Thursday, July 29, 2010

8 simple ways to lower your Bounce Rate

1. Use a nice Web Design / Layout
The design of your website is one of the most important factors. Try using eye friendly colors, avoid animations that popup in the middle of the page and anything that could distract or make the visitor feel uncomfortable. Organized content without information overflow in one page can deliver your message to the visitors effectively. Avoid using template sites and have the layout designed by a professional. Make sure that the HTML of your website is valid in order to have the same result in all the browsers. Use our HTML Validator to check your site.

2. Keep the size of your pages low
Make sure you have optimized the size of your images, keep the text/html code ratio low and try your best to keep the loading time as low as possible as it affects the user’s experience.

3. Build a user friendly Navigation (Menu)
The hyperlinks are the power of the web. Your site needs to have a user friendly menu that will allow the visitor to find what he wants easily. Avoid placing the menu on the bottom, try to organize the pages into categories and do not bury the important pages more than 3 clicks away from the homepage. Suggesting relevant products or services and placing links in strategic place in the text is something worth doing. Try using text links that contain keywords and avoid flash menus.

4. Create well written texts
Check that the title, the headers and the metatags of each page are relevant with the context. Have an abstract in the first paragraph or try to answer all the visitor’s questions in the first lines of your page. Use our Keyword Analyzer to test their relevance. You can find more in the article “5 basic rules of SEO copywriting“.

5. Optimize for the correct keywords
When it comes to SEO, always optimize the pages for relevant keywords. Each page should target to 1 or 2 terms. Make sure they have a good keyword density and that they appear in the important parts of the document such as the titles and headers. Do not try to trick the users and Google by including unrelated or too generic keywords. Even if you manage to rank first, the users will leave right away and you will increase the Bounce Rate. Use our Keyword Analyzer to check the keywords of your site.

6. Get Quality Links
Try to get some good links pointing to your page. Make sure they contain the correct anchor text. You can lure other webmasters to link to your pages by placing good content in your pages (interesting texts, a free service, start a clever marketing campaign etc). Try to avoid link exchange as in most of the cases one of the 2 linkers loses more PageRank. Use our Site Submitter to bring more links to your site.

7. Start a PPC Campaign on the most important keywords
Consider starting a Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaign on the important keywords of your site. Make sure you will pay a reasonable price per click and select the ones that are relevant to you content. Pay attention to the bidding management of your PPC campaign. Bid for the right keywords in order to avoid wrong traffic.

8. Study the reports
As a webmaster, when you evaluate how successful the online marketing campaign was, you should not only take into account the amount of traffic, the PageRank or the page views of your site but also focus on the Bounce Rate, the Average Time on Site, the Pages/Visit and the Conversion Rates. Use a web analytics tool like Google Analytics, define your goals, study the reports, categorize your visitors based on their behavior and redesign your SEO plan when needed.
Here are some simple thinks to have in mind:
• The user must find what he searches for. Averagely you have about 8 seconds before he leaves the page.
• The content (titles, headers, texts) of your page should be clear and easy to read.
• Get to the point and do not distract the user with popups, huge ad banners, tones of links etc.
• Give him the option to search or suggest him something relative pages.

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Business benefits of SEO

Search Engine Marketing helps site owners meet their various online marketing objectives such as generating leads, sales or simply building awareness.

There is more to search engine optimisation than just marketing, as companies can derive many business benefits from using SEO. Let’s take a look at a few...

  • Cost-effective Customer Acquisition
    There is no payment to the search engines for being indexed. This is important for high volume, low intent phrases which can be expensive in paid-search (eg ‘car insurance’).
    It can also be useful for generating visitors on the long tail of search. Many companies bid on these phrases through paid-search, so giving opportunities for those who use an SEO strategy for the tail.
  • Fixed Costs
    The cost of SEO is relatively fixed, independent of click volume. Effectively, the cost per click from SEO declines through time after initial optimisation costs and lower ongoing optimisation costs. Conversely, paid-search is essentially a variable cost.
  • Brand Visibility
    Think about that search on ‘car insurance’. The big insurance companies are all desperate to make it onto the first page of Google. The ones that didn’t make it either need to buy PPC ads to be seen, which is expensive for such a competitive search query.
  • Focus on Web Standards / Accessibility
    Designing a website for search is an exercise in designing a best practice website. Search engine crawlers notice errors in your code, so valid code is a must for SEO. And that makes for a healthier, more accessible website. Accessible for Google’s crawlers, and for people.
  • Repeat Business
    Customers referred from search engines tend to stick around for longer. Increase customer lifetime revenues via SEO!
  • Customer Acquisition - Targeted Prospects
    Search is demand-driven, so anybody referred from a search engine is hoping that your web page matches their search query. If it does, and you show them all the information they need to see, they may well become your next customer.
Focus on Unique Content
  • We are big believers in quality content. Original content. Google loves it too. And so do many SEO experts – the general advice these days is to create subject-specific content on your website, and to categorise and label that content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. Blogs are good for this. Remember that quality content attracts quality links. And that links are still very important for SEO. So if you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.
  • Credibility / Brand Perception
    “Why aren’t you in Google for ‘car insurance’”? Consumers expect big brand businesses to be prominently placed in Google, so what is the effect if you aren’t on the first page or two?
  • Findability
    Search engines allow you to find relevant web pages even if you only remember snippets of information. A song lyric, a company name, a product review, a person…

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Article directory


Article directories are websites where users submit unique articles to be categorized and included to a specific niche. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Submitting Articles for SEO
Article directories allow users to submit unique articles to the directory. These directories allow articles to have to embed links to other websites with relevant Anchor text. Popular article directories are considered authority sites and are constantly crawled by Search Engine Bots. As a result, webmasters submit articles with relevant anchor text linking back to their site and obtain powerful backlinks.

Article Structure and Format

For Search engine optimization purposes, the ideal article length is 400-500 words with a keyword density of approximately 2%-3%. Most article submission sites allow links, but they usually limit the amount to 2-3. The backlinks should have anchor text created using HREF tags. Most article directories prohibit keyword stuffing, so it is good practice to use multiple anchor text and links in the article.

Places to get Articles for SEO purposes

There are many places on the internet that offers article writing services, often times the SEO consulting companies will get the articles written for you and submit them for you as well. However, some consultants will actually charge you less if you have already written your articles and is just in need of consultation and submission. Freelancers are the best source for article writers and they are also widely available, but you have to be prepared to do your research to get a capable freelancer who can actually write well. There are websites that are dedicated to providing you with such writers, one of which is the ever famous Getafreelancer website, that allows you to post a project stating exactly what you want and then have person bid on it. you can then make a choice.

Another website is Shannarticles, this website does not have bidding; you will simply send a request through the website and it will be picked up by the staff who will advise you of its acceptance and provide you with exactly what you asked for in the manner that you wanted it. There are a few others, but these are two reliable sources that i know of so far. The fact is that good SEO articles that are written with strategically placed keywords and anchor text can really boost the popularity of a website, because these articles are submitted to directories that serves as back links to the promoted website.

Digital marketing

Digital Marketing is the promoting of brands using all forms of digital advertising. This now includes Television, Radio, Internet, mobile and any other form of digital media.

Digital Marketing is the practice of promoting products and services using digital distribution channels to reach consumers in a timely, relevant, personal and cost-effective manner.

Whilst digital marketing does include many of the techniques and practices contained within the category of Internet Marketing, it extends beyond this by including other channels with which to reach people that do not require the use of The Internet. As a result of this non-reliance on the Internet, the field of digital marketing includes a whole host of elements such as mobile phones, sms/mms, display / banner ads and digital outdoor.

Previously seen as a stand-alone service in its own right, it is frequently being seen as a domain that can and does cover most, if not all, of the more traditional marketing areas such as Direct Marketing by providing the same method of communicating with an audience but in a digital fashion. Digital is now being broadened to support the "servicing" and "engagement" of customers.

Article marketing

Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace. Each article contains a bio box and byline (collectively known as the resource box) that include references and contact information for the author's business. Well-written content articles released for free distribution have the potential of increasing the authoring business' credibility within its market as well as attracting new clients.

Internet Article Marketing
Internet article marketing, is an Internet marketing technique to subtly advertise products and services via online article directories. Most directories receive a high volume of traffic and are considered authority sites by search engines, which often results in submitted articles receiving substantial free traffic.

Internet marketers will often try to maximize the results of an article marketing campaign by submitting their promotion to multiple article directories. However, most search engines filter duplicate content to prevent the same content from appearing multiple times in searches. Some marketers try to circumvent this filter by creating multiple variations of an article. By doing this, one article an theoretically gain traffic from multiple article directories.

Most forms of search engine optimization and Internet marketing require a domain, hosting plan, and advertising budget. However, article marketing uses article directories as a free host and receives traffic via organic searches due to the directory's search engine authority.

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Google Page Rank (PR)

PageRankTM (PR)

is a numeric value that represents how important a website is online. Google becomes the idea that when a web site places a link (link) to another, is in fact a vote for the latter.

The more votes has a page will be considered more important by Google. Moreover, the importance of the page that casts the vote also determines the weight of this vote. In this way, Google calculates the importance of a page thanks to the votes received, taking into account the importance of each page that casts the vote.

PageRankTM (developed by the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin)is the way Google decides the importance of a page. It is a valuable data because it is one of the factors that determine the position will have a page within the search results. It is not the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is one of the most important.Sites containing more PR also generate more money.

Keep in mind that not all the links are taken into account by Google. For example, Google filters out and discards the links of pages devoted exclusively to put links (called 'link farms').

In addition, Google admits that a page can not control the links that point to it, but you can check the links page to other pages in place. Therefore, links to a page can not harm it, but it links a page to place penalized sites may be harmful to your PageRankTM.

If a site has PR0, it is usually a site penalized, and may not be intelligent to put a link to her.

One way to know a page is PageRankTM download it the Google search bar (only available for MS IExplorer). Bar appears in the one shown in green PageRankTM value on a scale of 0 to 10. PR10 websites are Yahoo, Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, and Google. You have a full list of PR10 sites.

The algorithm 'PageRankTM' was patented in the United States on 8 January 1998 by Larry Page. The original title is "Method for node ranking in a linked database ', and was assigned patent number 6,285,999.

How does affiliate marketing generate money?

The work of affiliate marketing as are so simple would have difficulty believing how such a scheme can generate cash. In affiliate marketing, one is introduced to a system where an affiliate, who owns the Web site should display and announces other websites which are owned, in turn, to a merchant.

The merchant is the one who expects to generate sales with affiliate promoting your website. Once these links are clicked on by the people and makes a purchase, the merchant pays the affiliate a commission. It is simply promoting other websites through its own that an affiliate can earn the money to be as easy as possible.

The principle involved in affiliate marketing can be compared to the type of interaction of species in the ecology called mutualism where interaction between two species allows both of them derive advantage of the situation without injury. The result is a bond that allows co-exist in harmony in the community where they both move. Affiliate marketing allows affiliates get paid in recognition of what he could contribute. The traders, in turn, can advertise their products and ultimately be sold with the efforts provided by the member.

The reason why products advertised by affiliates through their websites generate many sales is because the number of people using the Internet is growing every minute. Each commodity announced this means you get all the attention you could possibly need to convince someone that is worth trying. This is the ultimate reason why there is money in affiliate marketing. More links a website promotes, the more chance sales will be generated. More sales generated, the happier the merchant, and the happier the merchant, the better for the affiliate professionally and financially.

Those who have pleasure in affiliate marketing have achieved the goals and dreams they could not do under ordinary circumstances. There are even those who have skyrocketed to the top simply because they have devoted their time and effort to perfect their knowledge of this business without even a little hesitation. You can be sure of the fact that there is money in affiliate marketing. He has only faced the fact that it is impossible to generate riches in this business overnight.

Well, not really. All he has to do is learn everything he possibly could about the industry in which he is. If he can master all the tricks relating to trade, then nothing will play