PPC and SEO: Two sides of the Coin

By Marcus Anderson PPC search engine advertising or Pay per click search engine can help you immediately begin to receive traffic. PPC search engine advertising can provide you with the traffic you have to run and own successful online business. This is the most cost effective way of promoting your business online today. How you can get start to your campaign? There are many ways to start with a PPC search engine and advertising in a few minutes, first find the right company to suit your needs as an advertiser. Common questions: What should be the minimum bid for expected keywords or phrase? Is there a limit on the number of keywords, I can offer? Last but not least, it is kind of premium for me to become a member? Almost all PPC search engines will all this information on their website.

After choosing a solid company and want to launch a PPC search engines advertising campaign, you must choose your keywords and phrases. The second task is very important; you can choose any keyword you want for your PPC search engines advertising campaign with targeted traffic in mind. Bidding only on twice of non targeted keywords it is a waste of money if you get all cliental products is not interested in you.

Take a prospect of spelling and how they can help you gain a cheap off traffic PPC search engine advertising, ex. You sell Caps and say 100 people per month search on the keyword Caps. Just because their fate can not does not mean they can not by a Caps. Now, all you have to do besides sit and relax, you must adjust your daily spending limit. I normally start at $ 10 per day as a test which corresponds to 1000 visitors to my site if I only offer $ 0.01 per keyword or phrase. To find out how much you can afford to pay the keyword is to run simple tests. Want to know how many people it takes to sell an item? Saying the 1000 people have already come to your website and 10 people you have purchased products at a cost of $ 10 each. Thus, it took 100 people to make a sale you then exchanged for $ 10 $ 90 would be an indication that you can set you up all day higher. There are many ways to advertise online and PPC search engine advertising has been one of the most powerful tools for my websites. It's fast and easy traffic, and when you can combine other methods of advertising. You will find PPC Search Engine Advertise much batter then any

Marcus is a senior PPC Search Engine Advertising Consultant with "Thagodz" a Columbia based PPC Search Engine marketing company specializing in PPC Search Engine advertising .

SEO Tools Reviewed - Keyword Helpers

There are a couple of tried and tested SEO tools in the market. Take a look at a few of them that are known to actually work!

If you’re concerned about search engine optimization (and you should be), then you know that keywords are important to your site’s success. However, choosing those keywords can be a challenge. Thankfully, there are SEO tools available that can make the task easier.

SEO Tools : Wordze

If you’re looking for SEO tools to help you conduct keyword research, then Wordze has a number of features you might want to look for in such a tool. When you’re doing a manual search for keywords on your own, you may end up not catching all of the possible words that might help boost your traffic. That’s less likely to happen when you’re using SEO tools like Wordze because you can actually search for words and find deeper levels of related words that might also attract visitors. These are generally words that won’t appear in free keyword tools and that you probably won’t brainstorm on your own.

Besides the keyword research, it also allows you to see your specific competition for a particular keyword or phrase. For example, if you’re looking at a phrase like "English tutoring" you can immediately see which other top sites are using the same phrase.

Effective SEO tools do need to have a lot of features to give them an advantage over free services. With Wordze, you’ll be able to look at which of your specific keywords are bringing in different percentages of your traffic. That will help you refine your marketing efforts. You can also find common misspellings of your keywords so that you can lock onto those potential customers as well.

SEO Tools: Keyword Spy

If you’re interested in doing a different of keyword research then SEO tools like Keyword Spy might actually be useful to you. Unlike Wordze which focuses on the keywords you can use to boost your traffic, Keyword Spy actually helps you see what your competition is specifically doing so you can try to top them and beat them in the search engine rankings.

To do this, you only have to type in a web site address into the tool. The tool will display all of the keywords the site is currently targeting. You can arrange them in a convenient spreadsheet and even add them directly into your campaigns through major search engines.

Another great benefit of SEO tools like this one is it can give you some ideas on which words to target if you’re not experienced in this area yet. New Internet marketers often struggle with selecting the correct keywords for their efforts. With this tool, you can find out which words are working for similar sites. That can give you a great advantage.

These are only two of dozens of SEO tools you’ll find on the Internet to help you with your search engine optimization efforts. The important thing when you’re looking at these tools is to take them for a test drive. Most SEO tools do offer a free trial period before you have to pay a dime. Use that period wisely before making a commitment.

Web Site Submission - How To Increase Your Revenue Results

Once you have created a web site for your business or organization, the next step is to use it to increase your sales. Web site submission is a fast and economical way to do so.

Web site submission arranges for your URL address to be indexed on the major search engines which help to define who you are and what type of business you conduct on the internet. Once the search engine has the information from you to begin the indexing process, you can often be ranked with the big search engines such as Google, MSN and Yahoo fairly quickly. This brings targeted customers to your web site and increases the revenue that results from visitors. Simple mathematics tells you that the more people that view your web site, the more likely you are that sales will result.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a beginning step in web site submission to increase your revenue results. SEO can be done by hiring a professional skilled in the procedures and methods of making your web site most effective. SEO can also be done by learning about the process either through a good tutorial or by taking advantage of some of the great software packages. Be sure to review the software reviews so you know what you are getting and what specialties might limit the software for your particular industry. Either way you refine and polish your web site, you will improve your chances of being indexed with a good score.

Page Ranking

The page ranking is a somewhat arbitrary assignment of quality done by some of the search engines along with indexing the web site. Web site submission depends on review and ranking of the information on the web site in order to determine how and where to index the information included. A high page ranking means your web site is more likely to be seen by searchers, while a low page ranking means your information will be too far down the list for most people to even get to that point on the search engine results page (SERP).

Human readers

Regardless of how creative you are with the search engine optimization techniques and how high your page ranking for the web page you have created it is important to remember that the real reason for web pages and for web site submission is for the human readers who will be viewing the pages. Search engine optimization can't measure creativity. Page ranking doesn't have an 'interesting' index. Even human readers will vary in their responses to a web page. But, it is the humans who make the decision to purchase your product or service and it is the human readers whose attention must be captured.

Page revisions

It is important to keep your web site current and fresh, or visitors will have little or no reason to return. Your web site submission only needs to be done once, though, for the search engine spider to return on a regular basis in order to check for revisions or updates to the page. It is not necessary to resubmit each time you make a change to your web site. However, if you do a major overhaul to your site, you may also want to consider requesting another visit from the search engine robots.

New Technologies Detect Black Hat SEO Methods

There are two categories of SEO methods. Black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Either one of the methods can help you gain a higher ranking status on some of the most popular search engines. But, one is more likely to get your website banned from search engines entirely, and according to recent information, your website may not be safe for long. If you haven’t guessed it, the potential bad seed in this batch is the black hat SEO.

White hat SEO is not going to trick the search engines. When you use white hat SEO methods, you can ensure that you are in fact playing by the rules and should be safe from trouble with your website. Websites that use white hat SEO tend to be very helpful to users, search engines and webmasters themselves.

Black hat SEO is the method that tries to trick the search engines by means of unsavory ways gain higher search engine rankings. Some of the methods used in black hat SEO methods include cloaking, hidden texts and doorway pages. Search engines such as Google have announced that they will penalize websites who use these methods when detected.

You may be wondering why black hat SEO methods are blocked if they work so well to get higher rankings, right? Well, they may work well initially, but in the long run most of the black hat SEO methods are being detected and punished by search engines. These methods have not been approved by Google and other search engines, and they can be frustrating to those who are relying on Google and search engines to provide them with good, relevant search results.

You may get away with black hat SEO methods for a while, but chances are good that you will get caught and when you do, it will not be pretty. Even if you think you know people who have used these methods, or continue to use them on their websites and have nothing but good results, you should remind them that it is only a matter of time before they are banned from search engines.

What might be effective right away to gain good rankings on search engines, will cost you a lot more in the end if you end up getting your website banned from Google entirely. Black hat SEO methods are similar to those of cheating in school. You may get away with it for a while with good results, but eventually you will get caught and then all of the hard work that went into building your online business and website will be wasted.

Using white hat SEO methods may be more time consuming and expensive right away, but if you are diligent and determined, your website can be effectively ranked on Google and other search engines. If you are unsure what methods may be considered black hat SEO, you might want to seek out a professional before you attempt to use them.

SEO - How Early SEO Corrupted The Search Engines

The practice of search engine optimization first came into being in the mid 1990s when the first search engines began cataloguing the contents of the Internet. Initially the entire procedure was fairly honest and a fair reflection of what content there was on the web. Sites were submitted to the search engines and a spider crawled the content and then stored the collected data in a database that could be accessed by individuals performing a search.

When a search engine spider detects new content on the Internet it downloads a page where it is stored on the engine’s own server. Once on the server a second program, known as indexer extract information about the page as well as all of the links it contains. This page is then placed into a depository of pages to be crawled at a later date.

At first, the information that ended up on these early search engines came from the webmasters who were trusted to be honest. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page's content. However the corruption of this system began when webmasters abused meta tags by including keywords that had nothing to do with the content of their pages, to artificially increase page impressions for their Website. This of course also increased their ad revenue from pay per clicks and costs per impressions. Greed soon led to inaccurate, incomplete cataloguing of web pages and too many people being led to pages without content or with misleading content when they conducted a web search. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms with the result that understanding SEO has become much more complicated then it ever has been before and will continue to become more complicated.

Using Blog PR To Promote Your Site

The recent trend of using the press release to promote an online business has emerged with good reason – good press costs very little and can do more for a business than thousands of dollars of marketing. Most businesses use press distribution services like PR Web or PRFree to get the word out about their news. While distribution services certainly can be effective, they tend to miss out on arguably the most influential group of the press – bloggers.

Bloggers mold and shape the opinions of their readers, who are normally the most important in their particular industry, many of whom are also bloggers. Not long after a post from an influential blogger, your news has been picked up by several other bloggers and within days you are all over the blogsphere. Before you know it your site is getting more attention than it would if a story ran in the local newspaper! So how do you get the influential bloggers in your industry to run a story about your business?

Why Would Anyone Do a Story About Your Business?

Are you a new company? Did you just launch a new product that they could review? Did your business win an award? Are you a group of college kids who started a company on savings from your summer jobs? You get the idea. There needs to be a reason that someone would want to read about you. Bloggers take pride in the content they feed their readers. You don't stand a chance of getting a blogger to write about you if you don't have a story that their readers will be interested in.

Research Bloggers in Your Industry

More is less when it comes to contacting bloggers. Buy a list of 1,000 bloggers and send out a generic email to all of them and you'll likely get no response. But send a small amount of personalized emails to the appropriate bloggers and you'll be shocked at how many positive responses you get.

The first step is to make a list of the bloggers that would be interested in your story. You can generally get a feel for whether or not a blogger would be interested in your story by reading a couple of posts and checking out their bio. If they've done a few similar stories in the past or they are heavily involved in your industry, there is a good chance they'll want to hear your story. If not, leave them off your list and move on.

The single best method that I have found to research blogs is the Technorati Blog Directory http://www.technorati.com/blogs/. You can peruse blogs in your industry in order of “authority” - how important Technorati thinks a blog is. This is extremely useful. For example, if you are in the travel industry, you can view a list of the most influential blogs in the world of travel.

Another great way to find the right bloggers is to search through your competitors press sections on their websites to see what blogs have mentioned them. You can also find out who has mentioned your competitors by looking at the sites that have linked to them (type in “links:www.theirsite.com” on Yahoo!). There's a good chance that if they found your competitors story interesting, they'll find your story interesting as well.

Compose Your Email

The best way to contact bloggers is by email. The good news is that most bloggers make themselves easy to access and provide their email addresses on their blogs. The bad news is that most people don't know what to do with said email address once they get it. Use the following outline for your email and you'll see amazing results:

- Have a simple subject. You probably won't get many responses by treating your email like a press release and writing RELEASE in the subject line. Try something simple like “fan of your blog” or “comment about your blog.” You want to make sure they actually read your email and don't mentally mark it as SPAM when they see the subject.

- Start by complementing them. Since you've read their blog and learned about them from their bio, you know quite a bit about them. Use it to your advantage. Complement them on your favorite post, or how cool it is that they worked for XYZ company.

- Request them to post about you (be direct). In three sentences or less, tell them your story, why you think it would be of interest to them and their readers, and respectfully ask that they write a post about it. Be direct and to the point. They will respect that.

- Offer something in return. You have something that could help them. Maybe it's a link back to their blog from your personal blog, or maybe you could provide them with a free product or service that could help them or their business. One way or another, there's something you have to offer them in return for the time spent on a post about you.

- Close with something nice. Thank them for their time and wish them luck with their blog and/or business ventures.

Notice that of the five components of the email, only one is about your story. The rest of the email is spent complimenting them and offering them something. Your chances of getting a positive response have just gone through the roof. Every blogger, no matter how large, likes to hear that people are enjoying their posts.

Respond Promptly and Respectfully

Not everyone is going to agree to run your story. Some will say that they don't do that type of thing or that they don't have time. Since you have been so nice as to compliment them, they will still usually reply either way. Regardless of the response, be sure to thank them for their time and wish them luck with their ventures. You never know when they will encounter someone who needs your product or service in the future (remember, they are in your industry) and if they have a positive image of you and your company they will undoubtedly give you a good recommendation.

Sit Back and Watch the Traffic Roll In

Over the course of the next few weeks you will see post after post appear about your business. Be sure to send another thank you email to the blogger after the post and also be sure to promptly provide whatever you offered them in return. At this point you have developed a mutually beneficial relationship with someone important in your industry that can become invaluable over time.

That wasn't that hard was it? With a little research and a carefully crafted email, any business can effectively use blog PR to drive traffic to their site.

SEO - Tips For Making SEO Copy More Personal

The problem with SEO copy (search engine optimized) is that often reads very robotic, repetitive and cold. However so many marketing experts say that you need to make an emotional connection with your reader in order to make sales. This means that you need to find the fine balance between making your copy sound personal and pleasing the search engine spiders and robots.

First of all never pose yourself an expert or a guru if you are not one. People can usually tell that you aren’t within the first paragraph or so of an article, especially if it is peppered with keywords and not much quality content. This type of content is easily identifiable as it is based on old-fashioned direct sales marketing techniques. Once people see those long sales letters on sites, they know it’s snake oil salesman time. It is better to connect with them on a one to one basis rather than in an imitation of some hotshot copywriter from the 1970s.

Never use the royal "we". Stay away from phrases like "We here at Search Engine City promises to deliver you the best copy” instead make it more personal by using the "you or your" form as in: "You are certain to find a keyword analyzer that is perfect for that special someone at here at Search Engine City.”

Another tip is to try and identify with your audience in some way. For instance if your audience is a bunch of affiliate marketers, refer to the practice of creating blogs with affiliate links as bum marketing which is the nickname for it. Try to write in the niche language that they are used to. Of course if you truly are an expert in your niche then writing this type of SEO enriched, yet user-friendly copy will not be difficult for you at all!

Understanding Organic SEO

In the old days of the Internet, there were no SEO Consultants, automated systems, or all that high technology stuff. A few years ago, in fact, the term "Search Engine Optimization" did not even exist! Website owners struggled with ways and means to get the much-needed hits to their website (never mind if it was not targeted) to hopefully generate the needed revenues. Those were the days of IBM (or "It’s Best done Manually) and Organic SEO.

Organic SEO still refers to the processes and strategies that are undertaken to optimize a website so that it gets good relevance ratings based on the keywords that the site is responsive to. The only difference between Organic SEO and the SEO we now know is that Organic SEO is a manual process vs. the current automated processes of page submission and alteration that characterizes “modern” SEO. Organic SEO focuses on promoting websites on the Natural search engine results also known as organic results in contrast with sponsored links (Pay-Per-Click/PPC). Organic SEO, if you really think about is a "purist" approach to website optimization because nothing is a "black box". As an expert in Organic SEO, you know optimization; you don’t just blindly trust it.

Organic SEO is based on a clear understanding of fundamental concepts, including:

• Search engines and how they work

Obviously, you cannot practice Organic SEO if you don’t even know how the first two letters of SEO (i.e., Search Engine) works. A search engine is a web site that provides the visitor a list of recommended websites to go to, based on a specific keyword or keywords. The rank of a website is statistically determined by what is termed as "key word density" or the ratio of keywords to the total number of words of content in a website. Inbound links and their relevance is another factor that determines your rankings. The gatherer of this statistical data is what is called a "spider" or "spider bot", which is a program whose function is to count the number of times a keyword appears in a website through a process called "crawling".

• Search Engine Optimization

You can’t have Organic SEO without the SEO part, which stands what Search Engine Optimization. SEO’s main goal is simple: bring as many visitors to your website as possible by exerting influence on the search engine to position your website as close to the top of the list as possible. As a result of having more visitors, it is hoped that your website will generate business for you. This result is every Organic SEO practitioner’s clear measure of success.

• Viral Marketing

This is an important concept to understand if you are serious about becoming a good Organic SEO expert. Viral Marketing is a strategy to exponentially increase the number of visitors to your website from a small base that you have developed from your initial Organic SEO strategy. An example of Viral Marketing is to offer visitors to your website an opportunity to generate income from their own website by simply putting in your website’s link on theirs so that when people visit their website, then there is a good chance that they will visit yours. This strategy is certainly a handy component of the arsenal of a practitioner of Organic SEO.

• Optimized Domain Names

One of the simplest concepts to understand, yet also one that is not as easy to implement. Getting a keyword-rich domain name is every Organic SEO consultant’s dream because it carries so much weight in the relevance scale. If you domain name is exactly what you are selling, you will be able to smoothly sail on without much of a problem in the rankings. The problem, of course, is that there is a very high likelihood that the “good” domain names already belong to someone, and this makes an Organic SEO specialist life more difficult.

• Keyword Research

This is the first step on the list of to-dos for an Organic SEO practitioner because it plays a major role in determining your optimization strategy. Since it takes months for any optimization strategy to take effect, an Organic SEO expert’s efforts will be wasted if he makes the mistake of optimizing a website based on keywords that are not as popular as he assumed.

Becoming an Organic SEO specialist is not an easy task at all because it requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals that those utilizing automated systems take for granted. There is a major advantage, however, of Organic SEO vs. the “lazy man’s” SEO: A clear understanding of the concepts allows you to analyze SEO situations more accurately and come up with strategies that are more appropriate and responsive to your website’s needs. Understanding Organic SEO by Moe Tamani

What a Search Engine Optimization Firm Does

Before going into what a Search Engine Optimization firm does, let us first define what “search engine optimization” or SEO is. In “brick-and-mortar” terms, SEO may be compared to placing an advertisement in a medium that caters largely to a particular market segment, e.g., medical journals, fashion magazines, adult cable channels, etc. so that there is a high probability that whatever products or services you offer is what that particular viewing, reading, or listening market segment needs. The “agent” for this type of advertising is the advertising or marketing firm which, when related to cyberspace is the Search Engine Optimization firm.

SEO is the set of activities and strategies implemented (either by yourself or through a Search Engine Optimization firm) that influences a search engine’s “spiderbot” to give your website a high relevance rating which translates into a high ranking in the list of keyword relevant websites. Since it is a targeted approach, the success rate of an SEO strategy (measured in terms of average business per visitor also known as conversion rate) that a Search Engine Optimization firm implements should be higher than, say, online advertising (which may attract more visitors but will include a big share of “just looking” hits, thus resulting to a lower average business per visitor). This ultimately results to lower cost per sale since the resources required to service the visits (which will go down in terms of quantity but increase in terms of quality) goes down.

What does a Search Engine Optimization firm do in order to achieve its objective of ethically optimizing your website? One Search Engine Optimization firm may apply a different set of SEO strategies versus another Search Engine Optimization firm, but they both focus on one aspect: the search engine keyword or keywords. Essentially, the keyword is the major rating criterion of a relevance rating; i.e., how often it appears in the website or content. Although more sophisticated discernment algorithms are being implemented by the search engine’s “spiderbot” to weed out unethical practices (e.g., embedding keywords in articles or content that do not have any logical connection), the keyword density still the key.

Some of the strategies that a Search Engine Optimization firm employs are as follows:

• Keyword Rich Domain Names

This is the most “no brainer” strategy that a Search Engine Optimization firm could employ, yet is one of the most difficult to implement. The proposition of this strategy is that the best way to get a high ranking for a keyword relevant site is to embed the keyword into the domain name. For example, www.recipes.com will obviously get top ranking when the keyword “recipes” is used in the search box (as a side note, if you are looking for recipes, you might even just skip the search engine altogether and instinctively enter www.recipes.com ). The problem with this strategy, of course, is that these domain names are probably owned by someone else already, in which case, the Search Engine Optimization firm could embed the keyword in a longer domain name like, e.g., www.mothers-recipes.com or www.home-cooked-meal-recipes.com , which, when combined with other SEO strategies could potentially even outrank www.recipes.com .

• Content Optimization

In this strategy, the Search Engine Optimization firm ensures that the content is ethically filled with all the relevant keywords to which the website is responsive to. This is accomplished by framing the advertising copy around the keyword and making it appear as many times as relevancy allows, including the keywords in the text articles, etc. The Search Engine Optimization firm has several ways of determining the possible relevance rank of your website based on the level of content optimization.

• Meta-Tag Optimization

All websites use HTML in several parts of the website’s program. In the body of the HTML program are areas that the programmer uses, among other things, for remarks (e.g., to remind him what the code is all about). The content of these areas (called meta-tags) do not have an impact on how the website looks but is “crawled through” by the search engine’s “spiderbot” all the same. Because these meta-tags play a factor in the website’s relevance, a Search Engine Optimization firm will normally embed as many keywords as ethically allowed to into them.

In selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm that you will use to optimize your website, be sure to put a heavy premium on its experience and reputation. Also, avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that engages in unethical (and illegal) practices just to increase the number of visitors to your sites. Avoid a Search Engine Optimization firm that is vague about how it is going to optimize your website. If it has nothing to hide, then it should be transparent as to what it is supposed to do. If you heard about a Search Engine Optimization firm through spam mail, do not even consider it. If the Search Engine Optimization firm charges you a low price without any clear specifics as to what it will do, walk away. Finally, make sure to canvass your requirements before selecting the Search Engine Optimization firm you will use. What a Search Engine Optimization firm does by Moe Tamani

Promote youe website on Google Yahoo! MSN

What’s Best: Blogging Traffic Or SEO Traffic Generation?

I’ve heard it said, and even seen it written, that blogging is better than SEO for getting traffic. Are blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation techniques better for you, or does it not really matter?

Actually, a lot depends on you and which you like best: blogs or traditional websites, and also what you want the traffic for. I also wonder why the distinction is being made, since anybody serious about internet marketing and getting plenty of traffic, will use both. There is really no need to choose one or the other. However, when I hear such arguments I get the feeling that it is more academic than which provides the more traffic. Feelings, however can be wrong, so it is worth discussion.

When you think about it, the type of traffic you get from a blog could very well have different needs and interests to those that reached your site after carrying a search on Google or Yahoo using specific keywords. OK, you can get to blogs from search engines also, and through the use of keywords, but if you are looking to buy something you wouldn’t normally log onto a blog, would you?

Let’s say you wanted the best price for a gross of Titleist golf balls, you wouldn’t visit a blog site. Similarly if wanted to discuss their benefits, you would go to a blog or a forum. Sometimes it gets difficult to tell the difference these days, since blogs are becoming increasingly more interactive, but you get my general drift. I hope!

With a blog you can advertise whatever you want to, and the same is true of a website. However, you are more likely to make a direct purchase from a website, and to seek information from a blog. Hence, the traffic you get on a blog are information seekers and those on your website may also be looking for info, but might also be wanting to make a purchase. So right away we can kind of separate blog readers from website visitors.

It’s not a well defined separation, but bloggers tend not to be looking for something different to what a search engine user is looking for. If you have a blog on your website, your blog page will be likely to attract prospects that will tend to be more regular visitors than those that are checking out your website. If the latter don’t respond to your opt-in form, you will be unlikely to see them again, but a visitor to your blog page might return frequently.

However, to return to the question: what is better, blog traffic or SEO traffic, as long as each is free it doesn’t really matter I would have thought. I suppose that it could be argued that the SEO traffic is more focussed because they have used your specific keywords to get to the page they landed on ,and blog traffic could come from ezines and other sources that are perhaps not specific to any product you are selling. Me, I would accept any traffic no matter where it came from, and quite frankly once the traffic gets to your webpage it is up to you to convert it to sales.

The difference between the two is that if you don’t make an immediate impact with the SEO visitors, you could be struggling to keep them returning to your website, but you are likely to have more time with the bloggers, since they tend to keep coming back to the blog. The SEO visitors might register with your opt-in page, but that only allows you to keep in contact with them, and you still have to try to induce them to return to your website.

On the other hand, the blog readers need no such inducement, since they visit your site each time you publish a new posting. That is assuming that your blog is on your own website, and not on the blog server as many (perhaps most) are.

Perhaps I am completely on the wrong track, but I will keep tabs on it and report on my website what my findings are regarding blog traffic and SEO traffic, and whether or not one tends to buy more that the other. It is useful to know, since for a website that is designed to sell products it can determine whether or not it is worth having a blog on your site or keep trying to improve your SEO.

That is a big decision to make, and if it could make the difference between success and failure then it should be determines mathematically and scientifically rather than by conjecture and opinion. It is scientific testing that frequently makes the difference between those that are successful in internet marketing and those that fail.

So, is blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation the best? Who knows? I hope to know shortly though, and I will share it with you on my site when I finish my testing. What’s best: Blogging traffic or SEO traffic generation? by Peter Nisbet

Using A Blog To Promote Your Business

Using a blog to promote your wellness business is a very effective marketing tool. What is great about using blogs is that you can promote your wellness business absolutely free. There are many places on the Internet that you can set up a blog without it costing you a single penny. With a new home business it is important to maximize promotion without spending all your profits on advertising and marketing. Using a blog is one of the methods that you can use to promote your wellness business without it emptying your business budget.

You do not have to be a computer wiz, internet wiz or programmer to set up an attractive blog. There are many places on the Internet that have blogs already set up for you. All that you have to do is create a free account, select the name for you blog and start making blog posts. It’s literally that simple without requiring that you know how to program or pay any type of membership fees or hosting fees. This is why blogging is ideal for promotion because it’s so simple to do.

Once you have your blog selected and your account created, it is time to name your blog. When selecting a name choose something that fits both the wellness industry and compliments the types of products that you will be promoting for your wellness business. For example, if you sell weight loss products you could name your blog something such as Skinny Tips. This would let others know the general theme of the blog.

The blog setup will ask you to create a description for you blog. Take the time to write out several descriptions until you have just the perfect one. The description that you post on the blog will often be what is used when search engines pick up your blog and list it in the pages. For the example of the skinny tips blog you could do a description such as helpful tips and information for weight loss. The description then further explains your blog so that more people are likely to read your posts because they will know what the blog is going to be about before they start reading.

What should you write about for your blog? One of the top things to write about is the general topic of the blog. Blogs with a lot of different topics can get confusing to readers. They are successful but the purpose of this type of business blog is to promote your wellness home business. If for example you had the Skinny Tips blog, you could write short pieces about losing weight, eating well and exercising. You can even write reviews for the different products that you are promoting. In the reviews, you can link directly to the product to encourage visitors to visit your main wellness small home business Internet site.

The primary purpose of blogs is to provide information. Providing a great deal of information is the key to a successful blog for business. You get people that would not normally visit a wellness product site to come and read your blog. After reading your blog on a regular basis, visitors will naturally go and visit your business site. Use the blog as a portal to get traffic to your website and not as a big advertisement. People will stay and read the information if it is informative and entertaining. Using a blog to promote your Business by Zachary Thompson

How Not To Waste Your Time Submitting To Dead Directories

Every webmaster knows that one of the link building methods is submitting to web directories.

Let's say you spend 1 minute submitting to one directory and you submit to 50 directories. That's 50 minutes. If one quarter of them are dead this equals 12 minutes wasted.

As we all know, time is money and this mean , simply, wasted money.

Web directories numbers are vastly increasing this days and, as many are created every day, a lot of them also die, for various reasons, one of them being that the directory owner got bored of his toy and no longer review the submitted links.

In a couple of months the directory domain expire or, the most common situation, the directory freeze and no new links are added.

Such directories are many and avoid submitting to them must be one of webmasters top things to watch.

How to do that ? Look for websites that keep lists of directories and check them often.

If you use a list and from the first 10 directories you find half that changed submission type or have thousands of links pending (while having hundreds approved) than you can be sure that your list source is not so good.

Try another source for your directory list, submitting to a low number of directories on that list and see how accurate the list is. You will find a good and updated list pretty fast this way, by removing bad sources.

The situation fits even we change directory for article directory, the same problem is still valid when submitting articles to article directory sites.

If you have multiple sites try submitting an article to some article sites and watch their review time.

Sometime submitting to a high pr directory where your link is never reviewed is worse that submitting to a lower pr directory but where your link has a chance to show up in your lifetime. How not to waste your time submitting to dead directories by Enache Vladian

Top Tips for Web Design

This article takes a look at the top 10 web design tips for users at any level. It will give you 10 complete different points to contemplate when you next begin a site design or when talking to your web design consultant/employee.

Design is never straight forward and web design has the additional unpredictable complication of technology thrown in. This means that you need to consider the consequences of your design decisions and how it will effect the most important people who see your site, the users themselves. The following tips should help you consider this and have a positive effect on your site and its users.

1. Navigation & Functionality

You should never sacrifice overall functionality for artistic extravagance. It is highly unlikely your site will ever achieve its purpose if the people who visit it cannot clearly and easily navigate around it.

Your site should look good but first and foremost consider how someone who knows nothing about the site would think when they landed there.

Something occurring in website frequently these days is Mystery Meat Navigation. This is a term coined by Vincent Flanders and it is used to describe site where navigation structures are so obscure and difficult to process that users cannot identify them at all and end up running there mouse across whole sections of a screen just to identify hyperlinks.

2. Images

People say images are worth a 1000 words and in web design that’s true in 2 ways. Firstly an image can do a lot more than text in some situation but secondly they are much, much bigger files with a higher download time.

It is widely accepted users will click away from a page that takes longer than 5-10 seconds to load and every time you put an image in a page you are increasing the likelihood of this happening. Additionally each image you imbed into a page design activates an additional HTTP request to your server so dividing an image into smaller ones or using lots of small images across a page does not solve the problem.

ALT tags should also be factored into the code of a website. They are a huge help to people who have either images turned off in a browse, mobile broswers that can’t read the images or a random error preventing the image from showing. They also hold a small SEO benefit.

3. Tables

It is advised that you use CSS and not tables to format a document but in some cases tables can be necessary. Remember one thing however, a table cannot be displayed until it has fully loaded. This can potentially cause a huge problem for users as they wait for the page to load, nothing appears then out of nowhere the whole page is done.

Someone is much more likely to click away when nothing is loading than when they can see progress.

4. Fonts

Don’t design sites to use fonts only you have, chances are they will be converted into some dull font and ruin the effect you were trying to achieve. Save special fonts for specific headers and convert them to images. Make the rest of your site in standard fonts so that as many browsers as possible will see it in the way you meant it to be. Recommended fonts for high scale compatibility are Arial, Verdana, Courier, Tahoma and Helvetica.

5. Plug-Ins

Plug-ins hold a lot of potential for both users and designers but it can easily be misused and misguided.

Plug-ins have a many forms and uses, the most popular being Java and Flash Player. I have heard a lot of people say that these plug-ins are “safe” and that everyone has them but this is simply not true. Every plug-in has a stack of different versions and connects differently depending on the browser the user is surfing with.

Think if your users will really want to browse to other sites to download a plug-in, restart the browser then navigate back. If the answer is no use other tricks at your disposal to make your page unique and save the big guns that are Flash and Java for times where it is essential.

6. Tags

The “tags” I am referring to hear are meta keywords and description, title, alt and h1 tags. Together these tags help manage your sites search engine optimisation (SEO) potential and this is defiantly something not to overlook. Helping people find your site will bring more traffic in and more conversion if you are a retail site.

The higher search engines rank you the more traffic will filter down and the more successful your site will be. Try to keep a constant theme running through all your tags but do so in a subtle way. Splashing the same word 1000 times on your page will only have negative effects so make sure you strike the correct balance between informative and spammy.

7. Browsers

In a perfect world everyone would use the same browser and your website would look the same on everyone’s screen but unfortunately this is not the case. Every browser has its own specific functions and styles and learning to make you code cooperate with both can present some serious problems.

The three you really need to concern yourself with are Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. These make up a good 95% of the browser market at the very least and while there are some additional popular browser I would not recommend you spend time optimising code for the rest.

The only thing you can do is do your best and stay away from browser specific functions, you’ll never make someone get a new browser.

8. Pop Ups

Something that is very important to remember is that the user should be in control of their browser and desktop. Do not place unnecessary pop ups and window opening links everywhere and the user will feel they have lost control of the site, become annoyed and close the windows.

There are some exceptions to using the (_blank) attribute but I would steer clear whenever possible.

9. Text Layout

Text is part of your design to and positioning it correctly on the page is very important. Try to get all the copy you need as early in the design process as possible. This means you will be able to design around the copy instead of trying to cram it into smaller spaces because someone wrote twice as much copy as they said they were going to.

Use the right alignment for the right situation, remember 99% of people will prefer left align and while justified look aesthetically better it can be very difficult to read in longer bouts.

10. Site Search

In this day and age finding what you want on a website in paramount. After you have followed the first tip on navigation you should also provide a search bar on your site so that a visitor who cannot immediately see what they are looking for can search. Many internet studies have seen the success of these smaller additions to your site and free ones are available from Google and many other SE operators.

Conclusion

Taking these 10 tips into account will help you design a more user-friendly and successful website, sometime it may seem like they are hindering your grand design but failing to take notice may result in your site being a very pretty stop sign for browsers. Just because you can find your way around your Flash menu system that takes 6 minutes to load doesn’t mean Mrs Smith who needs the product can. Top Tips for Web Design by Frank Woodford

MySpace Website Traffic Generation: Drive Massive Traffic Using MySpace

One of the most popular social networking site on the web is MySpace.

MySpace is a place that attracts massive traffic from search engines and repeat traffic from millions of visitors from their member base.

If you are not trying to direct some traffic to your website using MySpace you are leaving huge piles of targeted website traffic right on the table.

Having millions of members makes it an excellent place for us to focus to drive massive website traffic.

Here are 5 killer tactics to drive traffic using myspace...

1. Customize your MySpace page.

Design your own page, this will help you to bring out your personality. Make it beneficial by including your video, audio, graphics and content that will be valued by the visitors in your niche.

To drive traffic to your site donot forget to embed your websites url out there.

2. MySpace Blog.

Make sure to create your myspace blog.

Blog with myspace, this will help you to create your credibility as an expert in your niche.

Post your articles and inlude your website link out there. This will make sure that you provide valuable information to your visitors and in turn this will also help to boost your website traffic. This will make sure that members consider you as an expert in your niche and this will boost your credibility and they will start trusting you.

3. Classified Ad Section.

Drive traffic using the classified ad section of your myspace.

Make sure that your ads in the classified ads section are keyword rich.

This will be useful in increasing your click through rates.

4. Increase Your Network.

Constantly keep looking for members who might be interested in your niche.

Invite them and make sure that you make them your friends.

Ask them their needs and wants. Help them to solve their problems. And then strategically introduce themt to your products and services.

5. Keep Your Profile Updated.

Give them new valuable information on your page every time.

Post new informative articles, photos or just keep updating your blog with valuable keyword riche content. MySpace Website Traffic Generation Drive Massive Traffic Using MySpace by Murtuza Abbas

6 Secret Traffic Strategies

Building a website is not all you need to do. Once you have a site you need to know how to drive traffic to the site. The following are 6 traffic strategies that you can apply to immediately drive targeted traffic to your website. Learn how to transform your site quickly and easily.

The key to succeeding in any internet related business is traffic. So then, how do you get visitors to flow to your site? Driving customers, clients, or readers to make your website a place that they regularly visit is really not hard to do. Driving traffic does not just happen on its own. You need to plan and execute the plan to make it happen.

1. Consider visiting other sites that are similar to yours. Visit the blog or forum of these sites and post a message with a back link to your site. A back link is simply the URL (address) or your site. Needless to say you need to put the back link in the context of a short sentence or message. If the site allows you to have a signature, then add a link to your site in your signature.

2. Create a blog with a RSS feed that notifies subscribers whenever you have updated information. Then create new content in your blog regularly. You will find that others will begin to link to you from their own pages and list you as a valuable source of information.

3. Start with Free traffic techniques and then graduate to paid traffic. Makes sense? Common sense will make you successful sooner! Traffic exchanges can quickly bring in a lot of traffic. There are plenty of good free traffic resources. Consider using Traffic Swarm. Open a free account or sign up as a pro. I started with a free account then graduated to pro. Pro will allow you to gain more points sooner and benefit from your downline.

4. SEO mean Search Engine Optimization and is one of the best things you can do for your business. SEO will help you generate targeted traffic for your website. Targeted traffic means that the people that visit your website will actually be looking for what you have to offer! Techniques like keyword density within paragraphs as well as keyword placement within the title of the webpage, Meta tags and the bolding, underline and italicizing of keywords within the webpage are a few of the SEO techniques that will impact traffic to your site. You may learn more about this at enlightenedsource.org

5. Use safe linking practices. Set up linking arrangements that appear natural. You only want to link to site related to your keywords and target market. Just having links is not what you want to do. In fact you will be penalized for just having links. It is not the number of links that matter. What matters is if the sites you link to be related to your site and that those site you link to have a rank of 3 or higher.

6. Good site content is very important. Search engines love content, and so do your visitors! Fresh content will keep your visitors coming back to your website at their own will and you’ll naturally get higher results at search engines