SEOcontest2008

Effective article writing and publishing as part of online marketing. You can increase link popularity and drive traffic to you site. This article is intended to help us get started.

There are several online services that can help publish your articles online. Google can deliver some good resources.

Some sites require that you register with them. My suggestion would be that you use the same user name and password with each publication website. Create a template using Notepad so that when you are ready to entering in your articles you will have everything in one place.

The following outline can be used as a template. Article Title: Make sure that you have your theme keyword phrase here. Author Bio: Limit your bio to about 200 characters some allow more, but I think shorter is better. Add at least, one link to your website in the bio. Have the link pointing back to the page on your site where the article resides. Keyword List: Use one or two keyword phrases. Make a list of two or three keyword phrases that you want your article to be found under. Put the phrases are in the beginning and ending of your article. Article Content: This is the content of your article, not include the title go in this box. The articles should be about 500 plus words. the majority of the article publishing sites have a 500 minimum. Use the following outline if you are not sure how to proceed: Introduction: Introduce the problem that you’re going to solve. The next, state the three areas that you’re going to cover, the “points” of the article. Points of the article: Point1 Two or three sentences, Point2 Two or three sentences, Point3 Two or three sentences. Conclusion: Encourage reader to think about what are they are going to do now. Make some suggestions on what to do next. Invite them to look for upcoming articles on this topic or related topics. Finally: Edit your article for spelling and grammar. Create Meta tags so that you can have them when that page is added to your website. Add the content to your website and have it on your site for about a week before you publish the article.

It is time for you to go to the next step: start writing. Effective article writing and publishing will only be beneficial after you do it!

Landing pages have the ability to grab and hold us like fly no-fly paper or repel us like jumping on the trampling. The question is what impact does your landing page have on the people who visit your website. As I talk to people who are just getting into SEO (search engine optimization), all they focus on our rankings in traffic. We have to remember that “rankings” in “traffic” or not the end but a means to the end. That end is visitors to your site that take advantage of the solutions that you offer. We can have a lot of traffic to our website but if no one is sticking around long enough to see if our solutions can solve their problems then that traffic does not mean anything.

A lot of thought must go into your landing pages, both from a search engine perspective and from a customer perspective.

Search Engine perspective:

This is covered in Search Engines 101 Paid Vs Natural Search so I am not going to go into detail here.

Customer Focused Landing Pages:

Your landing page has to do one thing, answer the questions that the searcher had in mind when he typed in his keywords. The searcher type in his search terms because he has a problem, needs a solution or is in some kind of “pain”. You have about two seconds to convince him that you understand what he is going through and what he needs. The last thing a searcher wants to see is that you can jump higher, run faster and do it better than the competition. He just doesn’t care (yet). Besides, most of the websites that he already visited probably stated that they do that. The challenge is to show the searcher that you have the answers to his needs. How do we do that?

1. Think of as many questions as you can that might be on the mind of a visitor to that specific landing page.

2. Choose one of the questions to be the title of that specific landing page. Use the other questions as sub points or topics in the outline of the page.

3. The content underneath each heading will be a description of the problem. It is very important that when you describe the problem you do it from your client’s perspective.

4. After describing two or three scenarios that your client may fall into closeout with the paragraph that describes your qualifications for dealing with the above scenarios. This is where you put in how me years of experience, the combined experience of your team or your experience in the marketplace.

5. The last thing is to have a call to action. The idea is that if your client falls into one of the scenarios described it would be natural for them to do the call for action to get help with their problem.

For example, if someone is doing a search on long-term care insurance they may only have a general idea of what you’re looking for. When they come to a landing page that has a question like “what happens to your nest egg if you suffer an illness or an injury that requires long-term care?” Then in the description of the problem they read that one year of long-term care can cost between $90,000 and $130,000 and as a result of this high costs it will either force you into bankruptcy or dependency on your children or family to take care of you. (Not a pretty picture.) After you add your qualifications, whatever they are, you put in your call to action. It could be something like “for a free quote and help in understanding what your options are fill out form below and one of our experts will contact you within the next 48 hours”.

So the question remains, are your landing pages flypaper or trampolines? Customer focused landing pages are worth the time and energy to produce. If you are not sure give us a call and we will do a free evaluation of your site. This will help determine whether or not changes or in order.

Search Engines

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN are really just data bases. When you do a Google Search you are not searching the “world wide web” you are searching Google’s data base. There are two ways to get in to these databases. One is to submit your site to the different search engines. In about 6 to 9 weeks the search engine will index your site. They have software that comes to your site and index every page and adds it to the database. They come into your main web URL and follow the links to all the pages of your site. They capture key elements from the code on your page to the content. These are then stored in the data base. When someone puts a keyword in the search box the “algorithms” determine the best page or links to the best pages for your search.

The other way to get added to the search engines data base is to have the search engine software find you through a link to your site from another web site back to yours. The software, called “spiders” will periodically comeback and re crawl your site to see if you have updated it.

One important thing to know is that each page on your site is indexed individually and each page stands on its own. The ranking are based upon the combination of correct meta tags, relevant content to the keyword they are trying to get rankings for and link popularity. Mostly one way links back to their site from relevant sites.

As long as the search engine can index the site, clearly read the meta tags and content, the better. The big issues come when a site is built in flash with very little content (search engines cannot read or index “flash” sites. Also, if the bulk of the relevant content is in PDF format this is bad because the search engines cannot read PDF. If the search engines cannot index the relevant text there will be no rankings.

You all ready know this but “sites” are not ranked, individual pages are ranked for specific terms found in the content of that page as well as link popularity, (relevant links pointing back to that specific page) for the term that you are trying to get ranked on. This is why each page has to be giving very specific attention. Paid search

Paid search is when your ad shows up at the very top of a Google search or down the right hand side of the results page. These are called “sponsored ads”. You pay for those positions. When every you click on one of those ads the owner of the ad pays the search engine. This is also called “pay-per-click”. The amount you pay is determined by several factors including what you are willing to pay every time someone clicks on your ad.

Natural Search

Natural Search is when you type in a “keyword” and a link and a description shows up on left hand side of the search result page. The only way to get on the first page is to have very relevant content on your web site and links to your site from other relevant sites. This is a long process for people in it for the long haul. There are a lot of companies that claim to be able to get you on the first page of Google. That may be true if the “search term” is very specific and no one else would ever search for it but you or they are using a “black hat” method that could get you site banned from the search engine. Bottom line: Paid Search means you pay for your position. The benefit is, if you have the $$, you will get instant traffic. Stop paying and the traffic goes away. Natural search is free traffic but it is built over time. The advantage is, if done right, it can provide traffic for a long time.

Search traffic (paid or natural) is the BEST traffic to have because you are being found by folks who are specifically looking for what you have. It does not get any better than that.

Article writing is a very good way to earn money over the Internet. Article writers often write website content for a specific website as a one time assignment. They write their article, receive payment and then go on to write for someone else. Article marketing on the other hand is a way that will be profitable to you as long as you are on a specific Internet site. How would you like to receive a continual supply of money from articles you write instead of a one-time payment?

Article marketing, is placing your articles in online article directories for everyone to read. These articles usually will have a link to your own website at the bottom, with a photo and a short biodata about you. If someone reads your article and clicks on the backlink, your website gets traffic. Your article has to be impressive enough to induce the visitor to click on the backlink.

You can allow it to happen if you remain aware of particular things. Writing should involve topics of interest to the reader. The topic you choose should concern a little-known but beneficial service, a guide to self-help, a do-it-yourself article, or even hints about a certain item. Choose unique articles that will engage a reader. Unique contents are certain to create interest.

Write in a reader-friendly language and style. Try not to use decorative language which may be difficult for the normal internet user to understand. Also try not to use difficult concepts. If the article contains some complex term, it is your duty to explain what it means. Formatting your article using headings and bulleted lists will make your article easy to read. Try to provide some valuable insight into the article. It should be clear to the reader that you are quite knowledgeable on the subject.

As soon as your copy is prepared for publication, put it on a popular article directory. This is a kind of site that solicits columns from authors of all nations throughout the globe. It provides room for your contact information and for a backlink. It is crucial to post your copy on more than one directory at a time in order to raise your internet profile and generate more visitors to your site.

Sometimes article marketing could fail to be the promised money mint. It may fail if the article is too weak to attract any visitors. It is logical that the writer must have some basic writing talents. Another reason may be the sudden disappearance of the writer from the internet. Article marketing is an unending process. The writers need to constantly keep writing new articles. For a hardworking and talented writer, article marketing is certainly a way to make good money.

In today’s technologically driven world there are many ways to earn money through Internet and article writing is one of them. Many article writers are happy writing content for websites. If you engage yourself in article marketing, then your article will pay you as long as it is present on the site. Write something your reader is interested in. Your subject matter can be about a little-known but useful service or a self-help guide, a how-to article or handy hints about something. If your unique articles contain stimulating information, their unique content is sure to arouse your reader’s interest. Write in a reader-friendly language and style.

There is more business being done online than ever before. There are hundreds of thousands of new business web sites coming on every month. 70% of the US population (233 million people) are online. Over 1.2 billion people worldwide are online. The question is how do we find clients in an ocean of competitors?

Part of the answer to the above question is which number do you focus on, the number of people on line or the number of competitors? If you are focused on the number of people online, read on. If you are more focused on the number of competitors, read on.

Search engine marketing has been proven to have the lowest cost per acquisition of any other marketing medium. It is the only medium where people are actively searching for you. A successful campaign should include a web site designed around one question: “What are your clients looking for?” This is the starting point and may seem basic but it is surprising how many people have are just scratching the surface in their understanding of this.

Your clients are in need of solutions, answers or products. Do they know:

1.that you exist? 2.the unique value that you bring to the table? 3.the depth of knowledge and experience you can bring to bear in helping them solve their issues? 4.the passion that you have for meeting their needs?

SEO Management SEO (search engine optimization), is the art helping people find what they are looking for, on your site”. A well optimized website requires two elements the correct “on page” optimization so that the search engines can determine the relevancy of the information you are presenting. Yes, it is not as important as it use to be but it is still needed. Another essential piece of the puzzle is “off page optimization”. This is having web sites linking back to yours. You may think that you are important and provide a great service to mankind but if no one else does you will not get ranked well. Quality links to your web site and an on going linking strategy is absolutely vital for good rankings. SEO optimization is not a onetime deal it is an ongoing process.

PPC Management Pay-per-click is a fantastic way to drive traffic to your site from the major search engines. It can also suck your marketing budget dry in just a couple of days if not done properly. The goal of the search engines (and their strategies) is more clicks. The more people click on your ads the more money the search engines make. Their strategy is to get as many clicks as possible with in your budget and they are willing to do that all day long. Great for them bad for you.

The real goal should be more conversion with less clicks and lower cost. For lead generation sites this will mean lower cost per conversion. For e commerce sites this will result in a higher “return on ad spend”. It is easy to figure out: profit/ad spend=% and if that % is not over 101% you are losing money! The only way to do that is to track every thing from clicks to conversions; cost per click to cost per conversion; total revenue. PPC Management should be the process that is designed to make that happen.

Click Fraud Management Click Fraud is a fact of life in the online world. The search engines are getting better at detecting and crediting their online advertisers. The key is to find a Click Fraud program that can track an IP address even if the go to another search engine and click on your ads and give them a warning that they are being tracked. It is amazing how bad behavior stops if the they know they are being watched and tracked! Also, some click fraud caused by our clients who find it easier to keep clicking on our ad instead of book marking our page. This will give them a gentle reminder to do that.

Many Roads It is also important to examine as many roads to your site as possible. Find blogs where your clients hang out. Write articles and publish them on the web. There are hundreds of sites that will publish you articles for free. For a nominal fee some sites will push your article out to thousands of other sites looking for content, Isnare.com is a good example. This is great from three perspectives. One, you will get a tremendous amount of links back to your site. Secondly, this will lead to increase traffic and thirdly writing articles will help establish you as an expert in your field. There are newsletters, co-registration, affiliate marketing. The key is to research these and see what will work for you.

Hire or not to Hire outside help

“How do I know if I need help?”

You might need help if:

1.Your clients and customers are not able to find you on the search engines. 2.You do not know why your competitors are in the top ten search results and you are on page 10,001! 3.You can not keep up with the changing technologies and even the changes in the market. 3.You do not have the time to take away from what you do best, running your business!

If you do need help, do your home work.

1.Get references and call them. 2.Get specifics about how they have helped their clients. 3.Find out how many clients they have and how many your account manager will handle. 4.Get a specific action calendar. Know what they are going to do and when it will be complete. 5.Make sure they understand your products, services and goals. 6.Do not be afraid to get another company to “audit” their work.

Finally This is serious business and one can loose a lot of money and time very quickly if you do not do it correctly. The bottom line is, if your customers cannot find you, they will find someone else. If you do not have someone in house with a passion to help grow your business. Find someone who knows what is important to the search engines and will not get you banned.

You might contemplate and assume it is extremely tough to work part-time from your house to make dosh online as you work full time in a normal job occupation. You are wide of the mark, if you consider so. It isn’t.

Some added readily available cash would have to assuredly come in useful with every person in pressing times of need, so let us see exactly how we can work from the comfort of your home to make income working online by some very acceptable and doable ways.

Some Genuine Ways To Manage A Part-Time income In the cyber Business world:

Automate your working online investment: The most essential factor that you would want to do with your part-time online adventure is to automate it so that it won’t take masses of your time and effort to maintain it. For the purposes of this illustration you may well have programmed online email contact replies and responses to the visitors of your website instead of obligating to face up to the bother of replying to each and every message yourself. Besides you could also automate the sending of your writings/articles to hundreds of directory websites as opposed to requiring interaction with each one individually.

Make your passionate interest your professional business and outsource: The next extremely significant thing is - build a part-time working online venture on what you are first-rate at, well-informed about or just like a lot. Outsource the work for your wired online business if you are short on time but have the built up/earned wealth to provide. Like how about leasing out your needs such as text information to other people who might do it from their own residences for you? e.g. see Elance.com

Use Multi Level Marketing programs or member platforms to buildup your working online part-time investment potential prospects:

You may well opt to have a small scale and in essense part-time wired online professional business to earn commission by assembling sales for extra work relating to online brokers. You might shape your own sales affiliate group and pull in more cash over time as you work part-time to earn fantastic money wired online. These associates and network online marketers that you gain will in actual fact work like the salesguys for your nicely designed website/online biz as well as for the websites to whom you are offering website links and web space.

Pursue various freelance jobs:

By working as a casual freelancer you may well work part-time at home to make wealth online. You could give graphic design, marketing copy, casual writing of articles etc., software development or other self-employed projects a try. Even offering your services for them is getting to be a chosen way to escalate part-time professional business opportunities.

What is bidding and in what way can someone bid? Well, in short, in bidding you make a firm estimate letting your probable user know the quantity of time you would take to accomplish his/her project and how much you ought to cost for the work. Of course your prospective purchaser must go for the cheapest bid. So you have to also make sure that your bid is good enough to gain you some ad hoc freelance projects. If they do, your working online part-time investment is on its way to success.

Besides all these ways indicated above, you may possibly do a part-time venture of offering pieces on eBay, selling websites and domain titles or even get money for dealing in market research surveys. Why not produce a nicely designed site and gifting a mass of free gifts like downloadable gifts, wall computer backgrounds etc. on it and see in satisfaction your casual online adventure website grow in status as a lucrative site.

Never give up, give your aspirations a chance to shoot up in the sky with an online part-time venture and shower your loved ones with gifts and trips as you work part-time from home to make massive bucks on the internet.

The best way to make more sales online or earn extra revenue is to attract more visitors to your site. The best way to attract these visitors is by increasing your Search engine rankings. The problem is that the SEO forums are full of inconsistencies and misinformation. It can be quite difficult at times to find cold hard facts.

Every now and again a product is released that is worth it’s weight in gold. One such product is Xtreme Rankings by Ryan Moran. Xtreme rankings contains no fluff and lot of information that will allow you to capture top search engine rankings. These in turn lead to more visitors and more income.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of Xtreme Rankings. It wasn’t released and promoted by hundreds of so called guru’s. It is the type of product that thrives on recommendations from satisfied customers.

Xtreme Rankings consists of an e-book and accompanying Video, or should that be a video and accompanying e-book? I suppose it depends on whether you learn from seeing or reading. Either way you will be shown step by step how to conquer the search engine rankings and propel your site to the top. No matter what your level of ability you will be able to follow the guides.

SEO techniques tend to change on a regular basis. What worked last month may not be as effective next month. Therefore it is good to know that Ryan keeps Xtreme Rankings Updated. Recent changes to Netscape who changed their branding to Propeller have already been included in the latest version.

I’ve been using Xtreme rankings for several months now and the change to my business has been immense. I have drastically reduced my PPC costs as I no longer need to advertise as much as my sites now get organic traffic from the the search engines. The savings in advertising costs alone would have paid for Xtreme rankings many times over.

When I now launch a site I am secure in the knowledge that within 4 weeks by using the methods in Xtreme rankings I’ll be generating a good level of free search engine traffic. In the past 2 days a site created at the end of last month has made 2 sales. This is only going to grow over the coming few months.

Another site I created last month is already getting over 90 visitors a day. Last Sunday 133 people visited the site. Yesterday 106 people came to look at what I was offering. This is a site that is 4 weeks old. Before Buying Xtreme rankings I could only dream of seeing visitors like that within 6 months.

If you want to make money online then the best way is to increase your search engine rankings in Google , MSN and Yahoo. The best way to rank well is to read the e-book and view the video that comes with Xtreme Rankings. You owe it to yourself to look at what Xtreme Rankings can do for you.

You can read a full review of Xtreme rankings by clicking on one of the links below.

It’s no wonder that search engine optimization has such a bad name in some areas of the Internet. A visit to any SEO forum will reveal so called advice which is at the best a year out of date. This advice is put forward with such conviction that many people believe it and continue to use out dated practices. A large number of Search Engine Optimization “specialists” should rank alongside the Quack doctors of the 19th century

The problem is that Search Engine Optimization is an in general an evolving science. The search engines are constantly improving their algorithms to produce more accurate results. What worked last week more than like likely won’t work this week. The good news is that there are some things that work now and have always worked. These are the basics of SEO and you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to get someone to do them for you each time you build a new site you can easily learn to do them yourself.

Luckily for us a series of new product has recently been released that at last talks some sense about Search engine optimization. Xtreme Rankings is a book and series of videos that shows you how to get your sites ranking at the top of Google. The process is laid out in easy to understand section sand Ryan the author takes you by the hand and guides you through the SEO maze.

Ryan’s system is so easy to follow that my daughter was able to understand all the steps involved in creating a plan to promote a website. Both the book and videos were easy to follow and she didn’t need to ask me to explain anything. I can tell you I was pretty impressed by this.

Xtreme Rankings consists of a set of Videos and an e-book. It also comes with a Bonus product.

Part 1 The Xtreme Rankings Book

Part 2. The accompanying Xranking Videos

Bonus Product: The Joel method e-book

The Book part of Xtreme ranking Guides you through what you need to do to get to the top of Gooles rankings. The books contains no filler and it just nugget after nugget of pure information. I just wish some other recently released products could have been this useful. You get all the information you need and see all the tools which Ryan uses.

The Video portion of Xtreme Rankings are my favorite part. Ryan takes you through every tool and resource that he uses. Each Video ties in with a section of the e-book so you get to see exactly how he performs each step. Once again Ryan doesn’t hide anything and shows us everything we will need to know.

Why Xtreme Rankings comes with a bonus product is a mystery. If Ryan is reading this I’d like him to know that it doesn’t need a bonus the product is good enough as it is with out offering bonus’s. The bonus book covers a cool method of generating income that was used by a friend of Ryan’s.

When you’re trying to generate money and business with your website, keyword research is one of the most important steps you’ll take in building your website. Figure out what your website will be about - what product or service you’re selling. Then you can start to brainstorm on what words people might search for to find your services.

The thousands of terms people use to search for things related to your industry online will help you target your pay per click advertising and other web marketing, as well as help your SEO efforts (especially so you know what anchor text to use when link building). The wider your subject and more services or products your provide, the more in-depth your keyword research will get, sometimes resulting in lists tens of thousands of words long.

To start your keyword research, just brainstorm a bit and get into your target audience’s head. What might they search for in the search engines to find your service? From there you can generate short list of broad terms. From there you can take your research in one of two directions.

The more traditional way to generate keyword lists and conduct keyword research is to use online tools and software. Google’s keyword tool will give you a list of keywords related to the terms you entered as well as related terms you may want to consider. There is also software you can purchase that will search several keyword tools on the Net, including Google’s, Yahoo’s, WordTracker and even find common misspellings of your keywords so you can target those with your search marketing as well.

If the purpose of your keyword research is for your pay per click ads in Google or Yahoo, there’s a better way to conduct your research. How is that you ask? Just a bit of experimentation involving your pay per click program.

Most pay per click programs allows you to choose a ‘broad’ match or ‘exact’ match option regarding your keywords as your build ad campaigns. Spend a bit of cash to build a general campaign around your original keyword research - the list of several general terms you created. Add them as broad matches, which will allow your ads to pop up anytime at least one of those words is in a search inquiry.

After letting the campaign run for a while, you can check to see which EXACT keywords send the most traffic to your website. This allows you to tell which keyword terms attract the most business for the least money. You can begin building a more detailed campaign and eventually phase out the broad keywords for exact matches, saving you many man-hours of keyword research.

It’s really not rocket-science, it just means putting a little money up front. While more traditional keyword research works and definitely has value, for companies with less manpower and time, this method should help lead to higher conversion rates at lower costs. It can’t hurt to try!

If you are an author or a professional who has lately been downsized, you can find loads of ways to earn money by doing article marketing without even leaving your house. Sure you might like to write the traditional way - on an assignment given to you by an editor and with a regular salary - but times have really changed.

Many people write articles at home and then have to market them on the internet or in traditional print media. It may not be necessary or advisable to research, write, and edit a well-developed article before you market it. You might achieve better results by preparing a story proposal and sending a sample of the style of writing that you hope to employ in the article to be written and sold.

Grabbing the reader’s attention with a hot story line is what many see as the basis of marketing in the more traditional print versions. Check news websites for local and global issues, and use that topic. These random and wide arrays of topics can turn into very marketable articles.

Article marketing can be done in new ways on the Internet. Writers can find several services soliciting articles. Money is made for these services through advertising messages associated with the submitted articles. These articles are often on topics that are of interest to potential web researchers. They often contain key words that search engines are likely to use to locate information. Instructional articles, holiday themes, beginner guides, and reviews are examples of this type of writing.

You can start a blog and accept an offer from an advertising service to earn money by finding viewers for advertisements associated with your articles. With an interest in a given subject like automobiles, shopping, or sports, you can attract a group of loyal readers and support a successful blog.

Your personal life and work experience may be what gives you that edge to deliver unique content in your articles. With the internet being the first choice of many seeking information for things as varied as a new handbag to news to travel, a well-researched article can provide just what they are looking for. Perhaps your point of view, sense of humor or expertise is exactly what will put you ahead of the game and article marketing will be a cinch for you.

Article marketing is a form of advertising which has become widespread and popular among Internet businesses. Companies have formed with the sole business of providing unique content and unique articles to use as part of their promotion. Articles that provide specialized content are the best. You are able to make your stories stand out if you have personal experience or knowledge in the topic. These articles can simply be comprised of basic information on any given topic. The web is often the first place people around the globe look for information. If you can write, this will be simple to master.