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Blogging: The New Generation Marketing Tool

Blogging: The New Generation Marketing Tool.

Blogging is a simple yet extremely effective marketing tool which can help fuel the growth of your business. Both enterprise and small/medium businesses are giving due diligence to blogging while designing their online marketing strategy.

Why Blog?

Contrary to common belief, blogging is not a means for venting frustrations to the World Wide Web. A well written blog featuring informative and original content, updated regularly (as per a schedule, not as ‘regularly’ you call your mom) helps you in establishing a personal connection with your prospective and existing customers informally. You can establish your credentials and show off your in depth knowledge about pertaining to your expertise. When readers return to your blog, chances that they will purchase your services increases manifold.

Blogs are easy to promote using different strategies like article submission and social bookmarking. In fact it is much easier to market a blog than a static service page. Make sure to include your website’s url in your web signature while submitting articles. This can be key factor in driving targeted traffic to your website. This will also generate one way links to your website which helps boost your page rank and improve your ranking in natural search.

It is not recommended to sell via the blog posts. You may link to the blog post to the specific service page which is usually done at the bottom of the post using a brief sentence. While writing posts for your blog, try to include the key words you are targeting. This will help you reach the intended audience more effectively.

You may advertise on your blog using ads like Google Adsense. However signing up for another popular products affiliate program is where the big money is. To increase visibility of these ads place them in between, above, below or next to your content.

When using blogging for professional purposes, host the blog as a sub domain of your main website. Do not use free blogging membership sites is okay for personal use (yes, you may vent out in a blog like this), but is definitely not recommended for serious bloggers. Use one of the many available customizable blog frameworks to match your website’s theme.

Need help to set up your professional online presence? We can help you set up a static site, set up an easy to maintain blog on your domain or add a shopping cart to your site.

Tags: Internet Marketing by Harry Morad
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Make your site survive the Google Algorithm Changes

Several webmasters complain that they have suddenly lost their search rank on their favorite keywords, a punishment we commonly know as Google Penalty. It’s not easy to see your hard work go down the drain. At the same time, there are always websites who not only survive the algorithm changes, but stay rather well up on top.

Search Engine Optimization is an essential part of your online business. But many SEO companies routinely use techniques that are not allowed by the search engines in an attempt to quickly manifest higher ranking for a client’s site and draw more traffic. These techniques are also called Black-Hat SEO techniques.

When search engine designers see these techniques have been used, they make changes to their algorithm, and your site end up losing the rank. Your SEO company may get off with it, saying it wasn’t their fault, it was the new Google’s Algorithm.

Are there any Surviving Tips for Google Algorithm Changes?

1. The websites who are unaffected after any Google update have their SEO efforts actually benefit the Google Search Results. Their pages are full of relevant, useful content and they refrain from using “gray area” SEO techniques. That is the single most important reason showing the benefits of Content Syndication. If you cannot produce good quality Content yourself, you may hire Ghost Writers to write relevant content for you.

2. The keyword is “moderation” when it comes to SEO. If all your SEO is based on Black Or Grey Hat techniques, you are being on the extreme edge, you are likely to cross it when Google algorithm changes next time. Stuffing up the keywords in the page content, image attributes, header tags etc. Or  Getting links from Pages full of Links - All of the typical SEO techniques that are in use by webmasters today, are prone to Future Algorithm changes.

3. The new age techniques for building a good Rapport with Google are Blogs and Social Networking. If Bloggers and Reviewers are talking about you, Google will be listening. And you are likely to get benefited out of it. How to get Bloggers talking about your site? Providing a free service and popularising it within the blogger community may be one of the answers.

Today’s SEO have come out of ages of simple link building, and On-page SEO, to be dynamic and well above others in the race, your website needs to create a difference.

Redwave is an innovations driven Search Engine Optimization Company. To know more about how you can win the Search Engine Optimization Battle, Let us know about your website and we can discuss a few ideas with you. Write to us at Info @ redwavect.com.

Tags: Internet Marketing by Harry Morad
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Six Easy Ways to do Link Building

Link building is an important part of the search engine optimization process to help direct the search engine rankings of your website up north and helps to attract relevant traffic. Quality links are one of the major factors considered by leading search engines such as Yahoo and Google while ranking your site. As far as incoming links are concerned, the more the merrier! These links are also a terrific source of referral traffic to your website, which can be significant if you are able to link up with the right sites.

Which brings us back to the vital question how? How can I get these amazing sites to link up with mine? There are several things you can do to persuade other webmasters to link to your site:

Exchange Links - “Exchange” of links is usually simpler than signing up one way incoming links. Identify websites which complement your site. This can be easily done using the very search engine you are targeting. Look up your target keywords and search sites which relate to your site , but are not a direct competitor. Place the desired ‘reciprocal’ link in your page and then write a personal mail to the webmaster/administrator explaining how a link exchange with your website will help both of you and enclose the link of your website which you want featured and the page where you feature his link (if they are different). Provide him with a decent time frame to respond.

Start an Affiliate Program - Affiliate or associate program are ideal for online merchants, where an online merchant promises other affiliate websites a financial incentive for forwarding traffic .The incentive can be based on the volume of traffic forwarded or actual sale from this traffic. Multi Level affiliates lets your affiliates further create affiliates, increasing your reach on the internet.

Spread the Information - Internet is now becoming synonymous with Information, free Information. Great Content is the best way to promote your site. It is hard to pass up free expert opinion!

Make articles in your field of specialization available to others for use. Sign up as an expert on one of the sites providing information in your field and contribute these articles for free. The articles will have in their footers information about you and will link to your website.

Books for Download - Make free E-books available for download regarding your field of expertise through various sites.Send out news letters distributing these and also make them available to your affiliates.There are several sites which carry information on free books. These E-Books will have information about you and your website.

Ask for it! - Lets try the easiest and the simplest of these all, how about trying to ask for a link! If your website has good content on the subject and complements the information available on the target link, they might just want to feature your website. A personal note highlighting your USP’s and your link might just do the trick.

Freebies - If this does not work, throw in a free service in lieu of the exchange, it could be a free software download or a testimonial for his services that links back to your website.

There can be several other ways to “BAIT” incoming links to your website based on your area of expertise. Link Building, though a time consuming process, if pursued persistently can drive traffic and search engine rankings. So get cracking to achieve a favorable Internal to External links ratio.

Tags: Internet Marketing by Harry Morad
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Reaching the top 10 positions in Organic Search

Search Engine Optimization is a collective term used for referring to multiple strategies required to boost your websites rank on the search engine, with the objective of getting the website all the way up to page One for the targeted keywords.

Sponsored vs Organic Search Results

All search engine pages have two sections, one features ‘natural’ results, while the other feature ’sponsored’ results. Sponsored result, well are sponsored and features website availing the Pay Per Click or PPC Program. The positions on this sponsored list are bid upon by competing websites. To top this list you need to outbid other websites bidding on the same keyword. Your payment for the PPC Advertising program is calculated based on the number of times your advertisement is clicked.

PPC Advertising Programs, though expensive are the fastest way to get your website to Page One.Traffic generated from PPC is lesser than the traffic generated by ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ results as most surfers prefer to visit natural results over sponsored results.

Achieving high ranking amongst the organic search results is a tedious task, one has to continuously work towards it and use a combination of several strategies to optimize your website for the desired keywords. The fact that Search Engine companies keep changing the algorithms they use to calculate the rankings of a website on a regular basis does not make it any easier.

Here are some tips that must be considered for building a Search Engine Optimized site:

Use Canonical URL’s

URL or Universal Resource Locator is a unique common name assigned to each page of a website. A web page is accessed by writing the URL in the browsers address bar. Search Engines index the URL’s along with other data from your page to determine the content of your page. As Google refers to them, Canonical URL is the best URL from amongst the several choices available. It is recommended to have your keyword as a part of the URL as it may make your page more visible to the Search Engines.

Static vs Dynamic URL

Avoid Dynamic URL’s which include query strings, since pages with query strings or dynamic url’s are constructed on the fly, they are not indexed appropriately. It is advisable to avoid dynamic url’s and use seo friendly software.

Pay attention to the Keywords

Keywords are the phrases that are searched for by users, to succeed in organic searches your site must be optimized for the right keywords.Not only must you optimize for the popular keywords, but also pay attention to other not so popular keywords since your chances of making it to the top for these keywords are better. Though this means featuring on the top fewer times, it is definitely better than featuring on the 10th page almost all the time.

Strategic Placement of Keywords

Use your primary keywords as a part of the title and as the main keyword in the image tags. This will help your site appear higher in organic searches made on search engines.

Maintain Keyword Density

Continuously make improvements in your site based on which keywords are being searched and maintain a keyword density of at least 3 to 5%, which is quite a job. Since no one knows your business as well as you do, compile content on your website and avail professional SEO Copywriting services to achieve this. Several paid and free tools are available for keyword density analysis.

Page Rank

Page Rank is proprietary to Google and Google assign page rank to a page based on many factors, incoming links being one of them. Both the quantity and quality of these links is considered. Pages with higher page rank appear higher in organic results on search engines.

Link Building

Incoming links are one of the key factors considered by leading search engines - Google and Yahoo to decide the prominence of your page in the context of the keyword. Both quality and quantity of the links are considered in determining the page rank.Link building is one of the most important seo task.

Create a Sitemap

Having a sitemap not only improves navigation of a website but also helps to index your website with a search engine. Web Crawlers are able to reach all pages of the website with ease. If your website is not humongous, link all your pages using the sitemap, else link all the major sections.

Perseverance and patience

SEO campaigns do not tend to show immediate results, it is important to give due diligence to your website constantly.It is a good long term strategy to push for higher organic search results, however pay per click programs can drive short term growth.

Tags: Internet Marketing by Harry Morad
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Analyze your Competition Before Starting an SEO and Marketing Plan

Thinking about adding an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to your advertising and marketing campaign this year? Before starting your program, it is important to first know who your online competitors are and what kind of online marketing strategies they are already doing. You will want to take some time to research and analyze your local and national competitors online…before they analyze you first.

Here are some guidelines and questions to consider while performing research on the Internet about your competitors:

Website Design and Layout

1. Are your competitors using a search engine friendly Web design, like a basic HTML or ASP site?
2. Are they using JavaScript, a dynamically-driven site, frames, or tables that will prevent search engines from properly indexing their sites?
3. Are any Web sites built entirely in flash?
4. Are their sites easy to navigate with a professional look and feel by using the same font styles and sizes and similar color schemes throughout?
5. How heavily are the graphics on the Web site?
6. How many Web pages total does each of your competitors have on their site? Does your site need improvement on the amount of content-rich Web pages you have?
7. Does the entire Web site focus on one central theme alone?

Placement of Keywords

1. Where are your competitors using their chosen keywords? The META title tag? The META description tag? The META keywords tag? In ALT tags? What about in link text and headline tags? The page URL? Image names?
2. How often do those keywords appear on each Web page?
3. Where does each of their keywords first appear on the pages of each of your competitors sites?
4. Are they achieving good rankings for their chosen keywords online in Google, MSN and Yahoo!?
5. What is the keyword weight and density of the entire content of your competitors’ pages? Are they keyword spamming?
6. What are their chosen keywords being targeted on their sites? Are they single words or long-tail keywords with 3, 4 or even 5 keyword phrases?

Off Page Factors

1. Check your competitors Alexa traffic rank and compare with yours. Do they receive more or less Web traffic to their sites, according to Alexa.com?
2. What is their Google PageRank? Again, is it higher or lower than yours?
3. Go to a reputable link popularity checker online and compare the number of incoming links your site has versus your competitors. How much improvement in link building, if any, does your site need to effectively compete online?
4. What types of incoming links are they receiving, how top quality are these links, and how much traffic does a link from these sites generate for your competitors each month?
5. Are any of your competitors registered with any popular link directories, like dmoz.org, Yahoo! Directory, Business.com or other similar high traffic directories online?
6. Do they have a sign up box for an industry email newsletter on their sites?

Use of Spamming Techniques

1. Is the competitor’s site using any spam or unethical search engine practices? If so, what are they?
2. Do any of these sites have doorway or gateway pages?
3. Do they have same color text on a same color background?
4. Are they blatantly keyword spamming?
5. Are these sites publicly listed or affiliated with gambling or adult-oriented sites?

Tags: Internet Marketing by Harry Morad
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