Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Yahoo! Search Marketing Canada, is scheduled to sponsor SEO seminars, hosted by The Search Engine Academy Toronto and Montreal SEO Workshops, taking place in February and March, 2007.

Search Engine Academy Workshops are Certified Search Engine Optimization Training Courses, where you work hands-on with expert instructors, while you acquire genuine SEO knowledge. The 2, 3 and 5-Day Workshops are designed specifically for a) people with little or no previous experience in SEO and b) for current SEOs with experience but little or no formal training. Unlike at seminars where you sit and listen passively, at our workshops, students work in real time on actual websites. Students experience a combination of training mixed with live demonstrations and individual, and group, projects to build their search engine marketing skills with maximum information retention in the minimum amount of time. Everything is included in the Toronto Workshop so there is nothing extra to buy. Tuition includes 5-Days of hands-on instruction plus 3 months of membership to resources after class, plus the 6 Month Mentoring program.

Greg Mate, President of Search Engine Academy Montreal remarked, "At a launch party last week Yahoo ! Search Marketing Canada announced that they were sponsoring two SEO 101 Seminars for their major clients. We are obviously thrilled with the opportunity to work with Yahoo ! Canada and we look forward to providing their clients with search engine marketing guidance designed to grow their businesses."

The first two 3-hour seminars - a morning and afternoon session - held in Toronto on February 20th 2007, was quickly booked to capacity. The seminars focused on Why Canadian Business Need to Include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Marketing or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) in the Marketing Mix, and some Basic SEO Tips. Mr. Mate continued, "The timing is right, our next Certified Toronto (hands-on) SEO Workshops run from March 26-30, 2007 (2-Day Basic Essentials SEO Course Mar 26-27, 3-Day Advanced SEO Mastery Training Mar 28-30, and 5-Day Intensive SEO Workshop Mar 26-30) and in Montreal (also in English) from June 18-22, 2007.''

Barry Byers, President of Search Engine Academy Toronto and Greg Mate, President of Search Engine Academy Montreal, have been Professional Search Engine Optimizers and Internet Marketers for several years, and have assisted numerous businesses in gaining top Search Engine rankings and increased focused traffic in both Canada and the United States. Together they have designed and programmed effective websites as well as consulted on SEO and marketing on existing sites. Now you too can benefit from their years of hands on search engine marketing by attending their live Search Engine Optimization / Search Engine Marketing workshop training courses.

Yahoo! Inc. is a leading global Internet brand and one of the most trafficked Internet destinations worldwide. Yahoo! seeks to provide online products and services essential to users' lives, and offers a full range of tools and marketing solutions for businesses to connect with Internet users around the world. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

To learn more about the event Agenda, please visit: www.searchengineacademy.ca/workshop_agenda.htm

For more info on Yahoo ! Search Marketing Platform, please visit: http://searchmarketing.yahoo....

Promoting your internet business can be a tough task. The costs of traditional advertising are prohibitive. It can cost as much as $50,000 to run a print advertisement in a prominent publication. It can cost much more than that to produce and run a TV commercial, especially if the commercial airs during peak viewing hours. Online marketing is a problem too, because it is extremely difficult and takes a long time to climb to the top of the search engine rankings. So,

what should you do? Well, you will need to do rely on the same thing all internet businesses do when they first start out. Of course, we are talking about pay-per-click (PPC). By advertising with pay-per-click, you pay a certain price per click to be listed near the top of the first page of the search engines for your chosen keyword or phrase. Every time someone clicks on your PPC ad, you pay for that click.

If you have never used PPC before or do not know what it is, perform a search on any search engine and you will notice that at the top or to the side of the search results you will see a section called "sponsored links." These are websites that are paying a certain amount per click to be listed there.

PPC can be very expensive depending upon what keyword you want to receive clicks for, but there are ways to budget your money wisely so you can maximize the effectiveness of your PPC marketing campaign without having a ton of money to spend. Some of the companies at the top of the sponsored links section might be bidding up to $20 per click for certain keywords. Insurance companies such as Geico and Progressive often bid up to $25 per click for the keyword "auto insurance."

However, for most keywords, you can bid relatively low and still get a lot of clicks. Each PPC service has a traffic calculator that tells you how many clicks you will receive given a certain bid price and daily budget. So, if you want to spend $0.50 per click, you can put that bid into their traffic calculator and it will tell you how many clicks you can expect to receive at $0.50 per click and how much that will cost per day. The traffic calculator will also tell you what your position will be (the higher your bid price, the higher your position will be within the sponsored links section for that keyword).

There are several PPC programs that you can use to receive traffic. There is Google Adwords (spans several engines, including Jeeves, AOL, and Google), Overture (Yahoo and other engines), Miva, and many others. They are all reliable, and they will all deliver traffic to your website.

The most important part of PPC advertising is knowing what keywords or phrases to bid on. You have to remember that most people using a search engine are only looking for information, and are not seeking to buy a product or service. So, if you are using PPC to get traffic to your website in order to sell something, make sure you bid on a keyword that will bring you customers who are looking to make a purchase and are not there just to glean information.

For example, if you are selling Vitamin A on your website, and you bid on the keyword "Vitamin A," you are going to receive a lot of traffic from people who visit your website merely to read what is there, because they are probably just looking for information about Vitamin A and do not want to buy it. Instead, you should bid on the phrase "Buy Vitamin A." In this manner, you will only receive qualified traffic from people that are looking to buy vitamin A, which will increase your sales and allow you to get more bang for your marketing buck.

PPC advertising is the most effective form of advertising on the internet, so you should use it when launching your new internet business. Just make sure that you bid within your budget and use specific keywords or phrases so that you will receive qualified traffic, and you will do fine.

Source: entireweb

Using a professional search engine optimization service can sometimes be expensive. However, if your budget is tíght and you have a basic understanding of web page construction it is possible to optimize your own website without hiring an SEO specialist. For those who would like to give it a try, here are ten "Do it yourself" search engine optimization tips:

1. Think about SEO right from the start.

Many people plan, design and build their websites without giving any thought as to whether their site is search engine friendly or whether it will be capable of attracting traffíc in organic search engine results. At the last minute, after most of the site has been built, they try to optimize their site, not realizing that this work should have been done throughout the planning and building process. It is far better to think about search engine optimization in the earliest stages of the project. For example, if it is at all possible, choose a domain name that will allow you to include your most important keyword or search term in your URL. If you are selling bicycles then you would do well have to a domain name like www.xyzbicycles.com . And don't stop with the domain name; include your keywords in your file names as well. For example, a sub-page of this hypothetical site might be www.xyzbicycles.com/road-bikes.html

2. Design your site with both search engines and users in mind.

Your site should be easy for your human readers to understand, but it should also be easy for search engine robots as well. If you want to see what a search engine robot will "see" then view your site in a notepad document or use the html view of the popular web editing programs. If you have used gif images to represent your headlines or other important text, then this text will not be picked up by the search engine robots. In addition, if you have designed a site that is entirely in a flash format, you will not be providing the search engine spiders with much "food," or searchable text. Furthermore, if you have long strings of java scrípt and complex style instructions in the head section of your html page it is better to put the java scrípt in an external file and the style instructions in a separate CSS (cascading style sheet) file, in order to give prominence to the actual text of your web page.

3. Write individual title tags for each and every page of your website.

From the standpoint of search engine optimization, the single most important sentence on any web page is the title tag. The title tag gives the search engine a good indication as to what your page is all about. Incorporate your main keywords or search phrases into your title tag, and keep them at the very front of the sentence. These keywords are more important than your company name (unless it is Coca Cola!). So our XYZ Bicycle Company might have a title tag that looks like this . The title tags of each of the sub-pages of the site should reflect the main content of those pages. Nevër use the same title tag for all the pages of the site.

4. Write a concise description tag for each of your web pages.

Just as the title tag is the most important sentence or phrase on any page, the description tag is the most important paragraph on any page. Summarize the gist of your page in two or three sentences, again incorporating the keywords and search phrases for which you think people will use when searching for your site. A description tag for the home page of the XYZ Bicycle Company could look like this: "The EXZ Bicycle Company manufactures mountain bikes, racing bicycles, road bikes and bicycle accessories. Our bicycles are distributed and sold around the world."

5. Put your keywords into headers and headlines on your page.

Your human readers and search engines alike need prominent headlines in order to understand what your page is all about. While a human reader only needs to see the headline in a large bold text, search engines distinguish the headlines, which they regard as important indicators of the page, by noting which phrases are encased in header tags such as

h1, h2, h3 tags etc. H1 is considered most important and your first headline should be labeled with this tag. If the header tags make your copy look too big, then you can change the size of the headers by creating style instructions that will render the headlines into sizes that are consistent with the look and feel of your site.

6. Write copy that includes your keyword and search phrases at the beginning, middle and end.

If you want to write website copy that is search engine optimized, then you only have to follow good writing and presentation procedure. State clearly what you want to say in the opening paragraph, elaborate on your basic ideas in the middle section of your text and at the end summarize what you have said, reminding your readers with text that is similar to the opening paragraph. Be natural; don't try to stuff your page with the keywords. If you read the page out loud and it sounds funny, then you have overdone the repetition of your search phrases and keywords. A density of 2% is considered to be OK. Thus in a 400 word page of text your keyword might be repeated eight times.

7. Place your keywords and phrases in the link text of your web pages.

So far we have placed the keywords in the strategic places of the web page: the title, the description, the headlines and the body text. Now we have to see that the keywords are included in clickable link text on the page. Whenever you are linking to sub pages or other pages of your site, make sure that your keywords are included in the clickable portions of the links. Thus, instead of making a link that says "clíck here" for more information about bicycle accessories, it would be better to write: clíck here for more information about "bicycle accessories," with the keywords "bicycle accessories" being the anchor (clickable) text.

8. Install a navigation system that can be easily followed by search engines.

One of the most important steps in getting more traffíc to your site is to ensure that all of the site's web pages are included in the search engine indices. Normally a search engine robot will visit the main page of a site and follow links to the other pages. If your navigation system is based on java scrípt, or on images, there is a possibility that some search engine robots will not be able to follow the links and thus they will not pick up the interior pages of your site. One simple remedy for this problem is to build an additional text-link navigation bar and place it at the bottom of the page. This additional navigation bar will serve multiple purposes:
a. Help the search engines to reach the interior pages.
b. Put your keywords in link "anchor text".
c. Remind the user to go deeper into the site by repeating the navigation options again.

9. Build a site map page or use the Google sitemap option.

Getting all of your pages indexed is so important, that it is also prudent to take another step that will ensure that all of your pages are visited by search engine robots. A site map is a page that has text links to all of the pages of your site. As with a text link navigation bar, a site map serves multiple purposes:
1. It helps users to find what they are looking for on the site by providing an outline summary of all of your pages.
2. It helps search engine robots to land on the interior pages.
After you build your site map page, be sure to make a link to it from your home page and the other important pages of your website. In addition to a normal site map page, you can also make an XML site map, upload it to the server and then register it with the Google site map tool. You can use a free online utility to create your XML site map at: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and visit http://www.google.com/webmast... for more information. This process is easy to accomplish, and registration with the Google sitemap program will supply you with important statistical information from Google as well as help to get all of your pages indexed.

10. Once your website is up and running concentrate on off-site optimization.

So far all the steps that I have outlined are concerned with on-page factors, the parts of your website that are under your control. But your ranking in Google and other search engines will also be heavily dependent on off-page factors such as how many high quality sites link to your site.

Unless you obtain a good amount of high quality links to your site you will not be able to compete in highly competitive search categories.

By far the best way to get links to your site is to build a site that has valuable content. You should endeavor to build a site that is so "cool" or so unique, that other people will link to you without even asking you. Of course this is easier said than done, but it should be what you are striving for.

The next best way to get high quality back links to a website is to write informative articles and get them published on other websites with a link back to your site. This process is known as article marketing and it not only helps to build incoming links, but it also builds your online reputation as an expert in your field.

Other common methods of increasing incoming links include submissions to important directories, participation in forums and careful trading of links with respected websites.

If you follow the ten "do-it-yourself" ; search engine optimization tips that I have described in this article, you will have taken a big step towards guaranteeing the success of your online enterprise.

News Source: SEO-News

The search engine marketing industry is consistently evolving, sometimes at a pace that makes it hard to believe that search engine marketing services can stay on top of all the latest developments.

The one constant for search engine marketing firms, and for the industry in general, is change--usually for the better, sometimes for the worse, but almost always significant. The industry is not for the faint-hearted or those who abhor change. However, savvy search engine marketing firms try to look ahead to anticipate trends. Here are my predictions of issues that search engine marketing services will face in the short term.

More Accountability Demanded from Search Engine Marketing Firms

Search engine marketing firms that use tactics designed to trick the engines into showing results that aren't directly addressing the search query will struggle, as more companies begin to look at the larger goals that lead them to investigate search engine marketing services in the first place. The "traffic-centric&quo t; mindset will evolve as companies begin to demand accountability from search engine marketing firms in terms of bottom line increases. Ranking increases delivered by search engine marketing services will be questioned if they do not lead to significant traffic increases, and traffic increases will be questioned if there is no subsequent increase in business generated from the website. This is a good thing for quality search engine marketing firms, since the "snake-oil" practitioners that have given the industry such a bad name will never be given serious consideration by any company that does its homework in the vendor selection process.

Rising PPC Costs and Increasing PPC Frustration

As larger companies with huge budgets continue to jump into the pay per click (PPC) arena, costs will continue to rise. (Average PPC costs have increased 37% from Q1 2005 to Q1 2006.1) These well-funded companies will use PPC as a branding tool as much as a sales tool, which will squeeze out many of the current smaller advertisers. In fact, the top 10 PPC advertising companies, based upon the number of PPC impressions, include such names as eBay, NextTag, Vonage, Time Warner, Orbitz, Target, and Yahoo.2 More large companies will continue to join the fray, many of them throwing ROI out the window and bidding high prices for desirable keyphrases for the sake of branding. This means that search engine marketing firms will find small- to medium-sized companies turning to SEO to achieve results when they no longer can afford PPC.

Increased Interest in Organic SEO

While PPC costs rise, there is also a trend that no doubt disturbs the engines that offer PPC programs. Sixty-six percent of consumers "distrust" paid search ads.3 Up to 85% of searchers say they "tend to ignore the paid listings"4, while 87% of commercial clicks take place "on the natural (not sponsored) search results."5 Three times as many marketers who outsource the management of their natural SEO to search engine marketing firms and who also participate in pay per click advertising recognize a higher ROI from their search engine marketing services than from PPC.6 These facts, coupled with the fact that Google has recently announced that it will begin to take the relevance of pages into consideration when deciding in what order the ads will appear (which will mean that effective PPC campaigns will need at least some basic organic SEO), point to one obvious result--an increase in the number of companies that investigate organic SEO programs, whether internally generated or provided by outside search engine marketing firms.

Continued Reluctance from Agencies to Pursue Search Marketing

To most, it seems like a perfect fit--traditional advertising agencies joining forces with (or purchasing outright) PPC providers and organic search engine marketing services. However, the average agency is scared to death of search engine marketing services in any form (although some forward-looking agencies have finally jumped on the search engine marketing bandwagon). The reasons are simple: accountability and metrics.

Advertising agencies have for years made money based upon a percentage of what a company spends on advertising. This model has been the accepted norm for decades. However, it raises some ethical issues. What is the motivation for an agency to recommend decreased spending on non-performing initiatives? Moreover, what reasons does an agency have to report on the effectiveness of each of its campaigns? (If an agency's clients dug deeply into any such metrics, they would likely reduce their advertising spend based on the performance of individual campaigns.) Many PPC service providers have adopted this model, even though the goal of a PPC campaign should be to monitor the metrics of a campaign to decrease the spend (eliminating underperforming keyphrases, for example).

Good search engine marketing services offer metrics that scare traditional advertising agencies. If these agencies were to present such metrics to their clients, those same clients may start to demand similar metrics for other campaigns (television, radio, magazine ads, etc.). Until the "percentage of spend" model is altered, large agencies will continue to reject search engine marketing services and will not recommend them to their clients.

Continued Focus on Google for Organic SEO

In general, where Google goes, other engines will follow. Smart search engine marketing services will continue to optimize for Google, which currently accounts for half of searches in the United States7. However, instead of trying to trick Google by unraveling the latest, ever-changing algorithm, search engine marketing firms will instead need to use the "piggyback" approach. This approach entails learning from the extensive studies that Google conducts of its users (learning by observing the commonalities of the types of sites that consistently rank highly) and applying those same attributes to client websites. In this way, search engine marketing firms not only make sites better for Google, but also for users. As other engines try to close the relevancy gap in search engine results, search engine marketing firms will be rewarded as the tactics they have used for Google success become the accepted industry standard.

Conclusion

The use of search engine marketing services is still a new, "unproven" channel to many companies. Even so, it is changing the way that many traditional advertising agencies must do business. With PPC costs on the rise, and the effectiveness of the PPC channel coming into question, more companies will investigate the hiring of search engine marketing firms using organic tactics for their Internet marketing needs. Smart companies that outsource organic or PPC advertising will no longer say "what have you done for me lately"--they will say "prove what you've done for me lately." Search engine marketing services that are on top of the curve will be more than happy to do so.

News Source: http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expert articles/wpn-62-20060907S EMServicesTrendsandPredic tions.html" title="http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expert articles/wpn-62-20060907S EMServicesTrendsandPredic tions.html" target="_blank"http://www.webpronews.com/exp...

There is one hard and fast rule in generating income for your website: A steady flow of website traffic. If no one goes to your site, it hardly bares a chance of generating an income. Many sites have tried and failed in doing so, and these results to the sites demise. It takes money to maintain an income generating site; it also takes money to make money.

BUT, it doesn’t take a whole caboodle of cash to generate website traffic for your site.

Ever wonder how does big hit sites drive traffic top their site? Most of them are spending tons of money to drive the traffic to their sites, investing in many advertising campaigns and different forms of marketing schemes and gimmickries. This is all worthwhile because, well, they are what they are now, high earning, big hitting websites.

You don’t have to do this if you don’t really have their resources. There are many ways to generate low cost website traffic without having to spend what you don’t have or can’t afford. Many people have banked on high cost methods and have ended up losing their shirt over it.

Here I present to you the Top five ways to generate low cost website traffic that could help your site a whole lot. Even if you only get a small percentage of successful visitors in to client ratio it still works especially if you get a high number of website traffic.

Exchange Links

This is a sure and proven method. Rarely would you see a site where there is no link to another site. Many webmasters are willing to exchange links with one another so that they could produce more public awareness about their sites. You’ll soon see and feel the sudden upsurge of the traffic coming in to your site from other sites.

A major prerequisite in exchanging links with other sites is having the same niche or content as the other site. They should share a common subject so that there is continuity in the providing of service and information to what interests your target traffic.

Exchanging links also boosts your chances of getting a high ranking in search engine results. It is common knowledge that search engines ranks high sites that have inbound and outbound theme-related links. With a good ranking position in the search engines, you will generate more traffic in your website without the high costs.

Traffic Exchange

This is like exchanging links but on a different higher level. This may cost a bit more than exchanging or trading links but could be made cheaper because you get to earn credits. You can use those credits when viewing others traffic, while you earn credits when someone views yours.

Traffic exchange services are the viewing of another’s site or page. This is done vice versa where a site can use your sites contents and so can you to his or her site. You both benefit from each others efforts to generate traffic. The other sites visitors can go to your pages and know more about your site as well as theirs. Once again the public awareness of your sites existence is boosted.

Write and Submit Articles

There are many e-zines and online encyclopedias in the internet which provides free space for articles to be submitted. If you want to save costs, you can do the articles yourself. There are many freelance writers who are willing to write for you for a small fee, but to save money, it is wise to do those articles yourself.

Write articles that are themed along with the niche of your site. Write something that you have expertise on so that when they read it, they can feel your knowledge about the subject and will be eager to go to your site. Write articles that produce tips and guidelines to the subject or niche your site has.

Include a resource box at the end of your article that can link them to your site. Write a little about yourself and your site. If you provide a light, information-laden and interesting article, they will go to your site for more.

Make a Newsletter.

This may sound like hard work because of all the articles you may need to use to build a newsletter but on the contrary, this is not so. There are many writers and sites that are willing to provide free articles as long as they can get their name in on your newsletter. This will also provide free advertising for them as well.

As your newsletter gets pass around, you can widen your public awareness and build an opt-in list that can regularly visit your site.

Join Online Communities and Forums

This only requires your time and nothing else. You can share your knowledge and expertise with many online communities as well as your website. You can get free advertising when you go to forums that have the same subject or niche with your site.

Share your two cents and let them see how knowledgeable you are with the subject. As you build your reputation, you also build the reputation of your site, making it a reputable and honest business that could be frequented and trusted by many people.

For more info on seo services visit: http://seoservicesdelhi.blogs...

News Source: http://www.americanchronicle....

Experts offer tips on generating, buying sales leads at Connect Generate them yourself, buy them from aggregators, or hire somebody to drum them up for you. If you're in the real estate or home lending business, you need sales leads.

Experts with companies that do all of the above were at Real Estate Connect San Francisco Wednesday to offer advice. With more people shopping for mortgages online, lenders who want to generate their own leads can try optimizing their Web sites or paying fees to make sure they are featured prominently in search-engine results.

Every month, 9.4 million people get on the Internet to shop for a mortgage, said media analyst Greg Sterling, citing research by Compete Inc. Sterling, the moderator of the panel, "Top of the Funnel: Search Engine and Portal Marketing," said one in four consumers find their way to lenders' Web portals through links from other real estate sites.

Search engines drive about the same percentage of traffic to mortgage lenders. Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN use formulas that attempt to rank results based on their relevance. You can hire an expert in search-engine optimization to make sure your site shows up higher in the so-called "natural" results. If you've got the money to burn, another way to drive traffic to your site is to place bids on the keywords consumers use in their searches.

The highest bidders end up on top of the paid search results, placing them in "the golden triangle" -- the area of a consumer's computer screen that's most likely to catch their eye and generate a click, Sterling said. Dean DeBiase, chairman and chief executive officer of Fathom Online, said he recommends that his clients focus on paid search, spending about $9 on that for each dollar they spend on search-engine optimization. But turning up on top of paid results can be an expensive proposition.

Surveys show aggregators like LendingTree and ChampionMortgage.com are willing to pay up to $8 a click for keyword search terms like "mortgage" and "refinance," Sterling said. That's part of the reason aggregators -- Web sites that generate leads for lenders -- get 75 percent of online home loan applications.

With national lenders and aggregators willing to pay top dollar for keywords, "You're talking about a real inventory squeeze," Sterling said. "What the hell do people do when they get squeezed out of these top spots?" For smaller firms working local markets, "It's better to go after the longer tail," said Jamie Glenn, vice president of product development for Trulia, a vertical real estate search site.

Glenn recommended bidding for more specific keywords that describe the product you're offering or the market you do business in -- like a city or neighborhood. One drawback to that approach is that you may have to bid on, and track the results of, hundreds or even thousands of keywords.

Sam Sebastian, Google's director of classifieds and local advertising, said sometimes it makes more sense to just buy leads, rather than generating them yourself. "If you're a smaller, more local lending organization, don't spend a ton of money on search," Sebastian said. "Buy leads. Because it's much more efficient to buy that lead from LendingTree than trying to get better terms on Google or Yahoo!" ROOT Markets lets buyers and sellers trade leads in a setting modeled after stock markets and commodity exchanges.

The quality of the leads is validated and verified by TARGUSinfo. The panelists agreed that online marketing, paid search and search-engine optimization are best used in conjunction with -- not instead of -- traditional print, radio and TV ads. "If someone runs a billboard in a local market, or ads on local TV stations, you can see how those offline campaigns perform via the metrics on search," Sebastian said.

"I think online and search can help evaluate offline campaigns and results. It's easy to change message and test things." Steve Horowitz, senior vice president of product and business development at mortgage aggregator Bankrate.com, said that in addition to its Web site, the company sells consumer mortgage guides in about 500 newspapers.

"We've had people come off the Bankrate (Web site) table, and move all their money into print," Horowitz said, largely because the types of loans originated by newspaper ads are more profitable to lenders. There's no one-size-fits-all formula for deciding how much to spend on online marketing efforts versus traditional mediums.

"We have some companies spend 80-20 online-traditional, and others that do just the opposite," Fathom Online's DeBiase said. An interactive marketing firm, Fathom Online provides analytics that help its customers determine how effective their online campaigns are -- a must for any business, panelists said.

"We're getting people to spend 5 to 10 percent online to jump in, and more as analytics prove to you effective marketing media," DeBiase said. Generating your own leads or buying them from aggregators aren't your only options. Companies like Ingenio and LeadQual help their clients use the Internet to generate phone calls from prospective customers.

Ross Weinstein, Ingenio's director of sales and business development, said the company is geared for the estimated 13.8 million businesses that either don't have a Web site, or whose Internet presence is limited to "brochure ware" marketing, rather than e-commerce. Ingenio uses an auction model. Clients pick the geographic area they are searching for leads in, the hours they want to take calls, and then place bids, paying for each call they receive.

"You do not have to worry about bidding for thousands of keywords, which if you don't have a lot of time can be unmanageable," Weinstein said. "That just means the call is working for these people," he said.

"They are converting, or they would not pay for the calls." LeadQual helps companies convert their online leads into sales by making sure they are handled quickly. When a potential customer fills out a form on your Web site,

"you can all but guarantee that person has filled out another form (at a competing site), and you're in a race to get in touch with the client," said co-founder Glenn Houck. In real estate, only 52 percent of Internet leads actually get called, he said, and of those, only 62 percent get a call the same day, he said.

"Leads are falling through the cracks, and response times are slow," Houck said. LeadQual employs operators who call Internet leads within minutes, qualifying them and "hot-swapping" calls to clients' sales staff along with the information needed to close a sale.

News Source: http://www.inman.com/inmannew...

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's the age old saying that encourages you to mitigate your risk by spreading yourself out instead of relying on one thing only. Ask any stock broker and they'll tell you putting all your money in one company is very risky and is rarely the right move. When you only rely on one source, if something bad should happen you have nothing else to fall back on. At the end of the day, most people would agree this is basic common sense.

Enter the Google era, where many webmasters seem to have tossed this conventional logic aside in favour of a Google-tunnel-vision. It is true that Google is the most popular search engine in the world today reaching 380 million unique users per month. According to ComScore Media Metrix they have a 42.3% share of the search market. These numbers should make webmasters stand up and pay attention, but it should not make them neglect everything else.

Many SEOs (search engine optimizers) will exclusively talk about obtaining a high ranking in Google, as if that is the one and only way to drive traffic on the web. Other SEOs see the web in a larger sense and, instead, treat Google as one piece of the puzzle (albeit an important piece). The good SEOs recognize that while most searches may originate at Google, there are a lot of potential website visitors and customers coming from other engines that deserve some attention too. Fortunately, many of the search engines determine the importance of a site using similar criteria, so optimizing for one engine should give you a boost in all the others as well. But if your SEO is giving you ranking reports that only say Google, it may be time to start asking where you rank in the other engines. After all, no webmaster is prepared to say that a customer coming from a website other than Google is a customer they don't want!

List Yourself in Web Directories

Your website traffic and customers can come from all over, so you want to make sure that wherever customers looking, they'll find you. There are a lot of different web directories on the Internet. Some catalogue all sorts of sites, while others focus on a particular niche market. By taking just a little bit of time you can launch a web directory campaign that gets you listed in all the directories your potential visitors may use. Best of all, many web directories will let you submit your site for free, so this is a cost-effective way to generate targeted traffic. The best directories are those that offer a direct link back to your site. This way, your directory campaign also becomes a link-building campaign, and you boost your ranking on most search engines, including Google. (Two birds with one stone, not too shabby!)

Find Those Niche Sites

The web was built based on links. It's how web surfers move from one site to another, following an endless flow of information. You need to take advantage of this by making sure that your site is linked to along this path. If you are selling t-shirts, try to find a site that is dedicated to the topic of t-shirts (or fashion, in this instance). In this day and age, you are almost guaranteed to find a site with t-shirt resources. Look for ways you can generate a link to your site from theirs. If you have some marketing dollars to spend, you may be able to buy text or banner advertising, which will also provide a link back to your site. You can send a quick, polite email to the webmaster requesting to trade links (after all, that sites wants links too!), or maybe you can contribute content somehow and include a link to your site in your author bio. There are a lot of different approaches you can take, and as long as you end up getting a link to your site, you'll increase the likelihood of attracting visitors who are following that information path.

The world wide web is a big place and it's only getting bigger. You should devote a good amount of resources to the more important traffic drivers, like Google, but you should not fall into a trap where that's the only thing you can rely on. By diversifying your incoming traffic resources and listing yourself in web directories, you will be better prepared for what the future may bring.

News Source: http://www.dailyindia.com/sho...

The first step in the process of most practitioners of search engine optimization is keyword research. This is often an iterative process in which the site owner and presumably industry expert works together with an SEO in order to determine which keywords and phrases to target for high rankings. Although to many this would seem like a very introductory level topic, the fact is that keyword research can make or break a campaign when it comes to determining actual success. Choosing the right keywords will lead to rankings that produce legitimate traffic, as opposed to rankings for terms that may have lots of "competition," but little "action."

A few threads going on at various forums currently are discussing keyword research. At High Rankings Forums, a member complains of - yes I know - high rankings in Google and Yahoo!, but no traffic. A couple of good recommendations follow.

At Search Engine Watch Forums, an interesting discussion about measuring keyword competition is happening, with the conversation seemingly helping to dispel some myths about degree of difficulty estimation. One of the classic discussions on keyword competitiveness can be found at the HighRankings Forum's Keyword Research category. A recent thread at Cre8asite Forums discusses the concept/alleged importance of keyword density.

Not sure if you are targeting the right keywords for your SEO initiative? Check out any of the above threads. If you know of more good ones, feel free to post them in the comments.

News Source: http://www.seroundtable.com/a...

Learn how we can increase your sales, develop your brand, and generate interest in your site.

Affiliate marketing networks are an excellent way for websites to increase their customer base in a cost efficient manner. By building a network of affiliates, a business can tap into an enormously large number of independent contractors who will actively promote their products and services in exchange for a commission. Affiliate networks have the potential to significantly boost sales for both online and offline businesses.

An outstanding example of an affiliate network is Amazon.com, which happens to be one of the most successful online. Amazon has enjoyed a tremendous amount of success, in great part due to their massive number of affiliates. After seeing the success of Amazon.com, many other businesses have utilized affiliate programs to expand their businesses and boost sales with great success.

Affiliate networks have even extended to businesses such as executive recruitment and career searches. By allowing affiliates to sign up and promote their websites for a commission, they've been able to spread the word of their services virally all over the Internet in a very short amount of time.

To see affiliate marketing in action and to see firsthand just how popular it has become, simply look at the next web page you view. Chances are, you'll be staring at colorful banners promoting affiliate products for a commission. I would encourage you to get involved in the world of affiliate marketing, it is an outstanding way to earn a living and one that can certainly make all of your financial dreams become a reality. Massive incomes are being earned every single day by super affiliates who have grabbed hold of the affiliate marketing concept and created businesses around it.

To get started earning money with affiliate marketing, you don't need a certain level of education or credentials. Simply sign up as an affiliate for various programs, put together a game plan, and work towards your goals every single day until you achieve them. Just remember, with affiliate marketing, there are no limits and anything is possible!

Perhaps “blogging” isn’t such a graceful word. For me, personally, it sounds like a worded drudgery the way cereals can be soggy, skies can be foggy, and the way minds can be groggy. But for now, it’s too late to rename this shortened word for web-logging. Widespread blogging is nevertheless one of the most engaging Internet developments of the past few years. As a medium it gives rise to many new and worthy voices and plays a new and vital force in shaping opinions, political realities, trends, and even our language.

I believe that a blog is simply a tool to use for someone who’s got something to say. Let me be clear in saying that a blog is a poor choice for someone who needs a megaphone to scream out to cyberspace in order to elicit a meaningful response from Internet users. If you want attention and want it now and expect blogging to bring it to you, then this will surely be a disappointment. However, if you like to write and engage others on subjects of which you have some command or experience, then it’s a wonderful application with which you can interact with people who share similar interests as you. The hype is well founded.

Anyway, here’s a list of blogging tips…

1.) Be topical.
Cohesiveness in message is not optional. Readers may or may not be interested in your topic, but if your message is haphazard that few will bother remembering to return to your blog because it essentially would offer nothing to remember. This doesn’t mean blogs can’t jump from subject to subject. For instance, a blog with a humorous focus has all the leeway in the world for subject matter, but it would be foolish for such a blog to turn the humor on and off. In such an example, the aspect of humor would be content’s glue, the strength of the blog. The beauty of staying on point and on topic is that eventually, due to the nature of the Internet, you will find those interested solely in your topic. (as opposed to online diaries. There are millions of them on the internet, few have any readers. Email me with examples if I’m wrong and I’ll be able to show you why you’re showing me a blog and not a diary.)

2.) Refresh your content
Create a schedule and stick to it. Realizing that blogging requires time and effort, don't create unrealistic expectations and be unable to deliver. An occasional lapse or holiday is generally understood but readers returning to find stale, out-dated content are going to find another blog with similar content. New blogs and RSS feeds are popping up on a daily basis. If you have worked hard to develop an audience and a community you don't want to lose them due to lack of communication. And remember, what’s old is not new and, for blogs, thusly not interesting. 2006 isn’t the time to rail against Enron or Vanilla Ice. Insight doesn’t matter much to yesterday’s news.

3.) Clear Language Counts.
Blessed is the blog with a clear line of logic. Write without inside jokes, clique-y catchphrases or ambiguous logic. First time readers need to be close to your message. They are more likely to return to blogs that strike them positively. If the first read is confusing there will not be a second read.

4.) Feed the Spiders.
Search engines take notice of active blogs and blog search engines are especially sensitive to activity. If nothing else, search engines are smarter today than they were yesterday and are only getting smarter. In constantly improving they are seeking to aggregate quality; quality blogs are updated several times a week, if not daily, as opposed to once or twice a month. I don’t mean to scare you but a big spider is watching, so dance for them.

5.) RSS.
Think of RSS like a magic to blogging world, because that’s the effect it’s had. RSS feeds are a way to exponentially sound your voice to the interested. These feeds are a great means to increase the distribution and readership of your original content.

6.) Spell check.
Hey man, use the spell-check. I do – if I didn’t you probably wouldn’t have made it to #6. It only takes a minute and can save you from looking like a hack.

Your weblog audiences will be small at first. And, frankly, that’s the way it should be. Who are you to think that half the internet will flock to you after three or four posts of your blog, anyway?

If you tough it out while maintaining quality, readership will materialize. You will link to good, relevant blogs and, in turn, they will to you. While your voice may be unique, your niche likely isn’t and if your content is emitted smartly to the Internet those relevant readers will respond through readership and interaction. That I guarantee.

Source: http://www.site-reference.com...

Did you know that you can considerably increase the number of visitors that come to your site on a daily basis from Google?

And it's not continually improving your position in Google search engine result pages(SERPs) for your competitive keywords which can take some time after working on your search engine marketing campaigns.

I take this example from Google because I've experienced it some time back now. Apart concentrating on getting and maintaining a top 10 ranking in Google, there are lots of easy traffic sources that you haven't exploited up till now.

We are still talking about search engine traffic here. What's that approach you ask? The answer might surprise you but it's a technique that works and is pretty legal. It's not creating stand alone or doorway pages with practically no content, excessively optimized with keywords and a link back to the homepage. Doorway pages work but only if you know how to do it well. And this article will talk a bit about this topic as well.

The strategy is to search for ignored keyword phrases which are not too competitive and create effective doorway pages related to these keyword phrases. These pages can be promoting a product for instance. Imagine you come up with several keyword phrases that generate a few monthly searches, you now have several pages.

So each page targeting a specific keyword phrase is worth traffic and not any type of traffic but it will be targeted. So if you have one page which brings you only 1 visitor per day and you have 50 pages, you can easily receive 50 visitors per day for free. You see the potential now.

Keywords that have about 1000 searches on Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions previously known as Overture valuable keywords with lower competition.

If you are using wordtracker , a keyword with only 10 searches per day can get you a good ranking and bring you traffic.

If you have already a website which is generating traffic, you can dramatically increase your numbers, simply by adding relevant doorway pages targeting a specific keyword.

These pages have content and have your optimized navigation menu on it with their specific keyword phrases. These pages are just an entry to your site nothing more nothing less. They should not be excessively optimized with keywords but they must have some optimized content which is readable by your visitors and friendly for the search engines as well.

If you have a good website which is crawled by Google's robot called "Googlebot" often, your new pages will get spidered and indexed fast and will start bringing you small loads of targeted traffic.

But be careful when adding pages, don't go in a frenzy with this and add hundreds or even thousands of pages all of a sudden.

For eg if your site has 50 pages already indexed in Google and ranking well and you add 100 new pages at once, your indexed pages might suffer a temporary drop in rankings.

The key here is to add pages on a regular basis say 1 or 2 pages daily until you reach the total number of pages to be added. Why not take advantage of on this free source of traffic?

The key is to research your keywords well first, work on your content and create these pages afterwards. Your website will grow bigger and bigger with time and it will attract loads of targeted traffic from multiple keyword phrases.

Good luck and happy research and optimizing.

There are literally thousands of blogs by eBusiness insiders. This has changed the landscape of guerrilla marketing. At first it was seen as just something cool to do ... but blogs are now being used to build personal and corporate credibility that will eventually attract customers (they hope!).

Blogs are a goldmine of formerly hard to get insight from CEO's, marketing guru's and others who never used to have a public forum. These business leaders are utilizing the internet to convey their personal thoughts on happenings in their industry and life. They are blogging for the same reasons they do public speaking, to build credibility for themselves and their company's. Blogging has become a new … less time consuming and less expensive way to reach potential and current customers.

Big Blog Company associate Jackie Danicki comments in The Times (London) on CEO blogs, "You basically have a lot of CEOs who are sitting there and writing about what they know. Also adding personal things in, talking off-topic, about their holidays. ...It gets readers to feel an affinity."

Danicki continues, "Executives start blogging for a number of reasons, They want to raise their personal profile. They want to reach out to customers and members of their own staff without going through official channels and PR departments. They want to be seen as a forward thinking company up to date with the latest trend."

The effect is powerful viral marketing with blogs linking to other blogs. "The real value is things that you don't expect," says Danicki. "I know from our perspective, the amount of people we've ended up talking to and doing business with just simply thanks to our blog is amazing. Producers in Hollywood. People from publishing companies in the States. People who in another time without this network we would never have made contact with."

So, what kind of information is in these blogs? I remember reading Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler's blog where he warns "all trade show operators about the perils of working with the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas". Real time concerns by big time CEO's, now that's what the internet was invented for!

Then there is Jonathan's Blog. Sounds innocuous doesn't it? Well, Jonathan is none other than President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems. Sure, he has a pony tail, but at least he isn't wearing pajamas. Jonathan is usually pointed and philisophical in his frequent blog posts as in this recent excerpt, "Please do not listen to the bizarro numbskull anti-Sun conspiracy theorists. They were lunatics then, they are lunatics now, they will always be lunatics. We love the open source community, we spawned from it."

Billionairs have blogs too. Dot com billionair Mark Cuban who is starring in "The Benefactor" reality show has been blogging since March. In one post he dumps on Trump, "I don't think its dawned on you just how hard Mark Burnett threw you under the bus. … Nice job on Leno last night Donald. At least you admitted that you hadn't seen The Benefactor. But saying that it will fail. That's a little much Donald, even from you."

The CEO of Tucows, a big domain seller, blogs us with his insider insights that future domain sales will be done via auctions. Elliot Noss states, "The market for expired names is changing. The old one (framework) wasn't working. Not for everyday registrants and that is who we should all be thinking about. Not for Verisign and not for ICANN. Those who say that either of them like the status quo really do not have a clue."

Robin Hopper, CEO & Founder of iUpload, talks about how major consumer marketing efforts are starting to utilize blogs. "Coke's online brand manager Mark Dooley reveals they've been keeping a close watch on consumer generated marketing including blogs and that they plan a social networking-oriented marketing effort soon. Bottom line, consumer generated marketing is going to be a must have tactic in your arsenal…"

The Jason Calacanis Weblog shows how blogs often reflect where one has traveled to. Jason is currently the Chairman of The Weblogs, Inc. and has previously started and sold several dot com ventures. In this post Jason is at the Gnomedex conference (on blogging) in California ...

"Speaking at Gnomedex right now.. I'm blogging this from the stage of Gnomedex."

Well, its not always biting commentary, but it is fun … and in the end it's marketing. Possibly, the most powerful type of corporate marketing per dollar spent ever invented. 

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/ins...

Isn't it frustrating? All you need is a new computer desk (or whatever you may be currently shopping for), but you can't make a decision you're comfortable with. It shouldn't be this hard, should it? What's holding you back? Probably lack of information.

Here's something every web site owner should know. When visitors come to your site, they are looking for a reason to buy from you. Think that's stating the obvious? You'd be surprised! I come across countless sites every day that do everything but give the visitor a reason to buy, subscribe, click, call or otherwise take action. It's a fatal mistake in any business, but it's especially damaging for web-based companies.

Let's continue with our example of buying a computer desk. You start with the Big 3 office-supply stores. You click the "office furniture" link, and you're faced with a barrage of links to pages about lamps, printer stands, bookshelves and more. Then you get to the desks. Computer desks, desk collections, metal desks, workstations… geez! There are lots of links, but no information. Finally, after trudging through pages of links, you find some actual copy that describes a desk you think you might want.

You look over the features. You write down the price. You gather the shipping or delivery information. Great! Now, on to the next site.

When you arrive, everything looks almost the same except the logo. Same navigation, same links, same inventory, same prices. The shipping amount is the same, and the delivery policy is identical to the one on the site you just came from. As you click from site to site, it's like déjà vu. How are you supposed to make a decision to buy when all your options are equal? What will be the determining factor between site A and site B?

If you're feeling frustrated just reading this scenario, imagine how your site visitors feel. When they come to your site, they are looking for a clear reason to buy from you instead of all the other sites. Do you give them a reason? Do you give them several reasons?

If all factors are equal -- even if all factors are similar -- your visitors will find it difficult to make a decision. When they start guessing which site would be best to buy from, you start losing business. Maybe they'll choose you, maybe they won't. There is a way to ensure you are chosen over your competition. You have to clearly point out how you are different or better than every other option available.

MarketingExperiments.com recently published their findings in regards to differentiating your company from others. They reported that when asked what their most unique aspect was, most companies answered, "Our great customer service." I have bad news for you. That won't cut it. Why? Because, in most cases, when customers are visiting sites to gather information and make purchasing decisions, they won't come in contact with your customer service department. It would be a non-issue until something went wrong.

Also, since most businesses are claiming excellent customer service, it's an overused promise that has begun to carry less and less weight. You need something solid. You need something that is persuasive. If I were standing in front of you and told you that I was considering buying my desk from you or from Vendor Z, what would you say to convince me to buy from you? Here are some things to consider when trying to differentiate yourself from other businesses:

Offer free shipping (on all orders or on orders over a certain amount).

Increase your inventory.

Decrease your inventory and carry only specialty items.

Lower your prices.

Raise your prices (works well for premium goods & services).

Increase your area of expertise (for service-based businesses).

Specialize or narrow your niche.

Achieve ratings or rankings from well-known associations or organizations.

Apply for a patent.

Win awards.

Offer a customer-loyalty program.

Conduct an online survey of your visitors to ask what they want. (SurveyMonkey.com is great for this.)

Look back over your complaints and other feedback for ideas about how to set yourself apart. * Email existing customers (if you have their permission to do so) and ask them why they chose you.

Whatever you do, don't stay in a position where you are exactly the same as (or highly similar to) your competition. The chances are far too great that you'll get lost in the crowd.

Source: http://www.searchengineguide....

You've got your blog set up and you've started posting pithy, useful information that your niche market would benefit from and enjoy. Days go by, you keep publishing, but no one comments and your traffic stats are barely registering. What do you do?

Like any website you own, you must do some blog promotion to start driving traffic to your site. Here are 16 steps, in no particular order of importance, that you can start doing now to get traffic moving to your blog.

1. Set up a Bloglet subscription form on your blog and invite everyone in your network to subscribe: family, friends, colleagues, clients, associates. http://www.bloglet.com/

2. Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search engine (see tutorial on http://www.biztipsblog.com) http://www.my.yahoo.com

3. Read and comment on other blogs that are in your target niche. Don't write things like "nice blog" or "great post." Write intelligent, useful comments with a link to your blog.

4. Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish. http://www.pingomatic.com

5. Submit your blog to traditional search engines: http://www.submitfire.com

6. Submit your blog to blog directories. The most comprehensive list of directories is on this site: http://www.masternewmedia.org... Tip: Create a form to track your submissions; this can take several hours when you first start so schedule an hour a day for submitting or hire a VA to do it for you.

7. Add a link to your blog in your email signature file.

8. Put a link to your blog on every page of your website.

9. If you publish a newsletter, make sure you have a link to your blog in every issue.

10. Include a link to your blog as a standard part of all outgoing correspondence such as autoresponder sequences, sales letters, reports, white papers, etc.

11. Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

12. Make sure you have an RSS feed URL that people can subscribe to. The acronym RSS means Rich Site Summary, or some may consider its meaning as Really Simple Syndication. It is a document type that lists updates of websites or blogs available for syndication. These RSS documents (also known as 'feeds') may be read using aggregators (news readers). RSS feeds may show headlines only or both headlines and summaries. To learn how news aggregators/RSS readers work, see this site: http://www.rss-specifications...

13. Post often to keep attracting your subscribers to come back and refer you to others in their networks; include links to other blogs, articles and websites in your posts

14. Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts. What is TrackBack? Essentially what this does is send a message from one server to another server letting it know you have posted a reference to their post. The beauty is that a link to your blog is now included on their site.

15. Write articles to post around the web in article directories. Include a link to your blog in the author info box (See example in our signature below).

16. Make a commitment to blog everyday. 10 minutes a day can help increase your traffic as new content attracts search engine spiders. Put it on your calendar as a task every day at the same time. Tip: Use a hit counter to track your visitor stats: how many unique visitors, how many page views, average length of visit. You can get a free hit counter at http://www.sitemeter.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/