things come at a price and so does SEM. If you have the budget and are in a hurry to get your site listed in the search engines, nothing like search engine marketing. Otherwise, SEO is an inexpensive, but time consuming process that you can make use of for getting targeted traffic to your site.

http://www.segnant.com/

Hey Marketers Have You Planned For Holiday Marketing?

2007-05-04T03:27:00.000-05:00

Marketers all over the globe are very well aware of the importance of holiday marketing that can bring upto 40 percent of annual revenue and more than half of annual profit. To make the most of the festive season, a savvy marketer will always keep in mind the checklist for that holiday season so that no opportunity to encash upon this time is missed out. To freshen your memories, here is a list of things that you need to plan and execute for that all very important holiday season:

Always start the holiday planning with review of last year's performance, results, outcomes, challenges,etc. This will also give you an insight into the present and future trends in the market and merchandise related industry. You should also calculate the ROI for all of your previous promotions and customer categories to know what worked and what didn't.

Clean up and update your database so that you work with the latest and most valuable customers and all your promotional campaigns are garnered towards the most recent/active and valuable customers.

Always go through the calender to see all the important dates and the time gap or interval between different festivals or major holidays. After all you would want to encash upon every occassion. Also check which occassions demand more attention and accordingly make plans, solidify your team, and keep the stock in order.

It is always good to remember your old customers during holiday season and send them at least one communication from your side, even if they are dormant now. Holiday season is a good time to remind them and apprise them of the things you have added in your store or company.

Keep in mind the unexpected always. Life is unpredictable, so is everything else. You must keep an alternative marketing plan ready in case of any changes in the weather, or some other unforseen events.

Always create a comprehensive promotion calender devoted completely to holiday season so that you can keep it updated and make adjustments accordingly. This will also help reduce the complexity involved in the promotional plans.

In the holiday season, there is generally what is called the last minute rush. Encash upon this by offering people some really cool and aggressive shopping offers as the shopping deadlines draw near.

If you want to minimize risk, optimize response, and maximize ROI, you must restrain from any testing during the holiday season.

Never forget that the next year is round the corner, so start making your New year's plan well in advance by learning and taking feedback from your present ones. This will save a lot of time and energy for the planning of the next year.

http://www.segnant.com/

What is SMTP Path Analysis?

2007-04-25T07:07:00.000-05:00

Do you have a major problem with junk mail? Do you want to put an end to junk mail once and for all? Well, that does not seem to be a bleak possibility now. Researchers from IBM and Cornell University have come up with an anti-spam technique called "SMTP Path Analysis". It is an amazing technique for checking the information embedded in email messages regarding the route it has taken across the internet. But this is not seen by the user who recieve an email message. It can be used to trace the path taken by the message between different mail servers. The algorithm of this technique learns from the string of IP addresses that are included in the spam and real email headers.

The best thing about this technique is that now a good guess about the email message being spam or real can be made. The algorithm studies the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) data and this information is then added to email message header as it is passed between servers on the internet. As a result of this, whenever a new message comes, SMTP is able to judge whether the message is junk or legitimate. Though not being able to work efficiently on its own, this technique works pretty well in conjunction with other content filtering tools.

Isn't this great news to all people harassed by unwanted email messages?

http://www.segnant.com/

The Power of Title Tag in SEO

2007-04-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Would you like to read a book without a title? How would you react to a movie that doesn't have a title? Would a titleless article excite you to read on? Think of a lesson taught in the class that doesn't have a title. Similarly every web site must have a relevant title tag to guide the search engines in determining the contents of every page on the website. Think of the recipe or preparation of a dish without knowing the name of th dish. If you want your site to be seen and visited by people when they make a keyword query by typing that keyword in the search engine, it is important to have powerful and purposeful title tags for each web page.

Length of a Title Tag

Ideally a title tag should be in between 50-80 characters including hyphens, spaces and other characters. Too long a title tag can derail you from the focus or the major service, product you want to focus on. Even the search engines don't consider indexing a very long title tag that has too much information crammed in one long sentence. If you have multiple services and products to offer, you can always mention them in the title tags of other pages of your site.

Use of Title Tags

There are many purposes for which the title tags are used, the most important and foremost being ranking of your web pages.The search engines pay most attention to the title tag while determining the contents of your site. Also it helps you target your visitors by the search engines by getting dispalyed in web search results. Even for linking to your site, website resource librarians, directory editors, and other webmasters use title tags. The title is also displayed in the browser window of the visitors at the top viewable part of the browser screen.

Benefits of a Well Written Title Tag

A good and relevant title tag acts like a well directed trailer of a movie. If the trailer is good, relevant, and exciting, the chances of people coming to see the movie will be much better. A well crafted title tag makes it much easier for the webmasters, editors, and web resource librarians to access it. But obvious, a relevant and understandable title tag also means more traffic for the site, and better conversion rate. Even for the search engines, a smartly and intelligently created title tag means greater chances of your site being ranked higher in search engines, and that again means hitting your target audience and converting them to prospective customers and buyers of your products and services.

Have you ever heard of a sound foundation on which the building is constructed? If the foundation is shaky or not solid, imagine the plight of the building then. Treat your title tag as the foundation of an impressive, powerful and attractive website and pay extra attention to it. Just imagine the end of that story the begining of which only is pathetic. So make the begining speak about the story itself. Make your title tag do the talking, so that people feel egged on to read the body of your website.

http://www.segnant.com/

Website Designing Techniques That Hamper Higher Rankings

2007-04-12T23:42:00.000-05:00

Web designers may create websites using the best, latest and most sophisticated techniques available, but while putting their heart and soul in designing them, they forget one very important thing - SEO. Why is a website created? Not just to showcase your web designing talent, but the usability and visibility of the site to the users. And if the site is not seen by users,there is no question of it being used or visited. In fact, even the expertise and hard work of the web designer will also be appreciated only if the site is seen by people or spidered by the search engines. Hence, wisdom lies in designing a site keeping in mind the target audience and the search engines who will index it on the basis of its relevance and purposefulness. Using the the following designing techniques should be minimal or not at all, if you want your site to appear in top rankings:

Flash- Search engines don't read Flash files that are loaded from a stationary HTML page. That means no text embedded in this software is read. The way out is to either place hypertext links at the end of a few HTML pages linking to each other and to the homepage. This will aid the search engines to read the inside pages. Or you can put the flash file on each of these pages to avoid them being seen by physical visitors. This way flash file will be loaded and seen only when these pages rank and get clicked by visitors.

Frames- Again, frames obstruct the search engines to read website text. Frames lead to confusion for both the search engines and the visitors. If you can't avoid using them, then put meta tags in the frames programming and in no frames programming area.The most important thing is to have good amount of content in the no frames programming area along with invisible links to stationary HTML pages. This will make the search engines read, identify and index content from these pages. So, your site will appear as a no frames site even with frames.

ASP, Cold Fusion- Active Server Pages (ASP) and Cold Fusion Sites reduce the impact of a site on the search engines as they are dynamically created and the search engines find static HTML main page and static inside pages more attractive for ranking high. Cold Fusion jumbles up the whole site together, thus making it difficult for the search engines to change or index all such pages with .cfm extension.

More than just home page- Search engines are looking for good and relevant content in sites to attract visitors to them. So, if your site has just a homepage and no inside pages, chances are you may not get spidered and indexed by the search engines.

Too much Javascript- More the javascript for roll-over effects, longer the time taken to load that site. So, advisable is to put javascript in external .js files.

Confusing Directory Structures- Creating seperate folders for every inside web page with just a link can confuse and hamper the search engines to index your site as many spiders don't index very deep into the website. Make it as easy as possible for the search engines to find every page of your web site within seconds.

http://www.segnant.com/

Are You Earning Return on Investment (ROI) From Your Online Marketing?

2007-04-05T00:41:00.000-05:00

You may be spending a lot on online marketing campaign to make your products and services shine and sparkle on the web. But the million dollar question that arises is whether you are earning and generating revenue from your marketing campaign or not. If the answer is negative, then you need to pull up your socks and make the following suggested changes in your online marketing schedule and ideas to start earning the much required return on investment (ROI).

A well executed marketing plan including your company's goals, objectives, and sales can make all the difference to your reaping marketing ROI. It also takes into account your target markets, audiences and strategies. Strategies will further involve all marketing initiatives, publicity, marketing channels that convey your marketing message in the best possible way and maintain your brand awareness and popularity. So first work out the marketing/sales objectives and then strategies and tactics should be planned accordingly.

Try to make a solid market for your brand, products or services even if it means employing some cutting edge market makers. You may be missing out on potential market opportunites by not sniffing for trends or looking out for what competitors are doing. All you need to do is to monitor and keep track of your markets as well as the industry news for trends influencing your markets.

There is something called buzz marketing, viral marketing, and word of mouth marketing, all of which can help market your products, services and brand along with paid advertising. This is called smart and intelligent use of Public Relations and alternative marketing methods.

Web marketing including opt-in e-mail newsletters, blogging, article writing can also help market your products and services. Web based marketing techniques are not only inexpensive but also have a wider and quicker reach and popularity.

Measuring your marketing plans and programs is as important as executing them. Because that will act as a yardstick whether your marketing efforts have gone futile or reaped benefits. This will also help you analyze what went wrong where in your marketing program if it failed. And if it was a success, again you get to know the things that you ought to repeat for getting similar results.

So, start oiling the wheels of your marketing program using these strategies, and watch your returns on marketing investment, speed up like never before.

http://www.segnant.com/

Cloaking:Part III

2007-04-04T06:29:00.000-05:00

In the previous blogs( Part I and II ), we discussed about cloaking and its benefits according to some webmasters. But in this blog, we will discuss about the disadvantages of cloaking.

Hiding your search engine optimization strategies is fair enough, but the problem is that cloaking hides much more than that. It can be used to steal your site's content and hide it behind a secret script. Spam techniques like redirection can also be hidden from the view of the visitors/users. We all know how effective and powerful good meta-tags and optimal keyword placement are in improving search engines rankings. Along with these two factors, link popularity too plays an important role. But the fact remains that if the web pages are cloaked, and never visited by users, then how can they attain good popularity. And the most important fact is that search engines don't like cloaking. In fact many major search engines have already decided to ban cloaked websites permanently from their respective search engine databases.

Now that does not sound too promising or good proposition at all. It is advisable to webmasters that it is better to indulge in ethical and legal SEO practices and study their website design to improve rankings and increase sales, instead of employing risky and dangerous techniques like cloaking.

http://www.segnant.com/

Cloaking: Part II

2007-03-25T05:39:00.000-05:00

In the previous blog, we talked about cloaking and what it means. Though on the whole not a very good practice, the webmasters who do favor cloaking give the following reasons for using it:

They feel that with the help of cloaking different web pages can be tailored and customized according to different search engine spiders and thus can contribute in scoring top positions in more than one search engines as different search engines use different algorithms and a single web page cannot impress or fall in favor of all search engines and their different algorithms.

They also feel that with cloaking a site will be free from the restrictions of having search engine friendly design and layout. This will help in better indexing of all those sites that have a great layout and content still they cannot be indexed by search engines properly.

One of the major reasons given by proponents of cloaking is that it helps hide the HTML code from others, especially your competitors. When your site achieves a high ranking, generally the competitors study and analyze the top ranked web pages and their HTML code. So to avoid that and secure the site's main strategies for achieving high rankings, cloaking is used.

But every coin has the other side also that tells a different story. So does cloaking. In the next blog, we will discuss about the disadvantages and dangers of using cloaking.

http://www.segnant.com/

Beware of Cloaking:Part I

2007-03-19T05:28:00.000-05:00

How would you feel when you go to see a movie and what you see in the trailers of the movie is totally different from the movie itself? You will be shocked, frustrated, and angry at wasting time and money on something you had not wished or intended to watch. This is what happens in Cloaking where two totally different versions of the same page are shown to the search engines and the users respectively.

In cloaking a web server is scripted in such a way that it looks for search engines that are crawling. This is done so that an index of search results may be created. This fools the search engines into believing that they are selecting the key match to their results based on the meta tags that site adminstrator has input. But in reality, as a result of cloaking, the meta tags does not match the existing content on the page. Hence, the search results are misleading.

Webmasters generally resort to cloaking either to protect their pages from other search engine optimization firms or to increase search engine rankings. Every SEO company spends precious time, resources, and money to optimize websites so that they can rank well in search engines. And they don't want to reveal their strategies or techniques to anybody else. There is a lot of competition amongst different SEO firms in the ratings game. But what we forget is that merely getting a top ranking is not enough. You may get a lot of visitors to your website, but this will not, necessarily, result in increased revenue or sales.If your website displays to the visitors something different from the results returned by the search engines, people will leave your site as soon as they entered it.

So in order to create high ranking web pages, some webmasters pay more attention to how the web pages look to the spiders indexing the pages than what will be seen by the visitors.In other words, the real web page is hidden from the visitors.

Cloaking has it's own advantages and disadvantages which we will discuss in the coming blogs in detail.

http://www.segnant.com/

Treat your web site as an Extension of yourself:Make it talk to the visitors

2007-03-12T06:26:00.000-05:00

You must be thinking after reading the title of this blog, "How can a web site be treated as a human being? How can one talk to a piece of machine? This is utter rubbish".Wait a minute. Read this blog and you will change your thinking, I bet. Let's take a simple example from our daily lives. How would you feel if you cannot contact a person for sharing some information, or some news, or just to say hello to that person?Or worse yet, you would go mad if you are left alone simply because people cannot contact you or talk to you. Web marketing,to a great extent, depends upon your network and the level of interaction between your web site and the visitors to your site.If visitors don't find a comfortable, easy, and simple way of contacting and connecting with you, they will not get the confidence to trust you or your services and products. You have to involve them and talk to them through your site.

Ways to make your site more interactive

1. Always provide an easy email address link to the people as the first step to start any interaction is to send a message to someone or talk to someone. Providing the visitors with a contact form also helps as it is easy to fill and even people working on others' computers can also fill it.

2. Newsletter related to your web site updating about the new features on your web site and even articles on themes related to products and services provided by you will also involve the readers' interest in your site. The newsletter can be a free sign-up feature that allures readers to sign up for your newsletter. And in the newsletter, you can provid links to your site, products,services or order now page.

3. Bulletin boards act as great discussion forums and people come back to them time and again. It is just like giving importance and weightage to the feelings, views and thoughts of your visitors.

4. Act as a good advisor and provide solutions, answers, and clear confusions of the visitors by having a 'question answer section' or 'expert advice' section where you entertain all the queries, doubts, questions of the visitors. This will increase the interactivity between you and your visitors, and may even your sales in the long run.

http://www.segnant.com/

Page Rank: An Innovative Web Page Attribute

2007-03-05T07:00:00.000-05:00

We all know what an amazing web page attribute Page Rank is. Thanks to the efforts and innovations taking place in Google that we have got something like Page Rank today. Named after one of the founders of Google search engine, Larry Page, Page Rank is based on the theory that a link from one web page to web page of another website is like a vote for that page. It is quite obvious that webmasters will only link to those websites that they feel are relevant and are of value to their visitors.

Google counted the number of inbound links to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page and then decided what place should be allocated to that page in the search results page (SERPs). A scale was devised for this measurement. The scale rated from 1 to 10. Next came the creation of a toolbar for the information of webmasters and individuals so that they can see the Page Rank of a particular web page. The
toolbar can be easily deployed in Internet Explorer indicating the Page Rank value of the web page shown, called the PR0 or PR10 values.

This numeric value shows the importance of a web page on web. It is based on the simple premise that when one web page links to another, it is actually voting for that page and the more votes a page gets, more important the page must be. So Google calculates the importance of a page from the sites linking to that particular site or web page.

Though not the only way of deciding a page's rank, Page Rank is one of the most important attributes of Google to give a particular ranking to a page.

http://www.segnant.com/

Earning Your Advertising Revenue Fast and Easy: Google AdSense

2007-03-04T06:30:00.000-05:00

We all want to earn good revenue from online advertising if we have a website. Well, there is nothing wrong in wishing and wanting so. After all we are out there to do business, and earning some revenue from online advertising is not asking for much. Google's Adsense program comes as a boon for all of us who have a desire to make some bucks through online advertising.

The AdSense program gives you revenue from each page on your website in an easy, fast and least cumbersome way. The only condition for this program to work for you is the presence of relevant and good content on your web pages.

How it Works?

The website publishers are allowed to display relevant, text-based, down-to-earth kind of Google AdWords on their website's content pages and earn money. The benefit here is that due to the relevancy of the ads to what your visitors are looking for specifically in your site, you get a chance to earn monetarily and improve your content pages.

The text and image ads completely relevant to your products and services are fully targeted to your site content. Adding a Google search box to your site makes AdSense deliver relevant text ads that are targeted to the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) activated by the visitors' search request.

Though, when this program was launched in March 2003, only large websites were allowed to employ the Google AdWords program in their sites. But now the program allows even smaller websites with only a few thousand page views per month also to apply for and use the Google AdSense program.

http://www.segnant.com/

Maintaining High Rankings: Monthly SEO Maintenance Plan

2007-01-25T06:23:00.000-05:00

As the famous proverb goes, "Prevention is better than cure", this holds true for the SEO maintenance plan too. It acts as apreventive measure against any sorts of problems in the website that may bring down the ranking of your site.Thus, it becomes imperative to monitor your web site's position and health, time and again, or better still, on monthly basis, like a good doctor, to prevent any loss of page rank or high ranking on the search engines.

1. Keeping an eye on rankings - In the web marketing arena, search engines are the Big-B's who call the shots. They keep changing their algorithms and ways of indexing the sites. To keep abreast with their changing SEO rules and retain your site's ranking, it becomes essential to check your site's rankings regularly. Maintaining a monthly ranking report is a big plus to keep a tab on your ranking over every month.

2. Monitoring the traffic flow - If the doctor comes to know from where most of his patients are coming, or for what reason they are coming to him, he can easily modify and change his marketing strategy accordingly. Similarly, if you know from where your traffic is coming, you can modify the marketing strategy for those pages and keywords that are being used to reach your site.

3. Reviewing the keywords - Simply receiving high ranking for your favorite keywords is not good enough.These keywords need to generate good traffic too. So, the keywords need to be reviewed regularly to keep up with increasing number of sites on the web. Accordingly, changes and additions need to be made to the whole content of the site.

4. Remain one step ahead of competitors - Get into the shoes of your competitors and think like them. See what keywords they are using. Work out the statistics of keywords that you are competing for. Competition is good only till the time you are making profits, otherwise it is wiser to use less competitive keywords for your web pages or use them along with the most popular ones.

5. What's new in your site?- Give visitors more reasons to come to your site. In other words, put more content on regular basis so that visitors get more chances to come to you. Updating and adding new content increase chances of better rankings manifold.

6. Creating an impressive web copy - Even a small error-grammatical or spelling- can break your reputation and reliability. So create a web copy that is meant for your visitors, garnered to their needs and hits the bull's eye right away.

7. Active link Exchange program - The more people you know, more popular you are as more are the chances of them talking about you to others.But that doesn't mean you know every Tom, Dick, And Harry. It means cultivating good and fruitful relations with people related to your field or area. Similarly, the more the quality web sites linking to you, brighter the chances of your site ranking well on search engines.

8. Rid free your site from all navigation problems - Your site should be absolutely free from any kind of navigation or content related problems. Do not offend or make the visitor run away due to confusing navigation, or unclear content.

Take the web site as a mirror image of your business. It reflects your business sense and understanding. Treat it well, take care of it, and don't abandon or neglect it. This is going to be one solid reason for your increased and expanded business.

http://www.segnant.com/

What is Google Dance?

2007-01-25T05:08:00.000-05:00

Technically speaking, whenever Google search engine updates its index, the process is termed as "Google dance". This update generally takes place once every month. You can find out whether Google dance is taking place or not from the significant movement that occurs in search results and by Google's collection of all indexed pages showing the status of Google's last spidering. During Google dance, one can see new backward links for pages shown by Google along with movement in search results.

Every month Google orders it's spiders to crawl and archive every website. These websites are then presented in the next Google update. The update is started every 30 days. And the servers are updated individually from one to another. The indexes are updated slowly and not in one go only, in order to prevent downtime. The term Google dance is very appropriate because if you check the results from one server to another during the update, they will certainly differ.

As a result of the Google Dance, the Page Rank values also get affected. Usually, Google Toolbar obtains the Page Rank values from the data center specified by its IP address in the actual DNS record for www.google.com. Thus, during the Google Dance, what one sees on the GoogleToolbar is the old Page Rank values.

http://www.segnant.com/