Once you overcome the technical hurdle of getting your website up and going, the next major hurdle is how to get eyeballs looking at your website.  You can have the most fantastically designed website in the world but design doesn’t really matter if you aren’t getting people to your site.

Once you get people to your site, you can then test various designs to see what is working and what isn’t but the important thing is to get them there in the first place.

Getting people to visit your site can definitely be challenging.  Here are some off page search engine optimizations tips you can use to ensure you have traffic coming to your website.

1. Visit forums and start posting comments and providing useful advice to forum members.  Whilst most forums won’t let you put your website links in the body of your message, they will often let you put your website link in the signature section of your profile. Incidentally, if you do this make sure to use anchor text that links to your URL and not the URL itself.  To find forums, simply type in your “keyword+forum” in Google.
2. Start visiting blogs and make comments.  Let the owner know that you like the information they have provided and why. If they like your comments they will approve it and you might find that you have a few more links pointing back to your site.
3. Set up your email address with a Gravatar. Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Not only does it help identify you, it also encourages people to click on your gravatar and go to your site. It can also provide a valuable link back to your site.
4. Use FireFox as your browser and install the FireFox “NoDoFollow” plug-in. The plug-in will show which blogs are good for making comments on and which ones are not so good. Hint: the not so good ones don’t give you any links back to your site and have no SEO value.
5. Locate blogs that use the Comment Luv plug-in.  To do this, visit Google search and type “title=”CommentLuv Enabled”” Keyphrase making sure you replace the “Keyphrase” terms with the actual keyword you are targeting.
6. Alternatively, type “your keyword”+”do follow blog” and get the results. You should have a nice juicy list of blogs where you can make comments.
7. Download Comment Kahuna and enter your keyword. The software will enable you to search by page rank or no follow / do follow.  Hint: you want “do follow” links.
8. Make a video and upload your video to You Tube. In the description, type in your website URL making sure you put http at the front so that a link is generated.
9. Locate You Tube channels in your niche that allows comments.  To do this go to Google and type in “Keyphrase” “Channel Comments” site:youtube.com/user. Just like blogs, make a useful comment about the channel. People will follow you back to your channel.
10. If using WordPress, use social media bookmarking tools such as Only Wire, Social Marker, Socialable, Sexy Bookmarks, Share This, TweetMeMe and the Facebook like plugin to help users share, bookmark and email your posts.
11. If you have other websites in related markets, make them work harder by getting them to link to each other.  Visitors might then go off and visit your other sites. However, do be careful with this strategy and ensure that each website is not just reciprocating links back to each other.
12. If you have physical products include the website address on your packaging. You’ll be amazed how many people will check this out and visit your site.

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One pillar of Search Engine Optimization is using the right keywords on your website.  The problem is that not a lot of marketers understand the importance of keywords in Search Engine Optimization. Unfortunately they they are the ones that control and brief the web designer to get their website up and running.

Fortunately, there are some quick SEO keyword tools you can use to check how effective your search engine optimization is. Using these tools will help you formulate the right SEO strategies and ask the right questions to your website designer. The first SEO analysis tool is Woorank. All you need to do is visit the site, enter in the URL and within a few minutes you will have access to a report that outlines what SEO improvements can be made to your site.  In a similar vein to Woorank, Website Grader also points out what things you can do to optimize your site.

The third tool is SEO Quake. This nifty little tool works with the Firefox browser and can be downloaded as a plugin. Once installed, the tool will tell you critical information about any website you are on. You can assess your own website by visiting the page and then activating the plugin.

Both tools will tell you information like:

• Information contained in the title
• Meta keywords
• Meta description
• Internal Links
• External Links
• Page Rank
• Alexa Rank
• Keyword Density
• Backlinks
• The age of the domain
• The number of internal links
• Sitemap
• Robots text
• And much more

SEO Quake is good for those people who already understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization and what the results mean. Woorank will tell you the same information but will also give pointers on what can be improved.

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I was recently reviewing a PPC Marketing campaign by trying to compare the cost of recruiting customers to our main database via three of our branded websites.   I compared three  separate PPC campaigns, each with different objectives and each that ran over different time frames.  The results were fascinating.

Campaign 1: Involved having a dedicated  email database marketing campaign to sign consumers up to their database. In this scenario the user had a strong call to action with a chance to win a $200 gift voucher and was directed straight to a sign up page.

Campaign 2: This search engine marketing campaign focused on branding awareness, product information and product uses.  The website’s homepage had a three column layout and a flash rotating banner at the top with 1 out of the 3 rotations focused on acquisition. The acquisition component again involved the chance to win a $200 gift voucher. The user was directed to different pages depending on search terms. There was no call to action on the other pages.

Campaign 3: This search engine marketing campaign also focused on awareness not acquisition. The website had a two column layout and a small call to action with a chance to win a $200 gift voucher in the top right corner of the website which was repeated throughout the site. The website had a lot of things happening so the user could be tempted to navigate to lots of different pages within the site.

Interestingly the cost of acquisition varied significantly for each of the campaigns?

Which campaign was the most effective? Which campaign was the cheapest?

Without a doubt Campaign 1 was the cheapest. At a cost of $2.50 per sign up it was very inexpensive.    Campaign 2 and 3 were very expensive if you compare them with Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Priceline’s costs as reported in the Entrepreneur. Campaign 2 cost just over $54 per acquisition and campaign 3 cost $81. Pretty expensive when you consider these products are high volume, low margin products sold in supermarkets with no upsells!

Whilst Campaign 1 had the lowest cost per acquisition, the audience was not very targeted. It is likely that more people signed up because of the strong call to action and a chance to win rather than being engaged with the product.

People who signed up from campaigns 2 and 3, were more likely to be loyal and engaged with the products but the cost for acquisition was significantly higher. Both campaigns had lot of waste and will need to be reworked and split into two separate areas.

Upon analysis, it is also believed that the keywords recommended by the media agency were not well targeted. A more focused campaign would reduce wastage and the cost per acquisition costs.

Future Directions:

Whilst buying a list was the fastest method of attracting users, there is some doubt as to how loyal users will these will be in the long term.  What was probably more effective in this example was the fact that the user had no distractions and a strong call to action that motivated them to sign up.

When using a search engine marketing campaign, it is a good idea to develop separate landing pages aimed at recruiting people to your database – particularly if your website is cluttered.  It is also extremely important that you scrutinize your keyword list to ensure the search terms are targeted and specific to the products and / or services you provide.

Other tactics worth looking at to maximize your return on investment are:

• Focusing on generic branded keywords with the advertising copy focusing on enter to win (giving loyal users a chance to win)
• Have some terms listed as negative terms if the search term has a double meaning and could be misinterpreted as something else
• Ensure that there are actually people searching for the keyword terms.

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You’ve got your website up and running and you have done the hard stuff and put loads of content on your site.  Your website is search engine optimized and you have web analytics installed on your website so you can see how many visitors are on your site.  Problem is, only a few people are visiting and your most loyal vistor is you. So one of the most frequently asked questions is how to get traffic to your site.

There are three main ways of getting traffic to your site:

• Organically (using on page SEO)
• Organically (using off page SEO and backlinks)
• Paid (using Pay Per Click advertising)

But before you do all of that, you want to make sure that search engines can find your website.  It can often takes weeks before a search engine will find you. So a way to speed up the process is to submit your sites to the major search engines – Google, Yahoo, Bing and DMOZ.

Getting listed in the DMOZ open directory is relativelty straight forward. You just need to submit your site details to the directory. Make sure that your site has lots of content and useful information before you submit as you risk it not being listed. You should also be aware that it may take some time  to get listed as it is manned by volunteers.

Google also provide a site where you can Add Your URL.  Google admits that they don’t always add every site that is submitted but it is well worth giving it a go.  By taking action, at least you give your site a sporting chance of getting listed quickly.

Like Google Bing also provide a site submission service.  Yahoo’s direct submission service is also worth checking out.  There is also a free website submission service called Addme that can be quite useful and you can also bookmark your site using Only Wire which syndicates content to the Ask search engine as well as the top social networking sites automatically.  You got to love that!

And if all else fails, another alternative to help get your site listed quickly is to get links from other sites to your site. Having a link from a site that is already listed will help because when the robots visit the other site with the link to your site, it follows the link and then adds your site to their search engine listings.  This will help get your site listed with Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Getting a link to your site from another website is not as hard as it sounds. Some options for getting backlinks to your site are:

• Upload a video to You Tube and put a link in the description to your site
• Visit forums  relevant to your wesbite and post comments in the forum with links back to your site
• Visit blogs relevant to your website and post comments with a link back to your site
• Find a website that that operates in a similar territory to yours and request that they put a link back to your site

Finally, some tips when submitting to search engine directories:

• Do not keep re-submitting your site. Try and be patient. Constant resubmission means you will run the risk of being banned.
• Make sure you have adequate content on your website before you submit it.  Search engines work on the concept of “relevance” and need content to match the search terms the searcher is looking for.

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Our media agency recently gave me a big long list of keywords so we could start a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign to drive traffic to our site. The list was long, very very long.  It took about 6 A3 pages to print the list off and the search terms were related to our brand, food products that we sell as well as recipes for those products.

The problem was that the list proposed that we use the following search terms:

• our brand name
• a ton of keywords relating to the products we sell as well as some terms that were less related to the products we sell
• spelling errors on those search terms
• lists of one word search terms
• copy that promised recipes and meal ideas for the products

Now this may not seem that ununusal  but after looking at the list of search terms, there were a number of flaws with in the list. The issues were:

• The terms were very broad
• They were not very targeted
• Some keyphrases contained negative keywords
• The destination URL did not provide the information promised in the ad copy
• The recipes that we had on the site had been moved to another site and therefore would not be relevant to the searcher if they clicked on the ad

What surprised me the most is that the keyword list essentially showed a fundamental lack of understanding of our business and our objectives.  Funny as the agency we deal with is a top notch agency, is one of the biggest media agencies in town and has dealt with our business for over 10 years. It seemed that they were more interested in using the money that they saved us from our television campaign on our online campaign.

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In order to get your website to rank number 1 in google, or another other search engine, you may need to look at increasing the number of backlinks to your website. What are backlinks? Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website.

Why backlinks? Because backlinks are an indicator or the popularity or importance of your website. Consider that if your site is important and popular, the more trustworthy your site is likely to be. Trusted sites are therefore more relevant and more likely to be ranked higher in search engines such as Google.  Relevance is a critical point, because the success of Google is hinged upon enhancing the user experience and that means making sure the searcher will find the most relevant content to their search.

Backlinks could also be said to increase the relevance of your site. If you are a small business wanting to be found amongst the billions of websites, using backlinks as one of the many strategies you employ will help boost your rank in Google.

One rule of thumb is to understand that not all backlinks are created equal.  It is not just quantity of banklinks, it is also quality.  If you do decide that you want to employ a backlink strategy  you need to make sure that some of your backlinks are of good quality. So what constitutes good quality?  The link to your website should contain the keyword (or phrase) you want to rank for and the theme of the site that links to your is the same.

How do you know how many websites have backlinks to you? Simple! All you do is go to Google and type in link:yourdomain.com and Google will tell you what sites have inbound links to your site. So if you are focusing your efforts on backlinks, you will be able to see if your link strategy is working and that your links are recognised.

Follow the link to find out more about the importance of backlinks.

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On Christmas Day Facebook became the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, according to Hitwise. This is the 1st time a site has surpassed Google as being the most visited site in a day. Such is the power of Facebook.  A quick look at the statistics tells me that Facebook now has over 350 million active users and 50% log into Facebook on any given day.

With those sort of numbers, Facebook has become a powerful tool for marketers to harness. It provides one of the best low cost options for marketers. It excels at connecting friends and people with common interests together.   The trouble is that many companies still don’t understand the power of Facebook and are reluctant to become involved.  Why? There are are number of reasons but two of the biggest are:

1. Companies are fearful that they will lose control of their marketing. Marketing is now in the hands of your potential or actual customer.
2. There is a business cost to hire staff to monitor and respond to comments on Facebook.

The fears and concerns are valid.  However, by not playing in this space companies are missing out on a powerful opportunity to connect and engage with consumers. This fear and the reluctance to join in a social conversation creates a wonderful opportunity for smaller and start up businesses to start up a conversation and build trust providing they play by the new rules of engagement. Some stunning upsets will occur in this new world of social media networking. Brands better be prepared and should start to consider how they join in and be part of the community.

Some powerful tools within Facebook that are relevant to marketers include:

1. Profile – Setting up a profile with strong keywords in the interests section of your profile
2. Groups – you can join or create groups
3. Pages – you can create pages and users can become fans, you can also become fans of other pages. Pages can also be used as a powerful viral marketing tool as they appear more prominently on peoples profiles
4. Events – this feature can be used to push marketing events, product launches, sponsored gathering
5. Advertising – there are a number of ways to advertise on Facebook.  There are 2 main ways – via the news feed and via using ads.
   • The New Feed
     • Posting items from external sites
     • Posting items with the Share on Facebook button
     • Posting items from Partner Websites
   • Using Ads
     • Click through ad
     • Social Ads

The main benefit of using Ads on Facebook is that you can target demographics with unparalleled precision. No other advertising medium I know of comes as close to Facebook in terms of demographic precision.  The benefits of this are enormous if you have an in depth understanding of your target audience.

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