Archive for April, 2008
Why You Should Submit Press Releases
There are many online business owners and webmasters who either underestimate or don’t know the power of a press release. Unknown to many, submitting a press release about your website or business this can be the most powerful marketing tool that you could ever utilize. Not only would you gain free publicity, you can also drive a lot of potential customers or clients to your online business.
If you are new to the world of press release, you may want to consider taking advantage of the many benefits that await you. First of all, you have to know that a press release is news about your business that is not known to people. This means that if there is something about your business that you want people to know about, say a new product, a new service, or a new sponsored event, you may want to write about it and submit to news sites. Just make sure that the material that you are writing is newsworthy or is appealing to the audience.
One thing to note about a press release is it should be written in third person and should be factual and narrative. It should appear as if a media person is interviewing you and reporting about your material. At the same time, you have to answer those questions thrown at you. In other words, you assume two personalities when writing a press release—a business owner who answers questions and a reporter who narrates, reports and asks questions.
So how does a press release work? Once your press release has been submitted to a news site, the latter will decide whether your material is newsworthy or not. Small news sites may pick up a press release that is well-written and easy to read. However, for giant news sites such as BBC and CNN, it is tough to be included unless your material is extremely unique and worth the attention of the world. If you target your press release to be spidered by search engines such as Google, it is much easier as long as your press release is optimized for search engines.
The potential of getting a lot of traffic through a press release is endless. Once a big news site picks up your news, you are guaranteed to be flooded with business. So if you have not started writing a press release for your own site, you may check out some information online on how to write an effective one. If you have a knack for writing web content, this would not be a tremendous task to do. After some research and practice, you’d be able to write like a pro.
However, if you think you won’t do justice to the article, you can always hire the services of a professional press release writer. Just search for “press release writing services” on Google and you’d be able to choose the most competent and affordable writer to create this material for you.
Tags: press releases, search engine optimisationWhich Way Should You Go? One-way, Two-way and Three-way Links
The World Wide Web makes the world not so big after all and it’s even made smaller through links. These links, when clicked directs the person to the website whose URL is linked. Oftentimes, these links are used to show appreciation for an interesting site, to advertise and gain popularity or to improve a site’s ranking in search engines. There are three kinds of links: they can be one-way, two-way and three-way Links. One-way links are, as the name connotes, unilateral links. This is a situation wherein a certain website puts a link directing someone to your site although your site does not contain a link that directs a person to that site. In other words, one-way links “do not return the favor” of having more visitors due to the other site’s link. They propel an influential significance to the search engines. It sort of hints that your website is so helpful, appealing or functional that other websites desire to let other people know about it.
A link exchange that is probably most commonly used at present is two-way linking. This type of linking is bilateral in nature. They are also known as “link swaps”, “link exchanges” and “link partners”. This is where mutualism is seen. This demonstrates the “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” attitude. The links are mutually beneficial to the two websites because they both contain links directing the viewers to each other. Oftentimes, webmasters resort to two-way linking through matching sites. These are sites that are somewhat similar to the nature of your own site. This is because chances are, you both have the same target market. How? Initiate it. Place a link on your site that directs to the other site and contact the other site’s owner to inform the webmaster of what you just did. Shortly discuss the good points that you saw in their site that prompted you to link their site to yours and discreetly suggest that you will appreciate a “link back”. You may also want to think about paying for link ads on other sites. Be as creative as possible. It definitely will be worth it.
Lastly, three-way linking is a unique kind of reciprocal linking. This link building method’s purpose is to generate more “normal” links for search engines. These three-way links are deemed superior to two-way links. A three-way link is a kind of reciprocal link exchange that happens between three domains instead of two. To demonstrate, supposing site Earth links to site Venus, but Venus does not link to Earth. Therefore, site Venus is only receiving a one-way link from site Earth and NOT linking back to it. Similarly, site Mars and site Earth are linked from one site but not linking back. Instead, site Mars and Earth are linking reciprocally to diverse domains. Through this method, search engines find it more difficult to distinguish your linking strategy because this pattern is common in a number of websites in the Internet. Link exchanges can go as far as four-way or even five-way.
Tags: backling, backlinks, linking, search engine optimisationWhat is Seo?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving the website’s internal and external aspects to increase its relevance, and rank very high on search engine results for keywords that describe what the website is all about. The goal of using SEO is for the website to draw maximum attention from its target market. But before that, the website must attain high rankings in the search engine results page (SERP) for a relevant keyword. This comes from the premise that the higher the website’s ranking is in the search engine results, the higher the chance that it will be clicked and visited by visitors.
Ultimately, if you utilize SEO in marketing your website, you would want your target visitors to interact with your site by purchasing your product or availing of your services; requesting for more information about your offers, downloading your free informational materials, signing up in your newsletter, or just plainly commenting to your articles.
Companies and online businesses spend loads of money to land on the first page results for their target keywords. To rank very high for a very competitive keyword, they hire an SEO specialist and for larger companies, they seek the services of an SEO firm. This is because landing first on the search engine results page can be very lucrative to any commercial website. This is due to the fact that when web surfers go to their favorite search engine and search for a particular keyword, they usually just click on the first page results and don’t bother digging through pages and pages of results.
For example your site sells kitchen cabinets and a web surfer searches for a kitchen cabinet to buy, you would want that web surfer to find your website on the first page. Currently, there are 259,000 results for the keywords “kitchen cabinets” on Google. It is therefore crucial for your site to land on the first page for the surfers to easily or else your site will go unnoticed.
Another conscious effort to optimize the website is to fill it with unique, well-written and interesting content. Unique content are popular among visitors and are easily indexed by search engine spiders. There is also a bigger chance that they will be syndicated, quoted or linked to by other websites. It also helps that relevant keywords are naturally woven into the text for the article to be fully optimized.
SEO is used as a marketing strategy by webmasters and online business owners. If their website contains what the visitors are looking for, these visitors will easily convert to regular visitors or customers customers for commercial sites.
However, SEO does not guarantee return on investment on every site that uses it. Results vary from one site to another depending on its nature and goals. Results also vary depending on the change in the search engine’s algorithm, which can affect sending referrals to your site. Therefore, if you rely heavily on SEO for your Internet marketing campaigns and rule out other strategies, you may not easily get the results that you want.
Tags: search engine optimisation, seo, what is seoThe Importance of Keyworded Content
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an important element in building traffic to your website. Large companies spend thousands of dollars on this facet of Internet marketing to ensure that their websites are visible to all search engines. These companies invest enormous amount of money, time and effort to make their websites SEO-friendly, so to speak, and eventually reach their potential clients or customers.
However, there are other factors that affect the efficiency of an SEO campaign. This includes the utilization of keywords in the content of your website. Keywords play an indispensable role in optimizing your website. A good webpage should contain pertinent information that people are looking for. It is therefore a prerequisite to research which keywords best describe your content or website and integrate them into your text. Your goal is to find keywords that can bring in the most traffic but have the least competition. Put yourself into the searchers’ shoes. What key phrases will they type in the search engine to find your website? Researching for these keywords can be tasking, but once you found what you are looking for, a continuous flow of your target traffic is assured on a daily basis.
Keywords and key phrases have to be strategically woven in the text in a way that is noticeable to the search engine spider. For your content to be optimized for a particular keyword, this keyword should be repeated in your content at least few times so that search engines can easily spot your site’s relevance to your chosen keyword. If you fail to put your target keywords several times in your web content, then every word in your web page is tracked as keywords.
Proper positioning of keywords in your web content is likely to attract your target market. They should not be haphazardly inserted or worse, overused in the text. You need to observe keyword density so your content or will not be mistaken as spam. If you overuse keywords, search engines will likely to assume that you intend to trick the system. This will not make a good impact on your rating. To know whether you are putting the right keyword density in your page or article, multiply the total number of words of your article with the recommended density percentage, which is between 1% and 5%. So in a 500-word article, your keyword should be mentioned not less than 5 but not more than 25 times so as not to make your content incomprehensible to the readers.
Keyword placement is the fundamental step in search engine optimization. It greatly affects the ranking of your website as well as the profit of your company. Proper placement of the right number of keywords in your content will surely create high traffic to your web site. This eventually results to high profits because more visitors are checking or reading your web page. So, be careful in embedding keywords in your web page. You may decide to place them in the title or in the first word of the first sentence of your article because you believe that the search engine spider will easily recognize and index them in those locations.
Tags: search engine optimisation, unique content, writing contentSEO Needs No Mistakes
In developing your website, you are bound to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars in search engine optimization (SEO). Ineffective SEO plan might lead to redesigning your webpage or worse trashing your entire website. Of course, that is never part of your objective. There are several good ways to optimize your website, and there are also bad ones that can wreck it. Rather than wasting your money and time redesigning or recreating your SEO plan, take time to do research on how you can prevent committing the common SEO mistakes.
For starters, here are some of the most common SEO mistakes:
Poor Web Content
Search engines analyze the content of your webpage and determine whether it is relevant or not to your targets. If you want to draw traffic to your website, make sure that your page contains unique and well-written information that your readers may find important or useful. Otherwise, search engines and readers will easily be turned-off by your site.
Keyword Density
Remember that the suggested keyword density percentage should be between 1% and 5%. Keywords should be used in your web content several times but not more than the recommended density percentage. The redundancy of these words will drive the search engines to penalize your page or your article since they suspect that you are trying to cheat the system. To obtain the proper keyword density, multiply the total number of words of your article by the allowed density percentage.
Improper Use of Meta tags
Meta tags such as keywords tags and description tags are important factors to bring target searchers to your website. Both keywords and description tags must be found in your webpage header. These tags will help the search engines index your page and to determine its relevance to your searchers. Remember that search engines usually show your entire description tag whenever a keyword or phrase is asked. In case your site is nowhere to be found, it is likely that you put the wrong keywords in your tags. But remember to not just put in all keywords that you can think of. Select those keywords and phrases that best describe your page.
Using Image, Animation or Frames
Search engines do not recognize pictures, animations and frames, so using these to enhance the look of your website is irrelevant. However, if you need to use frames in your page just put a noframes tag and include keyword “rich text.”
Use Alt Tags Instead of Pictures
As mentioned earlier, the search engine spiders cannot recognize pictures or images. Put alt tags instead.
Using Java Scripts
In trying to make websites appealing to its prospects, placing javascripts for navigation can be pleasing and practical. However, the use of javascripts for linking other pages of your website will make your website unrecognizable and therefore not indexed by search engines spiders.
Overlooking CSS
Cascading style sheet (CSS) is a device that helps you minimize the file size of your pages. This also shortens the loading time of your files. With CSS, you also get cleaner and better codes that allow the search engine spiders to focus on the text therefore making your pages easier to index. It also makes your site accessible to various PDA browsers like the PDA and WAP.
Using Password-Protected Pages
If you want to add a page that is protected by a password, better create a sub page for it because search engine spiders have no means of knowing your password. If this kind of page is not indexed by the search engine robot then putting this page is unnecessary.
Using Pop Up Windows
Clients and searchers are generally annoyed by these pop up windows. These windows do not, in any way, enhance the appearance of your page and increase your ranking in SERPs.
Grammatical Errors and Misspelled Keywords
Always have time to spell-check your web content because misspelled keywords mean the “death of your site.” This is due to the fact that search engine robots index your page based on keywords and tags. So if your keywords or tags are misspelled, you will not be visible to your searchers. Grammatical errors, on the other hand, lessen the credibility of your website which might lead to losing your customers.
A website that does not observe careful planning and research is inclined to fail in reaching its target market. Search engine optimization is not an easy process, but it is worth the effort, time and money. You can save thousands of dollars if you avoid committing these common SEO mistakes. A skillfully designed website that contains quality information is always likely to reach its prospects.
Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization
Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) play essential parts in the world of cyber advertisement in the present times. These are methods that webmasters, online entrepreneurs and even ordinary businessmen can resort to in advertising their products or services on the Internet. If you are not as techie, these may be foreign words that you don’t totally understand. So, if you need and want to know more about these due to interest or necessity, then you must continue reading.
Pay Per Click is also labeled as Cost Per Click or CPC. This is an advertisement technique where viewers are paid for every click on a particular link. In the beginning, it probably is a good strategy for urgent exposure. It can be a little pricey though in the long run. Paid links and pay per click programs work on the auction framework. It is done by choosing a keyword and bidding on it. The highest bidder gets the place of the advertisement exhibited on the top. Every time a viewer clicks on the advertisement, the search engine will make the sponsor pay the value of their bid. The PPC strategy is the fastest way to increase traffic to your website. You can acquire more visitors a few minutes after you set the whole thing up. If you have a relatively new product or idea, PPC may be your solution to making people aware of your ingenuity or if your business is seasonal or time-dependent, it might be a great idea too. The problem is that it is a recurring expenditure. The benefits cease when your payment ceases.
One the other hand, Search Engine Optimization is the more practical way towards increasing the site traffic. Marketing through SEO is somewhat more advantageous as far as impressions are concerned in comparison to sponsored links. This may be attributed to the fact that in instances where a person comes across a sponsored link, he is aware that the link exists because the company paid money to the search engine for the advertisement. Subsequently, when a viewer comes across a site as a result of a normal search, he is made to believe that it is what he is looking for. This psychologically conditions the viewers to favorably act towards the SEO-using company. The downside, of course, is that the results aren’t as instant as the Pay Per Click method. It takes a longer time to feel the advantages and to actually enjoy them. But they do come, eventually… and when they do, they are long lasting and well, worth the wait.
At the end of the day, it’s still going to be your decision. Your decision-making process may be tedious but it is necessary for a more rewarding result. The final aim of advertising is to increase targeted traffic from your clientele. Both SEO and PPC are effective and they may be seen not as alternatives of each other but as complements or supplements that add to the effectiveness of your marketing techniques.