» Posts Tagged ‘search engine rankings’
Optimizing Tactics For Generating Website Traffic
Sunday, June 1st, 2008Internet marketing has been around for as long as there has been the internet. It really took off, though, once the World Wide Web caught fire in the late 1990’s.
What many people new to internet marketing lose site of, or perhaps didn’t know to begin with, is that internet marketing is based on the fundamental principles of marketing. It just so happens that internet marketers use those principles with a new medium, the web, to reach buyers.
The fundamental principle of marketing is - if you want to sell anything, you need prospective customers.
For many people, knowing how to generate massive amounts of traffic is the "missing link" to internet marketing.
Everyday there are lots of people who struggle to create websites and products, make them look pretty good and then… nothing. Everything was built and nobody showed up!
This is one of the biggest reasons people quit before they are successful.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There is no exact strategy that is guaranteed to bring you millions of visitors everyday. However, there are proven techniques for generating huge amounts of traffic, some very quickly and some for free.
Higher traffíc increases the potential for sales and referral commissions. The goal is to boost search engine traffic because this means a wider audience and long-term profit from various sources like ads. That is why there is such a lot of innovation in the field of search engine optimization (SEO).
Long Tails and How They Help
One of the most recent techniques, and a very effective one at that, is the use of LONG TAIL keywords to direct search engine traffic to your website.
The term may sound intimidating, but all it refers to is a new marketing trend. In the past, a few major keywords were identified to pull traffic through search engines. In the new model, websites will be drawing their business from a large variety of low-volume search queries or phrases. So, it’s goodbye to all those oft-used, clichéd keywords.
This brings about a paradigm shift in your strategy to identify keywords and phrases. Instead of opting for the most obvious keywords like ‘Makíng money online’, web marketers now have to identify several keyword phrases that attract streams of low volume traffic. The combined action of several streams of low-volume traffic will eventually add up to high revenue.
To identify Long Tails or multi-word search queries (for that is what they are), you have to pick out the actual phrases that visitors use to arrive at your website. These key phrases are more specific than general. They embody the specific information users are looking for. So, a phrase like "Top 5 SEO techniques to earn money online" will pull in more targeted traffíc than ‘makíng money online’. Ultimately, such a strategy leads to an overall jump in web traffíc.
For example, ‘Self-hypnosis’ is a general keyword. The keyword phrases within this niche would be ‘Self-hypnosis to lose weíght’ or ‘using self-hypnosis techniques to improve memory’ or ‘benefits of self-hypnosis for controlling anger’.
Methods to Identify Keyword Phrases
Use tracking programs: Certain automated programs generate a number of subject-specific keyword phrases. But you will still have to filter and select specific phrases from a long catalog of results. Further to this, you may have to run your selected phrases through a search volume analyzer, to zero in on the top phrases.
Keyword research tools: Tools like Google’s Keywords Tool can help determine the popularity of keywords, thus enabling you to develop a wide variety of secondary keywords to improve web traffíc to your site. Stringing together these words should enable you to identify keyword phrases.
Search boxes: Using on-site search boxes will enable you to monitor specific keyword phrases your visitors are looking for. This way, you get direct feedback from your visitors. This is an amazing method you can use to learn more about the general public’s search habits.
Check out your competition: Find out what phrases they are using. Search their meta tags, titles and headers. Here, all the work has been done for you. You only need to fine-tune the words and string them together to make phrases that will pull lots of search engine traffic. Keyword parsing tools help you analyze other websites.
Advantages
By using keyword phrases, you reap a number of benefits:
* High search-engine rankings: Competition will be weaker for the phrases you have identified so you can easily climb to the top of search engine rankings for your particular choice of phrase.
* Higher conversion rates: Since you are using the actual phrase your visitors are looking for, the website traffic you get is highly targeted. People who come to you in this manner are more likely to click the ‘Buy Now’ button than people who come in out of curiosity.
* Increased inflow: Since you will be using many keyword phrases, you will build up several streams of low-volume customers. These streams will improve your search engine traffic.
* Make more money: Your monetizing potential is high when you pull in search engine traffic because people who come to you are serious about your product, service or information. They are more likely to subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feeds.
Using Long Tails on your websites or Blogs will undoubtedly improve web traffíc to your site.
And of course, more traffíc is always good news!
source: SiteProNews.com
How Anyone Can Improve Their Search Engine Rankings
Friday, March 14th, 2008The goal of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information to its users. It’s in the best interests of the search engines to be relevant because if the information returned is not relevant, the web user will use a different search engine and this will take money out of their (massive) pockets.
The majority of searches worldwide are conducted on 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).
Are you familiar with algebra? The search engines use mathematical formulas called ‘algorithms’ to evaluate your website’s relevance in relation to ’search terms’ or ‘keywords’. Each search engine uses different algorithms (which are not disclosed to the public), which focus on 2 main areas which I call: Content and Link Popularity.
The term ‘link popularity’ as I refer to it, means: "How authoritative your website is in the eyes of the search engines according to the amount of links you have and the quality and relevance of those links." (When compared to the content on your website and your competitors’ websites).
This means any content in your website including: all text, images, audio and videos.
PageRank™ is a series of algorithms that was invented by Serge Brin and Larry Page, (the billionaire founders of Google) in 1998 and is constantly evolving.
Google’s description of Pagerank:
"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes or links a page receives, it also analyzes the pages that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’."
PageRank (from here on I will refer to it as PR) works on a scale from 0 - 10, with 0 being lowest and 10 being highest. The higher your PR is, the more authoritative your site is.
Each website that links to you will give you some of their PR (if they have any) and vice versa. A great analogy is that PR is like water. The higher the PR of the website that links to you, the more water that they will give you. It’s important to remember though that if that webpage is already giving water (linking) to lots of other sites, they will not give you as much as they would if they weren’t linking to so many sites.
Most websites have the highest PR on their homepage because that’s where the majority of their incoming links point to. A common theme is that a website will have a high PR on their homepage, but low or no PR on most of their internal pages.
It is important to have "deep links", these are links going to a page in your site other than your homepage.
FAQs:
Do I need to have a high PR to get into the top listings of the search engines?
That’s a tricky question, my answer is Yes and No! Each of the search engines has different criteria when it comes to listing your website on their first page. It is possible that you could have PR of zero and get the first listing. However, this would most likely be only on a keyword with no competition. Example: "vanilla carrot croisants" Obviously this is not a word that anyone is typing into the search engines, (as of now lol).
If the keyword you are trying to get high rankings on is competitive, usually the top spots go to relevant sites that have the highest PR.
As the PageRank formula is an algorithm, how many links would it take from a PR 4 site webpage to equal one link from a PR5 site?
The answer to this is kept top secret by Google and Yahoo, but some industry experts predict that you would need between 8-10. So if that is true than it would take from 60-100 PR3 links to equal just 1 PR5 link based on PR alone.
Personally I think this is just a vague guideline that doesn’t hold true in many cases. A PR5 link will be more or less valuable depending on: how many pages it is already linking to, it’s relevance to your website theme, and other hidden factors.
How do I get onto the first page of Google?
Getting onto the first page of Google (and the other search engines) for a particular keyword or keyword phrase depends on 3 factors:
*Content - what your webpage contents say that it is about in relation to a particular keyword.
*Link Reputation - what other web-pages say your webpage is about (based on the words in and around the links that point to your website) and the determined quality and authority of those web-pages.
*Authority - how important your website is in the "eyes" of the search engines based on the amount of links and quality of links pointing to your site (PageRank)
The position that your site will get depends on the ’score’ that it receives based on these factors. Remember that this ’score’ is always in relation to a particular keyword.
If your website is about "chocolate cake recipes" (are you getting hungry yet?), your website can achieve rankings related to this keyword. You won’t be able to rank for "banana pudding" or "creme brule" unless you have that content in your website.
If you would like to get higher search engine rankings I suggest you start to learn about how to optimize your content and how to get quality links to your site. Happy Optimizing!
source: Entireweb.com
© icreativepro llc | Terms and Conditions | Powered by WordPress