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.