Archive for the ‘Internet Marketing’ Category

How To Choose Your Target Keywords

Monday, October 6th, 2008

How do you figure out your target keywords for your search engine marketing campaign? First you need to put together a list of the products you sell, services you offer, and any other keywords that represent what your website offers. Once you have that list, you need to use some tools to do proper keyword research. There is no purpose in targeting keywords that people are not searching for, because the search engine rankings will not turn into traffic. I personally like to use the Google Keyword Suggestion tool and the Google Traffic Estimator tool. Please those two tools, I am able to map out the target keywords for my client, and then estimate the traffic from Google, as well as the other major search engines, including Yahoo and MSN, based upon their market share compared to Google.

Seth Rand, the Search Engine Marketing Expert at Icon Website Design, follows the above procedure for every search engine marketing client of his, whether it be for a search engine optimization project or a pay per click marketing project. For more info, please contact Seth at 954-533-7362 or seth@randseo.com.

AOL and MySpace interested in buying Yahoo

Friday, April 11th, 2008

Yahoo Inc., resisting a $44.6 billion takeover by Microsoft Corp., which runs MSN.com, may wring a higher offer out of the software maker after finding an alternate suitor in Time Warner Inc.’s AOL unit.

A new partner may help CEO Jerry Yang turn around investor confidence in Yahoo. Less than a week ago, his options appeared limited after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threatened to cut his bid if the board refused to give in. With AOL in the fray, a better price is possible, and The New York Times said Thursday that News Corp. may join Microsoft’s offer.

“Microsoft, if it wants to stay in the game, is going to have to increase its bid,” Larry Haverty, associate portfolio manager at Gamco Investors Inc., said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Yahoo is a strategic necessity for Microsoft.”

Haverty said $35 a share is a fair value for Yahoo. His firm managed about $31 billion in assets as of Dec. 31, including shares of Microsoft and Yahoo.

If Microsoft teams with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the transaction would unite Microsoft’s MSN, Yahoo and News Corp.’s MySpace, the Times said. Microsoft’s original bid is $31 a share.

Here is a difference between companies that talk about search engine optimization versus doing

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I think the main difference is in companies that talk to versus companies who are actually walking the walk, is obviously where their website ranks within the search engines, as well as their clients. A company that I’ve done when business with so many different times in the past referred to as http://www.iconwebsitesearchengineoptimization.com/ has showed me time and time again that they actually can and will produce results that thereafter. I know that they also have a guarantee with the work that they do something to the effect of 50% down in the final 50% is based on them actually getting the results they said that they would get. So obviously deaf in one of five comp has integrity, and can give you a list of different customers that they’ve done business with over the years.  As Wells testimonials. I know, they also manage pay per click campaigns for various different clients. To my knowledge, they actually go in and create landing pages to the various different major search engine such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. I didn’t actually know this and the very beginning, but I realize now that they actually have in the pay per click sector provided the company placing your nose with a doing it actually can optimize the Google paper click campaign. This is referred to as Google optimization, MSN optimization, as well as Yahoo optimization. I know that there are some fairly aggressive affiliate marketing programs as well. When it comes down to Internet marketing these guys are the best. They also have a site map generator that will generate an incomplete site map for your interior pages.

The humbling fact about some websites is that they do have limitations!!

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Some people come to us as a search engine optimization firm asking us.  Can we take your existing website and get them within the top 10 results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. And the fact is, however on flattering it may be.  If your website is not constructed in the right way. Then your chances ultimately are slim to none. We actually did search engine optimization initially for a large publicly traded company, which name I won’t get into right now.  And although they were publicly traded their website was substandard to say the least. Throughout the entire database when you navigated to various different products.  It was all out, putting from the database source. What I mean by this is, it was reporting directly out of the database looking something like this, for example,  www. stevestv. com content.php?p_catId=3 other thing is that every single page output it exactly like this. From a search engine optimization point of view, a database outputting in this way and not being able to have the are URLs output in a way that it would look like they were coming from an HTML page is not in any way shape or form beneficial to search engine optimization.  The other reason that it becomes a big prom is that it looks like it has duplicate text of going on throughout the own toys site.

Needless to say, we ended up doing search engine optimization on the site as best we could put our results were not anywhere that they would normally are. I think ultimately the decline was satisfied with the work to we had done, but it’s just disappointing working so hard on the project in getting the results that to you or not accept them. It’s sort of like trying to scoop out the water of the Titanic as it was on its way down to the bottom of the ocean. Obviously when you look at it from that standpoint, it’s a near impossible feat per yet as a person hired to produce it, you got no choice but to try.

In a looking back at that particular search engine optimization deal.  I remember us coming to the client and telling them at the time that they really needed to rebuild the whole entire website for us to have an effective search engine optimization campaign. He said they wanted us to just create site maps, and see if we had some type of affiliate marketing program for him. I think in the end.  Personally I think that they should just sprung and created a brand-new website.

A play something that I would love some people do make some comments about is the newest update that Google seems to be making to its search engine. Over the last seven days I’ve been looking at various different websites that were initially ranking Berrier high in their page ranks and now based on Google’s new algorithm a lot of these websites that once had very high page ranks fell off like a ski jump. I remember there was one company that had a page rank of the 10. This the most do you understand is a near impossibility.  Being that I guess at the time that there was only somewhere in the area of 30 in the world. And after this new page rank update through cool that same website has a page rank of a six. That is very disturbing to say the least.

Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Owners

Thursday, November 1st, 2007

Search Engine Optimization for Small Business Owners

Small business owners are often limited by small marketing budgets and manpower. But that doesn’t mean they can’t compete against larger businesses or websites when focused on search engine optimization. SEO is a basic marketing tool that everyone should use regardless of size.Can the small websites compete with the big guys?

I’m often asked by small business owners if they stand a chance against larger websites when it comes to organic search results. My response is that size doesn’t matter. When it comes to improving natural search results, it’s all about the keywords you choose and how competitive those keywords are.

What makes a keyword competitive?

One way to determine the competitiveness of a search term is to simply type that search term into Google and notice the number of web pages that contain that search term. This number appears in the upper right-hand corner of the search results page and appears as, “Results 1 - 10 of about 228,000,000 for [your search term here].”

The large number you see gives you an indication of how many websites contain the keyword term or phrase you’re searching for. Not all of these sites would necessarily be competitors, but have been indexed by Google none-the-less. From my perspective, when this number is less than 3 or 4 million, the particular search term would not be all that competitive in and of itself.

Determining just how competitive the search term is.

There are a variety of methods to determine true keyword effectiveness (KEI, etc.). However, if you’re just a regular person trying to figure out how difficult it will be to rank well for a particular keyword, consider the following. In addition to the number of sites that contain your keyword, how well optimized are the top 3 sites that appear on the search result. You can determine this by:

1. Visiting the site and determining the Google PR of the page. This information is available by downloading the Google toolbar and looking in your browser. You will see a green bar and ranking (ex: PR5), which tells you how Google ranks this page/website with regard to popularity. Any site with a Google PR6 or better is well established and will be difficult to outrank in the near term.

2. Visit Google and type, “link:www.competitorwebsite.com”. Be sure to replace ‘competitorwebsite’ with the website name you are researching. Remember, this should be a website that appears on the Google search result for the keyword term or phrase you’re researching. This will tell you how many sites are linking to this particular website. The larger the number the more difficult it will be to outrank.

3. Look at the website code. Simply visit the competitor’s website and go to “View”, “View Source”. Look for the meta tags of “Title”, “Description”, and “Keywords”. Are the meta tags at the very top of the page? Does the website also use h1, h2, and h3 tags? If so, they probably know something about SEO and have applied some on-page optimization techniques.

Using the above will give you a good sense of whether of not you can compete for given keywords. As you’ve figured out by now, a company’s size is no indication of their level of experience in optimizing their own website. You’d be surprise of the type (and size) of companies that call me for SEO advice.

Keep this in mind the next time you think that size matters!

Author: Michael Fleischner

Search engine optimization, what a wonderful gift!

Monday, October 29th, 2007

The truth is, if your website, preferably a custom-designed website and not some  website template, and that website has been optimized that is search engine optimized to maximize your exposure on Internet.  It is generally a very wonderful gift. It’s been said many times in the past that the best things in life are free.  Such goes for search engine optimization. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not the end-all be-all and chances are you still do no one to your fair share of paper click advertising.  But what it does do, is it brings down your costs per acquisition. What I mean by this is let’s say you’re spending three dollars per click on paper click advertising with either Google Yahoo or MSN. And then you’re able to do some search engine optimization which it then also gives gives you an additional 250 to 500 hits a day more on your website. Then, what ends up happening is you end up actually reducing the cost per click on all your advertising. There are some websites that I have that all they have is search engine optimization done to them and as a result of that we still get a tremendous amount inbound calls as well our fair share of online purchases.

Another thing that you want to think about doing is probably running some banners on some websites that have a tremendous amount inbound traffic.

This are also some very good free online business directories. I will list a few of them did.  But I know that don’t charge anything whatsoever for you to list yourselves on their business directories.

1.) http://www.freeprintingdirectoryonline.com/   

 2. ) http://www.freebusinessdirectoryonline.com/

If you can’t find yourself in the search engines, then you need to hire new search engine optimization company.

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

One of things, I asked people at time of your about to hire a search engine optimization company make sure that they’re coming up traverse different key words with inside the search engines. I have people call me on a regular basis, not understanding that we are at you have a staff that the search engine optimization internally and then sits there and pitches us on search engine optimization.  At that point I usually have some fun. I asked him to come up with some different keywords that would show me where their businesses coming up presently with inside the search engines. Generally when our company does search engine optimization for people we only optimize for global although pool is one the most important search engines would also optimize for Yahoo and MSN and some of the smaller search engines well.

Where does your website show up in Google, Yahoo and MSN?

Monday, October 22nd, 2007

I  ask people on a regular basis, where does their website show up in the global search engines??

If you are a custom website does not show up within the first 10 results of Google, Yahoo and MSN. You’re missing out on a vast amount of money being spent on the Internet in any given day.  I can’t stress it enough find a company that knows how to do search engine optimization and utilize them.  There is a company that I’ve been sending people into most recently to have search engine optimization done in the name of that company is www.iconsearchengineoptimization.com I have been referring people to them for some time now and all I do is see if business is rave about the quality of search engine optimization and they done to their website.  It’s one of those things that are so many people out there that are not doing what’s necessary to level search engine optimization and cutting corners and ultimately in the long term they en up doing long-term damage to a lot of websites. icon search engine optimization.com will take care of everything from A to Z. They create your site maps, they will take care of your Google ad words account, they have their own affiliation marketing program, otherwise known as affiliate marketing program.

I know that they are working hand in hand with Google directly with a couple of their upper and senior members and they’ve also been doing things like Google optimization for different clients.

So when I tell you that good or very good I would never recommend somebody like or do anything less than perfection on someone’s custom website. Whatever you do make sure your research, whatever company and working with. As I said before, I like icon search engine optimization.com. The contact over there, as Seth Rand.

Here is the statement of the day. Stop talking about it and just do it.

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

I can’t tell you how many different people I run into on a regular basis.  Tell me they’ve thought about doing search engine optimization to their website, and so have not done anything about it.

To me this whole thing is a no-brainer. I would never sit here and tell you that search engine optimization is the single and only thing to you to do to promote your website to such a way that you could create the cells that you’re intending to do on a day-to-day week to week month-to-month basis. But here’s what I will tell you. I don’t care if you’re using Google ad-words, some type of paper click advertising with inside Yahoo or MSN.  Search engine optimization is the only form of Internet marketing medium that is so cost-effective that if you don’t do it is just plain crazy.

The reason I’m so adamant about search engine optimization is because it offsets all of your other expenses for Internet marketing. Sometimes I’m a client to spending some one areas of upwards to $50,000 a month and pay per click advertising. Not would never tell anybody that they should pull their complete paper click campaign, and only do search engine optimization. I personally don’t believe that my belief is that you can offset your pay per click advertising by thousands of dollars a month.  If you can work with, they quality search engine optimization company. Most companies that I know that do search engine optimization will also manage your pay per click campaign as well. This is important to me because I think that if you can have somebody cut every and all out of your pay per click campaign.  It’ll give you more marketing dollars to push into different directions.  Most of these highly decorated search engine optimization firms can not only optimize your website at the level of organic traffic, but they can also do search engine optimization to the various different search engines.

They will also create an internal site map that will have the spiders crawl your website in a much deeper capacity than they ever have before. This way of your website with interior pages, exceeding thousands and thousands of pages they can actually create this site map floor of the search engine’s will penetrat your site in a much deeper capacity.

The other thing that I suggest people to invest in is a good affiliate marketing program.  There are very is different affiliate marketing programs. One of these programs is known as www.commissionjunction.com we have use commission Junction for various different clients of Mars in the past. The good thing about commission Junction is there actually affiliate what major corporations around the country such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, target, Disney, and many more.  Fortune 100 companies.

The best thing I knew tell you is stop talking about doing search engine optimization.  Stop talking about doing Internet marketing.  Stop talking about doing paper click advertising.  And start finding companies that can help you create an effective marketing campaign.  So you and your website can start doing the business that the rest of these companies are doing throughout the home to your. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out if somebody spending 50 oh hundred thousand dollars a month on pay per click advertising.  And they’re doing this month after month, they must you making some money. So why not, claim your pieces of the pie and cash in on this Internet boom. The truth is the Internet and the amount of revenue streaming into it isn’t going anywhere. The projections for online sales for this holiday season is guaranteed to be through the roof.

Where do you stand on search engine optimization?

Friday, October 19th, 2007

There is definitely two opposing sides to this particular question.

1.) I would say that the first part of the Yang and Yang. Is what I’ll refer to as the force. Sort of like Star Wars. Many people don’t see Star Wars as a spiritual type of movie, but to me it is.  We think about the Jedi is there basically everything that would be in harmony in the world. They are the good, they are the worthy, they are the righteous, they are the happy, they are the light.

Well, here’s the thing about search engine of the visitation. There is what they call white hat.  These are people that the lack of a better word are part of the force. These are people and operate with inside the fields of search engine optimization.  But then not doing it with a malicious or hurtful intent. They are instead playing by the rules. This is saying that’s been used for many years now, what comes around goes around. What I found is long as you play by the rules and you try to help your clients to the best your ability than search engine optimization can be a very profitable feel to be in.

2.) This is my take however on the black side of the Yang. Or, what we can refer to as the dark side. What most people in the SCO field refer to it as is black hat techniques. Solid give you a quick rundown of my experiences been with people that are doing things to trick the search engines. Awhile back I had seen their website that had a flash intro on a what what I saw to be virtually no text whatsoever. Now, first I couldn’t figure this out why they were coming up with so many different terms.  In so many different cities and states with which seemed to me to be a blank flash intro. As I researched the page a little more what I found was.  There was probably a over 4000 terms going down on tire front of the page. But what they did was they put all the text in white against a white background. This obviously would have a look like there was absolutely no text on on tire page unless you want with your highlighter down all on tire page then you would see all of the text show up.  So to make a long story short, within four months this website was completely wiped out of the search engines. It’s real simple play nice, or suffer the consequences of your actions.

This so many different things that you can do the legitimate ways to promote your website online. There are things to do like creating an affiliate marketing programs. You can create an account with Google ad words. You can do pay per click campaigns Yahoo optimization and MSN optimization.

In my opinion, keep it simple to the right things and good things will come back to you. Ultimately, no matter who we are what we do.  I find that you definitely reap what you sow.

Take your people and they’ll take care you. There’s a saying that’s says that all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of one match. Do good in be good, that’s it for now…