Here’s an article that shows you some new keyword research tools like Google’s wonder wheel and older tools like word tracker. Check out the article - http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/development/how-to-find-best-keywords-ideas/
It is said that having a good foundation is fundamental to having a strong building to last for years to come. The same goes when it comes to developing your website. Before you start plans on how to market your site, it always pays dividend to take a step back and review the website to ensure that its fundamentals are right.
Here’s three items on the list of checklist to ensure that your site is able to capture users for long term benefits. The three simple ways to dramatically improve your website are as follows:
Mental Note 1 – Get them Hooked
The internet has changed since the old days back in 2004, there are a lot of things happening on screen that distracts your users’ attention. Browsers with multiple tabs also then to fight for attention, apart from this you still have real world distractions to compete with like answering phone calls, etc. Before long your user forgets what they have been reading or the site they were visiting. I bet this happens too many of us.
Provide tools to allow visitors to bookmark your article or site easily. The best place is to have it position near the top of the article. Also note that you should only display 3 bookmark links and an option to select others so as to not let the bookmarking tool snatch attention away from the page content. You can try out tools like addthis helps websites add a simple bookmarking tool
Mental Note 2 – Show the Visitor What They Want
You manage to attract visitors to your site and they feel complied to click through to your inner pages. Your site is content rich, however they can’t find the content that they are looking for. This isn’t good as it is commonly known when you present users with too much choice they tend not to make any decisions.
So to tackle this, make sure your site layout and content structure is properly sorted out. You would need to have clear navigation menus or breadcrumbs to allow users to navigate across the entire site. Having a HTML sitemap is also an essential item as this provides visitors with a bird’s eye view of your site structure.
Mental Note 3 – Use Nice Smoothing Colours
Ever been to a site that turns you offer visually upon arrival? In the past, there were many badly made websites. This has since changed, however there are still some design mistakes made by designers or site owners that do turn off users visually.
As a rule of thumb, always use web safe colours like white background, with dark font colours. Make sure the font size is also within an acceptable height and width. I normally use 11 pixel points for most of my sites. That’s the font size that works best for me. However do ask your readers if that’s the best size for them.
Do you have another mental note on how to dramatically improve your website’s performance, why not share a tip or so here – Drop a comment or contact me
3. Don’t Make Your Visitors Have To Write An Email To Contact You
If you are inviting enquiries or contact from visitors to your website you need to provide them with a way of doing this that is as easy as possible for them. Just posting your email address on the website is not the best solution. Why? Because when they click on it they need to then create an email from scratch. Do you know how busy your visitors are? They hardly have time to read the content of your homepage – never mind create an email from scratch. The solution? You need to use a simple form. A form enables you to standardise the responses that you receive and it also makes it very simple for your visitors to get in touch with you – all they need to do is pop in their name, email address and tick a few boxes and that’s it.
Making it easy for your visitors to contact you isn’t the only reason that using a form is a great idea. Doing so means you can get some information back from each person that fills in the form. You can ask them how they discovered your website, which other websites they like to visit – you can ask them anything! Anything that is going to help you learn more about them, more about who they are and more about what will make them buy from you. You think they would tell you all this if they were creating an email from scratch? No – of course they wouldn’t! That’s why you need a form.
An auto-responder is an automated mailing feature where one can setup to send a fix response to the recipient. This feature was created as we humans have to sleep and as the internet boomed, 24 hours service response became standard procedure. The core need auto-responders fulfill is to help save time and automate certain functions like customer support, Signup/Unsubscribe procedures, automated product delivery and timely delivery of scheduled emails.
At least that’s the original functions of auto-responders, however in the course of the internet things has changed with many marketers and webmasters coming up with creative ways to use auto-responders for their business. Here’s a few ways you can use an auto-responder to help your online business.
eZine delivery – If you have monthly or weekly ezines, keeping track of which subscribers received which issue could be troublesome. Using an auto-responder to send your publication out to your subscribers would help remove this issue, as it would automatically send your first issue to any new subscribers. In that case no one will get left out.
Promotional Sales – Using auto-responders to inform your members of monthly or weekly promotions that you have running. If you are selling something on your site, you could preset seasonal sales period like winter or summer sale and send the email out when the start dates for the season arrives.
eCourse delivery – If you sell information products and run ecourses, you could use auto-responders to deliver the course for you. This would free you up to add new course materials and capture new subscribers for your course.
Drive traffic to your site – Send teaser articles available on your site through your auto-responder system. The articles should entice the user to click for more content so that they drive traffic to your website directly.
Upsell products – If your subscriber purchased something from you before, use the auto-responder system to upsell complementary products that would be of use or you could simply run a special member rate on the following items to increase your conversion rates.
Last Minute Ditch – When your subscriber unsubscribe from your list, your auto-responder could be try to save him from leaving your list by maybe offering him a discount if you run a membership site or ask them for the reason that he is leaving in exchange for a gift.
I hope the above list helps provide some ideas on how marketers can tap into the power of auto-responders. Do you have other methods in using auto-responders to help run your internet business, why not share it with us!
Was checking my old emails today and found these 2 videos about social media that is pretty cool. One is from Google advising brands how they can leverage social media and another is social media explained in plain English.
Google’s Advice On How Brands Can Leverage Social Media
Social Media in Plain English
This post was inspired by revisiting some of the old tools I used in the past and I thought why not pay a visit to memory lane on some of the tools and sites that brought online marketing to where it is today. Do note – this is just a small list of random tools that came to my mind at the point of writing, so I know there would be others that I missed out.
Keyword Research: GoodKeyword tool, this is a free keyword tool where one can conduct keyword research. The data is pulled of overture, but since overture is pretty much not maintained I guess the tool wouldn’t be that useful.
Competitor Analysis: Alexa ranking at one point in time was the only place where we could openly get competitor stats for free. The toolbar helped tracked user behavior and how many people visit a particular site. However as the data is skewed towards individual who had installed the toolbar many had question the accuracy of the rankings.
Site Indexing: In the past when launching a new site it used to take about months to get the search engine spiders to find your site. One of the tools Google came up with to help them be aware of which sites are new would be the Add URL page. Found here – www.google.com/addurl.html. These days Google can index your site in hours, so no need to manually submit your site anymore.
Search Engine Rankings: DMoz.org the webs open source directory. It was known as a source of authority, getting listed here means you have a very powerful inbound link to your site. Ran by volunteers, the site was the crazy for many webmasters and SEO professionals. These days, it’s more like a forgotten site where having a link is good to have.
Here’s a SEO template that I like to share with my readers. If you are looking to optimize your site, one of the most important elements of SEO would be the title and meta tags. If you are developing a site or have engage someone to do the work for you, you might want to ask them to include this template with the site that is being developed.
This is the normal template that I use for most of my own and clients’ sites.
<title> Title Goes Here…</title>
<meta content=”keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, keyword 4″ name=”keywords”>
<meta content=”Your description goes here…” name=”description”>
<meta content=”10 days”>
<meta content=”index, follow”>
<meta content=”All”>
<meta content=”index,follow”>
<meta content=”global”>
Link building is a very important portion when it comes to off page search engine optimization. To get rankings for your targeted terms, keyword rich anchor tags from similar themed or authoritative sites is the key. However link building is the hardest SEO activity to date, as the search engines are looking for natural links instead of 100s of useless links from spammer sites. In this article, I like to provide some simple steps that my team and myself use while conducting link building for our clients and own sites.
Step 1: Set your results set to return at least 30 to 50 results. This would help you be able to go through the top 30-50 sites in one go.
Step 2: Conduct a Google search for your target keyword terms.
Step 3: Visit the sites from top to bottom, take note of sites that are of quality and jot down their contact details.
Step 4: Start contacting the sites that you had identified earlier. Be sure to send personalize emails so that your emails stand out from all the spam that is out there.
This should help you find links that would be of value to your sites targeted keyword terms. The hit rate for doing something like is normally 1-5% but getting as many emails out to like minded webmasters is the key.
As part of pushing sharing of marketing online on My SEO Tips, I wanted to see create this weekly feature where I ask fellow marketers like yourself certain marketing topics that we have covered over time.
This week’s question of the week is about using email signatures as part of your traffic acquisition methods. Implementing a link within your email signoff is very simple, but I wanted to know if how many of us have it included on our signoffs.
Also if you do have it implemented, could you share with us tips and formats your implementation. Is it a simple www.domain.com or something else? For me, I don’t really use email signoffs but if I were to do it, it would be as follows.
Best Regards,
Ryan
MySEOTips.com – Sharing How to Market Online Thru Personal Experience
[Email ] | [Tel No.]
Do you have a marketing question that you would like answered? Why not drop us a mail and we would give our 2 cents worth, plus ask the community
When you are conducting search engine ranking position reviews has anyone face such a problem, where your competitors are ranking higher with lesser backlinks even though your website is almost similar in size, structure, keywords and Pagerank? If this is you, don’t worry you aren’t alone. Many of us are facing this within our niche. If you are wondering why, we can’t absolutely pin point the cause, but we could try to intelligently turn the tables into our favor.
As a start, I would conduct a SEO review of your competitors and your own site to ensure that you have done all you could for the on page optimization before heading out to off page. But for the purpose of this topic, I would like to assume that all else are equal and only the quality of inbound links to both your competition and your sites are the deciding factor for higher search rankings.
So you will ask how can ensure that the quality of my inbound links are really of quality and they aren’t discounted from providing link juice. The straight answer is you cant sure, but you can use the following checklist to help you determine if the site does add value to link juice.
1 – Check if the site is indexed in Google, no point getting links from a banned site
2 – If the site is indexed, check when the last date of index occurred, the more recent the index it means it does have some value
3 – Does the page have a lot of outbound links, if it has a lot of links you might want to reconsider dropping your link on the page?
4 – Where does the outbound links go to, are the sites considered as good neighborhoods or bad neighborhoods? Again if its linking out to bad sites you might want to move on.
5 – Is the content on the page relevant or complementary to your page? No point getting a link on a page that is totally way out from your site’s topic as it doesn’t help much for SEO or attracting users to click on the link as well
6 – In the past, I would normally advise marketers to pay attention to the PR of the page. But its no hidden secret Google wants to remove PR, so focusing on PR should only be a nice to have instead of a deciding factor for dropping your links on the page.
This is my checklist that I use when I conduct link building, do you have others to add into the mix? Feel free to drop a note below or email us.
What is Publicity?
It is obtaining editorial coverage or features for your business from media publications and getting your business reported as news. Some examples of publicity are newspaper and magazine articles, radio and television interviews and Internet forums and much more. These are just a few reasons you should consider letting your business tap into the power of publicity.
1. Effective – Publicity has been proven to be 10 times more effective than traditional advertising. Your customers believe what they read in the newspaper or watch on the TV news because humans by nature believe what is reported to them as news.
2. Affordable – Obtaining publicity can cost as little as $0 dollars. Business owners can substitute a little time and imagination for money or hire publicity professionals, many of which have very affordable rates when compared to advertising.
3. 3rd Party Credibility – Having reporters write about your business in a news format gives your business 3rd party credibility that’s extremely valuable. Anyone can sing their own business’ praises, but getting respected people in the media to do it provides a type of credibility that ads and money just can’t buy.
There are numerous other reasons to use publicity. Next time you are looking for a new way to get the word out about your business, consider tapping into the power of publicity.
About The Author
Jenna Roman co-owns and operates JR Publicity, an Englewood, NJ-based public relations and marketing company with her husband, Josh Roman. For additional information, visit www.jrpublicity.com.