There are thousands of expert SEO service providers in the market today who offer SEO services like improving the visibility of your website on the search engines as well diverting the right kind of traffic to your site who in turn convert into your potential customers. But how do you actually choose the best SEO expert for your online website promotion campaign? Well, the points below will help you to get the answer to this question:

Do Some Research

This is particularly important and advantageous for you if you know a bit about SEO. Search online about this topic and try to get some information to determine the exact needs of your website. Doing research will also help you to carry out a technical discussion with your SEO company/expert.

Seek for testimonials from your SEO Company

Ask for testimonials from the SEO Company and see if they are genuine or just publicity. Contact the previous clients of the company and take their feedback regarding their experience with the company. Ask them if they have got back services worth their money.

Track the companies Experience

Try to judge how far the SEO company’s competence can help you with your SEO needs. Check if the work done by the SEO expert previously is related to what your current task is.

Set a discussion

Communication is very important for your optimization campaign to become successful. You need to have an open and honest discussion with your SEO expert. The manner in which the SEO expert engages with you in a conversation is a good cue of how far he can help you. If he listens to you meticulously and attentively besides going into the details of your project, you can be rest assured that you have someone who will provide you with personalized services.

These recommended steps will definitely ensure that you hire a good and reliable SEO expert. Always remember that all of your action has direct & big impact on your business. Therefore, willingly spend ample amount of time and attention to find an expert SEO service provider. You certainly do not want to link your business with any unknown person, so why to take lightly the matter of hiring a SEO expert?

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And as for free web hosting there are plenty of places to get it from.

As spread as they are, if you are not a stranger to the whole Internet experience, you might even have a web site hosted for free. Are you satisfied with your provider? Is it everything you wanted? Probably not. Anyway it is true that is comes with no cost and no other aggravations… or are there any?

Free web hosting cost no money but what can you expect from one?

Your web site will be turned into an advertising machine that works for the free web host. Expect, banners, pop up windows, frames. They will all mess the look of your web site in terms of design and accessibility for your visitors that might be literally flooded with popups almost after every click-through.

You can’t make advertising revenue of your web site, as most free web hosts don’t allow it. This is not such a big issue when you are maintaining a personal web site, but the cutting-off advertising revenues can mean significant losses for a business. For this last case, only a paid web hosting solution might be the right answer.

Very little space for your web pages. With free web hosting provider offering 5 to 15 MB of disk space, your site’s expansion will severely restricted. Growing your web site above the offered quota would result in transferring to a paid plan offered by the same hosting provider or finding a different paid web-hosting provider. In both cases you end paying for your hosting and you might loose traffic to your web site due to changing hosts.

No online store can go without secure server to enable secure online credit card processing. The great majority of free hosts don’t support secure web servers. Customers fearing fraud and concerned about their personal information will make it impossible, at least very hard for an online store to survive on a free host. And anyway, have you ever heard of a successful online store hosted by a free web host? None will hear from yours either.

The uptime of your web site will be like the weather forecast. Hope for good, but prepare for the worse. Downtime through free web hosts is unfortunately very common. As web hosts generate their revenues from advertising, they don’t feel very much compelled to care for the web site of a subscriber who doesn’t pay them anyway.

To whom will you turn when experiencing the abovementioned downtime or other technical problem with your web site? Free web hosts usually have a limited budget and don’t afford to hire large customer support teams, if any. You will find yourself alone, staring at the FAQ page.

Your domain name will be measured in feet and will tell nothing or very little of your business. This obviously results in low traffic scores, as your visitors won’t be able to remember your URL. Can you rely only on search engines, linked sites and people bookmarking your web site? If yes, at least consider the fact that in the age when companies try to create a personalized image, your web site will be condemned to be just another subdomain of your free host.

Will your customers trust a business hosted by a free web host? What credibility will your web site inspire? Not a very high one.

The above list is really rather long, but as surprisingly as it might be, it is far from being complete. Other additions to it could be that free web hosts not always offer FTP access to your web site file, or you only have one e-mail address to work with and probably looks like mysite@anotherfreeserver.com.

Yes, paid web hosting requires money, but the prices are lower than they used to be, and the advantages are rather impressive. Just turn all the above you can’t… or you have to do without… list around.

You are searching for a solution to host your business or even a professional personal web site, don’t look for it at a free web host.

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When coming to web hosting, many face the dilemma of choosing between free or paid web hosting. Although the costs associated with paid web hosting is rather small, it’s still money.

An easy and money free solution might seem to be registering it with a free web-hosting provider. They come in large numbers today and the 10-20 Megs of free personal space they usually offer sounds tempting. Not to mention that some of them even offer POP3 for your e-mail address on their web site or FTP access to your files on the web site.

So it looks like all this is building up to become quite an alternative to spending dear money for almost the same thing. I mean paid web hosting for an individual’s web site sound a little pretentious, doesn’t it?

Sure paid web hosting gives some more space, quite a few more features and all that, but do you need them anyway? You probably just need a web server that can feed .HTML and maybe some simple java scripts to your visitor. It’s not like you are ever going to need an SQL database, support for .ASP or .PHP. You just want your own web site, not an e-commerce solution or you are ever going to need more than one e-mail address for your own use.

A more careful look at the matter is likely to make the right decision easier to take. As a matter of fact, depending on the objectives trusted to your personal web site, the decision between free or cheap almost dictates itself. You should also keep in mind that you actually trusting your virtual image to the web host.

In exchange for the hosting you won’t be asked for money, but there could be banners, hot links, frames, popup windows or other forms of online advertising that will interfere with the content of your web site, possibly having a bad effect on its look and almost certainly annoying your visitors.

Another minus is that your traffic is not likely to attain very high values due to the long domain name. People are not going to return to your web site simply because they forgot its URL. Therefore if people haven’t added your site to their bookmarks, and if your web site is not easily reachable through search engine search or fro other linked sites, it is very likely that your traffic scores would not be very impressive.

A personal web site could be very useful asset in promoting your professional image to potential or actual employers and business contacts. Regardless we are considering the URL or e-mail address, what would an employer for example think when handed a business card with an e-mail address like yourname@freeserver.com. Would you feel comfortable going to a job interview and leaving your resume referring to your online portfolio available at [http://www.yourname.yetanotherfreehost.com?] All your effort and skill displayed by your web content would be almost surely hurt by as little as your URL. Not fair, but likely.

A part of the image of successful professionals nowadays is a good personal website. It is well known that success generates success. The look of a personal URL and e-mail such us [http://www.yourname.biz] or contact@yourname.com would definitely benefit to your image as a professional. As you were diligent enough to have a personal website, the matter of trusting it to a free web host or investing an additional and usual small amount of money might be the difference of being associated with a success story of your career or with the cliché of a quite all right fellow that is barely struggling and would make compromises even when it comes to its image.

Any problems with the web host, possible downtime, and narrow bandwidth will chase your visitors away and will be associated to your web site.

On the other hand, if your are just stating your experience with the World Wide Web, or if your are setting up a web site with only close friends and relatives as intended audience, a free web host might just do it for you. These are just a few of the examples of having a good reason to publish your web site on a free hosting provider.

Free web hosts helped thousands of people to familiarize themselves with the Internet experience, as first cradles for their web presence. This is one of the reasons free web hosts have contributed to the overall popularity of the Internet. As comfortable as cradles are, you can’t spend your whole life in the cradle!

So, if you are planning to have a web site to represent you online and you want to be taken seriously, to actually enhance your personal image, make right. Make your web site a living proof of your thoroughness and start with your URL.

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Fundamentals and Jargon Watch

All traffic analysis tools rely primarily upon information that is extracted from log files; i.e. files that are maintained on your server which show where a visitor came from, what keyword(s) they used to find your site (if applicable), what Operating System and Browser versions they are using, etc. There are literally hundreds of excellent log file analysis tools that can be located via CNet’s Download.com or TuCows – both sites are excellent resources for software and information.

It’s critical in today’s bottom line business environment to have the ability to analyze web traffic (visitors) and patterns and then integrate this knowledge with your overall business processes – what do you pay for traffic, is it converting (people are buying your goods and services), how long are people staying on specific sections or pages of your web site, what marketing expenditures are working and which aren’t!

You know your entering the reality distortion field (we marketing types need to justify our fees & services) and need to raise your jargon filters to stun level when you here and/or see these keywords; i.e. clickstream traffic (fancy way of saying traffic or visitors delivered via mouse clicks to your web site), ebusiness solutions (meaning – selling your products/services via an ecommerce site) or my all-time personal favorite, “ebusiness intelligence” (what’s ebusiness and what determines if it’s “intelligent”).

Traffic Counter Applications

First and foremost, do you really need a comprehensive product like Web Trends (more on the different applications later) or can you get by with a click (traffic) counter application like the Hit Box? The latter company provides a free plain vanilla traffic counter which can be easily set up in minutes via your web site. Hit Box is a great product and used by hundreds of thousands of web sites, so it may be sufficient for your business, if you just want very basic info (“Page Views and Daily Unique Visitors) and don’t mind advertising for another company via your web site.

But, there are some downsides to utilizing Hit Box, you must install their “button” on your Index (home) page and it only provides you with basic traffic information (how much per day with a forecast based on these numbers). You can upgrade to their HitBox Professional which is very similar to Web Trends basic application (“Web Trends Log Analyzer”) – but, you have to pay for this service on a traffic basis which can get expensive, depending on your overall traffic

Web Trends Applications and Interface

Web Trends (the company) was acquired by netiQ, Inc. the parent company about 18 months ago due to their strong market leadership position with web traffic analysis software. Like many good web-focused software companies, netiQ enables you to download all of their apps for a 30 day trial period. Estimates range from 60-80% market share for one of their three primary products; i.e. “Web Trends Log Analyzer,” their baseline $500. USD application which is a good solution for most web sites that have a single domain or under 25 in total; “Web Trends Analysis Suite” (SRP $2.5K USD), which incorporates the functionality of the Log Analyzer product and adds more features for managing bandwidth usage (interior and external), monitoring and alerting an IT Manager or Department for server related problems and handles up to 100 domains (sites); the “Web Trends Intelligence Suite” is their top of the line product (pricing varies depending on bundled services) geared for enterprise customers, it includes integration and training services for integrating the application with Online Analytics Processing Tools (“OLAP” yes another ebiz acronym) or other types of reporting tools.

We’ve been using and recommending Web Trends to clients for years primarily because of its interface and functionality. It’s a browser-enabled app, meaning anyone with a browser (IE or Netscape) can view reports and data. The reports are presented in a straightforward manner that includes basic pie chart or bar types of graphics – you can easily tell at a glance what your visitor traffic was for a given period, where they came from, what pages they visited and how long they stayed on specific pages. You don’t need to be a technologist or a marketing geek to use this application – see below for practical tips.

Practical Usage

So what do you want to measure and what type of custom reports do you want to run once you get the software installed? You will want to measure how much traffic (visitors) is coming to your web site per day, week, month, where they are coming from (country of origin), and where visitors going on your web site; i.e. home page, internal pages and of these what specific pages; i.e. About Us Products, Services your Shopping Cart, etc. Pay careful attention to usage times, how long people are staying on specific pages; too long may indicate they can’t figure out your content, or your content is so good its meaningful and educational. For example, if your “White Paper Resource” section is the most frequently visited and the visitor sessions (time elements) are long (2-4 minutes) then this means your content is being well received. But, if everyone is just reading your White Papers but not filling out your response forms then you may need to alter some aspects of your business processes and how you communicate them via your web site.

Web Trends compliments ongoing advertising campaigns and processes – it lets you capture critical ROI (“Return on Investment”) information by giving you an accurate picture of traffic and usage patterns that should correlate with what your ad agency or marketing partner is telling you or confirming with their own reports. For example: If your deploying an opt-in e-mail campaign and bringing people to a specific “landing page” (specific page where people are directed to that may include an “offer”) you need to carefully monitor if people are clicking through to the page and how long they are staying and/or going to your shopping cart to purchase a product or a registration fulfillment page. If the session times (how long they stay on a page) are short and people aren’t filling out a form or converting (purchasing or taking a specific action) then you clearly have some work to do on your web site content and or business processes.

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Make SEO a Marketing Priority. On some engagements, the SEO is almost entirely self-sufficient. On others, he or she might depend on the director of marketing, the president, the web designer or IT support to help facilitate the SEO effort. Some of these folks might not see the value of the optimization and don’t view SEO related efforts as a priority. If you can let your team know the critical nature of the work (and your SEO should be willing to help in this effort), the expected results should be achieved that much faster.

Learn enough about SEO in order to ask good questions. Over time, the talented stable of Search Engine Marketing writers at Search Engine Guide have produced a large number of articles covering almost every aspect of the SEO process. Read up. Become familiar with the terminology and concepts. At minimum, you need to be conversant enough to evaluate the metrics of the campaign.

But don’t tell your SEO how to do the work. Too much knowledge can be a dangerous thing for some clients because they lack the experience to place their knowledge within the context of the whole SEO process. Such clients may even feel empowered enough to tell their SEO vendor to take a course of action that will damage their efforts to obtain targeted natural search traffic. But if you have done proper due diligence in choosing a knowledgeable and ethical SEO expert, you shouldn’t have any trouble staying on the right track. Your chosen professional will probably be appreciative that you’ve educated yourself about the process and will be glad to answer your “tough” questions. All reputable SEO vendors should be open and transparent about their methods and work process…don’t work with any that aren’t. And if you are comfortable with your SEO expert, the value of his or her experience should be easily discernible.

Good SEO advice can smell funny. Bad SEO advice stinks. Sometimes it has been a challenge explaining the merits of link-exchange or RSS feeds to SEO novices. Many marketing professionals have cringed when I’ve recommended having at least 250 words on the website home page. Fortunately, I’ve been able to rely upon my own SEO experiences to demonstrate the value of my advice and, if necessary, I can seek out the authority of other experts in the field to support my views. But, “rogue SEO’s” have damaged many websites by convincing site owners to allow them to engage in practices such as link farms, hidden text, and cloaking that violate search engine guidelines. If you have educated yourself enough about SEO to be conversant in the terminology and techniques, you should be able to smell the odor before you step in the poop.

Well-run SEO campaigns still have hiccups. Search engines periodically change their algorithms which can be a boon or a bust for clients. Most recently, Google’s “Jagger” update hurt many websites that followed SEO best practices. I have a client who had an 18-month-old domain that lost excellent Google rankings that I helped achieve in a very competitive field. I explained that based upon my research (and reported by many other SEO’s through articles and forums) that Google has algorithmically implemented the following precepts: 1) It is very difficult for new domains to rank well for competitive terms and 2) Many inbound links must age for 6-12 months before they become effective. Now, it is incumbent upon me to chart a new course to help the client regain what was lost. Conversely, Jagger gave some of my clients excellent results far more quickly than I could have expected.

Measure results. A high-level web analytics solution like Clicktracks 6 (which I use and highly recommend) is essential to measure the success of your campaign. If you are spending thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on SEO, don’t rely on a $10 per month web stats package. Your SEO vendor should offer advanced web analytics as part of the service…shy away from an SEO who doesn’t use advanced analytics because the optimization decisions on your website will be made based upon incomplete information.

As a client, you need to view SEO as a long-term strategy that has peaks and valleys. Educating yourself about the SEO process will eliminate the “surprises” that are inherent in the process and will make for a far more efficient and productive vendor/client relationship.

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Nowadays being part of the informational revolution that the Internet has brought along, it is compulsory for a business and also for individuals. No need to explain here why having a web site out there on the World Wide Web is such a must, instead we’re only going to point out a few things related to choosing an adequate web host for your web site.

As complicated this entire business might seem, once you know what to look for, it’s really easier to find it.

Analyze your requirements and stick to them

When evaluating their needs in terms of space and bandwidth many inexperienced web owners often buy more than they will ever need. As this is unbelievably common, many web-hosting providers size their web servers taking this into account and actually over sell the space and bandwidth thinking that customers will never make full use of it. To avoid web hosts that result to just that or crowed their web servers to get an extra profit per customer, simply ask them their client per server ration. As a diligent buyer, you should do this with all the other companies you find interesting to do business with and are eligible to host your web site.

A web site is almost like a living creature. It grows. So try to leave some room for it, don’t just buy a web-hosting plan that will fit your needs just perfectly. Buy a little more so when the time comes to expand you would have the resources available. Think of the possibility that your initial bandwidth evaluation proves itself insufficient. You might find yourself in the position not to be able to use your web site because you have exceeded your bandwidth. So leave margin for error too.

Most web hosting plans come packed with features and some even offer pre-installed scripts and programs that might come handy for both knowledgeable and less knowledgeable web owners.

As you could consider any extra feature a plus, don’t forget to look for the things you actually need like the OS (Operating System) or the PHP support. You decide what you need, don’t let the provider talk you into something you don’t want or is less than you have expected.

Support – can you get enough of it?

Support is something you might overlook when you consider an offer that suits you in terms of space and bandwidth and is packed with all the other features you will ever going to need. It might be good to understand that the road to all those features goes through Support city. If the web-hosting provider is careless about the support he offers to his customers, any technical problem concerning your web site could be solved only after long hours of waiting and making plenty of irritating support calls.

To test the quality and the responsiveness of the support personnel, e-mail them some pre-sales questions. Is the response fact enough for you? Imagine that your web site is down and your company is just attending a congress… many clicks are expected, but is your web site online to get them? Is the response you are getting from the support team thorough or is it merely scratching the surface? Is the response easy to understand for you?

A provider concerned about the quality of his support, would make available as many as possible ways to communicate with its clients. So find out as much as you can about its online support staff, help desk, message boards etc.

Information on the reputation of a web-hosting provider is something you might find on forums or discussion boards. Any disgruntled customers there? Would you like to be one?

Reliability is another aspect of the problem. Ask for the uptime of the company’s web servers. Some hosts offer an uptime guarantee, usually 99.9% (100% is not a realistic figure in the computer world). The guarantee means that if your web site is not available 99.9% of the time, you will be refunded the money for that month or you will receive free web hosting for a month as compensation for your web site being unavailable.

Price

Well, true it’s paid web hosting and this means you have to pay for it. My advice would be don’t try too hard to find the cheapest possible web host. You will probably end-up wasting an incredible amount of time and is very likely that within two weeks after you have bought it, you will stumble upon a better deal. Apart from the irony of it and the loss of time, cheaper is not always better.

The other extreme, paying big money to get what you could have gotten for less is equally bad. At $50 for 200 MB of space with 2 GB of bandwidth you are definitely getting robbed, but the same service for $5 or $10 is a good deal.

The thin line between a profitable and, why not, enjoyable web presence and a nightmare with slow server response, unreachable support and irritating server downtime is drawn by you. By you choosing the web-hosting provider.

Choose carefully: there can be only one a few that will live up to their promises and deliver for you good quality web hosting!

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The very first step in changing web hosting providers is to find one that meets all your requirements. Although you should have some experience in finding one from your last search, let’s still review the main issues when choosing one. Take a good look at the disk space and bandwidth your future plan will provide you. As you web site’s bandwidth requirements may grow in time, purchase a little more than you need and take a good look at the costs of the bandwidth for exceeding your traffic quota. Also make sure that the new web hosting provider will offer you the same tools and installed software as your previous old one. Ask the technical support if the software or scripts in the offer are already installed and configured. It would be a bad experience to find out after you have completely migrated your web site that not everything is working properly just because the not all the software in the offer comes pre-installed and you should have requested its activation. All these are very important and ensure you don’t have to go through this whole procedure of changing web hosts real soon in the future.

Sign up for the new hosting plan. It sounds obvious, but the thing you should look after is sign up for the new one while still having about two weeks until your old hosting plan expires. This will give you time to react if anything goes wrong during the migration of your web site and will smoothen the transition for your visitors or customers, your business enjoying as much continuity as possible.

Update your backup copy of your web site – you do have backups don’t you? If not this is a very good place to start with. Best thing would be to have a backup copy of your web site burned onto a compact disk CD and store this CD into a safe location. Your backup will include the entire web site: files, images, directory structure, databases.

Upload your web site to the web servers of your new web hosting provider.

Now it is testing time. Most web hosting providers will offer you the possibility to preview your web site before it goes live. Use this feature to test if your web site looks good and its functionalities are all intact on your new web server.

Continue by configuring your existing e-mail accounts on the new web server. It would be a good idea to write down the new POP3 and SMTP you will be using soon.

If you haven’t changed your web site design with this move, it will be a good idea to put mark the web pages on your new web server just o differentiate from the old one. In this way you will be able to tell when your DNS information is updated, which is the next step of migrating your web site.

It’s time to change your name server. As anxious you might be to transfer, it would be a very good thing to announce your visitors and customers about the imminent change of web hosting providers you are making and to apologize for any possible inconveniences of downtime your web site might encounter. I don’t need to tell you how important this announcement is for the overall image of your web business.

Now you can announce your registrar to change your DNS information, or if you can change it yourself, go ahead and do it.

All you have to do now is wait for the DNS information to propagate across all the DNS servers. This entire process could take as much as 72 hours to complete, but it is possible to start seeing the first results after a couple of hours.

Final step would be to update the e-mail client you are using to match the new POP3 and SMTP settings.

You have successfully changed your web hosting provider. Good luck with the new one!

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So what are web templates?

Well, to put it in a simple way, web templates are nothing but readymade web-pages that can be used to create websites in seconds! How you ask? Web templates act as html coded dummy web pages that contain model content. Now these templates can be edited with ease (to add content, graphics, logo, pictures etc) to create professional web pages in less time.

How to edit web templates

Now the next possible question that arises is as how to edit the web templates; isn’t it? That’s simple! Most web templates are editable and can be edited using popular html editors like FrontPage, DreamWeaver, GoLive and Photoshop. These html editors are easy to use and have a friendly interface. You need not be a pro to use them. Anyway in case anyone finds the editing part difficult they can always go for template customization services that are provided by most web template providers.

Are web templates really that green?

As a matter of fact, web templates can really help you save up lots of money and time and best of all help you do professional work. Just imagine hiring a web designer to design your website. As most of you must be aware, a web designer can charge you anything between $50 to $200 for designing a single web-page! And then there is the time factor. Usually web-designers take a minimum of 10 -15 days to complete a website. Here’s where web templates come to the rescue.

Using a web template to create a website would cost you anything around $20 – $40 and that’s not all; websites designed using web templates could be over within a day after editing and pasting graphics and will look professional too! So now it doesn’t take an extraordinary mind to figure out which is more lucrative.

What about Flash websites?

Designing a flash website is a real pain and might take lots of time and money. But in case you believe in playing it smart your best bet would be to go for flash website templates. There are many template websites that offer flash website templates of high quality at low costs. All you need to do is insert content and you are ready to go!

Hey wait a minute I need to create a copyrighted website!

No problem! Almost all website template providers offer an option of copyrighted to non-copyrighted templates. The major different between a copyrighted and a non copyrighted template is the fact that copyrighted templates are sold only once and the purchaser of the copyrighted template gets all user rights over it whereas in a non copyrighted template the rights of usage stays with the template ownership company and can be sold again and again. So in case you need to create a copyrighted website that is unique be sure to go for copyrighted website templates.

How do I find out a quality template from an inferior one?

Quality web templates have the following features;

1. Web-templates should be editable
2. Web templates should be compatible with popular html editors
3. The coding should be such that there is no alteration in the structure of the template on content/graphic insertion
4. The web template should be easy to upload
5. A webpage generated by a web template should download with ease in any browser

So in case your templates don’t comply with the above, you can be sure they are of inferior quality. Website templates are a great and easy way to host your website. So in case you are game, go for good web template providers. Some good online website template provides are www.buytemplates.net, freewebtemplates.com, dreamweaver-templates.net and trendytemplates.com.

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Here are 12 highly effective strategies for designing a

search engine friendly web site:

1. Research highly targeted keywords – do this even before

you begin designing otherwise you may have to go back and

clean up some of your web site design. Use the keyword

research tool, Wordtracker (wordtracker.com) to research

the most popular keywords that pertain to the subject

matter of your web site. Wordtracker will show how many

people have searched for that particular keyword over

several search engines within the last 60 days.

2. Create a list of approximately 100 keywords or keyword

phrases that you can include within your web pages. After

having completed the above research, you should have found

the keywords that were searched on most frequently, but

only produce a small number of competing web sites.

3. Write a paragraph of 250 – 500 words of text for the top

of each web page. Weave your keywords within this text

being careful not have them so close together that your

copy reads strange for your visitors. Aim to please the

search engines as well as your web site visitors.

4. Optimize meta tags – the most significant meta tags are

the title and description meta tags. The keyword meta tag

has lost its effectiveness due to people spamming it,

however include it anyway as some search engines still use

it. Include your keywords within each of these meta tags.

The title meta tag should be a short sentence about the

purpose of your site. In your description meta tag, write

a sentence on the greatest benefit of your site. Your

keyword meta tag should include the most frequently used

keywords contained within your web page.

5. Include Heading Tags – these can range form H1-H6

most designers will only use H1-H3. These tags separate

each section of your web page with subheadings. The H1

tag contains the largest font and is the most significant.

Within the descriptive text of these header tags you should

include the keyword phrases placed in the same order as

your keyword phrases that are within your keyword meta tags.

6. Optimize images using the alt tag – write a short

description for the alt tag of your image. The alt tag has

2 purposes:

a) visitors can read the description if they can’t see the image.

b) search engines only spider text (not images), therefore this

could help your site’s rankings.

7. Reduce image size – too many images or very large images

on your web page will slow down the loading time of your

web site. Make sure your images have a resolution of 72ppi.

Slice large images into smaller pieces with your graphics

editor.

8. Find incoming links (backward links) – web sites that

link to yours raise your link popularity. Search for web

sites that are compatible with yours and have a PR 4 or more

to do a link exchange. Write optimized articles and include

them on your web site. This means your site has a greater

chance of being indexed quickly as well as getting a boost

in its rankings.

Create absolute links (ie http://www.domainname.com)

from all your internal pages to your home page. This will

increase the number of links pointing to your home page.

9. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to implement a clean

design throughout your web site. This will reduce the time

to implement a consistent text (or layout) style for your

web site. It will also enable you to easily update your

whole site should you wish to make any future changes.

10. Place any script code into external files – when using

javascript (ie for swapping images on your navigation bar)

it creates a lot of code between the header tags, pushing

down the text that search, engines would spider first.

Placing the script code in an external file reduces the

code to just one line.

11. Insert the DOC TYPE tag at the top of every web page. A

DOCTYPE ( “document type declaration”) informs the

validator which version of HTML you’re using for your web

pages. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages:

your markup and CSS won’t validate without them. i.e.

[!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01

Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"]

DOCTYPES are also essential to the proper rendering and

functioning of web documents in compliant browsers like

Mozilla, IE5/Mac, and IE6/Win.

12. Write clean html code – web site editors often write

extra code. This can increase the loading time of your web

pages. Check your html code by running it through a html

validator (http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator).

Once you have implemented all the strategies above, submit

your site to the search engines and get ready for lots of

targeted traffic.

You now have built a profitable search engine friendly web

site.

Resources

The Global Structure of an HTML Document

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.1

Page Validation and Loading Times

http://stoco.net/cgi-bin/wc/wc.pl

Fix HTML code errors

http://www.netmechanic.com

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We spent thousands of dollars before we were able to come up with accurate measures of which campaigns were actually converting prospects into customers. But after much testing, I came to an interesting conclusion about online advertising.

Many advertisers have a large emphasis on the amount of exposure you get to your web site, but after running many expensive campaigns, I have learned that this is not what matters at all. The things that matters most in web marketing usually boil down to how many qualified, targeted click thrus you can generate to your site.

Click thrus are the main thing you need to focus on when creating an advertising campaign. For our company, it has been the most accurate measure of the quality of any type of advertising we bought, whether it was banner ads, email campaigns, popunders, search engine, pay per click or any other type of advertising you do on the web.

Click thrus represent an Internet user who has been motivated to visit your site by clicking on an email or online advertisement of any type. It is the highest quality traffic you can have coming to your site.

Once you get this type of high quality traffic to your site, you can then focus on trying to convert your visitors to customers and sales. If you have a tracking method or software, you can then determine your conversion ratio. The conversion ration will tell you how many visitors you will need to get to your site to convert a sale.

If you can figure out how many click thrus it takes to make a sale and you know now much it cost to get clicks to your web site, you can then use that information to predict the results of some of your advertising campaigns. Armed with this information, you will then have a lot more confidence when spending money or time on any type of online advertising.

If you are looking to generate high quality click thru’s to your web site, you will find that this is not the easiest thing to do. You will find many types of online advertising and lots of companies making outrageous claims on how much exposure you get. But when it comes down to it, exposure means nothing if you don’t generate click thrus to your web site. If you want to generate true targeted traffic to your web site, you should definitely take a good look at these types of advertising.

Email Marketing – Email marketing is probably the most direct way to generate click thrus to your web site. You can either hire a third party company to mail to their lists or you can build a list of your own.

Email is great because you can instantly reach large numbers of interested prospect and start to generate click thru’s within hours of sending your message out.

This method of marketing does have its drawbacks. It is getting more and more difficult to send email, because of SPAM regulations and extensive filtering by ISP’s. Fortunately, many marketing tools are coming out to help the average person start and maintain a list without knowing a lot of technical knowledge.

The best way to use email marketing is to build an opt-in list of prospects that you can mail to over and over again. Using a third party list or company to email will cost you a fortune if you do it over and over without building a list of your own. This is why it is important to concentrate on building your opt in list. Many of the people who opt in to your list will eventually become your customers if you have a solution to their problem.

Coregistration – This is powerful list building method many Internet marketers have been using for about 3 years now. Coregistration advertising is the process of generating opt-in email leads to add to your mailing list or autoresponder for marketing purposes. Using this form of advertising, you can build a large list of qualified prospects in little time.

The quality of coregistration leads can vary from company to company so it really pays to understand how they are generated and how old the leads are. The best types of leads to buy are called Opt-In coregistrations where individuals have specifically responded to your ad for more information.

You can also get other type of leads that are cheaper, but they are not as high quality as the leads generated specifically for your business. In addition, these cheaper leads are harder to deal with when mailing your messages.

Once you have these leads in your email system, they become a source of targeted click thrus every time you mail out to your lists. In addition, you are basically getting free advertising once you have your own list. Coregistration helps you get to that point quickly if you use it correctly and if you find some solid lead sources.

Search Engines – Search engines have long been a source of rich, targeted traffic, but competition and strict search engine rules make it difficult to simply put up a web site and take advantage of this type of traffic.

You could hire a search engine optimization company (often called SEO’s) to help you get your site placed, but this usually costs a minimum of $1000 up to $5000 or more and a significant amount of time to get results. Most web site owners would be better off applying basic search engine optimization techniques themselves and saving their money. These techniques can include gaining link partners, frequently adding fresh content, and utilizing relevant keywords. The results of these efforts can be just as rewarding as using an SEO company in many cases.

Once you get listed, you will start to receive targeted click thrus to your web site from people specifically searching for what you offer.

Pay Per Click Search Engines – If you are frustrated with other types of traditional advertising and you want a direct relationship between what you spend and the amount of advertising you get, you need to look into pay per click search engine advertising.

You can sometimes get traffic to your web site for as little as $0.10 per click. Once you try to advertise using pay per click search engines, you will find that many of the best keywords will cost you much more than this (sometimes $1 to $5 or even more)! The key to this type of advertising is to do research to uncover low cost keywords so you can bid on them get traffic to your site.

Using this strategy, you should be able to use pay per click search engines to easily produce targeted clicks to your web site.

PR and Media – If you are looking for massive exposure at a very low cost, pr and media could be your ticket. A solid pr campaign could easily bring hundreds to thousands of targeted click thrus to your web site.

Getting your business in the news can be a difficult task and you need to either hire a solid pr company that promotes from a marketing standpoint or you need to learn how to do some basic PR yourself. Hiring a PR company can be expensive, so it may pay to simply find an experienced freelance writer who will help you.

PR/media can be hit or miss and it can take some persistence to start getting stories published and to start driving traffic to your web site. But for the amount of time and effort you spend doing PR, it can really pay off in the long run in the form of hundreds, thousands to even millions of dollars in free advertising.

EBay, Amazon and Other Large Sites – Large traffic sites that allow visitors to participate, open accounts and create profiles are great places to get free exposure for your web site. There is a lot of traffic generated by sites such as Amazon and Ebay which gives you the opportunity to harvest some of it through creating user profiles and participating with their communities.

This is a simple, low cost way to generate traffic to your site since it does not really cost anything to setup accounts with these sites.

Banner Ads – Many people say banner advertising is dead, but it still continues to be a great source of Internet traffic for many web site owners. The best part about banner advertising is that the prices have gone down significantly, so if you can create a banner that works, you can get a lot more quality exposure in comparison to other types of advertising.

The quality of your banner ad and your target audience will determine how many click thrus you get from your banner campaign, but many banner campaigns range anywhere from 1% click thrus to 8% click thrus, or sometimes as high as 20%. So if you are planning on doing any banner advertising, test a banner on a small level, and see how well it converts, and this will give you an indication of how well it converts on a larger level.

Affiliate Marketing/Joint Ventures – Affiliate markting and jv advertising are both similar in nature and. Most professional web marketers would say that it delivers the highest quality click thrus available on the web today. This is because these types of marketing are “endorsement” marketing where you have a particular person with certain credentials promoting your product. This personal referral often generates visitors who are hungry to see what you offer.

You can use this type of marketing by writing a letter to a potential partner who has a large customer base or by installing affiliate software on your web site and advertise for affiliate partners. Using an online affiliate program is very cost effective because you reach targeted visitors online and you only pay for leads or sales (usually a percentage of your sale or a set dollar amount).

Popunders/Guaranteed Visitors/Expired Domains – These traffic sources have been around for a while now and are all heavily promoted forms of advertising. But in comparison to the other forms of advertising, it does not perform as well. Personally, I have experienced sending millions of visitors from this type of traffic with hardly recognizable results.

Most of this traffic is not very targeted because the web site visitors did not get to the site by choice. Instead, they were solicited from third party advertisers using popunders or tricky web pages, which does not make that person a qualified visitor to your web site. There are some networks of advertisers who can provide quality popunders at a reasonable price.

Click thrus are a way to measure the quality of advertising because you can usually figure out how those clicks relate to your sales. That is why it is important to focus on how many click thrus you can produce when creating, marketing and advertising your web site. So next time you by any type of web advertising, try to get some indication of how many targeted click thrus you can expect to generate from that particular campaign, and you can get a good idea of how many sales you can generate.

Copyright 2005 Rod Davis

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