Small Business Website Promotion » SEO and Website Marketing

3 Top Website Promotion Scams

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:11:14 +0000

Hildonne Buckley asked:

Now lets discuss the first website promotion scams which is safelists. These are lists that you can join and become a member. These safelists may have thousands or millions on them, who knows?

As a member of one these safelists , you can submit your ad to the safelist of whatever you are promoting. It could be mlm , internet marketing , etc. The bad part is, that the other members on the saflist you have joined can also send their offers back to you.

Pretty soon your email box is filled with offers you do not want. Let me digress, as I said earlier is that you can send your offer you are promoting to any body that is on that safelist, being mlm , internet marketing etc.

Well alot of these programs provide the same ads for the members on the safelist of the particular program they might be promoting, mlm , internet marketing etc. What happens is they are sending the same offers to one another and no one is making any money.

Ok you join this safelist and become a member. You start receiving a bunch of emails in your inbox from the other members on the safelists. You noticed in the subject line of the email, the heading How to make a $100,000 a year in internet marketing.

Days and weeks go by and your are noticing that you see that same headline over and over again. You start getting used to seeing that headline and what do you? You delete it without giving it a second thought.

Probably the other members on the list are doing the same thing. Using safelist for your website promotion is a waste of time because it become a game of receive email , delete email. receive , delete.

Now the second website promotion scam I am going to talk about is those ad blaster software that promise to send your ads to millions of people and make you millions of dollars in the process, and also promising you that it will save you alot of time.

This is software that you can buy and download off the internet for a a low price. Here is how this website promotion scam works. You open up this software and fill out a few fills your title of the ad for your website and the description of your ad for your website and of course the website address.

You suppose to press a button and your ad for your website will be placed on thousands of websites . Are you a millionaire now right? wrong! because your ad is on top for a while and is then pushed off by the other ads and you have no control over it.

Let me digress and say just because it is automated software and it suppose to save you time does not mean it is a better website promotion tactic you should use in your internet marketing.

Article marketing is a good example of website promotion tactic that seems to be harder to start but is it more effective. There are many gurus who use and sell this type of ad blaster software and they prey on your hope , fears , dreams.

The third website promotion scam is those guaranteed hit programs that promise you that they will send 100,000 targeted hits to your website for $300. Many aspiring internet marketers fall for this website promotion scam and I know all to well.

In 2005 , I was searching on the internet like I normally do and I found one those companies that has one those guaranteed hit or traffic programs. So I called the company and I am not going to names no names.

One of their customer service reps answered the phone and he was telling me about company and how some of their clients were having success with this program. I thought to my self, if I purchase 100,000 hits and get a 1 percent conversion ratio that is a thousand orders I am rich!

Any how, the customer service rep told me all the benefits I would be receiving if I use this program , for example how it will improve my alexa traffic ranking. So I asked the customer service rep a question , Can you guarantee me that I will get sales using this program? and the customer rep said no.

I should of bailed out then , but I had dollar signs in my eyes and so i gave the customer service rep my credit card info any way. So I purchased 100,000 hits for over $300 and my traffic campaign was to start in september and end november.

So now my traffic campaign begins and I am checking my traffic stats and my sales stats. Now the first day of the month I check my traffic & sales and I see I have plenty of visitors and no sales. I am saying to myself, it is no big deal it is only the first day of the traffic campaign.

Fifteen days later I had plenty of traffic and no sales. I was starting to get a little concerned but i still had a couple of months. The end of the first month the same thing plenty of traffic and no sales.

Now we are in the first day of the second month, and the same thing happens, plenty of visitors and no sales. I am thinking to myself , Should I be making sales by now?

Fifteen days later , the same thing plenty of visitors and no sales. The end of the second month same results. Now the third month, guess what what? you guessed it plenty of visitors and no sales.

I just realized that I have been scammed and lost over $300. The feelings of sadness and anger and wanting to quit internet marketing for good. I found out some of the reasons why my particular traffic campaign did not work.

The visitors the company were sending me were not targeted visitors and they they were not even interested in the product I was selling. What I paid for was hits and not visitors , and there is a difference between visitors and hits.

Hits are just people who type in your domain name and leave and visitors are people who are actually interested in your product and stay and look at your website.

In hind sight, I could of used that $300 and set a google adwords campaign and came out way ahead and I also could of purchased a ezine solo ad and came out way ahead. All website promotion tactics are not created equal. if it too good to to be true it usually is.

Technorati Tags: Heading, Promotion Scam, Waste Of Time

Article Making is an Important Website Promotion Technique

admin — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 19:19:21 +0000

Angad Singh Thandi asked:

One way of increasing traffic your website is through promotion of well written articles. Articles that promote websites, products or services are widely acceptable and in fact getting popular as a tool to drive up website traffic. Many internet users are constantly on the lookout for information to increase knowledge in their areas of interest. Hence, well written articles are in demand. An excellent way of keeping your website updated and current is through article marketing. Articles that provide the latest information about your company and its products can serve as an important way of creating inward links to your website.

Article marketing is done through the posting of keyword-focused articles on article sites that then syndicate your content. Some of these article syndication sites have a significant readership following thus making article marketing an important website promotion technique.

Most article syndication sites allow you to post your content for free. Once published, your content becomes available for all to see – and potentially reuse. When properly done, articles posted on syndicated article sites can then become "link bait" for other sites. For example, you own a home business that sells closet organizers. If you or your web content writer writes an article about organizing office, others who may want to post a blog entry about how to organize an office may link to your article. In this way, you can get increased exposure for your writing and your subject matter, especially if the article site gets a great deal more traffic than your own website, which is fairly likely.

Some article sites allow you to include HTML links in your articles. You can then link your keyword phrase to the page on your website you are trying to promote for that keyword – a highly effective search engine optimization technique. Some others do not allow you to do that, but they will have no objections with you including links in your resource box (your profile or signature information used to let people know who you are), which adds important one-way backlinks to your website.

Article syndication sites also typically allow readers to conditionally include your article on their site. Conditions typically include the requirement that whoever reuses your article must cite you as the author and must retain any links in the article. As you can imagine, this will certainly provide additional opportunities to increase your site traffic and also get the buzz out about your article. Even if you have to pay to have the article ghost written for you, it is fairly inexpensive to have a good article written by a knowledgeable ghost writer and you still get the credit! Therefore, article marketing can be a very cost effective means of website promotion for your home business.

Technorati Tags: Article Syndication, How To Organize An Office, Website Promotion

Website Promotion Made Easy

admin — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:11:56 +0000

Gen Wright asked:

omes to website promotion, many individuals out there do not take a moment to think about website promotion as they are building their website business plans. Then when it all comes to an end, those individuals realize just how important website promotion is. Within this article, we are going to tell you some basic information on website promotion.

When it comes to website promotion, you should keep in mind that it is not just to tell people about your website and getting visitors to come to your website. The real meaning of website promotion is to get a higher amount of traffic to your website with what is called organic targeted visitors.

The first thing you will need to do is submit the website you have made into all different directories and search engines and don?t forget the other websites out there. This process sounds easy, but it can take a lot of time and it is the first step you should take while you are doing website promotion. Another method that has proven to be pretty effective to promote your website is called SEO, search engine optimization.

When it comes to search engine optimization, you should keep in mind that it takes more than just submitting the website to search engines and directories. When it comes to your website, if you want to have top rankings, you will need to check the keyword frequency, keyword density, make sure it has the right keywords, Meta tags, etc. You should also make sure your website has a ton of inbound links from high ranking websites in order to be on the first three pages on Yahoo or Google.

Have you ever heard of pay per click (PPC)? Pay per click marketing is a popular method that is used by many different individuals because of the immediate result it gives. This method is different from search engine optimization marketing because you will be able to get the right amount of traffic to your website in only a little bit of time. The downside to pay per click marketing is the fact that it could end up costing a lot of money if you are bidding on a keyword and phase that is popular.

When it comes to website promotion, there is no doubt that it is very important for your website but you will need to plan it ahead of time. There is no such thing as quick and easy to be on the top in website promotion. You should also keep in mind that website promotion is a process that you will need to keep up with in order to bring those quality organic visitors to view your website. The truth is that it never ends.

Technorati Tags: Amount Of Traffic, Density, Targeted Visitors

How To Make Website Promotion Successful

admin — Mon, 25 May 2009 02:39:48 +0000

David Nettey asked:

Many people start a website because they think that it is going to make their business grow, or get their name in front of a lot of people; and this can definitely be true. But unfortunately, without the appropriate amount of promotion nobody will know about your site; and if nobody knows about your site it is not very useful.

Website content is one of the most important aspects of promoting your site. If you have good, informative website content people will visit your site just to see what you say next. They will spread the word that your information is top notch, and word of mouth will start to increase your traffic. When searching for website content, you will want to stick to information that is easy to understand, but also informative to the people that will be reading it. Website keywords are important if you are looking to get your site ranked high on the search engines. For example, if you are writing about home based businesses you will want to make sure that you use applicable keywords such as work from home, home based, online business, and so on. This way the search engines will recognize your site.

In order to increase website traffic you will need to have a good promotion strategy in place before you even make your website live. Your website marketing campaign will be what decides if you get a lot of traffic, or if your site is just sitting stagnant. A good website marketing campaign will incorporate many different promotional tactics in order to ensure that you do not miss any important avenues.

If you already have a website, but are having a hard time increasing traffic you may want to look into updating your website. Updating websites is one of the best ways to increase traffic because you are giving it a complete makeover. This way you can have the same domain name, but advertise that you are launching a new and improved site. This should draw interest from outsiders who are interested in your industry.

To find a good website marketing strategy you may want to ask for help from other people in the industry. If you know of another successful website that is similar to yours, you may want to ask them what they do as far as website marketing is concerned. Often times they will be able to tell you exactly what works, and what you need to avoid. This way you will already be ahead of the game from the very beginning.

Overall, it is important to have a solid website promotion strategy. This way you will ensure yourself that you website will be worth the time and money that you put into it.

Copyright © David Nettey

Technorati Tags: Live Marketing, Makeover, Many People

10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization for Your Small Business Website

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:44:57 +0000

Getting your web site up and running is only half the battle. You also want your customers and prospects to find your site when they are looking for a product or service that you offer. The best way to ensure this will happen is to have your web site appear in the results when someone is using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. There are two ways to make this happen – one is optimizing your site to appear in the list of sites that the search engines index and display, and the other is to buy your way into the results using a sponsored link or ad. Below are 10 tips to help get your site displayed in the results generated by the search engine indexes. Information on advertising your way into the results can be found here.

Only worry about the top 4 – The most important search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. Don’t be fooled by automated programs that submit your site to thousands of search engines, because 94% of all web searches are performed on these top four search sites. So you might as well concentrate your time and money on these four and not even worry about the rest.
Target your search terms – The easiest and the most important goal is to get your site listed when someone searches on the name of your company. This will help existing customers or people who have been referred by others to find your site. Of course it is also nice if people find you when they are searching for a product or service that you offer. This is harder, and how hard depends on how many other sites also want to appear when someone is searching for that product or service. Generally the less general the search term, the better your chances of getting listed. For example, if you target the term “house painting”, you will be competing with a lot of other sites in the country, including large sites with a much better chance of appearing high in the results. If you target the term “house painting bakersville” you will have a better chance of appearing high in the results – and of finding potential customers in your town of Bakersville.
Optimize your content – Once you have chosen a few search terms that you want to target (generally called key words), make sure that the content (text) on your site includes these terms. The first 100 words or so on a page are the most important, so make sure your key words are included there.
Format your content – Search engine indexes focus on the content in certain areas of your site. One of these is the first 100 words on a page, as mentioned above. Another is the Heading 1 section of the page, indicated by being included between the brackets
and
in the HTML code. Most HTML Editors and web page building software allows you to highlight some text and designate it as Heading 1. Make sure you do this for the first bit of text on the page, ideally a headline of some sort, and make sure it includes your most important key words (like your company name). Other areas where you can add your key words are in the Alt tags for images – the text that appears as a tool tip when you hover over an image.
Add title and meta tags – The HTML title tag and meta tags are used by the search engines to generate their index – including the text that appears in your listing in the results. The title tag appears in the header bar of the site visitor’s browser, and the meta tags are invisible bits of HTML code that don’t appear when someone is looking at your site. There are a number of meta tags available, but the most important of these is the Description tag (the Keyword tag is generally not used by search engine indexes any longer). The Title tag should be up to 60 characters long, and the meta Description tag up to 250 characters. Make sure these include your key words!
Focus on your home page – It is possible to get pages other than your home page listed in the search engine results, but unless you have a big site with pages that cover significantly different types of content, it is probably best to focus your energy on your home page. The number of links to a page make a big difference in the ranking of your site (see next topic), so it is usually most expedient to concentrate on getting links to your home page.
Get links to your site – The search engine indexes, especially Google’s, place a lot of emphasis on the number of links pointing to your web site from other web sites to determine your site’s “popularity” – and popularity plays a large part in how high they will rank you. So do whatever you can to get links to your site from other sites, and the more popular these other sites are, the more they help you. Good places to get these links are directories such as those on the web sites of your chamber of commerce, trade association, or community web sites. You can also pay to have your link included in sites such as yellow pages directories.
Submit your site – Once you’ve optimized your site’s content for your key words, it is time to submit your site to the search engine indexes. The most important is Google, which is free and can be found at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. Another good choice is Inktomi, which you can add for $39 per year at http://www.positiontech.com/inktomi/index.htm. And lastly, if you can afford it, the Yahoo directory is a good investment for $299 per year at http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?+Business.
Avoid the link spammers – There are a lot of “search engine optimization” companies that will offer to improve your search engine rankings for a fee. Some of these use “link farms” or “link spamming” to generate a lot of links to your site from pages full of links or from “doorway pages” that redirect to your site. The goal is to improve the popularity of your site with all of these other links. This is a risky proposition for two reasons – one is that they are frowned upon by the search engines and they have been known to ban sites that use them from their indexes, and the other is that a lot of the companies that do this for you are “fly by night” operations with less than reputable business practices. So use caution when considering such an investment.
Consider getting assistance – And lastly, a little message from our sponsor. If you need a web site and want to optimize it and submit it to the search engines, consider using a service that will do it for you. The whole process is fairly complex and can be rather daunting, so it may be worth the investment to have someone else do it.

Technorati Tags: advertising, business, business sites, business web page, business web site templates, free, marketing, optimization, placement, promotion, report, search engine, site, small business, web, web design, web site, web site design, website, website builder software, website design, website templates

10 Tips on Search Engine Marketing for Your Small Business Website

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:30:48 +0000

Getting your web site up and running is only half the battle. You also want your customers and prospects to find your site when they are looking for a product or service that you offer. The best way to ensure this will happen is to have your web site appear in the results when someone is using a search engine like Google, Yahoo, MSN, or AOL. There are two ways to make this happen – one is optimizing your site to appear in the list of sites that the search engines index and display, and the other is to buy your way into the results using a sponsored link or ad. Below are 10 tips on advertising in the search engines with sponsored links or ads. Information on optimizing your site to appear in the results generated by the search engine indexes can be found here.

First consider the top two – The top two search engine advertising services are run by Google and Overture. Google’s advertising program is called AdWords, and the ads appear in colored boxes to the top and to the right of the search results on their search engine and as sponsored links on the AOL search engine. Overture does not offer its own search engine, but provides ads to other search engines, the most important being Yahoo and MSN. Between the two services you will get coverage on over 90% of the searches conducted on the Internet.
Then consider the rest – There are a host of other search engine advertising services available. Most of them have a much more limited reach than Google or Overture, but the ads are usually far less expensive since they are not as popular. These services include companies such as Business.com, FindWhat, LookSmart, Enhance, Kanoodle, Search123, ePilot, and Lycos InSite. If you find success with Google and Overture, it may be worth experimenting with some of these others as well.
About Google – Google’s AdWords program uses what is essentially a bidding approach to buying ads for certain key words that people may search for. You do not have to actually bid specific amounts for specific search terms, however. Instead you set a maximum price that you are willing to pay for a click-through on your ad for a search that contains your key words. The frequency and position in which Google presents your ad is based on what other advertisers are willing to pay and the available inventory for the key word. This maximum bid approach combined with the ability to set a daily budget allow you to easily manage the amount you spend without having to invest a lot of time in managing your campaigns, which is an advantage over Overture. Google’s approach to bidding on general key words rather than specific search terms generally makes them less labor-intensive than an Overture campaign as well.
About Overture – Overture uses a bidding approach to buying sponsored links for specific search terms, and you set the maximum price you are willing to pay for a click-through. You have the ability to see what the other bids are for the search term, so you know exactly what position your ad will appear in. They also provide the ability to bid on searches that contain key words rather than on specific search terms, but it is far less convenient and effective than Google’s approach. So in general Overture requires more work to manage your campaign, but in some cases this can be a good thing, and their broad distribution makes them a favorite for all serious search engine marketers.
Prepare your list of key words – The first step in getting started with search engine advertising is to prepare a list of key words that relate to the content on your web site. The idea is to choose words that people are likely to search on when looking for the product, service, or information that is offered on your web site. If you have a home painting business for example, such a list might include key words such as “home painting”, “house painting”, “residential painting”, “paint house”, “painting company”, etc. If your business targets a specific geographical area, be sure to include the name of the towns and areas you serve, for example “house painting atlanta”, “home painting atlanta”, etc. This prevents your ad from showing up when someone searches on “house painting new york”, since paying for a click-through on that term won’t do you any good. Both Google and Overture, as well as the smaller services, have key word suggestion tools that help you come up with other words related to ones that you can think of.
Prepare your ad content – Obviously the content of your ad will have a huge impact on whether a searcher is likely to click on it to go to your site. It is important to give this careful consideration, and whenever possible include the key words you are bidding on in the headline and/or description of your ad. The lengths of the headline and description varies for each service, so you will need to develop content for each service you are using. Overture and Google each offer helpful advice on developing your ad content, so you should read this before you get started.
Measure your campaign performance – It is important to track the success of your campaigns so you know what kind of return you are getting on your investment. Google and Overture both provide statistics on the number of impressions (how many times your ad is shown) and number of click-throughs for your ads. It is a good idea to analyze these occasionally to measure the effectiveness of the various key words you are bidding on so that you can improve or remove the poorly performing ones. You can also use tracking URL’s so that you can analyze it with your own web log analysis software if you have it.
Use conversion tools – Both Google and Overture offer conversion measurement tools that you can use to take your analysis a step beyond simple click-throughs. These tools generate HTML code for you to paste on pages on your web site that only users who complete a desired process will see (such as buying something, signing up for something, etc.). This allows you to measure how many people actually “convert” into a customer or lead, which is ultimately more important than how many simply view your site.
Experiment with content matching – Both Google and Overture allow you to show your ads on web sites that offer content related to your key words. This provides additional distribution for your ad beyond the search engine results pages where their standard services appears. You may find the performance for these ads is less than that for ads appearing in front of people who are actively searching, but it still may be a profitable way to attract visitors to your site, so it is probably worth experimenting with if your search campaigns are successful.
Stay on top of it – Successful search engine advertising requires an investment in time to keep your campaigns performing well. You need to monitor your results and adjust your campaigns accordingly. And especially with Overture, you will need to constantly adjust your bid amounts since your position is always changing based on the activity of other advertisers.

If you need a web site for your business, choose a service that makes it easy for you to build and affordable to host on an ongoing basis.

See 10 Tips on Search Engine Optimization for Your Small Business Website