Not Sold in Stores

Over the years, the industry of internet marketing has developed to the point where incorporating an online marketing plan is absolutely essential for any company wanting to succeed in the future. Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are the most popular forms of internet marketing as they can drive lots of targeted traffic to your website. Down below is a list of some of the most important lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of search as a medium:

- Search should not be thought of as a stand alone marketing medium - PPC (Paid Search) is better for accomplishing some goals than SEO is - SEO is better for accomplishing some goals than PPC is - Content is KING - Content is KING (did we say that already?)

Perhaps one of the most powerful of these lessons however, is that as powerful as search is, it CANNOT compensate for a faulty business model.

Faulty Business Model

Sure, in the short term a good SEO can help. Those rankings will often bring in some business through targeted traffic from the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Unfortunately, those same good rankings can also help to conceal problems within the business model.

What is a Good Business Model?

What does a good business model consist of? It’s usually a direct function of the relative value:price ratio for a product or service amongst competitors, sprinkled with a whole lot of common sense.

However, if anything is amiss - the company is doomed for failure, expert SEO or not.

Why Are Companies with Faulty Business Models Doomed?

Companies with faulty business models are doomed for a number of reasons. Primarily however, they’re doomed because search engines want to recommend sites that SATISFY searcher’s needs. Almost by definition, companies with faulty business models cannot satisfy clients and searchers, because either:

- Their price is too high given the value of the product or service - Their value is too low given the price of the product or service - Common sense is lacking, severely distorting the value:price ratio - and we suspect this is by far the most common

Long term (in a few more years - not yet though) this means search engines will look at your friend’s preferences and opinions (aka social search), and the behaviour patterns of thousands of other searchers, and will rearrange rankings based on those indicators. The result - faulty business models lose.

What Does This Mean for SEO’s and the Industry of Internet Marketing?

As a result, SEO and internet marketing companies in the future will have to make some interesting business decisions:

- do we accept or retain clients with faulty business models? - how do we identify clients with faulty business models - what are the signals? - do we attempt to become management/change consultants too?

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

Ultimately, this means that companies must focus their time and efforts on what it is they do best. They need to ensure they’ve got solid defensible business models. The more sound the business model, the easier it will be to rank for relevant terms. If not, make the tough decisions, and correct the issues, or Google will!

Following on from Part 1, here is Part 2 of ‘3 Ways To Dramatically Improve Search Engine Rankings’ I have a simple 3-Stage Approach to getting ranked high in the search engines. Here, in Part 2, is my second Stage…

Stage 2. Get Your Website Seen:

If you goal is to get high up the search engine rankings (and it should be!) then you need to get the search services to ’see you’. This sounds an obvious statement but few people really think it through that much. In a nutshell, and avoiding all the techie jargon, search engines really want to find you, or more specifically your website. When someone types in a ’search query’ they are looking for some information. If your website is relevant to the information which is being searched for (we’ll talk about this later), then the search engines are very keen to link the person searching with your website, which they do with the search results the search engine discovers.

The key then, knowing the search engines really want to find your website, is to set up your website in such a way as to make it be easily found by the search engines. The way you do this is to adopt some basic, but very important ‘optimisation’ tricks on your website - what is called ‘on page optimisation’.

The interesting thing is, even though it’s really important to do what I’m about to share with you, the on-page optimisation’ methods only really are about 15% of what contributes towards your search results ranking. The 85% of where you figure in search results is dependant on the ‘off-page optimisation’ which I’ll cover in stage 3. Even though ‘on page optimisation’ only makes up for 15% towards how you get ranked, it is still crucial to carry out these basic but key steps:

a) Ensure your keyword(s) appear in your pages ‘Title tag’ of the header code of your website (if you’re not sure what this is, ask someone to show you who does know - it’s that important). This is vital because it is one of the key things that search engines are looking for - matching the words the searcher types into their search (the keywords) with the title of a website, which in turn should be relevant to the search query. You can take this a stage further by adding in a description in the ‘meta description tag’ again incorporating your keywords, and then the ‘meta keywords tag’ which simply includes all your keywords, comma separated.

The search engines don’t put so much relevancy these days on the description or keyword tags, but they’re worth doing either way, but it’s vital you include your keywords in the Title tag.

b) Make the webpage you are pointing the keyword towards relevant to that keyword. In other words don’t have a keyword like ‘dog training tips’ and then have a webpage all about horses, cats, dogs and loads of other animals with little specific relevancy to dogs or dog training - make sure the webpage is relevant to your keyword.

c) Build into your website a simple Sitemap. Understand that the way search engines search the web is they look for (crawl) words and phrases in all the code of your website - they don’t understand pretty pictures, graphics, flash animations, etc - all they want to find is words and phrases relevant to want the searcher is looking for. So make it simpe for the search engines to ’see’ your web site when it looks for those key words and phrases. One way to do this and make it easier for the search engines to find the info they want is by incorporating a simply site map within your website. Again, if this doesn’t make sense to you, ask your webmaster about it.

I don’t know anyone that has all the traffic they need. Even the gurus that have thousands of visitors a day are always looking for ways to drive hot, targeted traffic to their websites. Could you use a little more targeted traffic to your site? Of course you could, I don’t know a marketer that couldn’t so lets dive on in.

Here are several quick and easy ways to get traffic to your site in record time.

Method 1 - Take a shot at article marketing. It’s not hat hard if you have an understanding of you product or service. Simply write 400-700 words on your topic and make it interesting. Out some passion and value added content in there and the next thing you know, people will want to know more about you and your expertise. That;’s when you send them to your site link using the resource box at the bottom of this article.

Method 2 - Do a quick video for YouTube. This doesn’t need to be an elaborate production but just something that tells the viewer about your product. Here’s the video marketing formula. Short Introduction, Present a problem, offer solution, and strong call to action. Write a headline that someone looking for your product would type into a search engine. Keep it simple.

Method 3 - Add your website link to your email signature. yo may already be doing this but is it enticing and attractive. Try offering a free special offer for clicking or something shocking or of value to quickly grab attention. Occasionally people will click on an old boring link but more often they want to know what’s in in for them . Give it to them!

Method 4 - Write a short downloadable e-book to give away. This doesn’t need to be a novel. Typically 8 to 12 pages of hard hitting information on your topic. Don’t give away the farm, but keep them interested and wanting more. This also positions you as an expert in the field which goes along way in customer retention.

Method 5 - Post tiny classified ads on Craigslist. This is a quick way to get things going immediately. If you’ve never used this method before you’ll find that it can result in some pretty fast, targeted traffic in no time. There are several little strategies to explode your traffic using this method but one is the use of a catchy value driven headline. For example: Drive Floods of Traffic To Any Website Using Craigslist…Guaranteed!

All of these methods work f you work them and the best thing is they are all absolutely 100% free. In terms of the learning curve and effectiveness of all these methods, I would probably start with Craigslist followed by article marketing.

With these key strategies under our belt, I suggest you waste no time getting started as there is traffic waiting for you. Don;t overwhelm your self by trying to tackle everything. Choose one or two and get going. Stay focused, good luck and happy marketing.

Starting a membership site is impossible if you do not have a hosting company that offers you the right tools to run your web site. At minimum the hosting company should allow you the ability to create forms, set up an ecommerce site, community development tools, recurring billing modules and access level controls. But that’s not all you will need to build and run a successful membership web site.

MySQL, PERL, CGI, SSI, CRON, Curl, FrontPage, PHP scripting tools, Python, GD and ImageMagik, which allows you to create streaming videos and music are a few basic programs that come with most webhosting packages. If these are not listed on the hosting company’s sales page, either move on to another company or send an email asking for clarification.

Don’t overlook your email needs. Your hosting package should come with auto responders, mailing lists, mail forwarding, web mail, Spam control, POP3, IMAP, and SMTP. Again, if in doubt, ask. It is a lot better to know upfront what you’re getting than to discover it when you need it - but don’t have it!

Does the hosting company provide you with a control panel? These control panels (often referred to as cpanels) usually offer you many tools and features such as hotlink protection, Fantastico, management of Search Engine submittals, and error pages. If Fantastico is provided you have at your fingertips access to instant blogging software, portals, PHP, Nuke, Instant Chat, Forums, counters, FTP, and so on.

You simply must have the ability to password protect for your folders - especially when you are running a membership site. Check to make sure the hosting company’s cpanel package has password protection; additionally, you will want .htaccess privileges.

Want to know what pages your customers are viewing, how many requests are returning an error code or where your visitors are coming from? Make sure you have tracking statistics available. Tracking statistics often include raw log or other access such as Awstats. Error logs and analogs are provided as well.

If your goal is to run a successful membership website, you really should consider purchasing the plan that offers ecommerce features, as well as Shared or Private SSL (this affords the consumer protection), Shopping Carts, Joomla, Mambo and other free membership scripts that are usually available if you have the Fantastico feature.

In addition to the basic tools listed above, you will also need to consider some marketing tools for your site when you get it set up. These will vary depending on they type of site you are building. In fact, there will be things you will need, but you won’t even know what they are until you run into a problem or two. Just head on over to the search engine and start searching.

Are you ready? It all started when you dared to dream of owning and running a membership site. You are now armed with knowledge of how to find a good hosting company for your site. Now its time to “just do it” - find a good host and get that membership site online!

The holy grail of internet marketing seems to be getting “free” traffic. Even though you could do a lot with paid traffic, such as pay-per-click, free traffic is great. There are several ways you can get some free traffic to your main website.

Starting a blog, whether on your own domain or even on a hosted site such as Blogger.com or Wordpress.com can give you a great advantage over just a regular website. The main thing that makes blogs great for getting traffic is that they have a built-in RSS feed. These RSS feeds allow search engines and several other directories or engines to index the content of blogs and do this very easily.

There are several social bookmarking sites, such as Digg.com and Del.icio.us and other sites like this. You can “bookmark” your own blog posts and other pages to help them get ranked in the search engines. Often times these social bookmarking “tag” pages will get ranked as well. Although this isn’t a direct link, these pages can serve as bridge pages with links back to your site and these pages rank also rank very well with the search engines.

Some other sites that can help you get traffic and rank well on their own are sites like Hubpages.com and Squidoo.com. If you have done your keyword research and know what keywords are getting searched for, you’ll have an easy time finding keywords that are getting searched, but have very little competition. Using these keywords in the title of your Squidoo “Lens” or your Hubpages “Hub”. Using the keywords in both your title and again throughout the page you create then doing some additional social bookmarking links back to your “Lens” or “Hub” and watch it get ranked in the search engines.

Next to pay-per-click, articles are the best way to get your website ranked and get traffic back to your website. The main reason these article websites are so good is because the pages on which your article shows up are very relevant and the links that are allowed in the author profile or resource box. Many of the good article sites also have a lot of “authority” with the search engines and their article pages rank very well which also means that the link values passed along from these types of sites are very high.

Posting on forums is another great way to generate links back to you site. Find forums within your niche and start contributing to the conversations. Make sure that you’re posting on forums that allow you to add a signature with a link. Also, whenever possible, view the source on forums and see if they add a “nofollow” attrib within the link code. If they do, that forum won’t do much for your search engine optimization, but will work for getting clicks back to your website.

There are a lot of blogs that you can add your comment to. These comments can be used for the search engine benefit by using your keyword phrase as the link back to your site. If the blog is a “popular” blog where many people add comments, the webmaster or blog owner may have a setting that prevent the search engine from giving credit for that link. In those cases, you can use the more popular blogs to link back to your site and simply get some clicks back to your site. This puts some of the pressure on to write comments that encourage the clicks.

Getting free traffic, or even paying for traffic is just the start to making sales and making money. These techniques can be used for non-ecommerce related sites as well.

What is SEO? It is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization and is the science of getting a high placement in search engine results. There are a lot of helpful SEO methods that can be used to optimize your website, and Texas Web Designers know how to make them work for you. A properly optimized website brings lots more targeted traffic to your website. Targeted means people who are already interested in what you are selling so they are more likely to buy.

Simply building a website isn’t enough to attract people in droves with their wallets wide open as many people fanaticize it will. Texas Web Designers know how to get your site optimized so that you can get the kind of results you are looking for and achieve financial success with your website.

Many SEO techniques exist solely for the purpose of internet marketing, which is marketing or promoting your website. It is important to have a budget and keep it in mind when creating your marketing plan. The inexperienced marketer can quickly find their finances run dry with little or no results, but Texas Web Designers can help you put these useful techniques in a way that is cost-effective and successful. An SEO website that is properly designed has the ability to get your business the exposure it needs to get a high search engine ranking and attract the droves of customers you’ve fantasized about.

Website quality is the determining factor in how high you are ranked. The Texas web designers will build your site according to a variety of specifications such as optimized content, link building, and with a host of tools designed to keep you on or near the top. The content on your page plays a major role in how search engines find you. When computer users type in search terms, they use keywords to designate a topic or subject. Those keywords may be very specific, or may include broad terminology with the intent of finding related topics.

When writing your web content, the Texas web designers will keep this in mind, and will integrate keywords that directly relate to your site, and are among those terms people would most likely use if conducting a search.

Texas Web Designers are keen on the purpose of using the right keywords in the right density and in creating content for your site that actually provides a service to your viewers. This will not only help to ensure a high search engine ranking, but it will also make people glad they came to your site and make them want to return again. The proper keywords will be integrated into the articles in natural language so that the reader has no idea they are reading an SEO article, they will just know it is good information.

When optimizing your page is also important to keep your page titles relative to the main keywords if you want good search engine results. Using the keywords in a way that is natural and not illogical in your page titles is important. Texas web designers can help you to build you website by taking your information and organizing it in a way that will attract search engines as well as make sense to readers.

An online business is a difficult type of business to be successful with. There are millions of websites online today and depending on your market you could be competing with thousands of them. A competition analysis can help your website succeed and Texas web designers can provide a complete analysis that will help you find out where you stand with your competition. Finding out what makes your website unique and different will help you stand out from the rest.

In your local community your business may only be competing with a small handful of other businesses. When you have an online company you are competing with thousands of other businesses who most likely offer the same products and services you offer. You cannot just build a website and assume that people will trust that you are the right place to shop. Texas web designers can help with competing in this global market and ensure customers you have what they are looking for and provide many reasons why they should buy from you.

A competition analysis from Texas web designers will look at where you stand in the global market. They will identify and examine your competitors and show you where your website stands with the competition. The analysis usually includes a list of your businesses strengths as well as your weaknesses and how you can improve them. They will show you the opportunities you have in the online marketplace to excel and help you to set goals for your business to achieve

Texas Web Designers will also help you discover ways to distinguish your website from the rest with your complete competition analysis. This will help you to create a unique image for your website and develop your own brand that will set you apart from the competition. Understanding the unique qualities and strengths your website has will allow you to focus these things and become even better. Capturing your share of the customers for your product takes using every advantage you can get these days.

Good Texas web designers can also provide more than just a competition analysis. A competition analysis will create a baseline as you begin to build your business and that you can use later to gauge your success. When you are able to see how far you have come it will help you stay motivated to continue to build your business.

It is a good idea to hire Texas web designers for a competition analysis when you have an online business. Even if you think you are successful they can help you build your business even better. They will provide a service which will set you apart from the competition by finding your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities throughout the marketplace. Branding is very important when you have thousands of other competitors. It is hard for shoppers to remember the name of a good business so you need to brand your name in their minds as the best place to shop.

SEO is an often used acronym for Search Engine Optimization which is the crux of internet marketing today. SEO consists of a variety of techniques that are used in the design of a website in order to get it to rank well with search engines. The higher your search engine ranking, the more people visit your website and the more money you can make. Good SEO is the difference between having a website and having a viable internet business. The people at Texas Web Designers are experts at creating websites with good SEO design that help their clients achieve financial success with their websites and they can do the same for you.

Texas Web Designers are known for the high quality of their SEO website design. They provide a variety of services that are designed to provide the greatest SEO results for their clients using the latest technology available. Understanding and implementing the best and most effective SEO techniques is vital to attaining success on the internet among the vast amounts of competition out there today. Your site must rank well with search engines like Google or you might as well not even exist.

In traditional businesses, every business owner knows that they must have an advertising budget. They use newspaper ads, radio and television commercials, signs and banners to attract and keep business coming in. It is no different on the internet, but the methods vary slightly. Texas Web Designers know which techniques to use in order to make your business stand out from the crowd and attract new customers daily.

Using Texas Web Designers for your website optimization is a good idea because of the many unique services they provide. Their knowledge, experience and expertise in creating SEO designed websites is unsurpassed. Using them to do your internet marketing frees up your time to focus on the other important aspects of your business so you can continue to move forward.

With all the many ways to optimize a website and with the ever-changing rules used by the search engines, it is nearly impossible for a novice to achieve noticeable results on their own. Texas Web Designers are experts in putting all the latest techniques to work for you and are always aware of the latest changes to the way the popular search engines rank websites so their clients are always ahead of the curve.

SEO is an important part of any online business and should be the focus of your marketing methods. Your businesses’ web presence is just as important as your physical presence and can attract many more customers and increase your revenues. Texas web designers are dedicated to providing you with quality optimization services that will get you the traffic your website needs to attract customers.

A well optimized site will mean more people will be able to find you through relevant searches. This means more potential customers for you, and that the name of your business will be seen more often by users browsing the Internet. The Texas web designers will consult with you to help you provide the best information to the greatest number of people possible.

Many web designers have an online company that is not achieving the results they want. Their website may look fantastic to them but they can’t figure out why they do not have the traffic they expected. Texas Web designers can provide the perfect advice for making a website successful and offer solutions to help any website succeed on the internet. Their services can include an evaluation of ways to improve your website, get more traffic, and higher search engine rankings.

An evaluation is the first step Texas web designers will take when working on a website. They will examine all of the web pages in a site and make sure they function properly. They will make sure the website is easy for visitors to navigate and determine if the site’s content is confusing or easy to understand. They will check the links on the website to make sure they are not broken and that everything points to where it should.

One thing that Texas Web Designers will focus on is your website’s consistency. Does each page reflect the same theme and have the same functionality? Can the user easily navigate from one page to another and back again without difficulty? Understanding what makes a viewer click off your site is vital to improving your conversion rate and making more money with your website. A professional web design company understands this all too well and knows how to make the changes you need to see your business take off.

Even though your website might look perfect to you and pleasing to the eyes, there may be a lot of problems which are responsible for the lack of success you are having. These are the most common problems and they usually include the improper or lack of content on a site. A Texas web designers provide much more than just building pages of a website. They provide the content that is responsible for search engines listing your site at the top of the results, your site rank which gives you credibility to the shoppers, and much more. Content is everything and if your site looks and works great but lacks the content, you are sure to fail.

Texas Web Designers provide much more than just website design. They are able to diagnose and treat major website problems, provide superior content and improve the site’s performance with major search engines in order to bring more visitors and make more sales. They work diligently in order to help websites improve their marketing and achieve true and lasting success for their businesses.

Many people think they don’t need Texas web designers to help them with their online business because the site looks great and the pages are well constructed. There are many more aspects to a website which make it successful. The right web design company can provide more than web pages which include content that works well with the search engines, articles and announcements about your business, a good site ranking, and much more.

You can improve your website traffic today if you want. Let us take into account some no-cost means to further your traffic as pay per click is the most natural solution. Blogging happens to be the most convenient channel and you can set one up for free today, if you do not have one as yet. Use the ping services to spread the word after the writing of posts with keywords related to your theme. Services such as this will enable your link to reach plenty of blog directories and sites. You can get an instant hit in one day, but your website traffic will get a boost the more you do it.

Post on Forums - there is a forum out there for most subjects and you can usually register for free. Search Google using your keywords and the word forum in order to find a relevant forum. As you are not allowed to promote your site straight away, write down to earth posts, offering help and advice, saying something with the popular threads and you will find people checking out your site on the same day at no cost.

Writing Articles - some article directories will assess your article before posting it to ensure quality and fluency, while others do not, so you can submit your article with a link on your site the same day. Others take the article to put it up on their website with your author data at the bottom, showing a link to your site.

Digg Sites - Digg is a fabulous site for you to post small quotes or abridged versions of your blog post, article post or absorbing text matter from your web site. It doesn’t take long at all for this to appear on their high ranking and busy pages, again offering a potential boost to your website traffic.

Email lists - how can you say that you have not collected a list of emails yet? The astounding fact is that lots of people on the web have not done anything to make their own email list. The advantage of having a list is that it enables you to arrange previously composed messages and send out mass emails at any time calling them to visit your website and benefit from the latest special offers or suggestions and thus improve your website traffic in no time.

Joint ventures may sometimes work in a day and sometimes not. If you receive a newsletter from a website which relates to your issue, try to see if you have anything interesting to offer them and their customers. Obviously, you would offer something of advantage - send a free report, a product, and the list owner and you would share the profit. A good way to boost traffic is to have a large number of names on the lists.