Affordable SEO Is The Secret To Great Traffic (And Great Traffic Per Dollar!)

Posted on May 17, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

Affordable SEO is one of those things that lots of people claim to be looking for, but no one seems to know when they’ve found it. That’s because the SEO market is almost as opaque as the health care market. You can pay $50 for 4,000 backlinks over here, or $750 for 50 backlinks, 30 custom-written articles, 48 hours of social media marketing, and 45,000 automated robo-backlinks from worthless pages over there. Which is the better deal?

God’s honest truth: no one knows. I know that’s going to ruffle a lot of feathers, and there are a lot of erstwhile gurus out there who pride themselves on knowing whether a backlink from a PR 8 blog on an .edu site is worth more or less than 12 backlinks from PR 5 Web 2.0 properties — but it’s true. SEO is a deliberately occult field; Google doesn’t want us to know what works and what doesn’t, because they don’t want us to be able to game them.

The One Great Secret
There really is one simple and great secret to affordable SEO, though: consistency. If you pick an SEO company that isn’t a scam (these days, as long as you avoid freelancers, you’re pretty safe) and simply consistently pay them a couple of hundred dollars each month, you will eventually achieve the goal: a flow of organic traffic that doesn’t cost you more than a few cents per visitor.

The Other Great Secret
There really is another simple and great secret to affordable SEO, though: keyword research. The one thing that truly separates a company that’s wasting it’s money on SEO versus a company that is getting truly affordable SEO is the quality of the keywords that they’re targeting.

If you and FauxShizzleLLC both spend $300/month on SEO, the chances are really good that you’re getting a pretty darn comparable value worth of backlinks. But if you’re targeting keywords that are lower traffic and higher competition than FauxShizzleLLC’s are, you’re not going to see the kind of traffic that they will, end of story.

So before you go to any website SEO company, talk to them about the quality of their keyword research. Ask them what metrics they use, what their target numbers are, and why. The company with the best keyword research is the company with the most affordable SEO, and thus the best traffic and the best traffic-per-dollar — end of story.


Internet Marketing Techniques And Ideas To Help You Succeed Online

Posted on May 15, 2012 by seo_sk

Internet marketing is a very broad term that refers to not only marketing on the internet but also email and wireless media marketing. It combines both technical and creative aspects of marketing in the digital era. It can be extremely effective as well as an inexpensive technique to market a business in the 21st century. Read through this article to learn about many of the methods for marketing on the internet.

Start your own e-zine for your website. This can help your customers find out valuable information on your site, products, and offers, along with being able to visit your site from a link included somewhere in the content. This will lead to more overall sales for you as they only need to see an ad once.

If you are going to use social media to expand your business’s web presence, be sure to understand the difference between personal and business profiles. You want your business profile to be creative and interesting, but it’s supposed to be about a business. Don’t include too much information about yourself as the business owner, for example.

Make sure that any classified ads that you send out really stand out from the rest of the ads. You can implement a lot of capital letters and bold text in the headline along with other typographical symbols such as pound symbols and dollar signs. Your ads need to stand out from the crowd.

Avoid all of the get-rich-quick formulas that proliferate on the internet. Internet marketing is not rocket science. Many reputable sources on the web provide free information for how to work your way through an internet marketing plan. However, there is no magic switch or button or pill. There’s only relationship building and getting your readers to trust, know and like you.

Replace banners by button ads. Buttons take less space and are much quicker to load. Make sure your buttons are attractive and present clearly what they redirect to. Do not have all your buttons in one area: place them in different parts of your pages. Use banner ads for your most important products only.

No matter what medium people use to access the internet (smart phone, touch tablet, laptop), more time is being spent online than ever before. Use this to your advantage in your marketing strategy. With the tips outlined in this article, you will get a head start in improving your online marketing skills.

Click the link to get more information and facts on press release service


Tortured Analogies — The Turtle And The Hare: Organic SEO and PPC Management

Posted on May 12, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

You’ve heard the story of the turtle and the hare. The hare races along, decides he can take a break, and the turtle catches up. Repeat until the turtle wins by a hair. Did you know that the moral applies to internet marketing as much as it does to ancient talking Greek animals?

In this case, though, the turtle is organic SEO and the hare is PPC management.

The Turtle
Organic SEO is the turtle in this scenario because it’s slow, it’s ponderous, and yet somehow in the end it always wins. You pay in, you pay in, you pay in, you pay in, you wait a while, and then suddenly and mysteriously, it goes from sending you a dozen hits a day to a dozen hits every 20 minutes. The cost per visitor starts enormous, and then almost magically it drops over the course of a few weeks from dollars per visitor to several visitors per cent.

The Hare
PPC management, on the other hand, allows you to safely take advantage of one of the few truly powerful shortcuts to instant traffic: pay-per-click marketing. PPC management isn’t just any hare; it’s Briar Rabbit, able to navigate the intense, pitfall-ridden terrain of pay-per-click marketing by virtue of years of experience with this particular briar patch. The only downside to PPC management is that, no matter how good you get at pay-per-click, the sheer efficiency of organic SEO will eventually make it the better option.

Winning The Race
Fortunately, as a webmaster in this scenario, there’s nothing whatsoever keeping you from switching animals mid-race. Invest equally in the tortoise and the hare — the bunny will make sure you get visitors under your belt in no time and start the profits flowing, and when the turtle makes it’s magical leap from zero to hero, you can ditch that lop and ride the shell of your glorious green friend into the sunset.

It might seem like a lot of up-front investment — to do PPC and SEO at the same time — but the trick is to invest the money you make from the PPC visitors into your SEO. Isn’t it great that rabbits and turtles both eat the same lettuce?


Would Your Brick-and-Mortar Benefit From Mobile Website Design?

Posted on May 7, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

Of course it would. Silly question.

Next!

What, more detail? OK. Let’s have a hypothetical. You’re a florist, and you offer some really cool bouquets for Mother’s day that hide presents like chocolates, candies, and even a beautiful box for earrings or something in your bouquets. There are five other florists in town — two at supermarkets, and two other independents.

The florists at the supermarkets are going to advertise in their weekly flyer, in the Mother’s Day sections. But you and the other two independents don’t have direct mail ads set up like that — you rely largely on word of mouth, your big beautiful street sign, and of course your popular website where you have detailed high-megapixel pictures of your favorite bouquet designs uploaded.

The other two local florists have copied your website, and they’re starting to steal your thunder, but there’s not a lot you can do about it. Or is there? You guessed it: mobile website design is the answer, in two ways at once.

Catch Mobile Traffic
The first thing that a mobile website does is capture all of those people who are searching from their mobile devices. How many times have you been out with your spouse and realized that you needed something critical — like a Mother’s Day bouquet — at the last moment? If you didn’t have a smartphone, you’d probably go get something generic at the supermarket. But if you did, you’d search for other options — something more special.

You just got a customer that none of your competitors had a snowball’s chance of snagging for themselves. Congrats.

Improved SEO
The other thing that mobile websites do it open up an opportunity for more organic SEO. People searching from mobile devices use slightly different search terms than the ones searching from home, because they’re definitively in a buying mode. Address them with their own SEO’d keywords, and you’ll draw them in like flies to honey.

In short, not only are you drawing in customers that are yours alone, but you’re also spreading the ‘net’ of your internet presence to keywords that you couldn’t have meaningfully targeted before — and the more the merrier, right?


Social Media: The Slowest Thing Since Website SEO, But More Important Than Ever

Posted on May 2, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

Social marketing is a particularly difficult nut to crack, especially for smaller businesses. Much like website SEO, social marketing takes an extraordinary amount of time, and the results don’t show up terribly quickly. The entire goal, if you don’t ‘get it’, is to communicate your company’s value (and personality) to the everyday folks that hang out on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and the other various social media.

Ostensibly, you do that by posting to your various social media profiles, by doing some social bookmarking, and by generally making yourself available to the people who are interested in you and your product. The reality is that most business owners don’t have enough time in their day to do all that kind of stuff, so like many other things these days, they outsource their value (and personality) to someone who does.

Why bother? Because social marketing is the new SEO. Here’s why.

Both SEO and social marketing have the end result of driving traffic to your website. But where SEO is based largely on how many people you can pay to write backlinks for you, social marketing is based largely on how skilled the few people you pay to play the crowd really are. Unlike in medieval Japan, where the skill of a single swordsman was pitted against the sheer numbers of conscripts with muskets, in the field of social marketing, the lone skilled individual is often the winner.

Consider, then, how much it costs to find and hire one skilled marketer versus a crowd of twenty or more backlink-builders. Yep — social marketing is just plain cost-effective.

Of course, SEO companies pretty quickly figured this out and started scooping up skilled social marketers left, right, and center, and adding them to their existing SEO packages. For you as the business owner, however, this presents an additional opportunity — because the cost of those packages didn’t meaningfully increase as a result. So you can get the best of both worlds by finding an SEO company that offers social marketing alongside their SEO packages.

Now, once Google changes their search algorithm to value +1s and Likes as much as it values backlinks (and the day is not that far away, mark our words), the power structure will change again — but for now, take advantage!


Web Video to Kill Bounce Rates: Web Presenters And Beyond

Posted on April 27, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

OK, let’s assume you know what a bounce rate is. If you have a problem with your bounce rate, you know you need to find something that will keep surfers on your site a little while longer — at least long enough to hear what it is you’re offering.

Before we get into that, though, let’s make sure you actually have a problem. A lot of internet marketing newbies and novice webmasters can kind of freak out a little bit about their bounce rates before they learn what’s going on. There are a lot of reasons why you might have what sounds like an absurd bounce rate.

Explaining the Bounce
The first is search engine spiders — those little bots that are responsible for recording your website’s SEO and ranking them accordingly. Every time a spider visits your site and leaves to a different site rather than a different page on your site, it registers as a bounce. For new websites that have little traffic, spiders can account for a bounce rate of 70~80%! Once your traffic starts to improve, your bounce rate will go down.

The second is that you may be providing everything your surfers are looking for on the first page they land on. If someone finds everything they want on the page they land on and they close the window satisfied, that counts as a bounce.

Web Video Counters Bouncing
There are several ways to counteract a high bounce rate. One of the best is to use a video — optimally, if you can afford one, a web presenter — to get the surfer interested in what might be on the deeper pages of your website. A web presenter (basically a person who pops up and starts talking to the surfer) can tell the visitor what they can expect and where to find more useful information deeper within the site.

You can even stack web presenters, so that the front page presenter shows up again on the inside pages, offering supplemental content and pointing to related pages within your site. Done cleverly, you can guide a visitor from an information-seeking mode into a purchasing mode and then drop him off right at your sales page. That’s marketing!


Organic SEO Is Worth the Time It Takes

Posted on April 22, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

Organic SEO is a time-consuming endeavor under the best of circumstances. The ideal situation is that you’ll pay for a few months of SEO, get a quick first page placement because you chose a decent, low-competition keyword, and then move on to new keywords to get ranked for. But that’s still an entire business quarter devoted to just the low-competition keywords, and as you ace those, there are ever more (and better) keywords to target.

Does it ever end? Nope. And even the nearest set of goalposts is several weeks away when you’re just starting. It can seem like quite a daunting investment for any cash-strapped young business to make — both in money and in time. But like most things worthwhile, the benefits of SEO are worth waiting for.

What’s not worthwhile is trying to put in the dozens-to-hundreds of man-hours it takes to toprank a website for even the most minor keywords…on your own. Unless you’re a big business and you can afford to hire an entire new in-house SEO department, you’re going to end up blowing through a huge scad of time — more than you can possibly afford to pay for — with results that won’t keep up with a professional SEO company’s.

It’s often said that ‘time is money’, but the more accurate way to put it may be that ‘money is time’. Time is the more valuable resource, after all: you can always find other or more ways to make money — until you find that you’ve run out of time. In the case of SEO, spending money in order to save yourself an expenditure of time isn’t just smart, it’s pretty much the only way to get things to work out in your favor.

That’s particularly true when things DON’T work out in your favor. If you find that the competition for a particular keyword is stiffer than your research led to you to believe, or if a website you’d been relying on for a wide spread of backlinks suddenly goes down for good halfway through your campaign, it can be irrecoverable if you’re working on your own. A solid SEO company, on the other hand, will have the resources they need to change gears and keep on plowing through an alternate route.

In short, it may be a bit of an investment and a bit of a wait for your SEO to pull through, but as long as you leave it in the hands of a competent SEO crew, it will be well worth the wait.


Website SEO Is A Long-Term Effort — But The RoI Is HUGE!

Posted on April 17, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

Website SEO isn’t something that you can really speed up by paying money for. To a point, sure, but Google watches a lot of variables about your website’s backlink structure, one of which is the amount of time it takes for your backlinks to appear. For example, if your website had 45 inbound links on Monday, 49 on Tuesday, 56 on Wednesday, and 740 on Thursday, the Google bot will immediately investigate further.

If those sudden 680+ links all share other attributes (for example, they all come from the came C-block of IP addresses, or they were all created sequentially in one eight-hour period, or they all have the same username attached to them), Google is pretty likely to out-and-out ignore them and possibly even punish you for cheating that hard.

In other words, SEO is by its very definition something that happens over a fairly extended period of time. Only by spreading the link building out over multiple IP C-blocks, multiple user accounts, a wide spread of times-of-day, and of course a fairly expansive period of time can an SEO company make your links appear natural to Google.

This, of course, means that when you pay for a month of SEO work, you’re not literally paying for some guy to sit around and build backlinks for you 8 hours a day for 31 days. You’re purchasing, in effect, as many backlinks as it makes sense to build during one month.

On the other hand, while you have to wait for a few months in order for those cumulative SEO payouts to add up to success, once they do, your traffic will spike and it won’t go back down until you stop paying for organic SEO for a few months (and one of your competitors who is still paying overtakes you in the rankings.)

Each new keyword that you ace will bring on another spike in traffic, until eight or eleven months from now, with several excellent keywords under your belt, you’ll be swimming in visitors. The cost-per-visitor will be miniscule even when you take the months of prior payments into account.


Web Presenters Make Great Attention Grabbers

Posted on April 12, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

One of the most important things about any website is it’s bounce rate — that is, the rate at which people who have just arrived on the site promptly click away and don’t return. The bounce rate is the bane of many a webmaster, because it means that the awesome content (presumably) on the site is being ignored because something is going wrong that is driving surfers away before they even start looking at said content.

So how do you convince someone to keep looking at a page that they’re already decided is somehow so deeply flawed that they simply don’t want to stay there? The answer is pretty straightforward, actually: you have to find some way to get their attention focused on perusing your site rather than on finding the ‘back’ button.

There are a few good tools for this, but few of them are more effective than the web presenter. Often offered up as a way of improving conversions, the web presenter is a decent fool for that purpose (though targeted Email marketing is generally speaking better.) The really shining reason to get a web presenter is that is grabs the attention of a typical websurfer and convinces both him and his money to stick around.

How does it do that? Simple — most web presenters start playing automatically after the surfers has been on the page for a moment. That means that, unless they’re lightning-quick with the back button, they’re going to be exposed to a few seconds of speech coming through their speakers and an image of an attractive person moving in an identifiably human fashion. By combing the visual cue with an audible one, you increase the chance of someone stopping and paying attention dramatically.

Start the web presenter’s spiel with something interesting and provocative, and your retention rate will skyrocket even more. Depending on your demographic, you want to choose a pretty young lady or an attractive older man or something in the middle. Finish off by placing the web presenter out of the way of your main text but still someplace plainly visible by someone who hasn’t scrolled anywhere and you’re well on your way to eliminating your bounce rate for good.


Time Management, Social Media, and Your Organic SEO Company

Posted on April 7, 2012 by seo_writer_mkl

The greatest challenge facing pretty much everyone in business today is time management. There are simply too many tasks on the average businessman’s checklist. You can tell because time management books are the second highest-selling group within self-help (after “actualization”, if you’re curious.)

One of the biggest time-suckers in your average webmaster’s day? Social media. It wasn’t until very recently that organic SEO companies started to offer social marketing services, and many business owners and/or their webmasters still don’t believe that the SEO company can market their company as responsibly and accurately as they can.

So a webmaster can and will spend four hours every day attending to all of the tweets, posts, comments, references, and feeds, and reach the point of diminishing returns long before he realizes he kind of wasting a lot of time. And lo and behold, if he’s not extraordinarily polite, funny, prompt, a tad bit servile, and superhumanly humble, he’s got as good of a chance of driving people away as he does attracting them.

The SEO companies, on the other hand, won’t offer you a service until they know they can do it right. They don’t want to drive their client base away any more than you do, after all. So hiring an SEO company to do your social marketing is no more dangerous than hiring one to do your blog posting — which has become common practice.

What will a social marketer from an SEO company do for you? Simple — bascially the same stuff you would have done yourself. They’ll answer your customer’s (and potential customer’s) questions; they’ll post intelligent, well-written commentary about your products, services, and industry. They’ll act with humility, a sense of humor, and approachability under your name and make people comfortable with your business.

Your options are pretty simple: you can pay someone who does web stuff for a living to act like a social marketer and get an inefficient effort that may well backfire on you — or you can spend a bit of money and hire a professional that will get the job done well the first time. Which to you think is the better way to manage your time and money?