Improve Rankings With Less Clutter

Did you know that almost 30% of online adults will immediately leave a website if they perceive it to be cluttered with ads, and more than 75% of those who remain on cluttered sites pay less attention to the ads there, according to a survey from Burst Media.

The survey of 4,000 web users found that cluttered sites not only annoy the audience, they diminish ad effectiveness and ultimately do a disservice to the publisher, the advertiser and the visitor.

Although respondents accept that advertising will appear on websites, the majority, say they have low tolerance for any more than two advertising units per page. Another 25 percent say they will tolerate only a single ad per web page, and slightly more than one-quarter will tolerate just two ads per page.

The online web site survey also found that advertising clutter has a negative impact on consumers perceptions of products and services:

• One out of two (52.4%) respondents has a less favorable opinion of an advertiser when their advertising appears on a web page they perceive as cluttered.

• One-half (56.4%) of women claim clutter negatively impacts their opinion of an advertiser, versus 48.3% of men.

• Women also are more likely than men to abandon a site that appears cluttered (32.1% vs 27.5% of men).

Ad clutter's negative impact on respondents' opinions increases with age. Less than half (46.8%) of respondents 18-24 years were impacted negatively by clutter, but nearly two-thirds (63.2%) of respondents age 55 and older were unfavorably impacted.

Advertising clutter can be defined as as the overcrowding of a web page with advertising units to the point of degrading the web users' experience. This is common among many of today's websites. If you want to improve your advertising revenue, remember this, "less is more."

Improve Search Results with Deep Linking

The secret to to improving search engine results is using deep linking strategies. Deep linking means not only pointing backlinks to your website's homepage, but also pointing them at the individual landing pages or hub pages within your website.

This is what we call Deep Linking Strategies. And it can make the difference between a little traffic and a lot of traffic!

Let me explain a little more using an example. Let's us an example site:

Myexample.com

The name or the title of this site is MyExample. This is the homepage and a typical backlink would look like this:

[a href="http://www.myexample.com/"]My Example[/a]

Within MyExample's website are a number of web pages that talk about a separate subject.

These topics are:

Good Examples
Bad Examples
New Examples

The best deep linking strategy that you could use in this case would be to find blogs related to these particular topics. Then, you could post your comments on those blogs with a backlink to each one of these webpages. Consider using a tool like Comment Hut or Technorati to find related blogs.

When the search engine spiders follow your back links they'll index each individual page in the search engine listings. The result, is that when someone types in your anchor text, a particular keyword or keyword phrase, your site will show up in the search engine results for that keyword.

Simple strategy but highly effective. Give it a try and see what type of results you can achieve.

What's a Good Way To Promote Your Site Online and Off?

Based on one of my most recent responses to a Yahoo Answers post, I thought I'd share this helpful response to a very common question - how to best promote your website!

There are a number of marketing strategies you can use to drive people to your website (both online and off) that cost very little money. From an online perspective, I would suggest offering a newsletter on your website. This ensures that you capture the email address of everyone visiting your website. As a result, with the proper policy in place, you can contact them via email to promote a given product... like your sweet orange and chili pepper candles! As an incentive, you can provide a coupon for anyone signing up for your newsletter such as coupon or general discount.

If you're trying to get more people to your website, I would focus on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Google Adwords would be great for attracting only those interested in what you have to offer and you can place caps on your daily spend in order to manage your budget.

For SEO, I would suggest writing some articles related to dating and submitting to major directories like eZineArticles or GoArticles. You should also consider directory submission.

From an offline perspective, I would suggest a post card campaign. You might be able to purchase a small list from a list broker and test a post card (smell and sniff). Its creative and might just generate the response you're looking for.

Video SEO: Here to Stay

The use of video’s to promote your online content is becoming more and more important in the expanding world of search engine optimization. With the growth of video portals such as You Tube it has never been easier to get your videos on the web.

Why use Video SEO?

1. Video on independent websites seem to be quickly and heavily indexed and ranked by the major search engines.

2. Including videos adds additional ways to optimize for your keywords and phrases. By adding content relevant to your keywords and phrases, combined with the related videos, will add weight to your site and its content.

3. The video content can be duplicated on 3rd party website such as you tube without any duplicate content penalties.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

4. Allows for more text and pages to optimize your keywords and phrases around. Be sure to surround videos with relevant on-page content.

5. Embedding videos in your site pages is a great way to increase the stickiness factor of your pages, which can increase both traffic and search rankings for a specific page. Google and most search engines use a variety of factors to determine the ranking importance a specific page online, one of which is average visitor session length on a page. Visitor length on a page can be increased by embedding a video. These longer site visits may be interpreted by Google that the page has increased value and in turn may be given a bump that translates into higher search engine rankings.

6. Choosing a video that is themed to your content and informative can help with the stickiness factor – you need to give the search engines something to crawl. Adding an irrelevant video for the sake of adding a video will just confuse your visitors.

7. Videos help in adding new, fresh and dynamic content to the site.

When thinking about SEO, you need to extend beyond your traditional web pages, blogs, and photos. Videos are part of today's marketing mix. Be sure to focus on video optimization to round out your SEO efforts.

This post adopted from Caroline Rodgers of Biznet IIS. Caroline Rodgers, SEO Executive, Biznet IIS.

Simple SEO Tips for Your Web Site

Search engine optimization is defined as the process of getting your website developed in a way to be found in organic web searches. By organic we mean web searches that appear naturally as the result of a search for a particular keyword or phrase on a popular search engine.

As a business business owner who creates and updates a web site on a regular basis, I have found a number of helpful tips for keeping my site moving up the search engine results.

Here are the 3 simple strategies that I regularly us on my web site for improved rankings:

1. Page title tags. This is the page information you see in the blue bar at the top of your browser window. For best results use your top two keywords in your title tag. The best way to do that is separated with a bar, for example, "Marketing | Internet Marketing."

2. Domain name. If at all possible, use a keyword in your domain name. You will have a slight edge over your competition by doing so especially on Yahoo and MSN. If you already have a domain that you've used for some time, include a keyword in the name of files for your website pages or sub domains. Example: http://www.yoursite.com/marketing.htm if your keyword is marketing.

3. Meta tags. These are descriptions on a web page that are not seen by most visitors except those who look at the page source code. While the keyword and description meta tags used to be the primary way that search engines indexed sites, that is no longer the case. You shouldn't ignore them entirely, as it is still worthwhile to include them as a part of your page description. For optimal SEO, your meta description and keyword tags should be no more than 150 characters each.

Simple.. yes! But knowing some basic tips about SEO and applying them regularly can go a long way in raising your web site to the #1 ranked position on Google and other major search engines.

For more help on raising your site's search engine rankings, check out the SEO Elite Review Blog.

Helpful Tips For Improving Search Marketing Results

Think your paid search campaign is the best it can be? I doubt it. Check out a few of these helpful tips for improving your search campaigns.

Contractual obligations. Be careful who you've locked yourself in with and don't tie your horse to the wrong cart. Be cautious of package deals from media holding companies.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Google default settings. These are great for improving reach but can be so broad that they hurt your targeting. Be sure to check default settings like “extended broad match” to achieve the right outcome for you right for you.

Not having a clear objective. If you don't know what you want to achieve from your paid search campaign, you can't develop a strategy.

Lack of internal tracking. If you don't track conversions and click paths, how do you know what's working? Tracking is essential for generating profitable campaigns.

Broken URLs. If your search advertising leads to a dead page, your click through rate is use­less. Be sure to check every link and detail in your campaign.

Hopefully these tips have given you a few things to think about. You don't want to fall prey to the one tips we haven't told you to watch out for: Simply hoping your search problems go away on their own.

This post provided by Gerry Bavaro, a VP of client services at Didit. Reach him at gerry.bavaro@didit.com.

Great Tips on Driving Targeted Traffic to Your Website

We all need traffic. It's the life-blood of an online business. But what are the best ways to drive targeted traffic directly to your website? Here are seven great tips to help you decide.

1. Offline advertising Equals Online profits

Whatever you're trying to sell online will most likely link to a relevant or appropriate media section offline. For example, if you're selling bicycles from your website, there will undoubtedly be a suitable offline magazine, in which you can place an ad. The purpose of the ad is not to sell your products, but to get prospects to visit your website. So your ad need only consist of a few lines, which should work out to be quite inexpensive.

Your bicycle ad could read like this: Looking for a new bicycle? We stock a huge range at discount prices and can deliver within 48 hours. To learn more visit our website. www. bicycles4u.com - Your ad could be placed in cycle mags, sports magazines or even national and local newspapers. Wherever you think your most likely prospects will look for your products or services offline is a means to getting them to go online.

2. Press releases for the inquiring minds

Some people just have to know what's new, what's in and what's out. To stay ahead in this information age, online and offline press releases can offer newsworthy titbits that could even be picked up by the national press. If you're just starting out in your online business, launching a new product or creating a new service, people will want to know about it.

If this is something you haven't done before, take a look at some existing press releases by going to Google and typing 'press releases' into the search field. Once you get the idea, write out your press release, including your contact details and website URL, then go back to Google and type in 'press agencies'. Most will charge you for this service but your press release could get maximum coverage on and off the internet.

3. Opt-in mailing lists

Opt-in mailing lists can provide one of the most effective means of generating repeat business from your existing customer base. If your customers have bought from you once and that buying experience was satisfactory, there's a very good chance they will buy from you again because they trust you. Capture emails by encouraging your customers to sign up for your newsletter or other promotional information. Alternatively, you could rent an opt-in email list. A carefully worded e-mail message to people who have expressed an interest in receiving further information about your products or services could lead to extra sales, but be prepared to pay a princely sum.

4. Getting your message delivered direct to your customers

For as long as anyone can remember, direct mail has been one of the most effective and profitable forms of marketing ever. Many people have made millions from direct mail and it's still as successful today as it was 50 years ago. It's also relatively easy and inexpensive. First, create a single page introductory sales letter or brochure, detailing you products or services and all the benefits. For maximum effect, offer your new customers a discount or something for free, when they first purchase from your website.

Don't forget, you want them to visit your website, so give them more than a good reason to do so. Next, rent a targeted mailing list from a reputable list broker. There are lists available, which cover every conceivable geographic and demographic statistic, so whatever business you're in, there will be one that's suitable for you. Send out your 'invitations' and wait for your hit counter to melt.

5. Referral marketing

This is a simple strategy of referring your own customers to a related but non-competitive website in return for them doing the same for you. Let's say you are selling printers. Find some quality sites that sell printer inks and contact the webmaster. Ask them if they would be willing to send their traffic to you in return for you doing the same for them. Most will agree. Between you, you will have to decide whether to display an ad on each other's site or go for a written recommendation. Either way, it will increase the chances of you getting more traffic to your site because you have been recommended. You could seek out many related websites and have numerous streams of traffic coming directly to you.

6. Traffic merchants

Paying a company to send traffic to your website is an easy option, so long as the traffic is targeted. There are many companies who specialize in selling traffic. You could say they are traffic traffickers. They use all forms of online advertising to get people to visit your website and usually guarantee the numbers. At around $20 for 10,000 visitors, it certainly looks tempting.

Although there are many merchants to choose from, beware the scamsters operating in this market. Some will take your money and put your ad on a Free For All (FFA) website, leaving you to deal with hundreds or thousands of spam emails from everyone and their dog trying to sell you their products. A good place to start would be SafePartner.com. They offer a variety of packages and are very affordable. TrafficCircuit.com is another company offering this service but charge a little more. However, they offer tracking services, so you can see where the traffic comes from. If you're into stats, you may find this service very useful.

7. Affiliate programs

You just can't afford to ignore affiliate programs. Getting other people to sell your products for a commission is a tried and tested, successful and very rewarding exercise. It doesn't work very well if you're selling a service, but it's overwhelmingly awesome for shifting your product range. The best part is, once set up it works on automatic pilot. All you have to do then is monitor its success, because affiliates do all the work for you. They advertise your products and send the traffic to your website to buy them.

Another thing is you don't have to pay your affiliates until you've been paid. Plus you save on advertising costs, and the increased activity to your website helps your search engine ranking. There's an array of affiliate program tracking software available to track your sales and commission payouts or if you prefer, you can hire a company to look after all that side of the business for you.

Building Links with Directories

Link building is an effective way to increase search engine ranking and one way links have more impact then simply trading links. Search engines are constantly changing their criteria but there are a few things that are very consistent. One of these is driving the Search Engines back to your site as much as you can through external links.

The real value is that links on other sites to yours pass the Google PR of that particular page to your page. This is called a transfer of page rank and has been one of my closely held secrets over most of my Internet marketing career. If you'd like to see the value of this information, do a Google search for "Internet Marketing Expert" and you'll find my site (MarketingScoop.com) ranked in the #1 position.

Posting to directories is a great way to accomplish this goal of building in-bound links. There are 100’s of directories to submit to and some cost and others are no charge. Each time you are approved and the search engines crawl the directory, it sends the search engines back to your site.

When posting to directories it is also important to position anchor words to improve your keyword relevancy. Using this tactic effectively can support your link building with real juice. Start today with directory submission to deliver value to your search engine optimization campaign.

What Would The Top Spot On Google Be Worth To You?

You see, people love to make things complicated, but making money online is actually really simple. Whether you are selling your own product, promoting affiliate links, or making money from adsense or "click flipping", it all boils down to just two things:

Conversion and Traffic.

Conversion comes first. You need to have an offer that people want. That "offer" might be a product, or it might be an enticing advert (e.g. Google Adsense) that people want to click on. And you need some kind of presentation (such as a sales letter) that encourages them to take the
action that you want them to take (eg buy the product or click on the advert).

In many ways this is the easy part. Most people can knock together a half decent website or sales letter that will convert at least some visitors into money.

But then you need Traffic. Loads of it. The more people that come by your site, the more money you will make - especially if that traffic is highly targeted. But, given the number of websites out there - all competing for the same traffic, just how do you get more visitors to your site?

Well, there are just three ways that people come to your site:

1. They type your URL straight into their browser. That comes from some sort of offline promotion - it might be your business card, a radio advert, an article in a magazine, or a conversation with a friend.

2. They click on a link somewhere. It might be in an email they received (eg from a friend or from an ezine they subscribed to), or it might be on another website they have visited.

3. Or they do a search in the search engines, see your site in the listings, and click to visit you.

That’s it. There is no other way for them to get to your site.

So, knowing that, how do get more traffic? Simple: 1. Make sure you are promoting your online presence in all your offline promotional materials. 2. Get lots of people to link to you, and lots of people to send out emails with your link in it. 3. Get a top position in the search engines.

Hmm. Simple, but not easy. Just how do you achieve 2 and 3 without spending heaps of cash or getting banned by the search engines?

1. Optimize your on-page factors. There is plenty of information online about how to do that. It is not difficult. But, in itself, it is also not enough.

2. Get lots of high quality, one-way, relevant links to your site from as many other sites as possible.

The million dollar question is, "How do you get people to link to you?" For some, this is overly complex. For me, I've been succeeding online with one simple answer, Unique Article Marketing!

1. Have a fantastic product so that they just, spontaneously, want to tell others about your site.

2. Pay them to link to you - buy a text link, or offer an affiliate program.

3. Exchange links with them - but reciprocal links are clearly not worth as much as one-way links, and it is a lot of work to do this effectively.

4. Provide them with fresh, unique content that adds value to their site in return for which they agree to post a link back to you. Loads of sites are constantly looking for fresh, unique content. They get this content by hunting through article directories, or by subscribing to article submission services.

So, if you send out articles to such directories, your articles will end up both on the directories themselves, AND on the niche sites that pick up and use our articles. And some of these are likely to be valuable "authority"-type sites. Of course it depends on the quality of your article who picks it up.

As you can see, this last method is the simplest and most powerful. It gives you hundreds or thousands of one way links, from niche, relevant sites, all for free. All you need is some way to get a different, unique, article to each of those directories and ezine publishers.

Which is, of course, what the Unique Article Wizard does.

Unique Article Wizard

But don’t stop there. The real power behind this system comes when you use it regularly. Preferably once a week. Imagine getting 200 to 1800 new permanent one way links every week?

By the end of a year, you could easily have 15,000 or more relevant, quality, one-way links to your site! That is the power of this system. And that is why it beats every other traffic generation and SEO system there is.

So, unless you don’t have an online presence at all, isn’t it time your harnessed this power for your own business?

Click here now to start your climb to the #1 position on your favorite search engine:

Unique Article Wizard

Kind Regards,
Michael Fleischner
-Internet marketing expert