Your website promotional strategy should act as part of your marketing strategy and enough time
should be assigned to it to ensure it works and gets you the results you are looking for. There are
certain promotional mishaps you will want to avoid and here we will discuss them in more detail
so that you know what to look out for.

Avoid working with frames
The first thing to know is that frames are not the same as search engine ‘spiders. You could sit
around all day and work your content to sit within a frame but realistically, do you want to go to
such tremendous effort when you could focus your efforts elsewhere?

Flash might look good but why it’s best to avoid it….
The nest thing is Flash. It might look fantastic but it isn’t overly usable and might prevent you
ranking as high as you want to. Your top priorities should include how the user experiences your
site so don’t dwell on making it look amazing when it might impact how easily your users can
access your information.

When writing your titles and tags
When you are writing your tags, include a little more information that will help search engines
rank you  higher in terms of relevance. If you use your keywords and phrases in your titles and
tags you can expect the keyword density to increase and your website to appear higher in the
listings.

Keep your titles the right length
It’s all about balance. You don’t want to stuff half of your content in your title so that it outweighs
the content it refers to, but you can still take the opportunity to write a simplistic title with your
keyword or phrase in it.

Don’t confuse your text with images
Some people get rather carried away with imagery and illustrations when really they just detract
from the readers’ ability to read what you have written. Of course images will add to your content
and can convey a sense of what the text is about, but the reader should be able to then decide to
read on if they choose rather than have to fight through your design to get to the content.

Head your text with titles
Your pages should be headed by titles and keywords or phrases and not by graphics. You site is
supposed to get people’s attention by appearing high on a search engine results page. Your text
will achieve this for you whereas graphics will not.

Use keyphrases rather than one-word search terms
You might like the idea of having a very broad keyword that will get you lots of traffic but in reality
this is not the case. The best advice is to have a keyphrase that includes up to four words so that
the search is narrowed and you get visitors to your site that actually want to know about you and
what you  do. Too generic a term will simply get you traffic that is of no consequence to your business.
If you are looking at conversion rates to see how many interested visitors are taking some form of action
when theyvisit your site then this will only be skewed by the number of visitors that were looking for
something completely different.

Remember the importance of links
Get some relevant links in the content of your text. You can’t ignore how valuable these links are in
strengthening your content and thus your relevance in search engine results listings.

Don’t overuse your keywords
Your website promotion strategy but calculate how much is enough keyword usage and how much is
too much.  There is a fine line. If you bombard the reader with your keywords, your text will become
nonsensical.

The dangers of lengthy URLs
Lengthy URLs can prevent a search engine from indexing your pages in the way they should be and you
will end up with lots of symbols that will confuse search tools. Remove these by taking advice from your
website developer and promotional specialist.

Getting high listings on Google does not require a perfect website. Just make it better,
when compared to your competitors’ websites. Your website will be clicked on, only
if you can make it slightly better than your competitor websites. Optimize your web
pages for the right keywords, then allow the quality of the backlinks to make the difference.

Here are top tips to help you surpass your competitors.

1. Locate who your real competitors are
   The websites that rank high for your keywords are your real competitors. This is what
   you are to do: use Google to carry out a search on your keywords (at least five of them),
   then write out the links or URLs of the sites that have the best rankings for the five keywords.
   These five URLs are the your potential competitors.
2. Find out the PageRank spread of linking Webpages
   The PageRank number displayed on Google’s tool bar is an imperfect metric. However, this
   number can still be useful in discovering the secret behind the higher ranking of certain websites;
   while others are left out.You can search out the sites that link to your competitors’ sites and notch
   up the Google PageRank of each page. Certain providers have link managers that sort the sites by PageRank. 

   
   
   If you find out that there are more backlinks from high PageRanked web pages to your competitors’
   sites than that of your own site, you can hire services from  some of the available providers to
   generate higher PR links.

3. Do some analysis on your Competitors’ backlinks
   Find time to analyze the number of links to your competitors’ sites that have your major keywords.
   You can accomplish this easily using the link manager feature of some market providers.Once you key-in the action, IBP will display the web pages linking to your competitors’ sites and will
   also reveal the anchor text of these links. To find out if your anchor texts are incorporated, sort the
   displayed sites by anchor text.You need to have more inbound links on your site (than your competitors) that feature the keywords
   you desire to rank high.
4. Analyze the high level domains of the linking web pages
   When targeting Google versions such as Google.co.uk, there should be more backlinks in your
   website – from sites that employ the matching top level domain – than the number acquired by
   your competitors..

Google pays attention to websites that link from related sites. Thus, if you market phones, make sure that you
link from sites selling phones as well. It is also needful to check your site’s content for compliance with Google’s
most recent ranking algorithm using Top Optimizers listed by several providers.

There are several aspects to Google’s Panda update, but one thing is certain:
Google is concerned with signals of trust, influence/authority, as well as real branding.
If you own a website or business, what steps can you take to send Google these signals?

Here are a couple of ideas that work.

Indulge in Public Speaking
When you are a public speaker, Google will see it as a signal that your source is trusted as well as
authoritative – having nothing to conceal. Your business name and domain on the web are signals
to Google that you are speaking. It doesn’t matter where you are speaking – industry conference,
community college seminars etc, there will always be a page that lists who is speaking. Usually,
such pages will provide you with a link. The citation of your domain counts anyway, whether or not
you get the link from the platform you are speaking from. So, you are not wasting time researching
and preparing for those quality talks you deliver, it pays off well.

Blogger Linkup
This is a daily email newsletter. Each day, there is email going out of blogs seeking to get guest posts,
as well as bloggers searching for sites that would accept them. Well, the entire truth is that this doesn’t
generate desirable response at times, since a good number of the sites seem to be somewhat dodgy – so
consider it critically before showing your commitment. One of the mighty errors with a good number
of guest articles is the repeated use of same bio box. This results in unnatural focus on inbound anchor
text. Ensure that you do not form part of this mistake.

HARO – Help A Reporter Out
Have you heard about Help a Reporter Out? This is a daily email list of reporters searching for experts in
different industries that would interview or quote for stories project. Obviously, you may not stumble on
a request from big name magazines and dailies such as the New York Times; however, there is still high
value placed on up-coming dailies and magazines, or industry-specific journals and magazines.

Press Releases
If you are regularly doing things that are press-worthy, it is likely you are sending out press releases about
such things. An example of press-worthy event is creating science project PDFs for an institution. If you
happen to get a guest blog post related to the project, don’t forget to link to it or mention it there. This way,
you can maximize content that you spent a lot of resources on (money, time). Now, you do not need to bother
about link equity passing of the press release – just see the links as directions or pointers. Once people stumble
on your press release and click on your link, search engine will definitely index them. Thus, it is recommended
that you place up to two deep links on your press release.

Consider Educational Links
Speaking generally, educational links known as .edu sites are seen as having more trust and are more authoritative
compared to any other site. One of the best ways to generate links from educational sites is to create valuable and
relevant content or project to .edu websites. If you are not skillful enough, pay a high profile writer to create a
valuable content that would attract the attention of professors, teachers and top professionals. Place the content
on a special template and do not include any ad or commercial links – if possible, turn the content into an encyclopedia.
Make the content downloadable by putting it in PDF format.

The common blunders I’m about to reveal here are obstacles to search engine rankings. Have a look at them and do avoid these blunders:

1. Using frames
   Search engine spiders tend to get confused when frames are involved. Therefore, if you have a frame site, your site may be likely ignored often by the search engine spider. There is nothing wrong with writing script or fine-tuning the content to function within frames; but, is it not better to divert that time to something more beneficial to your website in terms of higher ranking?
2. Over-doing it with title tags
   A better strategy for effective website promotion is when you stay within 70 characters for the titles, and also for punctuation (comma in particular) inserted between phrases in each title tag. The webpages that feature limited content should use fewer characters.
3. Using Flash
   No doubts, flash appears appealing – however, it affects the ranking of your site. Also, flash slows user experience. Most web surfers are not willing to wait a moment longer. Readability of the keywords by search engines could be improved by flash in the future, but this may also be meaningless if the webpages do not feature visible as well as readable text.
4. Using design to mask text
   Design has a way of concealing text. Ensure that your visible text is strategically placed high on the page.
5. Using effective search phrases
   Do this always; incorporate effective search phrases that are true representations of the content featured within your title tags.
6. Using the wrong words
   Most websites owners prefer to use single-word search phrases since it appears such keywords generate more traffic. However, the reality is that only very few web surfers who use such broad terms may be interested in your offering. It is more effective to incorporate search phrases that contain 2 – 4 words, this is the best way to target a wider range of people who may actually be interested in what you have to offer.
7. Not taking link building seriously
   Embark on massive link building, and concentrate on the websites that have categories and content relevant to your offerings. For instance, if you are offering computer software services, it would make no sense to link to websites that are marketing clothes.
8. Using long URLs
   For those taking advantage of a database to maintain their websites, this may ultimately result in the use of long URLs with multiple session IDs, as well as parameters that give rise to multiple equality signs and question marks. The summary is that long URLs may be obstacles to proper indexing of webpages by search engines. You can consult your website developer to shorten the lengthy URLs, or even get rid of them completely. Your ultimate goal is to be visible to those who are looking for your offerings, anything that would constitute an obstacle should be reconsidered.

Finally, do not overstuff your webpages with keywords; avoid using same keyword sequentially up to ten times. Just spread your major search term throughout the page as many times as possible.

It’s no longer news that your ranking on search engine result page can be influenced by changes on your web pages. But, no one can say for sure the mode of search engines’ reaction on the changes on our webpage, and what it is in particular that influences the changes in search results. Perhaps some answers may be generated from a new search engine patent.

Changes

A good number of search engine patents handle the changes that take place on your webpage.

Six years ago, a patent published by Google described how changes made to your webpage can influence your website ranks. Recently, another patent was granted to Microsoft that tells us the impact that changes on website have on how a site ranks in the search engine result page.

The new patent granted to Microsoft reveals the particular elements on your website that are likely to be monitored by search engines.

Now, what are your webpage elements that search engines monitor?

Here are the webpage elements that can be monitored according to the new patent:

• Webpage featured keywords
• Webpage related keywords
• The anchor texts employed on your webpage links
• How images or texts are positioned on your webpage
• The sizes as well as colors applied on your webpage featured images
• How frequent document on your webpage varies over time
• How much of the content on your website has changed
• The search terms that visitors are using to locate your page
• Your webpage’s assigned tags

How precisely, do the changes in these webpage elements influence the ranking of your webpage?

The patent revealed that searches are grouped into two; there’s the ‘informational’ as well as ‘navigational’ search. The category or group to which a search query belongs determines the effect of the changes on the website. The query a searcher uses to find a named webpage is an example of ‘navigational query’. For instance, a search for ‘Harvard University’ will take the searcher to the homepage of this university. On the other hand, ‘how can I repair my lace wig’ is an example of ‘informational query’.

If a web visitor is searching for info relating to a recent event, websites that included the information recently are likely to be boosted in their ranking.

There may be a boost to webpages that have static content. This technique works excellently with certain websites but may become an issue for home pages that embark on regular content update.

What is the significance of this to your Webpage?

Microsoft got this patent, but from all indication, it is likely that Google employs related techniques. Search engines are not only concerned with the current version of a webpage. They also take cognizance of the webpage’s status in the past. The changes on your webpage could mean that ownership of the site has changed, it may also mean that you are trying to make your site stay up-to-date. Search engines may also see changes on your webpage as a sign of spam etc.

So, do not embark on optimization of a web page that is already ranking high for any of your keywords. Instead, optimize a different page using the new keyword. Use different keywords to optimize different pages of your site, but ensure that the keywords are related. This proves to search engines that your site is relevant to a specific theme.

No doubts, if you have an online business, you want to see it successful. The same rules for conventional business work; you must know what to do to make your online business succeed – don’t just jump in like that, else you will jump out soon!

Here are some very useful tips to guide you.

• Link Your Site to Your Blog
  This is the best way to make updates on your content accessible to visitors easily. They must not be the ones to hunt for your content updates.
• Establish social bookmarking
  You must have a means of enabling people to share your content. WordPress offers tons of social bookmarking plugins. If your site is the regular type, tools like ‘ShareThis’ would be sufficient.
• Build social networks
  When you set up social networks, ensure that they are easy to see and follow. The buttons should be visible. Your blog as well as contact page are excellent pages to place your buttons.
• Make provision for profound articles or white papers on your website
  Engage your main website as one of your article submission areas if article marketing is your promotional tool. Use creative names for it – e.g. “White Papers” or “In-depth Articles Home”.  This is a great way to convert a section of your site to your own article directory.
• A site map is necessary
  Garnish your site map adequately, so that it would be conducive for visitors to explore. You may also keep it plain. The most important thing is that you should remember to build your sitemap and link it, since it facilitates the crawling of your site by search engines.
• Track your usage with your keyword analysis
  A spreadsheet such as excel is excellent for this purpose – you can also use word document as well. Record the terms used, meta description as well as your title for each main site page. If you make changes, put such changes in record as well. This is an excellent way to have a stable record of changes, and you can easily monitor the changes that influenced the traffic and ranking of your site.
• Content audits are important
  Do periodical content audit – it could be six-month interval. This is an excellent way to ‘fish out’ your webpages that are not performing optimally, spot the topics that captured the attention of your readers and mark the pages that are not necessary (so that you can take them off).
• Come up with a strategy for your content
  This is a more result-oriented approach than doing ‘trial and error’. The strategy would comprise of the following; the type of content you would send out (is it in the form of videos, images, blogs or white papers?), the destination for your content (is it your blog, main site, YouTube, guest post), technique for tracking your progress, major and sub goals of your content strategy.

These top valuable techniques will help you grow your online business successfully. However, there are other things you need to know in addition.

Just two weeks ago, while surfing a number of online shopping websites exploring new fashions and with no real intention of buying anything, I came across an irresistible offer to purchase 3 casual tops within the next 48 hours for just €60. Although I had no plan of buying these casual clothes, the offer was too good for me to pass, so I floundered.

You don’t need any second thought to rightly guess what made me buy the clothes – the tactfully and sneaky structured call-to-action played the trick. Any SEO expert will tell you this; one of the most essential features on your website is the call to action regardless of the industry you belong.

Explore these top tips for creating result-oriented calls to action on your company website:

1. Select your words with care
   Don’t make your visitors guess for a moment what you require them to do or they will give up and navigate away from your website. Your call-to-action should be very clear and straight forward. The cloth website was right on target with what it wanted the visitor to do – buy the 3 casual clothes for $60 within 48 hours.
2. Your call-to-action should be relevant
   Since I was on a cloth website, it would have been irrelevant if the call to action presented me with sales offer on shoes. Your call to action should be very relevant to your offering.
3. Your call-to-action should be as visible as possible
   Device a technique by which the call-to-action is fully visible to your visitors. For instance, the clothing website had used some design elements to make their offer of 3 clothes for $60, very much visible on every part of the page, even as you scroll.
4. You should know the calls to action that are most important to you
   It is confusing to place multiple calls to action on a single page; place only the call-to-action that is more important to you at a time. However, you can place essential navigation buttons such as the ‘contact us’ button on every page.
5. Your calls to action should be irresistible
   For instance, I could not just pass such juicy offer of having 3 cute casual wears for just $60 in 48 hours! Of course, any other person would have been induced to grab such an offer.
6. Deadlines may also play a great role
   I would have probably passed the 3 clothes for $60 offer if not for the accompanied deadline. Any person would have done the same.

Remember that I had no initial plan of buying clothes, but a well crafted call to action compelled me to do so. Your conversion rate and leads transform to more sales with a result-oriented call to action.

As usual, the month of December has been a hot and happening stretch of time for business strategists who have busy brain storming sessions on how to take advantage of the massive traffic for ecommerce sales and for the increased holiday demand. There are special promos offerings, coupon codes, contests and several other tactics of drawing customers with free shipping offers etc. In the midst of these, you can easily loose focus of the long-term business goals.

Pause a moment and let us examine top tips that would help you achieve increased email marketing conversions as we enter 2011.

1. Proper Tracking
   You need all the facts in place before your email marketing optimization can take place. Without proper tracking, you don’t have a means of ascertaining whether the changes you made impacted the results. Conversions are the most essential metric you can track
2. Redesign Your Email Layout
   Perhaps you’ve been using the same email layout for the past 12 months, 6 months or even 2 months. It is important that you experiment with new email layout designs, testing them with a segment of your database. You may be wasting money using a poor email marketing template.
3. Extensive Testing
   The test should start out simple, carrying out basic split tests on your subject line. Then, venture into the layout and design of your message with the testing. As soon as you decipher these variables, go ahead and test other areas which may not be aspects of the real email – however, they affect the outcome substantially. You can achieve untold results by testing the message segmentation, email sending time as well as landing page variables.
4. Segmentation Increase
   A lot of people are yet to start implementing segmentation; if you are among them, ensure that implementing segmentation becomes a priority to you as we approach 2011. Email marketing has grown to become a cooler and increased personalized communication medium, especially with the advent of social media as well as tracking – the engine that moves this personalization is segmentation!
5. Captivating Content
   It is appalling that most email senders do not have the skills and quite surprisingly, most of them do not take a serious note of fresh and captivating content. Ensure that this year you experiment with relevant, conversational and captivating content in place of the graphic-heavy email layout.
6. Get Fresh Subscribers
   One of the email marketing changes you should embark on in 2011 is list growing. Ensure that all hands are on deck for this task in your company (whether large or small). Your team members should take advantage of every opportunity – on the phone, at the register, in person etc and work towards growing your database.
7. Consider Outsourcing  Your Email Marketing
   If you notice that the other techniques (1-6) are not producing results (probably because you are not implementing them rightly), then consider outsourcing your email marketing to any email marketing company with an established

Google Places: A whole lot of local businesses strive to attain top ranking in Google with a judicious inference of relevant keywords or phrases that the users ought to be searching for. You can find a wide range of information sources on how to get your site into the Big Search Engine – Google. However, one of the essential things missing in such articles is the mention of Google Places as one of the best means to get on top of the Google search page.

‘Places’ is the default business directory of Google; the previous Google business directory was replaced by  Google Places, which provides more versatile ways of promoting a business, as well as the ability to include video, photos, promotions or coupons. Google Places also enables you to include updates that have similar status as Twitter.

Someone who already has Google local business listing is integrated already and can simply sign in to experiment with the new features. If everything is new to you, get the directions here.

Google Places Listing – Why it is important

Google Places account is as important to every business as food is to living beings. Google wants to ensure that valuable and relevant business listings are made available to web visitors searching for those who provide services locally. For instance, in a situation where a person residing in Tucson, AZ is searching for Tucson florists on Google, it will display a set of Places listings for florists in Tucson AZ. In search results for real estate, these placements are the most excellent that you can find. Literally, they are showed first since Google sees them to be highly prioritized in terms of relevancy.

Therefore, if you are yet to be listed, you have missed massive valuable traffic that has high potential of translating to real business. Do you know that you don’t even need a website to be listed in Google Places? Some business owners who were not able to generate meaningful traffic have attested to the fact that their traffic skyrocketed immediately after they created a Google Places account. If you are a local business owner, you are doing your business a lot of harm by not getting listed on Google Places.

Tips on Setting Up Google Places Account

You must have a Google account to set up Google Places account. This is not a big deal; Google will walk you through the process on how to get it done if you don’t have Google account.

Note:

• If the Google account you currently have is just as your personal account such as gmail, it is necessary to sign up for a separate account dedicated to your business.
• Verification of account is necessary; this can be achieved either via voice call, text message or via mail. The essence is to prevent any scam or fraud.

To create your Google Places account:

1. Log on to http://www.google.com/places

Start filling out all the details for your business; then click next.

1. You will be asked if you have an already existing business listing; depending on your answer, choose either ‘Add Listing’  or ‘Claim Listing’
2. Verify your listing immediately via phone to quicken the publishing of your listing. Other options are mail and SMS.

Once your account is verified, you are listed in Google Places! Note that if you choose ‘verify by phone’ you must keep your phone handy for Google call.

It is quite common to come across a question such as this: ‘How can domain names affect SEO?’ Although domain names are among the least significant aspects for a top SEO ranking, there are certain things you ought to be aware of.

What about Buying a Domain Name that Incorporates a Keyword?

Keywords integration into a domain name will only influence your website SEO if your domain name reflects the precise-match keyphrase or keyword which you desire to rank high, and at the same time matches the local.com version or the .com version of the keyphrase. A typical instance is travelinsurance.com.au; this and other similar domain names rank top on Google search result for exactly those keyphrases which are searched for very often.

It is very crucial to bear in mind that employing any other keyphrases in the domain name would negatively affect the ranking benefit obtainable in integrating the keyword-phrase in the domain name. This is an instance; for the purpose of travel insurance, domain name like mytravelinsurance.com.au will differ in ranking from travelinsurance.com.au

Also, if you have a .biz or .net or similar extension that differs from the .com version or the local.com version, you are not likely to rank high.

At What Stage is it Helpful to Have a Keyword Phrase in a Domain Name for SEO Purpose?

Having a keyword phrase in a domain name becomes helpful only when such domain name exactly matches the .com.au or.com version of the keyword you desire to achieve a high rank with. Also, the keyword needs to feature substantial and precise match search size to necessitate the use of key-phrase in your domain name instead of your business name.

Is it Ideal to Use a Business Name in Domain Name?

Certainly, most times, the perfect keyword to use in your domain name is your business name since you cannot forget it easily; also, establishing credibility and trust are achieved easily when using your business name. Again, using your business name as a domain name makes it easier to type it directly to the address bar in order to go straight to your site.

What about Varying a Competitor’s Domain Name and Using it as a New Domain Name?

This is highly discouraged. Besides likely trademark violations, your online credibility as well as integrity will be punctured when you cyber-squat on a variation of your competitor’s business domain name. Don’t forget that integrity and credibility are among the most essential features in any business online marketing performance.

How Suitable are Different Domain Extensions?

Don’t use domain extensions such as .biz, .cc or .net. The most valuable extensions are the .com or the localized version such as .com.au. Tried and proven SEO techniques have shown that other domain extensions outside the .com or localized version would not assist directly when it comes to achieving SEO rankings.

How about Incorporating Dashes in Domain Name?

It is highly discouraged to use dashes in domain name; rather, let your domain name be such that it can be remembered and typed in easily. Using dashes does not play any SEO role but would impact your branding negatively when your business expands.