Website Marketing Resource

With 40 million websites in existence, and more than 3 billion web pages indexed by Google at the time of this writing (July 2003), it’s no wonder that more and more people are relying on search engines to find their way through the unruly world that the web has become.

Nowadays, it is crucial to get your pages indexed by the most important search engines. To maximize traffic to your site, you must make sure that all your internal pages are indexed, not just your main page (homepage).

Fortunately, you don’t need to submit each of your pages manually. The most efficient way is to create a Site Map (a list of links to all the pages in your site) and link to it directly from your homepage.

How Will A Site Map Help Me?

Search engines find pages by "crawling" the web. They go through the code of all the pages in their database (also called index), following links to other pages and adding them to the database (in fact, more pages are added this way than by manual submission).

If you’ve been utilizing the Internet for any length of time it’s likely you have been bombarded with junk mail claiming you can make money "while you sleep." Most sensible people are bound to ignore such claims of easy money. But is it true? Can you really make money while you sleep?

The answer is an absolute YES! However, don’t assume my answer in any way implies that it is a get rich quick while you sleep proposition.

I know it is possible to make money via the Internet while one sleeps as I have been doing it for a little over a month. Actually, I have been utilizing the Internet to market my business and events for several years with a great deal of success, but it is only in the last month that I began aggressively selling products via my website.

Over the last few weeks, between e-products and my latest book, 101 Ways to Get Your Foot in the Door, I have sold a substantial amount of product. Within an hour of launching my products I was making money. From day one, each morning when I turn on my computer I am greeted with sales.

Search Engine Optimisation: Why Not a Flash Website?
 by: David Touri

Yeah why not! They look good and can be very creative with a lot of visual effects. But the truth is they are not very search engine friendly. For those who have just spent a lot of bucks on creating a flash masterpiece, no need to panic, there are a few ways to help improve your website’s search engine visibility.

To give you a quick rundown as to why flash websites are not favoured by search engines, they are seen as a one page image file with no text based content. You will notice that when you navigate through a flash website, the URL address will always remain the same. So here you have a website with no text based content, is a one page image file and has no internal link structure, translating into a search engine’s enemy.

Unless you have an extremely popular name within your industry or have an enormous amount of relevant incoming links, then you will get away with having a flash website for the obvious keyword phrases i.e. company name. Who would fall into this category? An example would be Coca Cola, ever heard of them? So for those who fall into the other category, and that would be about 90% of us, fortunately there are alternatives to help boost your rankings.

Question: How to deal with ultra skeptical offline or be it Internet surfers in order to reassure them and get them to happily open up their wallets?

I like that "happily open up their wallets"! Your customer should be happy to open his/her wallet. When business is done right, everybody wins and nobody loses. You’re happy to make a sale and your customer is happy to be getting a good value for the money.

Here’re a "small" list of things you can do to remove skepticism.

As you surf the web take a look around at many of the sites you see. Do you notice anything that seems strange? Well, let me point it out to you. There are hundreds of thousands of web sites that just don’t get much traffic. Some of these sites house hundreds of articles, reviews, tutorials, tools, products, forums to mention a few things, yet still they do not receive large amounts of traffic. What is their problem? They have the content. What is left?

The problem is these sites aren’t optimized for the search engines. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, SE Friendliness, however you refer to it doesn’t matter, the fact is it works and I’m going to tell you what’s involved.

Before we continue let me familiarize you with some relevant terminology in my own words.

**Search Engine Optimization**

Search engine optimization can be referred to as the addition and modification of all variables and extended variables of a web site in hopes of achieving a better position in the search engines. By variables I mean components of a website such as META tags and content. By extended variable I mean things such as links from other sites.

If you are using pay per click advertising, I don’t need to tell you that it can get very expensive if you have a lot of unnecessary click throughs. In this article I will explain how to screen your visitors and how to apply it to your pay per click advertising campaign, so that you can screen your visitors before they click through.

How It Works

To minimize the amount of unnecessary click throughs, we are going to talk about a screening technique that is used in copywriting. A good copywriter has the ablity to screen the serious individuals from the test pilots, before the sale is initially made.

By using this screening technique you will dramatically decrease the amount of refunds that you could be receiving. In this case, you need to be specific about your product or service without giving too many details, this will eliminate unnecessary click throughs.

When it comes time to develop an ad that best describes your offer, you need to use precise wording. If you use any ambiguous words, phrases or statements in your ads, you will confuse the viewer, making them either click through or leave. You need to keep in mind that every click through is costing you money, so you need to make sure that you are targeting your market and that each of your visitors are qualified.

Search Engine Optimisation: SEO Start Up, Landing your First Clients
 by: Ilan Touri

Starting a search engine optimisation business from scratch can be an extremely overwhelming and daunting task, especially if it is your first time. Establishing contacts and connections can also be extremely time consuming if you have no prior marketing and sales knowledge.

Below is a useful guide to help you get your first clients and to get your SEO / SEM business off the ground. Before I begin, please keep in mind that “word-of-mouth” is king, get the word out, talk and mention your business to whomever, whenever and wherever. Remember, the more exposure you offer your business, the more chances you will have landing that first deal.

Search engine optimisation marketing and offline selling tips:

1. Target your market and know your customers, i.e. do some background research. It helps to initially concentrate on one industry, e.g. travel websites, and know the terms, your clients, their line of work and their competition.

2. Localise yourself, concentrate on a local area. Try not to tackle too much at first, focus and concentrate on local businesses and gain their trust. Remember “you are a local” and share similarities.

Gain Massive Exposure For Your Service

Get your web site listed in Google and Yahoo in day’s if not hours, I did, never pay $299 to be listed in Yahoo - you can get your site listed if you have an RSS feed.

Googlebot and Yahoo’s ‘Slurp’ bot have never left my server since putting up a RSS feed, and syndicating it through RSS directories where it was quickly found by an eager, info- hungry crowd of affluent types who are looking to spend their disposable income on something that captures their imagination.

With still only about 90,000 RSS feeds in the world, compared with about 6 billion web pages, if you put up an RSS feed of your own, your feed will get noticed very quickly - like the same day!

Traffic to your web site will double, triple, or more from your RSS feed, and you will find more buyers coming in rather than freebie seekers.

If spam filters are putting you off sending out emailed newsletters, then keep in touch via your RSS feed and update it once, twice or more per day to get your info out that you want your subscribers to see.

When it comes to your marketing message, the little things count. Trouble is, you’ll never come to respect how much, until you make a commitment to science.

Let me ask you something. Do you practice Kaizen?

Kai what?

Kaizen is a Japanese word meaning gradual and orderly, continuous improvement. Sound like you?

Or do you just wake up one morning & decide that you need to re do your site?

Do you keep a diary?

Not the Anne Frank kind, a chronological record of the results revealed by your ongoing marketing experience. Documentation of exactly what happened last time you changed the copy on your web site, ad campaign, or sales letter.

If you’re like most, you don’t bother to go to this trouble, & you don’t practice Kaizen.

Now I don’t expect you to take my word for it that seemingly trivial changes to your marketing message could have a DRAMATIC impact on your results. I know better than that, see.

But here’s a simple three-step method that you can try out for the next six weeks to prove it, for yourself.

Does it seem to you that when you view "openings" within your statistics, that fewer recipients seem to be opening your campaigns?…

Where: There are 3 places your email can go once you have hit ’send’ on your latest e-marketing campaign:

1. The Inbox. Safely delivered (and hopefully read!)

2. Junk Mail Box. This has negative implications on:

a: Brand image

b: Decreased profile

c: Inaccurate campaign reporting

3. Undelivered. (?or are they?)

Why: The 3 main reasons why your statistics show less recipients are opening your campaigns:

1. Filters.

2. Fallen out of favour.

3. Statistics not accurate.

How: Let’s talk about how we can improve both the deliverability and the statistics of your campaign:

1. Filters. When an email is wrongly filtered out as Spam, this is known as a "False Positive". Here is a list of the most commonly used filters.

a) Community: This is based on the community joining together and installing the filters, then reporting any occurrences of Spam. False Positive occurrences should be low, but in reality they aren’t. This is due to a couple of reasons: The first being the weed theory. What one person regards as a weed, another may regard as a flower. We all have different opinions. The other is that many people are now reporting once wanted email as Spam instead of unsubscribing.