Rules of Blogging

There is a movement out in cyberspace known as Netiquette – how to behave on the Internet – so it only makes sense that there are a few rules of blogging that should be followed as well.

Rules of Blogging

Many of the rules of blogging are commonsense rules that can be applied to all actions on the web. The first, and most important, rule to remember is that anyone who can find your blog can read it. This means that even if you don't publicize your blog, or link to it from other pages, you can be found and people you don't know will be able to read your content. Unless your blog or site is password protected, assume that your content will be in the public domain, and don't write anything you would be ashamed of.

The second rule is also common to the rest of the Internet. Do not give out personal information – yours or anyone else's. People on the 'Net, just as everywhere else, can have less than kind intentions, so be aware of this when writing. Any time you put out your full name and address, or phone number, know that people reading your blog can find you. This may not be a good thing, especially if you are a teenager. Leave out the defining information – use first names and initials, towns instead of full addresses.

Blogs do have some specific challenges, not seen in other types of websites, so the rules of blogging do vary a bit. Writing in a blog can often feel like you are writing for yourself, or in a diary. This feeling can lead to expressing opinions about others that might come back to haunt you. Remember to never put in writing anything that you might regret later on – because older versions of blogs can always be quoted or found. Be careful with what you say and who you say it about.

A final rule goes along with the last one – don't give away secrets. This is especially important with business blogs. Company secrets or private data, ideas and other things that should be left within the company should not be written about on a blog. While you might think that no one else is reading, there is always the chance that a competitor or news company is checking out your blog for ideas and information.

Remembering to follow these simple rules of blogging can make sure that you don't regret starting your own blog, and that you enjoy blogging for years to come.

Statistics About Internet Blogging

It is easy to see how quickly the phenomenon of blogging has exploded on the Internet in recent years, and here are some interesting and important statistics about Internet blogging to showcase it.

Statistics About Internet Blogging

The relative newness of blogging makes it somewhat difficult to track specific trends and topics, but there are some statistics about Internet blogging that can be observed from information obtained by search engines and random surveys. Also hampering the statistics are the true definition of a blog, and the fact that not all blogs are standalone or able to be measured as a site. Despite these obstacles, there are some reliable statistics out there.

It is believed, according to surveys, that 9% of Internet users in 2005 (more recent surveys are still in process) had created and used blogs. 25% of Internet users surveyed stated that they read blogs on a regular basis. These statistics came out of a survey pool of over 2500 Internet users, which allows for other assumptions to be made. If stretched to include the entire US population, this statistic would equal about 6% of the population having created a blog, and 16% of the population being regular blog readers.

The statistics about Internet blogging also show that most blog writers are young. Among the pool of Internet users who were between the ages of 18-29, 19% of them have created blogs and written in blogs. Compare that to only 5% of over 50 Internet users. Most blog writers are also men, although only by a small margin. 11% of young male Internet users have created blogs at one point, while only 8% of female Internet users have created blogs.

Blog reading is equally popular among the sexes, however, with 36% of adults ages 18-29 having read blogs online. Blog reading is again less popular with older adults - only 18% of those over age 50 read blogs on the Internet. Statistics also show that about 20% of the newspaper reading population of the US also reads blogs, and about 40% of the people who listen to talk radio also read blog sites. This shows that while there are many who do read blogs for information, there is still a large area for gaining readership.

The statistics about Internet blogging are always changing, due to the fact that the Internet itself is always changing. As more people have access to the World Wide Web, more blogs will be created and read.

Blogging for Google Indexing

When most people think of blogging, they think about getting their message out to readers. There is, however, another audience that can be used. Yep, blogging for Google.

Blogging for Google Indexing

If you want to make money on the web, you have to focus on getting rankings in Google. To get rankings, of course, you first have to get your site included in the Google index. The index is simply the database Google maintains that has all the sites it has found on the web. When someone does a search on Google, it accesses the database and creates search results. If you are listed at the top of those results, people see your listing and click through to the corresponding page.

Google started out as the friendly, little guy battling big, bad Microsoft. It was extremely user friendly for most webmasters and getting rankings was not particularly difficult. As sad as it is to say, Google has evolved into a large corporate monster. When it comes to the web, Google is now far worse than Microsoft and a virtual bully on the web. It does what it wants, when it wants, how it wants and it doesn’t really care what anyone says. Ah, innocence lost.

One of the current problems with Google is getting into its index. Google has a bad habit of refusing to index all the pages on your site. You may have 500 pages, but Google will only pick up 97. Just as aggravating, it will often fail to index important pages on your site that you want to be ranked. So, how do you deal with this problem? One way is blogging for the purpose of being included in the Google index.

Google likes to stick its virtual hands in everything. While this is annoying, you can actually take advantage of it in some circumstances. In this case, we are talking about using Blogger.com. Blogger is owned by Google. Since it is a Google property, the robots the engine uses to fill its index run through all blogger posting once every few days. Ah, I love the smell of opportunity in the morning.

To get your pages indexed by Google, you should really consider starting a blog on blogger.com. Since Google “reads” it every few days, you can create blog entries that get the pages of your site indexed. To do so, you simply create a narrative entry for one of your pages. Include only half the content on that page and then a link that says “Read more…” that goes to the page on your site. The Google robots will usually follow the link to your site and add the page to the Google index.

When taking this approach, it is important to understand that the page mentioned in your blog will not immediately appear in the Google database. It can take a few weeks, but it should eventually appear. If you are lucky, Google will also index the rest of your site.

Free Blogging for Your Site

So, you have decided to start blogging and have ideas ready to put out there on your own personal or business website – the next step is finding free blogging for your site.

Free Blogging for Your Site

There are some pay blogging programs and sites out there, most notably TypePad and Movable Type, but for most bloggers, free blogging for your site is the way to go. Few blogs need the fancy options provided by pay sites or software, and especially if you are planning to have just a personal blog, free options are a great way to get started. Type “free blogging” into any search engine, and many different choices will appear.

The best bet for most first time bloggers is Blogger.com. This free blogging site has been around since 1999, and is owned by Google, one of the largest Internet related companies in the world. You can choose to start your new blog on their own blog hosting site, blogspot, or you can even have Blogger upload your blog to your own site. Getting started is easy – all you need is an email address and you can have a screen name, as well as your very own blog address. Just select a template and start typing.

Another way to get free blogging for your site is to download one of the open source software programs that are free for this purpose. The most popular blogging software for people with their own sites is Wordpress, which can be easily installed on your server by either yourself, or the company that runs it. As Wordpress is a program, there is a lot more you can do in terms of manipulation and customization than you can with some other free blogging companies.

A final way to get some free blogging for your site is to use a website that already has blogging capabilities built in. One example of this is the social networking site – Myspace. As well as allowing you to have a site to share personal info and photos, a blogging system is built into the site's structure. Once you sign up for Myspace, you have access to all of the tools available on the network in order to make your page and blog, with an easy integration between the two.

Free blogging is a great way to get onto the Internet and be able to express yourself to all who want to read. Share your life story or your business model – it doesn't matter what you want to write about, free blogging can help you get there.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet Blogging

Owning a blog and posting on it can be an interesting and fun way to share information with the world, but what are the real advantages and disadvantages of Internet blogging today?

Advantages and Disadvantages

Many of the advantages and disadvantages of Internet blogging can be judged by the type of blog being maintained. For example, some of the things that are advantages for personal blogs may actually be disadvantages for business related blogs and sites. The quick and easy way that a blog can be updated is a great advantage to bloggers – especially personal ones who want to be able to keep a daily log of events. This ease, however, can lead to unreal expectations for business blogs – where visitors might expect them to be updated each day, even if that's not possible.

Another advantage of personal blogs is the ability to vent your feelings, by simply typing in some text and letting the whole world be able to read what is going on in your head. This same advantage can be a disadvantage for a business blog as well. While writing in a blog that is business related, it can become all too easy to start writing in a conversational tone, or to express some personal feelings towards your company that might be misconstrued.

There are definitely some advantages to running a business blog, however. The easy way your blog can be updated does mean that you will be able to post new information quickly – and get it to your customers and clients just as fast. You will also be able to keep everyone informed of new policies, products and other important info without having to send out massive emails or snail mail. You can also drive traffic to your business site from your blog – by having links on your site as well as others'.

Just as there are advantages to having a business site, there are disadvantages to having personal sites. One of the biggest is posting too much personal information. This can come in the form of putting in particular information (your full name and address, for example) or “saying” something in one of your posts that you may regret later. Although you can easily delete posts that you have written, blogs have a funny way of staying in the memory of search engines – such as Google. It's important to never post something that you might be afraid will come back to you.

The advantages and disadvantages of Internet blogging are numerous, but ultimately it is up to you to decide whether or not blogging is something you would enjoy or profit from. Blogs are a great way to communicate and experience the Web – if used correctly.

How Do I Start Blogging

With the popularity of blogs and blogging on the rise in the past few years, many people may be wondering – how do I start blogging and create my own blog for others to read?

How Do I Start Blogging

The question “How do I start blogging?” can have many answers, some simple, some more complex. The first thing that needs to be done is an assessment of your Internet skills. Are you the type of person who could build your own website (whether with code or a program), or are you more the type of person who has trouble using email? With the many blogging solutions out there, it is important to choose a service that will allow you to get started with the least amount of effort.

The simplest way to start blogging is to sign up at one of the free blogging sites that are available. There are several – with the most popular being Blogger.com and Livejournal.com. Blogger has been around since 1999, and most people who are thinking about writing a blog for the first time choose this option because of the ease of use and compatibility. Livejournal is another option, but can be limited unless you choose to purchase a more extensive package (a pay-per-month version).

You will need to sign up for a username and password at your chosen blogging site, and then they will ask you a bit about yourself for your profile. Use as little information or as much as you like, but remember that these profiles are usually public. Don't put in any private or legal information – such as phone numbers or Social Security numbers. You may also be able to choose a picture to represent yourself on the blogging site (such as the avatars on Blogger or Myspace).

Once you have signed up for the site, most of the free blog sites will then allow you to choose or customize what your blog will look like. You'll be able to pick from templates provided for your use. Then it is up to you to enter information for your first blog. Many free sites make it easy to do this without downloading any extra programs or additional software – everything can be entered through your regular Internet browser. Have fun with your new blog!

If you want to know how do I start blogging, the best solution is to go to the blogging sites and see what they have to offer. Tutorials, as well as looking at other blogs can help you to get started on your way to creating the blog of your dreams.

History on Blogging

Blogs are an important part of Internet culture – nearly everyone either has a blog of their own or reads one regularly – but what is the history on blogging and how did this phenomenon get started?

History on Blogging

The history on blogging starts with the blog, which was originally called the “weblog”. This term is first found to be used in a research paper published by college lecturers from Australia in 1995. The term was used once, and then seemingly, it was forgotten. In 1997, weblog became a more commonly used term, as one of the first blogs, Robot Wisdom, and its owner Jorn Barger, used the term to describe its site. After this time, the word became commonplace among the users of the World Wide Web.
In the year 1999, the common term “blog” was coined by a different individual, Peter Merholz, who decided the word “weblog” was pronounced “wee-blog”. He shortened the term to blog, and blogging – the act of writing and maintaining a blog – was born. This is not to say that blogs didn't exist before the naming of them did. Dating back the earliest beginnings of the World Wide Web and the Internet as we know it today, people have had personal websites that were updated with news and events.

The difference between blogging and maintaining a personal website, however, is twofold. The format of the site itself is different – a blog is usually a simple site with styles for links and entries. Little else is needed to maintain a blog besides software that allows archiving of posts and easy updating. Whether or not a personal site is a blog is also judged by the way the site is updated. Entries are usually added without removing prior content, and these entries are displayed in reverse chronological order.
The biggest point in the history on blogging happened in 1999, when Pyra Labs developed software that made having a blog easy for anyone with access to the Internet. Blogger.com was developed in order to allow bloggers to write and host their blogs for free – using different styles of blog templates and choosing when and how to update their blogs.

The history on blogging is not very long, considering it (as well as the World Wide Web) is a fairly recent phenomenon. We can be certain, however, that there are many more developments in store for those who choose to blog.

What is Blogging?

Most people who are involved in blogging use their blogs for personal reasons – to talk about their day, or important events in their lives. Blogging can also be used to keep families up to date with current events, or to document the happenings in a household. Blogs can also be used in a personal way to express opinions on different subjects. Many bloggers use their blog as a place to explore their thoughts on diverse subjects from shopping to politics, and see it as a way to get their viewpoint across.

Other blogs are written by businesses or other institutions. In these instances, the blogs are used more as a way to keep their customers or followers in the know about key issues and events in their companies. Large companies, such as Microsoft and Sony, may have several different blogs flowing from within – some are written by employees, others by owners or outside observers. These blogs can be a good source of information about what is going on in the day to day life of a company.

A final way that blogging can be used is to allow a community of people, interested in the same topic, to post “entries” about that topic. Whether it is a blog about a specific hobby or even a specific type of employment, these types of blogs and this blogging style allows readers to see the different viewpoints and conversation from several individuals instead of just one. These blogs tend to be more focused on news or important events, but can also be personal experiences that add to the general feel of the blog.

So, what is blogging? Blogging is definitely one of the biggest trends online today – a way to both keep a journal for yourself and to showcase your thoughts to others. A blog is almost like a diary that's meant to be read – and the act of blogging can be both cathartic to the writer and interesting to the reader.

Introduction to Blogs

Blogs, blogging, bloggers – what does it all mean? Well, blogging is simply the latest, greatest craze on the Internet. Here is an introduction to blogs for your edification.

Introduction to Blogs

What is a blog? For purposes of this introduction, it is simply a narrative written by people with opinions on something. The opinion can range from politics to ramblings on a recent trip to some location. If you consider traditional media, blogs are essentially letters to the editor in the newspaper. In this case, people using the web are the newspaper and there is no editor defining the content written.
Blogs are one of those things that are given far more credit than they really deserve. Yes, you have probably heard of famous blogs and bloggers. They are, however, a small minority of the total blog community. 99.9 percent of blogs are junk and never read by anyone other than the author. In fact, blogs are becoming harder to find than they used to be. The reason has to do with the realization that most of them will never be read so what is the point of spending time on them? From a marketing standpoint, this was not always the case.

When blogs first became popular, search engines treated them like regular sites. Since blogs were updated all the time, search engines actually liked them and ranked them high in the search result for whatever subject the blog was discussing. Once webmasters realized this, everyone and their brother started a blog. This results in a significant problem. The problem, of course, was people searching for a term were not really interested in blogs. If you were searching for widgets, you would often find the first 10 results on the search page were all blogs. It was practically impossible to find a widget! The search engines remedied this in late 2005, but downgrading blogs. In simple terms, they rarely are ranked high in search results.
So, should you blog? Of course! Why? There are two scenarios. The first is the simplest. If you just want to ramble on about something, knock yourself out. There is no harm in doing so since nobody will probably read it. The second reason is more salient. Blogs are an effective way to keep visitors to your site updated. If you have new products coming out, the blog on your site can serve to let people know. It is easier and simpler than building new pages every few days. You can just use your blog program to do it.

The tone of this introduction to blogs may lead you to believe they are worthless. They are not. You can use them on your site to communicate with and update your customers.

Make Money At Home – Internet

Make Money At Home – Internet

With downsizing and such, many people are looking for ways to earn a living or supplement their income. Here is one idea to make money at home on the Internet.

Make Money At Home – Internet

First of all, I am not going to talk about stuffing envelopes or other bizarre pitches. You should use your common sense in evaluating business “opportunities.” My experience is that most of those pitches benefit only one person, the individual selling them. If you fall for that stuff, you are going to crash and burn.

Fortunately, there is a way to make money at home on the Internet that works every time and Google is going to help you. Allow me to introduce you to Google Adsense. Adsense is a program that Google uses to extend its reach across the world wide web. The program works by letting individual sites list ads that advertisers are placing on Google.

We take a very limited number of clients, but receive a lot of traffic. Instead of wasting it, we use Adsense to turn it into revenues. If you look at this page, you will see links in the text of this article and in the right column running along it. These are ads from Adsense. If someone clicks on one, we earn revenues. Google collects the revenues and sends them to use each month. You can do the exact same thing.

The advantage of Adsense is it cuts out a lot of the technical issues that tend to engulf a website. You don’t have to actually sell anything. You don’t have to deal with customers. You don’t have to collect money. You don’t have to accept returned items. You don’t need any inventory. If you don’t work for a day, you still make money. Finally, you are doing business with the biggest company on the web. If that doesn’t grab your interest, you are dead.

The best way to make money through Adsense is to simply find a subject you are interested in. Start a website on it, join Adsense and place the ads on your site. Google makes it super simple by giving you a piece of code to paste into your pages.

Taking this approach allows you to work in an area you are interested in and make money at home on the Internet. Some companies are devoted solely to this business. The earnings potential is tremendous.

Internet Business

In this section of the site, we are going to investigate different types of Internet business, marketing approaches and so on. Every Internet business is different, so pay attention to the different approaches.

Internet Business
Internet business is a rather vague term when you really think about it. While practically every site is an Internet business, each is unique. In the “real world”, Toyota dealerships and florist shops are both businesses, but you certainly wouldn’t run them the same way. Well, at least not for long.
The same holds true for Internet businesses, so we are going to throw out some different scenarios and talk about particular issues with each. Some articles will cover the entire build and market aspect of a site while others will just focus on a specific subject. If you don’t see your particular business area, give similar types of businesses a look. For instance, most sites offering services will have similar themes regardless of the specific service offered. Let’s get to it…

Starting Online Business

You have made the decision on starting an online business. You want to do it! So, what is the first step to starting an online business?

Starting Online Business

The first step is picking a business area. Contrary to your instincts, do not pick something specific in the business area. For example, let us assume you want to start an online business providing strategies for saving money. Your business area is money. Don’t make the mistake of jumping to a more specific area. Instead, you need to do some research.

The beautiful thing about starting an online business is you can access vast amounts of information on the cheap. In this case, you want to use the following tool:

Try Wordtracker

Wordtracker is a program that tracks the exact phrases used by people on the search engines to find things. You can type in any subject matter and Wordtracker will spit out the top 300 phrases incorporating that subject matter that were used in searches over the last 60 days. It draws this information from a database of over 300 million searches and is very accurate. Frankly, Wordtracker is considered the bible of Internet marketing.

Going back to our example, you would type in “money” into wordtracker and see what search phrases have been used over the last 60 days and how often they have been used. You then look for phrases with lots of searches. Exam the list to determine if any of the keyword phrases appeal to you. If they do not, move on to another subject matter.

In fact, let’s just go ahead and do it. I’ve opened my wordtracker account and typed in my subject matter – money. As expected, there are tons of searches incorporating the word. Ahhh…and I’ve found a subject matter. There are over 10,000 searches a day for “unclaimed money.” I happen to know that states collect unclaimed money for wages, tax returns and such. Sounds like a perfect online business to me!

Using Wordtracker is the key to starting an online business. By using it, you can make sure your business idea is one that people are searching for on the net. Nothing is worse than building a site in which nobody has any interest. Wordtracker keeps you from doing it.

Online Turnkey Business Website

You have decided to open a business online, but are not sure where to start. This brings us to the subject of the online turnkey business website.

Online Turnkey Business Website

An online turnkey business website comes in a couple of variations. All of them are designed to give you a base to work off for your business. The idea is to create the fundamentals of a site and then let you go to town with it. Depending on the platform, using one of these platforms can be good or bad.

Let me save you a ton of money from the outset. If you are considering an online turnkey business website that is fully contained, to wit, it gives you a site, domain and products to sell, you are going to have a very difficult time making money. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, your site is no different than all the other turnkey sites sold by the same company. Why would prospects come to your site instead of any of the others? Simply put, there is no way to make your site standout. Further, your marketing will be a major pain. Many pay-per-click search engines will not let you list the site because they only allow one listing per affiliate program and they will consider a turnkey business as one. Further, you will have difficulties pursuing any search engine rankings because you will have little ability to change the site. I strongly encourage you to avoid these online turnkey business websites like the plague.

There are online business website builders that work fine. These services essentially give you the ability to control the design of your site, and require you to have a domain as well as your own products and services. On the high end, we offer Business Creator Pro. It gives you the ability to build clean and fast sites with little knowledge of html. Other products are offered by Yahoo and so on.

This second set of platforms, known as online site builders, are really the way to go. In fact, this site is built using one. The days of learning and hammering out html code for pages has gone the way of the horse and buggy. The online site builders give you convenience, flexibility and control over your online venture. This allows you to manipulate the site as you gain a better understanding of your market and all things Internet.

An online turnkey business website sounds like a great thing at first blush, but it can cost you in the long run. Make sure you understand what you can and cannot do before committing to a system.

Accept Credit Card - No Merchant Account

Getting and keeping a merchant account online is a pain in the derriere. If you want to accept a credit card, but have no merchant account, there are some options.

Accept Credit Card - No Merchant Account

You must be able to accept a credit card payment if you are selling on the Internet. Unfortunately, the bane of most sites is the merchant account. The problem with merchant accounts is particular to the Internet.

Merchant accounts come with risk factors assigned to them. A merchant account for your local coffee shop is going to have a low risk factor because people rarely complain about charges for bad coffee or dispute whether they received the coffee. Unfortunately, most Internet merchant accounts are given a rating of high risk. People dispute charges all of the time, fairly or not. Then end result of this getting and keeping an account can be expensive, bad news for new or small online businesses.

If you want to accept credit card payments, but have no merchant account, there are some options. The options range from selling through another site that provides credit card transactions for you to using sites that are setup to solve your merchant account issues. Each has there benefits, so let’s take a look.

If you are selling products, EBay and Amazon offer options you may want to consider. EBay obviously is an auction site, but you can sell products through it like any normal business. The advantage of EBay is that it already attracts a lot of traffic, so you don’t really have to put much effort into your marketing. Amazon is also very good for this and I prefer it to EBay. Many people are surprised to learn that Amazon sells far more than just books. You can open a seller account with the site and sell a wide variety of things. Both sites take a small percentage of your sales, but they make life very easy when it comes to accepting credit card payments with no merchant account.

PayPal is a site that offers transaction processing services. I have to admit that I am not a big fan of it, but many people are and it does a tremendous amount of business. PayPal is essentially a giant merchant account. There is one problem, however, with the site. Any buyer has to be an approved member before they can purchase from you. If they are not, they can signup, but have to wait a few days to verify their account once a charge appears on their bank account or credit card statement. Obviously, this requirement tends to kill any impulse purchases.

There are a variety of other sites that offer credit card purchase options if you have no merchant account. They seem to come and go, so I can’t really recommend any of them. While they sound like great deals, you can never be sure if what exists today will be there tomorrow. I am sure some of them are excellent, but you need to look into them and do your due diligence before deciding whether to use them.

If you want to accept credit card payments with no merchant account, you are in luck. There are plenty of options, but make sure you understand the fees you have to pay and how the process works for each.

E-Business Failures

As you know from the dot.com debacle in the late 1990s, starting an e-business is no guarantee of success. E-business failures happen, but often for obvious reasons.

E-Business Failures

E-business simply refers to an online business devoted to profits through the sale of products and services. In the real world, a majority of small business startups fail because they get overwhelmed with overhead expenses. On the net, this is less of a problem if you can do any of the work yourself, such as building pages for your site. Even if you can’t, most sites do not fail because of expenses. There are plenty of other reasons.

E-Business failures almost always have a common denominator. The issue involves traffic. On the net, traffic refers to the number of visitors a site gets. Most e-businesses fail to properly research whether there is enough traffic for their area of business before building out their site. The first step is always to research whether people are actually searching for your business service or product. You can look under the keyword category in our article section to learn more.

The second area where e-business failures occur involves ignoring the keywords in question. Once you have a keyword list, you must focus on it. The list is telling you what problem people have in your field and you must supply them with a solution to each specific problem. If you do not provide the services or products indicated by certain keywords, figure out how to offer them. If you give prospects what they want, they will return to your site over and over again. Return visitors are the key to making profits.

Many e-business failures occur because sites bite off more than they can chew. The temptation is to go for the broadest subject matter possible. This is a mistake. You should focus on a niche. If you want to open an online bookstore, you will never be able to compete with Amazon. Amazon simply has far too big of a head start. If you focus on books devoted just to a certain subject, such as Eastern philosophy or home improvement, you have a good chance of making a profit. This can occur because fans of the niche will come to your site instead of Amazon since you focus entirely on the niche in question.

E-business failures occur because people simply do not take the time to properly research the situation before jumping in with both feet. Take your time and full understand your market and what you are getting into. If you are patient and thorough, you will not become one of the e-business failures dotting the net.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the key to your online promotion efforts. Yes, there are other avenues of marketing, but search engine marketing is where you will succeed or fail.
Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing comes down to two areas, pay-per-click and search engine optimization. If you can master both of these areas, you are going to be so far ahead of the competition that it will not be funny. Well, at least for your competitors. Following you will find some general articles on the subject as well as specific articles on pay-per-click and search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Potential clients often call to mention they are interested in pursuing search engine marketing. I ask them what they mean by search engine marketing and they often are not sure.

What is Search Engine Marketing?

What is search engine marketing? It is a global term that refers to all the different ways you can market a site on the zillion or so search engines out there. In truth, it is a catch all term for most people who know they should probably have a website, but not much more than that. It is like walking up to a real estate agent and saying you need a house.

If you have a business, you need a site. If you have site, you must need search engine marketing. Logically, this makes sense. In the practical world of internet marketing, however, search engine marketing is a very broad term. It encompasses a wide variety of things.

When most people use the phrase, they are really saying something else to a marketing company like ours. What they are saying is I need exposure for my site. I need to get people from the search engines to my site. Most important, I need them to buy. If this is your general thought process, you are thinking along the correct line of thought. There is, however, a problem.

Search engine marketing has a number of distinct areas. You can read about them here: “The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing”. The problem, of course, is most sites should only use a certain type of search engine marketing. The role of a good search engine marketing firm such as ours is to identify those areas, explain why they should be used and successfully carry out a campaign for your site.

In general, search engine marketing is just a catch-all phrase that really means very little. If you are considering marketing for your site, make sure to get a more detailed understanding of what you are getting into and why you should do so.

The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing

When it comes to search engine marketing, there are a wide variety of ways to go. Here are the top approaches, to wit, the key elements of search engine marketing.

The Key Elements of Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is a very general term that more or less encompasses most types of online marketing. It is by far the most effective way to generate traffic to your site. Traffic simply refers to the number of people coming to your site. Unlike rush hour on your local freeway, you want as much traffic as possible coming to your site. With search engine marketing, there are a couple of different ways to go about this.

Pay-per-click marketing is the simplest form of search engine marketing. It is also the most expensive and the least credible. With “PPC” marketing, you are simply paying for the placement of a small ad on the search engine in question. The problem, of course, is you are paying! If you are not careful, your return on investment can be atrocious and wipe you out within a few months. To make matters worse, many people fraudulently click ads just to use up your budget. This, of course, makes your return on investment even worse. PPC has its place, but it should never be relied upon as a total solution to your marketing needs.

Search engine optimization is the next method in the search engine marketing arena. With “SEO”, the goal is to get your site ranked in the top 10 in the search results for specific keywords. All the clicks you then receive are free, which makes your return on investment very high. The downside to SEO is it takes time to get those rankings. A new site can expect to wait six to nine months before even getting a sniff of a ranking on Google. Yahoo and MSN take less time, but not much less. Most sites run PPC campaigns during the first year while they wait for the rankings.

Article marketing is the third and newest element of search engine marketing. With this approach, you write articles for your site and submit them to clearing house sites known as directories. Webmasters for other sites can then use them so long as they also publish an author byline including your name and a link to your site. When the article is published on other sites, people start clicking the link and you have traffic.

For most sites, all of these elements of search engine marketing are used at one point or another. The ultimate goal is to get rankings through search engine optimization and sit back while the free traffic rolls in and sales occur.

Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. In this article, we discuss the most effective search engine marketing.
Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

Search engines are similar to the streets of a city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes.

Cutting to the chase, your search engine marketing should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses these engines to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines control 90 to 95 percent of all search traffic on the web. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

The most effective search engine marketing comes in two forms – pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, but the resulting traffic is nominal.

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective search engine marketing. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. For example, we pursued seo for this site and have top rankings. Our marketing cost for the site is $0. This greatly improves our profit margins. You should aim for the same with your site.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Search engine marketing is a fairly simple game. The most effective search engine marketing platforms are PPC and seo. Stick to these two and you should see good results.

Strategic Internet Marketing

Strategic Internet Marketing

Strategic Internet marketing is, obviously, the key to success on the web. Internet marketing isn’t nearly has hard as it is made out to be so long as you know the general rules.

Strategic Internet Marketing

Internet marketing breaks down into a variety of areas, but the two biggest are paid and free marketing. If you want immediate traffic, you will have to pay for it. The goal is to move away from paid to free traffic as soon as possible.

Strategies – Web Ecommerce

There are many strategies for web ecommerce projects, but one has been proven over and over. Of all the strategies, the “need strategy” is the clear winner.
Strategies – Web Ecommerce

I always laugh when listening to mainstream marketing company blabber on about branding and demographics. On the web, ecommerce is boils down to one concept and only one. You must determine the needs of your prospects and provide solutions.

It is so important that you should start every day and meeting off by saying, “What are the needs of my prospects and how does what I am doing provide a solution to those needs?” If you cannot provide a quick, simple answer, you have wondered off the path to profits and need to refocus.

So, what the hell do I mean by “needs.” The trick with web ecommerce is to realize that there is lookie loo traffic and need traffic. A person shopping online for Christmas presents on December 15th has a serious need and is highly motivated to buy. A person that is drinking coffee on a Sunday morning and catching up on the news has no needs and isn’t going to get off their butt to find their wallet. Obviously, you are only interested in the motivated person.

Finding the needs of your prospects should be the first thing you do. Before you decide on a business name. Before you buy a domain. Before you even decide on the exact products or services you will offer. All of these subjects will be determined by your prospects once you understand their needs.

Okay, so how do you figure out their needs? In the real world, you would invest $50,000 on a market analysis, surveys and so on to find out their needs and the best location for your business. You are going to love this. With web ecommerce, you are going to spend under a couple of hundred bucks.

You first step is to identify the single word that best describes your business. If you want to open an online travel site, the word is “travel.” If you want to sell a book on investing, the word is “investing.” Whatever you business, pick the one word that describes it best.

Taking your one word, you want to use this program: WordTracker. With Wordtracker, you are going to do a keyword analysis. You will do an analysis for “travel” by entering the word in a provided form, hitting the return button and then watching the program kick out every keyword phrase that incorporates “travel” that has been typed into a meta search engine in the last 60 days.

Think about that for a moment. It is going to report to you the exact phrases used by your prospects to find something related to your business, in this case, travel. Each of those keyword phrases represents a need your prospect has regarding travel.

Let’s say you were going to build a travel site focused on cruises to the Caribbean. After you do the keyword analysis using the phrase “cruise”, you find there are tons of search for cruises to Alaska. Your prospects are telling you the subject the site should focus on. Instead of wasting time and money on the wrong area, you know where to go to pull in customers. Your domain name, advertising and search engine optimization should all be focused on the keywords you identify for your area of interest.

Of all the purported strategies for web ecommerce, there is one that always works. Identify the needs of your prospects and provide solutions to them.

Strategies – Web Ecommerce

Buy Targeted Web Site Traffic

Not all traffic is the same. Getting a gazillion hits is great, but not if it is from random subjects. Sometimes it makes sense to buy targeted web site traffic.
Buy Targeted Web Site Traffic

Many sites make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people. It is far better to stick to a specific service or product than it is to offer limited options to customers. If you are selling hiking gear, be the best damn hiking gear site on the net and nothing else. This same problem arises when sites target traffic generation strategies.

The key to cost effective marketing is to get targeted web site traffic. At first blush, getting as much traffic as possible, regardless of how, sounds like a smart move. It is not. Doing so wastes your money, distracts you from what you should be doing and diverts your time from doing just that. If you are paying for traffic, you must buy targeted web site traffic with the important word being “targeted.”

Targeted traffic is simply traffic from sources and locations that are relevant to your site. If you have looked into generating traffic, you have probably seen offers of 100,000 hits for $50. Yes, you will get 100,000 hits. Of course, the traffic is coming off of free lottery sites or the visitors are being paid to visit your site. This traffic is not targeted and will not convert into revenues.

The best place to buy targeted web site traffic is Google and Overture. These are pay-per-click search engines that list your ads directly on their search results. This means you can specific the keyword phrases you want to be listed under, to wit, targeting your advertising to your market. You can also create filters that limit the ad placements to searches from certain geographic locations, such as the United States or Europe. This further targets your traffic by excluding clicks from some country which you can’t possibly do business with.

You can also buy targeted traffic from web sites and traffic vendors. The sites handle it differently, but you can often buy ad space on their sites in the form of a banner. There are some credible services out there, but there are a lot more dubious ones. Personally, I would never use any of them, but it is your money.

Targeting your marketing is important if you want a good return on investment. You can buy targeted web site traffic from a lot of sources, but Google and Overture are the best.

Branding Goal – Internet Marketing Strategy

Internet marketing is all about hard results, not generic concepts of branding. Still, if you have a branding goal, there is an effective Internet marketing strategy you can pursue.

Branding Goal – Internet Marketing Strategy

Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product or name brand with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding.

The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.

The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding goal is going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with your branding goal, the only cost effective and ultimately successful Internet marketing strategy is a width search engine optimization campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. To meet your branding goal, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.

This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your branding goal is met because the site appears in all the top 10 rankings. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both brand recognition and credibility. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.

To identify all the phrases being used by your prospects in searches, you must use a tool provided by Wordtracker. Wordtracker is a program that analyzes web searches on the major search engines. You simply enter a keyword and it kicks out every phrase being used by consumers, how often they use it and how many sites are trying to get ranked under it. This information is the equivalent of your Internet marketing bible. Give it a look:

Word Tracker

If you have a branding goal in mind, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization Internet marketing strategy to establish your brand and pick up tons of free traffic.

Internet Advertising for Business

In this article, we are going to discuss a major internet advertising for business issue. In fact, we are going to focus on one of the biggest mistakes made in internet advertising.
Internet Advertising for Business

The two prime internet advertising platforms for business are pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Whether search engine optimization is technically advertising is debatable, but we will assume as much for this article. The issue we are going to discuss today applies equally to either of these platforms as well as any other internet advertising you undertake.

The biggest mistake most businesses make with internet advertising is keyword perspective. Keyword perspective refers to the point of view one has when developing keywords for any type of advertising. There are primarily two perspectives, but each only works with one audience. If you get them crossed up, your internet advertising will be a mess.

The industry perspective is usually the area where I see the biggest messes. Industry perspective refers to using industry terminology to develop keywords instead of using terms your prospects actually use. For example, a mortgage professional might view HELOC [home equity line of credit] as a keyword. Most prospects, however, are not going to search for this. Instead, they will search for home equity line of credit or simply line of credit. When you are marketing to the general public, do not use industry terms. Instead, use the terms your prospects apply to your services or products.

The opposite of the industry perspective is found in the business to business field. If you are providing services or products to businesses, than you want to use industry terms! If you sell medical equipment to hospitals, your prospects are going to be both sophisticated and using technical terms in their searches. They will search for medial collateral isolation braces instead of knee brace. In the business to business scenario, you must focus on industry terms or have your internet advertising fail.

Internet advertising for business is all about perspective. You need to focus on who your prospects are and the terminology they use. Failure to do so will lead to the failure of your internet advertising.

Internet Marketing – Short Term Strategy

After spending a lot of time and effort on building a site, many wonder where they should start with Internet marketing. Site owners can be bombarded with pitches about marketing and it is hard to sort out what should be done. In this article, a short term marketing strategy is discussed.

Short Term Marketing Strategy

The single best short term marketing strategy is pay-per-click marketing campaigns. A “PPC” campaign simply involves placing advertisements on the results pages of search engines. In essence, you open an account with the PPCs, develop a list of keywords and create ads for those keywords. The two best PPC platforms are Google Adwords and Overture.

Google Adwords lets you place ads on Google search results. In addition to its own search engine, Google also supplies search results to AOL and other sites. When you create your ads, you can choose to place your ads on “content” or “search” results. Select only “search” results until you are sure the advertisement and your site coverts traffic into revenues.

Yahoo purchased Overture a few years ago for 1.8 billion dollars. Overture places advertisements on search results for MSN and, ta da, Yahoo among others. To build your ads, you search for keywords from a list provided by the PPC and create individuals ads. It can take a long time, but it is worth it.

Which PPC is Best?

Both Google and Overture have serious benefits. Google will send more traffic to your site than Overture. Getting your ad in front of AOL users is particularly advantageous because AOL users are buyers. For whatever reason, they simply seem to be more amenable to buying what you’re selling.

If Google is so great, why use Overture? In many ways, Overture has serious advantages over Google Adwords. One of the biggest advantages involves the size of ads.

To effectively run a profitable PPC campaign, you must get the maximum bang for your buck. One strategy for doing this is to qualify your traffic by explaining details in your description. If you only carry one model of a product, say that so money isn’t wasted with people who are looking for a different model clicking on your ad. With Google, you only get two to three words in your title and 8 to 10 in your description.

PPC advertising is a tremendous short term marketing strategy for a number or reasons. First, the advertising gets traffic to your site immediately. Second, it allows you to test the ability of your site to convert traffic into dollars. If conversions are low, you can modify the site and get immediate feedback.

If its time to get working on your marketing, research the PPC possibilities. Google Adwords and Overture have a lot to offer.

Internet Marketing – Long Term Strategy - SEO

Once your site is up and running, the best method for getting immediate traffic is pay-per-click search engine marketing. Although you have to be patient, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization as a long term strategy.

Search Engine Optimization – “SEO”

Search engine optimization, or “seo” as it is better known, is the definitive long term Internet marketing strategy. So, what is it? Seo simply refers to taking steps to make sure your site appears high in non-paid search results on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The reason seo is considered a long term strategy is…well, it takes a long time. If your marketing is focusing on highly competitive keywords, such as “Europe travel”, there is so much competition that you could be looking at two or three years before getting top rankings. The time period is really a factor of how fast you can build links. Sometimes you can move up within 6 months, but sometimes it takes a few years.

Is it worth it to wait for 2 years to get into the top five for “Europe travel”? There are over 2,000,000 searches a month for the keyword phrase. What do you think? If you offer a service or product related to traveling in Europe, how much money would you make if even 1 million people visited your site each month? Think about that.

The Big Three

There are three, and only three, search engines that matter when it comes to seo – Google, Yahoo and MSN. What about Alta Vista, etc.? They simply don’t have enough traffic to make them worth pursuing.

There are four keys to seo. First, you must research the amount of traffic various keywords are receiving. Second, you must modify your site to include the exact keywords phrases in the meta tagging and text. Third, you must add and add and add content to your site. The more content, the more the big three will like your site. Finally, you must trade links with other sites that have content related to your site.

The keys to pursuing a seo marketing strategy are discipline and patience. Let’s take a quick look at each.

You must have the discipline to stick with your seo effort when you are seeing no results. The desire to throw one’s arms in the air in frustration is going to be strong. Just remember that every step you take today will pay off down the road.

Patience balances feelings of frustration and you are going to have a lot of those. Look, it is going to take a long time, so resist the urge to whine. Stick a sign up over your desk counting off the months or have a regular exercise routine. If nothing else, you can day dream about all of the free traffic you are going to get one day.

Search engine optimization is not for the weak of mind or impatient. If you can stick with it, this long term marketing strategy always pays off.

The Chicken and The Egg - The Internet Marketer and Site Designer

An age-old question is, “Which came first? The Chicken or the Egg?” In ecommerce, the same question can be applied to site designers and Internet marketers.

Before we settle the answer, we need a few parameters. For purposes of this discussion, a marketer is some formulating and creating Internet marketing strategies and campaigns. This includes search engine optimization. In using the term “designer”, we are throwing a bigger net to include programmers and people writing html.

Introducing the Designer

After deciding to start a site, most businesses will hire a designer or design team as one of the first steps. Intellectually, this makes sense. We need a site, thus, we need someone to build it.

Introducing the Marketer

After a lot of time and money has been spent on the design of the site, the first thought is given to marketing. Books are purchased, online articles such as this are read. PPC is often discovered and, typically, the business decides this looks easy and starts pursuing campaigns. The site starts making sales, but at a loss or a rate that can’t be increased despite a variety of tips. Frustration sets in and professional Internet marketers come on the seen. At this point, things start to get very ugly.

The business interviews a number of marketing professionals. All of them offer services, but on the condition major and expensive changes be made to the site. At this point, the business owner decides one of two things, the marketers are wrong or the designer is incompetent. Both views are wrong.

Holding Hands

Which came first? The marketer or the designer? Neither!

An effective site design combines the practical needs of the design team and marketer. While a designer will create a database to facilitate the showing of products, the marketer will want the designer to keep database parameters out of the sub-domain URLs. Other issues that must be jointly addressed include meta content, load times, abandonment issues and landing pages.

Both design and marketing have to be addressed at the outset of the creation of a site. There is simply no other way to approach an overall e-commerce effort.

How to Analyze a Competitor’s Website

Competitors' websites, if analyzed properly, can give you all sorts of information that you can use to increase the traffic and the popularity of your site. Here is an article on how to analyze a competitor's website.

Identifying the Leaders

Start off by identifying the major players. A good place to do this is Yahoo’s directory. It is good to view the major players in similar fields to your own so that you have a better view of your web site as perceived by others. You may want to print out the directory to take a closer look. Check some of the bigger companies and find out some of the innovative approaches and new products offered.

Sites like Media Metrix 500 can tell you which companies get the most traffic, and you can learn about the relative traffic by using Alexa. It is a free add-on to your browser that ranks the traffic for each site you visit and informing you whether it is in the top 100 or top 1000 ranking. This gives you a rough idea of where your competitors are in the ranking order.

Scrutinize the Leaders

The next step is to study the top 5 or 10 competitors very closely. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at competitors' web sites and analyzing them. These are the things that you should look for:

1. Make sure you check to see what products or services competitors offer, and note anything that’s different from your own offerings.

2. Look for gaps that you could fill.

3. Think about the look, feel and functionality of the competitors' web sites.

4. Check the advertising campaigns and offers they are running.

5. Look at their strengths and weaknesses, from the customer’s point of view.

6. See if you can figure out their strategy.

If you are dealing with a public company then you can get detailed information from proper sources and write down the names of their key players. Then it is possible to look for any interviews, articles or speeches they might have made about relating to their web site.

Look for Strengths, Vulnerabilities, and Gaps

Now summarize the information you have found into few sentences for each competitor, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Note down the strategies to be followed to counter your competitor’s offering.

With this research, you can create or modify your marketing plan. Be sure to include how you intend to deal with competition, and what steps you think you would require getting top rankings in the search engines. On the basis of your research on your competitors' websites, you need to make a decision of either to compete with your competitor or walk out of the competition and focus on other areas.

Don’t get frightened away prematurely, though – make sure you know what you are getting into before you start, and don’t let big companies intimidate you. Remember that you can move faster than your competitors if you have confidence in your abilities. All you need to do is offer your customers things that they cannot find anywhere else.

The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the last few months. The indexing robot, Yahoo!Slurp, has become erratic. For some sites, the robot will view all pages, but only add a few to the Yahoo database. For other sites, sub-domain listings actually start disappearing! So, what’s the secret to getting indexed?

Pleasing Yahoo!Slurp

The secret to getting indexed in Yahoo involves constant updates to your site. The updates, however, have to be done on both the site and through Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. Here’s how you go about getting indexed.

The first step is to start a blog for your site. You can build a blog on your site or use a free service. I prefer blogger.com because it is easy to use, but you can use whatever you like. Once you have your blog up, you should make entries that correspond and link to content on your site. For example, I will post this article on my blog, Moshing Search Engines, and link it to the article page on MarketingTitan.com.

To supercharge the impact of the blog, you should also link to a site map on your site. If you don’t have a site map, make one in HTML. The Yahoo robot will definitely follow it and index the pages. Don’t rely on the xml site map strategy Google is promoting.

Once you have the blog up with content posted, you must turn the blog into a real simple syndication feed. Again, you can use your own system. I prefer to use a free service because I really don’t have the time to waste on such things.

Feedburner.com seems to work find and is simple to use. Opening an account with Feedburner is so easy, I am not even going to explain it. At the end of the process, feedburner will kick out the link for your RSS feed. Here’s where the magic begins.

If you have a yahoo email account, you need to access you’re My Yahoo page. If you don’t have an account, get one! Once you are on the My Yahoo page, do the following:

1. Click the “add content” link in the upper left hand under the search box.

2. When the new page opens, click the “Add RSS by URL” link on the right of the “Find Content” search box in the upper section of the page.

3. Enter the exact link provided by Feedburner and click “add.” Do NOT add the url for your blog.

4. Click the “My Yahoo” tab at the top of the page and refresh the page.

At this point, you should see your feed at the bottom of the page. If you don’t, be patient. Yahoo is sometimes slow, so just try it again in an hour or so. When the feed is added, you should see the name of your blog and the title of each post under it. Yahoo can take up to a day to add new posts, so don’t panic if they don’t show up immediately.

Once you’ve completed the above, Yahoo will follow the links in the blog and index the pages on your site. If one of the links goes to a site map, you are in business. As an added bonus, Google will do the same thing. Let’s look at an example.

We are currently building NomadJournalTrips.com, which has been up for about a month. Roughly 10 to 20 pages are being added each day. Nomad Rick’s Ramblings is the blog for the site and the feed is included on four “My Yahoo” pages for various email accounts. Yahoo has indexed 95 pages and is about four days behind the page additions. Google has indexed 151 pages and is adding to the index every day. The blog and RSS feed are solely responsible for getting these pages indexed this quickly.

Depending on the size of your site, the process can take a few days or a couple of weeks. Every time you add new content, slap it into your blog with links. In no time, you will be taming Yahoo!Slurp.

Analyzing the Competition – Check Indexes

The beauty of the Internet is the inherent open nature of competition. It is so open, you can check indexes when analyzing the competition to improve your site.

Analyzing the Competition

A key step to any search engine optimization effort is to analyze the competition. The simplest way to do this is to simply go to their site and look at the code. Most browsers let you do this by clicking the “view” tab and then selecting “source.”

You competition isn’t stupid. Many sites will bar browsers from showing source code using the above technique. If your competition takes this step, is there anything you can do? Yes, there is.

Indexes

Almost everyone knows how to check if their site is indexed in a search engine. Simply go to the engine and search for “site:yourdomainname.” This technique can also be used to see what your competition is up to.

If you want to see a glimpse of how a competitor is pursuing search engine optimization, check how many pages are indexed in the relevant search engine. Do a search for “site:competitorsdomainname.” You’ll be presented with a list of their pages, the meta title and meta description. This works particularly well with Google.

The resulting list of pages can be analyzed in a couple of different ways. First, you can isolate the particular keywords being pursued by the site. These should then be compared to your site to ascertain whether you’re missing anything. You almost always are missing a key niche. Second, you can analyze the meta description to see both the layout and particular formation of sentences and keyword placement they are pursuing. Again, compare it to yours. Using this process, you can get an idea of how your efforts differ from a competitor.

Importantly, this approach should not be overvalued. It is only a glimpse of the competitor’s site, not a thorough review. It will tell you nothing about how pages are arranged, keyword density approaches and so on. You’ll have to hunt and peck around the site for that information. Still, the meta information gained from this approach makes it worth a go if you are shut out from the code of a site.

Analyzing Traffic – Visitors v. Hits

A key component to every web site is traffic analysis. When analyzing traffic, it is important to understand the difference between hits and visitors…and why both are important.

Be One With The Log

To analyze traffic to a site, you should be looking at your server logs. Server logs come in very raw data, but most hosting companies have interpreting programs that summarize the information into readable form. From these programs, you should be able to analyze who is sending you traffic, the number of hits and visitors among other information.

Hits v. Visitors – The Game Is On…

Many people, myself included, are lazy when it comes to discussing traffic results. We tend to use “hits” as a catch phrase for traffic hitting a web site. This isn’t entirely true. Traffic should always be analyzed in two categories, hits and visitors.

A “visitor” is a click from someplace on the net to your site. In your server logs, a visitor will be credited with visiting the site one time regardless of the number of pages the visitor views. For example, a person entering a brick n’ mortar bookstore is only one potential customer regardless of the number of books the person looks at.

A “hit” is a click on any page of the site and represents a multiple of the visitors. When you review server logs, the hits represent how many times visitors clicked site pages. Going back to our bookstore example, every book viewed by the person in the bookstore would be a hit. So, which information is more important?

Hits v. Visitors – And The Winner Is…

The simple fact is both visitors and hits are important statistics to analyze in your server logs. Obviously, the information on the number of visitors is important because you want to know how many potential customers are coming to your site. That being said, you should never focus on visitors without contemplating hits as well.

Hits are important because the number of hits tells you very important information about your site. Since hits represent the total number of pages viewed by all visitors, you can use the information to determine the effectiveness of your site. I call this by the very original and sophisticated name “hits to visitors ratio.” Let’s go back to our bookstore example.

Assume a person walks into a bookstore and only looks at one book. This may mean the person knew what they wanted, found it and bought it. Obviously, this is an ideal result. But what if a thousand people walk into the bookstore and only look at one book each? The bookstore would have a problem and start trying to figure out what it is. The hits statistics on your server tells you the same thing.

If your site has multiple pages, you need to find out if visitors are clicking into the internal pages. This is generally known as determining the depth of your site. The simplest way to do this is to divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for a particular time period. This figure will tell you if people are seeing one “book” or taking a look around.

Analyzing your server stats can be a real eye-opening experience. The information can be good or bad, but at minimum you will know if any corrective steps need to be taken.